Speaker 1: Hi, Welcome to Fiction Revised, a short story podcast where
each episode is a short story, rewritten, reimagined, and reshaped
into a different genre, which is chosen at random. The
story is blown out tires and the genre is contemporary.
This is the first version of this story. The road
opened up in a way that it does out here,
flat enough to make you feel exposed, wide enough to
make you feel small, and long enough to make you
reconsider every life decision you'd ever made, including the questionable
gas station coffee now tap dancing through your system. The
sky was doing most of the work, pale, endless as
the land stretched thin flat beneath it. Traffic had separated
just enough for her to see the problem before she
reached it. Dark strips of shredded rubber lay scattered across
the lanes, jagged and uneven of a semi tire that
had finally said you know what I'm done, and it
exploded across the highway and one last dramatic attempt of
being in the way. Some pieces hugged the shoulder, or
others sat right in the middle of the road, bold
as anything, waiting for the next unsuspecting vehicle to test
its suspension. Most people held their breath and drove over
these things like they were passing through a haunted house.
She wasn't most people, but she still felt it immediately,
that tight, uninviting surge in her chest, the body's little
alarm system, overworked and underpaid, assuming at all times that
things were about to get worse. Nothing had happened, yet
nothing was happening. Still, her shoulders crept up like they
were bracing for impact, like they'd been training for this
moment their whole lives. She kept driving, doing what she
always did, moving forward, even when her body thought some
behind her was gaining on her. Moments like this had
a way of pulling things loose. Not the big memories,
not the dramatic ones that came with theme music and
life lessons that were easy to retell at bars because
they didn't cause others to flinch, Just the ones that
arrived without context and refused to explain themselves. The muscle
memory of staying agreeable, The reflex to make herself smaller
so the situation wouldn't escalate, The years spent learning exactly
how much space she was allowed to take up before
someone noticed and got irritated. The smell of hot rubber
tipped her into something older, like the brain had pulled
a file. No one requested, and she was small again,
standing on a chair and a quiet kitchen alone. Her
parents were somewhere exactly doesn't matter. She didn't ask questions.
Questions led to answers, and answers would lead to explanations,
and explanations never came, So why ask She did what
she always did. She figured it out. The pan on
the stove was heavier than she expected, the handle hotter.
When it burned, she hissed in air through her teeth
and kept quiet. They would have been mad at the mistake,
so she held it alone. Later she examined the mark
on her hand in the bathroom, the skin angry and blistered.
She ran it under cold water to soothe the pain
and cried silently. She would wrap it herself and tend
to it for weeks. No one noticed, no one asked.
Healed without witness, the way most things did. Then, years later,
the faint curve of a scar still lived there, pale, unremarkable,
shaped vaguely like a parenthesis, as if her hand had
been trying to whisper the rest of a story. No
one bothered to read. Proof of a lesson learned early,
and often rep pain was better left unmentioned. The memory passed,
but the pattern stayed, Like a guest who refused to leave.
The road head was still littered with debris. Cars reacted
in their own ways. One swerved hard, overcorrected, and sped
off like panic was something you could outrun if you
just hit the gas at the right angle. Another slowed
to a crawl. Hazard lights blinking apologetically, as though saying
I'm sorry, I exist, Please don't honk at me. She
watched them oddly detached, and realized how familiar this felt,
how often she had navigated her life like this, adjusting, anticipating,
preparing for damage that had already happened somewhere else. Being
careful around people who were already mid explosion. Convinced she
could foresee the danger if she watched closely enough. Her
hands were tight on the steering wheel. She noticed it
because she had learned to notice, not to fix them,
just to clock them, prepare, expect. Knuckles, white, jaws clenched,
breath aware, she took one deeper inhale. Not dramatic, just practical,
the emotional equivalent of wiping crumbs off a counter. The
debris wasn't coming for her. It wasn't alive, it wasn't personal.
It had already done its damage somewhere behind her, and
she had been living as if it might happen again
at any moment, letting it set the pace, letting it
decide how tightly she held on. Fear had been convincing,
Fear always was, But fear, she realized, had never actually
been in charge of getting her anywhere worth going. Fear
had terrible taste in destinations. More memories lined up like
they'd been waiting their turn, apologizing before being accused, mistaking
acceptance of others with acceptance of self, confusing demand with love.
She thought of her younger self, sitting on the edge
of beds and couches that were never really hers, listening
carefully while someone explained why they couldn't meet her where
she was, why this wasn't going to work, why she
was too much even when she asked for nothing. She
nodded through those conversations like nodding was a skill she'd mastered,
a talent she could put on a resume. Expert, instain agreeable,
proficient in emotional acrobatics, knows how to smile and to
shrink at the same time. She told herself closeness was
something you earned by trying harder, by being easier, by
not asking too much, that by being too much, you
were a failure. Being not enough was also a failure.
The rules were unclear, but the punishment was familiar. The
faces changed, but the endings didn't. She kept choosing things
that required fixing, things that stayed just out of reach.
She mistook intensity for intimacy and called it growth. She
stayed too long, even when it hurt, especially when it hurt,
because pain has always been part of the fine print.
When things fell apart, she took inventory of herself like
a mechanic, convinced the problem had to be internal. Something
must be wrong with me. Let me check the engine,
the wiring, the whole damn frame. She never asked why
she kept reaching for things that didn't reach back, why
she poured herself into people who held her like a
cup with a crack. The land stretched on, honest in
its refusal to entertain her. No distractions, no scenery to
hide behind, just long distances and the quiet insistence that
you keep going. The kind of landscape that didn't try
to impress you or seduce you. It just was unapologetically there, wide, flat, practical,
and uninterested in your emotional monologue. She adjusted her course slightly,
steady and de liberate, passing through the last of the
ruined rubber tires without ceremony, no crash, no moment, just movement.
The debris faded in the mirror, reduced to nothing more
than dark flecks, swallowed by distance. It was strange how
small they looked back there, how big they had felt
up close. She wondered how many things in her life
had followed that exact pattern, terrifying at first glance, forgettable
once she stopped staring at them. The road didn't soften,
the sky didn't change its mind, and her past didn't
disappear just because she finally looked forward. Trauma wasn't a
movie ending, not something solved with the monologue and a
swelling soundtrack. It stuck around, It lingered, sometimes, it made
popcorn and dragged a chair over. But something fundamental had shifted.
She no longer confused vigilance with wisdom, or pain with proof,
or love with possession. She no longer mistook someone staying
for someone choosing her. She no longer worshiped the idea
of being easy, like that was ever a goal. These
moments burned hands, swallowed words, misdirected love. They were real,
They carved paths, They lived within her etge into muscle
and instinct, But they didn't get to decide where she
was going. Her car hummed beneath her, steady and reliable,
and she thought about how many years she had spent
bracing for impact instead of appreciating the motion. How many
times she had mistaken survival for living. She wasn't judging
herself for it, not anymore. Surviving had been the right
move back then. It had kept her alive, It had
gotten her here. But she wasn't in that kitchen anymore.
She wasn't a girl on a chair with a too
heavy pan and no one to help. She wasn't sitting
on beds that didn't feel like home, waiting for someone
to pick her. She wasn't holding herself small to keep peace.
The road stretched ahead, long and honest. She loosened her
grip on the steering wheel, not completely. She wasn't reckless,
but enough enough to feel the difference between holding on
and hanging on. Maybe the stretch of road would have
more debris, maybe not. Either way, she could handle it.
She wasn't driving like the danger was already here. She
wasn't flinching at every shadow. She wasn't living like life
was just a series of explosions she had to predict.
She drove because she wanted to get somewhere, not because
she was running from what was behind her. The faint
scar on her hand caught the light as she adjusted
her grip. It was still there, it would always be there,
but it was just part of her now, not the
whole story. She breathed again, deeper, this time not out
of fear or preparation, but because she could head. The
sky remained huge and unimpressed, and for once she didn't
take it personally. Hey, thank you so much for listening.
Let's see what I'm writing next. Okay, according to the randomizer,
it's going to be a news story, which makes sense
considering there's only one story on the list right now,
and the genre is going to be horror because it's
a new story. Let's run it through the story shuffler,
which is a macro honestly that I built in Excel
that is going to give us the finer details of
the story. Okay, So for this new story, the location
will be a house that shouldn't still be standing, that
should probably be perfect to horror. The character is someone
everyone depends on, and the story is centered on coming
back next week. The story changes, See You There Fiction
Revised is written and read by Andy Kenyon