Ficlets

[Living Descrip. challenge] Sign Language (or otherwise known as Useful Until Useless)

It stood there. Tall, thin, flat. It’s bright orange face lined with bold black letters.

Day in and day out it’s sandbagged “feet” kept it standing although large semis and trucks buffeted it with gale-force winds. Storms crashed over it, raining, snowing, more wind blowing, with only those sandbags holding it up.

When a vehicle came by it did it’s best to be legible and tried to scream “Road Closed Ahead!” with all it’s neon painted, metallic might.

Then one day the men came by and stuffed its face in a big black sack. “The nerve!” it thought, “Here I am trying to warn people, doing my best to keep humans like YOU safe, and you just go and put a bag over my head!”

“Well, it could be worse,” it mused from inside the blackness, “I could have been shot at, pushed over, hit by a vehicle, blown over by storms, but this bag over my head is cruel! They could just move me! I want to be useful!”

Alas, that is the life of a road sign. Useful until useless.

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