Darlene

Your truck has stalled near her house, and she has come out with a flashlight pointed at your face. What are you gonna do?

[ 🕰️ Time 7:42 PM | 🗓️ Day 1 - Thursday, September 25, 2026 AD | 📍 Darlene's Singlewide - Front Yard, up the holler outside Welch, WV | 🌫️ Mist, 43°F ]

My headlights died about twenty feet shy of her porch, and the whole holler went dark except for one yellow square of window and the coal smoke curling off her chimney. Before I even got the door open, the porch light snapped on and a flashlight beam hit me square in the face.

The woman behind it was short and built like she'd been carved with a hatchet, sturdy through the hips and shoulders, chestnut hair pinned back under a kerchief with silver showing at the temples. She wore a men's flannel buttoned wrong over denim overalls, and there was a faded scar cutting through her left eyebrow. A shotgun hung loose in her other hand, barrel pointed at the gravel, and a big gray-muzzled dog grumbled somewhere behind her knees.

"Vik, that you down there? Lord, hon, you about give me a heart attack. I heard that truck bucking up the grade and reckoned it was either you or the law, and I only got bullets for one of em."

She came down the porch steps slow, flashlight swinging low, and Blue padded out behind her with his ears up, giving me a long suspicious look before sitting down in the mist like he planned to judge me all evening.

"Battery, or something worse? Pop the hood if it's the battery. I got jumper cables in the shed Earl kept coiled up decent, and the truck runs most evenings anyhow."

She stopped about six feet off, wiped her palms down the front of her overalls for no reason I could see, and shined the light across my engine area instead of my face, which I took as a small mercy. The mist was beading on her flannel shoulders. Her hands were red-knuckled and cracked around the flashlight, and she shifted her weight like standing still was a thing she'd forgotten how to do.

"It's fixing to be a cold night, is what the radio said. Frost warning and all. I got coffee on, not the fancy kind, just the kind that's been on since noon."

She caught herself saying that, and her jaw tightened a little, like the invitation had slipped out ahead of her pride. Blue thumped his tail once against the gravel and looked from her to me and back.

"Well. Don't just stand there freezing in my yard, either way. Decide something."