(Three Word Wednesday prompt: Empty; Highway; Ignored)
A heavy gray mist hung over the highway like the shawl of an old woman over twisted and knobbled knots of her spine. Gray on gray, concrete and exhaust smoke, incorporeal and immutable, wrapped around each other in a dance of the depressing. The grass tufting along like a stalled train seemed almost obscene for its streak of green, although it was the mist’s wet touch that dyed it that color.
A hitchhiker stood, wearing a faded white cotton shirt and slinging a sagging, empty backpack from his shoulder. A sore thumb, sticking out his own sore thumb. In the not-nearly-dawn stillness, he was the only thing moving. Pretty soon the first of the day’s trucks would push through the curtain of gray and rumble by, shattering the stillness with the mighty groan of tires and perhaps the clear, flat blare of a horn. And the hitchhiker would be ignored for the first time, but not the last, that day.
