an excerpt from a story i havent written yet

it was one of those in-between days. one of those days where nothing went quite right, but it couldnt have been said that anything went truly wrong either. where nothing was in black or white, just muddy shades of grey. it was hard to do anything on this type of day. the sun had been hiding behind the clouds all morning, and the dull light made indistinct shadows wherever she looked. it was one of those worst days. she somehow couldnt find enough feeling to make herself smile, and there was nothing, really, to smile about, either. but it wasnt one of those bad days. nothing truly terrible had gone wrong, so she didnt feel quite justified in letting herself feel miserable. but the miserableness was there in the frustration at the pure indifference of this day. if she were a cat, she would be twitching her tail, back and forth. flicking at the little indistinct bits of life that were converging to create this frustration.

but, unfortunately, she thought, she was not a cat and she could not flick her tail to and fro in that agitated manner. no, she just drove. the dry landscape scraped by the window of the car. she kept her eyes fixed on the dirty, blue minivan in front of her. she made up some painfully ordinary story about the yuppie soccer mom that was driving her 2.5 kids to the walmart a few miles away. she could almost hear the kids fighting in the backseat and she could imagine the tired thoughts that turned through the mother's head.

"i wonder if she would flick her tail, too," she mused under her breath. she said it aloud, though no one was in the car. the lack of company was precisely why she muttered this fleeting thought, rather than merely letting it swirl silently around in her head. had anyone been in her car with her, she would have been concentrating on them. her thoughts would have encompassed them, but as it were, her thoughts lingered on many things outside of her little car as she sped through the cold, dead countryside.

it wasnt brown, more of a yellowish tan. everyone always describes a dry winter landscape as brown, but to her, brown was too colorful of a description. a faded tan was closer to what she saw. almost a grey. brown was a rich and earthy color, and there was nothing rich or earthy about the grey road that cut through the greying grasses, with the faded tan tree trunks that stuck up out of the faded tan leaves. it was as if all the color from the summer had dried up and faded. like how colorful paper does when left in a sunny window. she could remember, as a child, taking down such colorful construction paper masterpieces to find that all their color had seeped through the glass and been washed away by the sun. the trees had just been left out in the sun too long. the trees, and the grasses, and the houses. all of them, faded from the too long exposure to the bleaching light.