by Christopher Davis

Catherine Jennings, Cat as she was known to most, walked easily away from the cheap freeway side motel here along the interstate, her heels clicking on the wet pavement of the parking lot as she did. The pay-by-the-hour motel was a far cry from the mini mansions that dotted the landscape here in the land of the beautiful people.

Clouds from an intermittent storm had parted revealing a bright silver moon, its glow reflecting on her black stockings like the memory of a forgotten lover and something old.

The red-head opened the door of a European import and wiped away tears as she adjusted the driver’s seat and rearview. Stevie Ray Vaughan was already well into a slow grinding roadhouse tune when the car’s stereo flashed on. The departed bluesman cried of the flooding down in Texas.

A finely tuned engine purred under the hood as Jennings backed away from the lot and out onto the street, thinking about what an ass her fiancé had turned out to be in the end. The car belonged to him. The new car was something borrowed and something new. This she didn’t think of as she tried to remember a little ditty she had heard as a child. How did that little rhyme go again?

Street lights passed in a blur along the roadside, their sodium arcs forming a halo in the saturated night sky crossing the city for the interstate.

Jennings and her fiancé had been engaged for nearly two years now. The wedding was to take place in the spring in front of friends and family. There would be no wedding now, no dresses, no honeymoon and no wedding vows.

The little engine came to life as Jennings mashed down on the accelerator, merging in with light freeway traffic. Water beaded and streamed off the rain splattered hood like the salty tears now running down the soft skin of her cheeks. That lying son of a bitch, she thought, that lying, cheating son of a bitch. After tonight, he wouldn’t be breaking any more hearts.

This was true. The fiancé now lay dead from a gunshot wound to the chest in a big bed that he had shared with another woman, his last.

In this part of the city, the rain had come back in torrents. The bluesman now sang about a crying sky: how fitting the song, something blue, very blue. It was ironic how the bluesman seemed to sense her mood here in the car, alone on the interstate now, and traveling — running really — to who knows where.

Big digital numbers in the car’s dash ran past 75, through 78, 80. Jennings finally remembered the words of the old English rhyme she had sang as a girl while skipping rope in the schoolyard: something old and something new, something borrowed, something blue …

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Christopher Davis is a central California native and grandfather of three rambunctious little ones. When not tending the herd, he’ll try his hand at writing Civil War, Western and crime fiction, some of which can be seen in Shotgun Honey, The Big Adios, Near to the Knuckle, Yellow Mama and David Tyson’s Ghosts Anthology. Find out more at http://www.christopherdaviswrites.com/.