About Bronco

There was no single idea for bronco. Instead, it was the combination of several concepts that came together.

It began with a question. Could an entire story take place inside a character’s head?

I’m forever indebted to Steven King for this next bit. While stuck at a traffic light, I wondered, could I write an entire story that happened over the duration of one stop. While I read one of his books, I noticed the character imagined all these horrific possible outcomes. Most were more frightening than the reality of the character’s situation. It was the perfect example of how powerful our imagination can be.

The next concept for bronco I discovered parked in front of the grocery store. An old pickup truck had been redneck modified for hunting. A custom camper was built out of old plywood. Old chains and metal hooks hung from the plywood, presumably for hanging game meat, or whatever type of meat. Its frame was old and dented, covered in patches of rust.

My wife, like Rachel in the story, is always in the know.

"The police are looking for a man," She told me, calling on her lunch break. "He tried to grab a girl outside the middle school. Apparently, he wasn’t strong enough to grab her. Several other girls rushed over to help, chasing the creep off. He was driving a white van." The police eventually caught the creep before he could grab anyone. I had more ideas. Why did creepy snatchers always use a white van? Wouldn’t a soccer mom SUV be a better cover? Wouldn't just about anything other than a white van be less suspicious?

Once again, I was stopped at a traffic light. It was summer, and the temperature had climbed above one hundred. I reached over and turned the air up at the same time I caught a glimpse of the driver in front of me. Something about his pale and wrinkled bald head upset me. The cool air sent a chill through me. Suddenly, I had another concept. Does our body know when it’s close to evil? Do we have a built-in early warning system?

I had almost all the pieces for a good story. A character, stopped at a traffic light, sees a vehicle that’s not a white van, but looks suspicious, get’s an idea that the driver is evil. I was excited about diving into the psychology surrounding fear, our reactions to being presented with evil in a nonthreatening environment, and how we project our imagined realities onto our environment. I only had one problem, what was the vehicle going to be?

Sitting in my Mazda Protégé before work, the answer literally drove up next to me. A coworker had bought an early ‘90’s Ford Bronco. It rumbled up next to me, shaking my little Mazda. It had a lift, and fat over sized off-road tires. I took one look at the Bronco and thought, there’s my beast. I had the first draft completed by the end of my lunch break.

The story I ended up with isn’t a direct distillation of these pieces, but I like to think it’s close. It didn’t happen all at one stoplight, and quite a bit of the story happens outside of our protagonist’s head. However, I believe the spirit of the ideas still live within the story. I was able to explore the ideas about our projections of fears, beliefs, and ideas onto our environment, not just with Dave’s perception of the bronco, but also his perception of all the traffic around him.

I was able to explore concepts around our understanding of evil. There are certainly evil events happening in the story, but all the violence that happens on stage, happens in Dave’s imagination. It’s even more disturbing when we realize he’s imagining it happening to a pseudo version of his wife. It’s a frightening prospect that we all have the imagination to conceptualize evil.

I was pleasantly surprised when a theme I hadn’t intended blossomed naturally out of the description and action of the traffic. It became a subtle metaphor for our socioeconomic struggle against the backdrop of traffic jockeying for position.

Another surprise was the epilogue. The original last line was:

“A minivan.” Dave muttered. “A white minivan.”

However, The Rime Time Killer wasn’t going to let his work go unnoticed.

Tell me what you thought of bronco? Let me know in the comments below and maybe one day we’ll find out what happened to Dave’s wife, Rachel.

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