Ellie half-expected her father to come chasing after her and pull her back, but he didn’t. She left the house, taking deep breaths, gulping down the cool air again. She jumped in her father’s truck and started driving. It was a shitty, old, little grey truck that broke down all the time, but it’s what she had. She drove away from the housing districts and didn’t pay much attention to anything apart from the road ahead of her until she got to more rural surroundings.
The morning blurred as the car rumbled along.
It wasn’t even noon and she felt like she had lived the most gruelling day of her life. Eventually, she found a side road leading to a farm and pulled just on the edge of it, so that she wasn’t blocking the road behind her.
She sat there for a while.
She had expected tears to come, which is why she pulled over, but instead, came only one horrible thought or dreadful memory after another. No tears, but a slew of anxiety-riddled questions and what ifs flooded through her mind, fogging her thoughts.
Sometime later she broke out of her stupor.
She restarted the truck, turned on the spot, and continued down the road. The next village was only twenty minutes away. She had enough money to at least stay the night at a cheap hotel and figure out where she was going to go, as well as refuel her truck.
She waited to hear a siren behind her or for her to be signalled to pull over with every mile she travelled; but none came. The next village was only twenty minutes away.
She wondered, as the London Eye popped into her thoughts once again, whether she would have enough money to drive there.
She wished she could explain to herself why she was so eager for the idea. She had no friends in London; no family, no job prospects, no experience of living in London, and she had never had any particular interest in London besides the tourist stuff… the idea of living in a city like that did not help her anxiety. So why did every thought of going somewhere all lead to London in her head?
You’re being stupid. You’d be robbed and stabbed in a day.
Or would I? I can do things now.
OK, Wonder Woman.
Seeing a sign for a service station, Ellie took the detour to refill her tank. As she did so, her phone buzzed.
From: Sophie
Hey, you aren’t in today? Did you forget to call in? Janine isn’t pleased xx
Ellie could hardly care what Janine thought at the moment, but didn’t want to let Sophie be the bearer of bad news, so as she filled her tank, she thought of how best to compose her text message of resignation to her boss.
Fiklin was a town built on the bones of a dead industry, a dense cluster of soot-stained granite and red brick hunkered down in a valley as if trying to hide from the North winds. It wasn’t a place people visited for the views; it was a town of hard edges and functional silence. Rows of steep-roofed Victorian tenements lined the narrow, winding streets, their grey stone darkened by a century of coal smoke and Atlantic damp.
In the center of town, the skeletal remains of a defunct textile mill loomed over the marketplace like a grounded shipwreck, with its jagged, broken windows and rusting doors. A narrow canal, choked with reeds and the rusted skeletons of old bikes, cut through the heart of the village, the water as still and black as oil. The air here felt heavier than the rural air Ellie had just left behind, carrying the faint, metallic tang of cold iron and wet slate. To Ellie, the look of the town was what she imagined a town taking its final breath would look like.
Given that it was already 4pm, and the winter skies had already begun to darken, Ellie decided that leaving for a five hour journey now would be silly. So she had decided to stay at the B&B until morning and leave in time to get to London at 4pm the following day.
The events of that morning felt several days old and she was desperate for a full night of sleep in an actual bed.
Upon arriving in Fiklin two hours ago, on a surprisingly sunny January morning, she had bought some ice cream at a local parlour and explored the village.
Her face now almost completely healed, she did not attract any attention. After she got bored exploring the marketplace, she headed for the nearest B&B she could find online at a modest price.
She had made a plan for tomorrow’s journey; she would leave Fiklin at 10am, and hopefully get to London at 4pm. She worried about getting lost, or the truck breaking down, but she did have a GPS app on her phone and she hadn’t heard her father complaining about the truck lately. She knew she had enough money for fuel to get to London, but wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to do when she got there.
Her immediate thought was “get a job”, but that led to more unanswerable questions like “What job?”, “Where would I stay?” and “How can I afford to dress for a job interview?”.
And yet, despite every part of her better judgement telling her that going to London right now was not a productive or sensible move, the rebel in her was ready to throw all that away and do it anyway.
Perhaps she was just being foolish, enamoured with the idea of breaking free from home and blazing a trail.
But it was more than that… something inside. Like a gut feeling, that wouldn’t go away.
A particularly loud advert on the small flat TV in the corner of the room snaps her out of her thoughts.
Deciding sleep was the best way to deal with avoiding her troubles and bringing on the journey the following morning, she turned off the TV and tucked herself into the neatly-made single bed with dark linen and a fluffy pillow that beat the flat, stained one at home and wrapped herself up.
As she began to drift off, her thoughts lingered on the fact she was in a strange village where she knew no-one for the first time in her life for a little too long. The loneliness began to set in, so Ellie started playing some music quietly on her charging phone, just to distract her from the white noise that was preventing sleep and succumbed shortly after.
© 2026 Rhys Clark. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, including scraping for AI training or large language models, without the prior written permission of the author.
Writing by Rhys Clark 