Ronnie Joe's Short Story: Valley Mobile Home

As the truck approached an easement that connected Highway 40 to old Farmers Road, Ronnie Joe felt a sudden chill. He wrapped his jacket tightly around him and sank into his seat. Along that easement was a neighborhood known to locals as Butterville, made up of weather beaten wooden houses on quarter-acre plots with at least a half mile between them. A neighborhood for the menial and the mendicant. There was no running water, no electricity, and no hope. The trees leaned over precariously in a slow death thrall that seemed as though it should last at least a thousand years. Ronnie Joe grew up in the house just over the easement where Farmers Road ended. He was no longer the angry child who had spent most of those years planning to run away, but he still didn’t like being so near to the place where his worst memories resided. The house was still there, could be …show more content…
He checked his speed repeatedly until he was well passed the easement. Ronnie Joe’s home was only ten minutes further at Valley Mobile Home Park, right on the outskirts of Hopkinsville. He pulled into the entrance and parked the truck at the end of an egg-yolk colored, one bedroom mobile home that Ronnie Joe shared with Donald. Ronnie Joe led Fred through the front door, flicked on the light and moved toward the kitchen so Fred could fit in the three-foot-square foyer marked by the four vinyl tiles that were set there in place of the wall-to-wall carpet that resembled brown, bear fur. “It’s real nice.” Fred said, smiling and glancing around in all directions. The fixtures were plastic, simulated brass, and the walls were covered in a dark yellow wood veneer. There was a large rectangular mirror embedded into the end wall of the living area that Fred started at with a confused look on his face. “It’s took make the place look bigger,” Ronnie Joe