The Last Match

The following is from the beginning of a chapter from my book, Tales of Whitethorn:

The rain roars out of the darkness splashing over our windshield like waves crashing on a beach. Our headlights catch flashes of huge redwood roots lining the dark road, threatening to catch our battered old pickup if we drive too close. It’s ten o’clock at night and Ruby and I are on our way home. We’ve been visiting Ruby’s sister, Doris who lives in Eureka. We started late because she insisted we eat dinner before we left. Of course she couldn’t start cooking until she and Uncle Max finished doing the evening milking.

“Can you see the road?” Ruby asks.

I squint my eyes. “Not very well. But I think that’s the white line in the middle of the road. We seem to be a few inches to the right side of it.”

This part of 101 highway is lined thick with giant redwoods and it would be easy to make a mistake and run head on into one of them. We are both scared and we still have about forty miles to go before we get home to Whitethorn. The Whitethorn gravel road that twists up into the mountains will be even more dangerous in this storm