HERMIT IN THE MIST

A short story by Gina Goldhammer

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‘Which way did they go?’ The three stared in a cheerless silence at the bend in the road, rain thrumming the windshield of their hired Fiat. ‘Is it too much to ask,’ Monica snapped at her husband. ‘That we turn on the windshield wipers?’

Muttering inaudibly, Freddie indicated that he couldn’t find the control switch. ‘And there isn’t a manual.’

‘Italians don't use manuals,’ Monica pointed out and thrust her arm impatiently over the steering wheel. The wipers instantly sprang to life, amid a terrible scrape and clatter, showing the passengers what they already knew: one lane veering steeply up the side of the Umbrian mountain and the other leading, at a right angle, deeper into fog.

Julia, looking on from the back seat, suggested it was a tossup. ‘I mean they could, after all, have gone in either direction.’

‘We would have been fine if that posh, what's-his-name tour guide hadn't been driving so fast.’

It felt like salt in the wound of Monica's extreme displeasure — with her husband, her sister's unhappiness and the journey so far — that she had been the one to insist Freddie drive slowly through the mountains. And now they were lost and the road map in the possession of the inept tour guide. Monica’s heart hadn’t been in the trip, and she had only agreed to it as a way of helping Julia through her bereavement. Still, and no matter how disagreeable, deep inside her soul she felt a certain pleasure that her forebodings were, one by one, being proven correct.

As the three debated whether to turn left or right, the fog seemed to creep inside the car.

‘Didn't our mum used to say...’ Julia leaned her cheek on Monica's shoulder... ‘that when in doubt, go right? The brochure mentioned the village was “high up” and the other way leads down.’

‘Unless,’ Monica proposed. ‘That crazy winding road we were on brought us higher than the village.’