Verity
an excerpt

When Verity was eleven her parents took her to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. These people lived in Vermont where the snow wasn’t ploughed and the roads were allowed to harden into an icy sheen. They drove at night and soon enough they got their car stuck on an incline that was iced over so well that they could barely walk upon it. Her father had turned on the car’s high beams and it just illuminated the white packed and reflective road that slowly rose up before them. They were stuck staring at this white space that gave way on either side of them to the total darkness of the forest for hours as they waited for a passing car or truck to rescue them. Even then she had essentially nothing to say to her parents, and the hours waiting were slow and arduous.
She had to stay in the car as her parents tried to flag down others as they passed; Verity watched their washed out forms jump and slide in the light like fools. She shivered in the back seat, her hair painfully pulled back into a hat and her form enclosed in a thick coat. Her hands and face were bare and she rubbed her fingers together before blowing into them softly. It was thanksgiving evening. The car was tenuously placed on the side of the hill, Verity inside and shaking. The heat was turned off to conserve the small bit of car battery, and it was shifted into park to keep the her from sliding back into the darkness.
Verity unlatched her seat belt and pressed forward between the front seats, looking intently out of the wind shield to make sure her parents were sufficiently occupied with their futile task in the dark. Verity ran her hand lightly over the ancient stick shift of the old car before attempting to wrest it from its place in park; it was just as futile. She slid into the driver’s seat and did as her father had tried to instruct her; she pressed her foot down hard on the big paddle break and then pulled the stick over into neutral. She could feel herself sliding backwards already, and watched as her parents’ illuminated, horrified faces lost their sheen as the car slid back down the road and the headlights’ beams were taken with it.
She car smelled of leather and the trees moved past the window very quickly, all darkness but for a bit of moon and dark brown shapes; the floor of the forest was smothered with dead leaves and snow. The car slammed back into a tree as the road finally shifted into a bend. Verity was jerked forward, her head hitting the driver’s wheel too hard and then jerked back into the seat’s headrest.