In the thickest part of the storm, as I spit gray rain and wind-blown filth from the gaps in my teeth, a rainbow flicker cuts through the darkness: reading ‘The O sis” in neon, its ‘a’ broken and dark.

A wilting poster outside the door advertises Spring specials, though we are well into Fall. The windows are obscured by condensation, streaked with thick, greasy dust. Something cooks inside. As I hesitate at the entrance, that something begins to burn.

Vague shadows move across the glass, diluted by the grime and by my own, burning eyes.

I enter and, though it was truly dark outside, ‘The Oasis’ appears dark for so few functioning lights. Illumination inside is haphazard and yellow, an atmosphere that makes skin appear splotchy and highlights the raised veins of hands. I approach the counter, dripping across the linoleum entryway, and a woman there coughs and looks me over.

“Are you here for the take-out order?” she asks.

The sky outside cracks with thunder.

“No,” I say.

“Wait time’s fifteen minutes.”

I am wary of the door, of the bell that hangs on the handle, but neither move in the twenty minutes or so I wait. The tenuous lighting hides my shadow and fellow patrons chew their burgers without sparing me a glance, without so much as turning their heads. In the quiet there, a pattern of sound emerges- the clinking of silverware on plates, the rustling of anxious feet, and several quiet coughs.

A mouse peers out from under the chair across from me. It makes a swift circle around one of the legs, daring itself to retrieve the bread crumb at my feet and losing its nerve at the last second. It loses this game of chicken several times before I kick the crumb toward it.

Or try to.

I kick the crumb and it does not budge. I feel its sharp edge drag across the tread of my boot. Bending over, I see it is glued down, that it is a brown piece of plastic in the likeness of a crumb. The mouse circles again. I see, now, that it is on a track.

I approach the counter again with a simple question: “What the hell?”

“Are you here for the take-out order?” she asks.

From the waist down the woman is nothing more than a thick pole and a bundle of dusty wires.

“Wait time’s fifteen minutes,” she says.

I wait for the crack of thunder but it does not come, or, it does come eventually, but not on cue. The storm outside is, unfortunately, very real.

It can’t have been anybody’s dream, to design an animatronic ‘customer looking over menu,’ but the scene is carefully prepared and vividly imagined. If I am to assume the creaking fans and the semi-circle coffee stains are a product of design rather than happenstance (and it does seem more reasonable than a place like this receiving the traffic necessary to warrant such wear) there is a deep insanity at the core of ‘The Mirage.’

There is comfort in its status as a franchise; I am comfortable knowing anybody involved with the design would be miles away.

There is a bell on the counter and a small sign that says ‘Ring for service.’ I consider the likelihood of it being another solid prop is about 70%, but try anyway and am rewarded by a sharp ding that startles a body to life in a booth to my right. The man rises and utters a string of apologies the way another person might curse. He dusts off his uniform and wipes a sheen of saliva from his cheek before maneuvering himself behind the counter.

“Are you here for the take-out order?” the false host asks.

“Come around the corner or she’ll keep on with that,’ the living man says.

“Wait time’s fifteen minutes.”

“Shut up,” he tells her, with more feeling, I think, than he means to show.

I wonder if a man in his situation names the things. It seems almost necessary.

“Welcome to ‘The Oasis,’” he says, “The best and only burger joint in this… 12.4 mile radius. Table for one?”

“Yes,” I say, glancing behind me, at the door again, “I’m not expecting anyone.”

As the man, Diego, wakes more fully, he proves to be more well-adjusted than I would expect of a person with his job. He gives me a tour of the menu and tells me that everything is in stock, that it’s all frozen in the back.

“Some of it’s frozen on the plates we serve ya with,” he says, “Microwave dinners for fourteen bucks.”

He recommends a pasta that freezes well, and he offers to let me dry the clothes in my pack with the machine normally reserved for aprons and floor mats.

“Least I could fricken’ do, man,” he says, heading toward the kitchen.

The animatronic fancy of ‘The Mirage’ extends, horrifically, into the bathroom where a detailed mannequin pisses eternally into the middle urinal and side-eyes when I pull up next to him. Two legs shift under one of the stalls and a man’s voice hums from inside every thirty seconds or so. I wave my hands uselessly under the taps before realizing these, of all things, are not motion controlled.

Back in my booth I begin to inventory what remains of my belongings. Most of what I lost was notes- things I scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper. The radio is intact but something rattles inside as I shake it. Pebbles, maybe, or something come lose. Could be nothing, too, I don’t make a habit of shaking my things.

The second copy of ‘Autumn by the Wayside,’ the one with the vandalized author, is heavy with water but readable. I open it on the table, to let it dry. The pack itself is a total loss. I unzip a pocket to retrieve my keys, my wallet, another to-

The comb case is gone.

“You okay, man?” Diego asks, stopping short of handing me my alfredo, “Lose something out there?”

“A comb case.”

“Your hair looks fine,” he jokes, “Considering.”

When I don’t respond he tries again.

“This thing important to you? Family heirloom or something?”

I am quiet, still, as I consider that the case itself was not passed to me, but that my family, just about every member, has almost certainly carried something like it: a bottle of ‘ibuprofen,’ an old looking box of ‘cigarettes,’ an unobtrusive flask. I was kidding myself with the idea of diners as my familiar. There is nothing more familiar to my family than these items. There is nothing more familiar to me than the comb case.

Was nothing.

“No big deal,” I say, though an amount of dread must creep into my voice, “Those, uh, those bathroom dudes are pretty creepy.”

“Fuck yes, they are,” Diego says, setting the pasta in front of me.

“Is the woman’s the same way?”

He leans in close and asks, “You a perv, man?”

It’s difficult to judge, by the tone of his voice, which answer he’s expecting.

“No…”

“Neither am I,” he says, slumping into the booth across from me, “But sometimes the wi-fi goes out. Desperate times n’ all that.”

The alfredo is about a degree cooler than the temperature of the room. I chew slowly, torn between thoughts of the comb case and the conversation with Diego.

“You see the urinal guy’s dick?”

I cough and look around at the other diners, forgetting, for an instant, that I am alone.

“From the corner of my eye,” I say, “Yes.”

Diego leans back against the booth and stretches: “Fucking hard to miss, that thing is.”

“Hmm.”

“Points due, fricken,’ North too.”

The thick of the storm is over us again. It rattles the windows and shakes Diego from his thoughts.

“I’ll go do up those dishes, man,” he says, standing, “You holler if you need a refill or something.”

I finish my alfredo and eat a slice of pie of the same consistency. The storm comes and goes in 45-minute intervals, it seems, circling the area like the door-mouse. I plan for an outward escape, along a service road that Diego says feeds ‘The Mirage’ at the end of every month. I am too late to catch a ride, but early enough that the truck’s recent passing will have made the road easier to follow in the rain. He lends me several garbage bags. I dress in one, stuff my things in the others.

“A proper hobo,” he remarks, idly dusting a dummy that pretends to stir a cup of coffee.

“Thanks,” I say, as joke at first but, then, sincerely, “Really, thanks for everything.”

“Ain’t a thing,” he says, “Every fuckin’ person comes through that door looking like yourself. ‘Cept for Ralph who brings in the food. And everybody but Ralph has a strangeness about’em that makes me think they could use a hand. If I can send you off with a few garbage bags, it’s my pleasure.”

“What’s my strangeness, then?” I ask of a man that ogles robo-dick.

“You ain’t got a shadow.”

-traveler

Imagine a place with a single published online review. Imagine it reads only: ‘Too good to be true.’

Imagine it is a one-star review.

That place is ‘The Oasis,’ or, in some regions, ‘The Mirage,’ one of a series of franchise restaurants that exist only in the least likely conditions. One might stumble upon ‘The Oasis’ operating in a ghost town, its neon and chrome casting ghoulish shadows across the walls of abandoned buildings. It might be the only establishment left open in an otherwise dead mall, the better-days ambience creeping through the halls of the empty complex. A smaller franchise might stand, inexplicably, at the peak of a mountain. The corporation’s location finder lists at least one in the open sea, where no known island exists.

Ecologically speaking, ‘The Oasis’ is whatever the opposite of a parasite might be: it can exist only when nothing else is around. It thrives for lack of competition because it is universally expensive, poorly run, and drab. When there is any other option, ‘The Oasis’ loses out, but when there is no choice, ‘The Oasis’ is unbeatable.

It would be easy to be critical of the franchise owners and of the overall business model at play but, if you find yourself at the doors of ‘The Oasis,’ you might reflect on your own choices and on the path that brought you there.

–excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

Is there a moral buried somewhere in the story of Dan Clay? It rattles in my head like a song, a sleeping ghost, returned from the back of some book I had as a child. Untitled and anonymously authored, I wonder if I am destined to write every story I have ever read.

My senses return, in time, though Clay and O’Keefe continue to trade bullets in the back of my head. I pull myself out of the mud and I search the valley wall for a likely ascension. It’s all mud, everything around and, behind me, the captive storm turns and approaches once more.

My backpack has burst at every seam, spilled itself across the wet ground. I gather what I can on the torn canvas and hold it to my chest like a child. I walk into the storm, toward the trees that form a paranoid huddle in the center of the valley.

There was a picture that accompanied the poem- I hated the picture and I looked at it often. It illustrated the climax, the turn of the second draw when Clay reappears from his year of torment to face O’Keefe, who would have only waited a terrestrial instant. The sheriff is lit up with fire and surrounded by smoke- deep, black, and toxic. Read as written, Clay’s reply to O’Keefe is solid and confident. It reiterates the notion that a good man can remain unbroken in hell.

The illustrator thought otherwise.

The drawn Clay is bent and burned, his face is twisted by a gaping frown, an expression normally reserved for cartoon ghosts. He is sorrowful and screaming or moaning in pain. The drawn Clay appears terrified.

I wonder about a character that would bear such suffering. I wonder why the author chose to repeat the beginning at the end.

I walk into the storm and am buffeted by rain. The soft ground becomes slick. I have nothing so clear as a destination, only the path away from a dead-end. There is still some comfort in that. I try to ration it. I spend much of my time rationalizing.

Clay is a reactionary man, a man molded by his misfortunes. He learns nothing but to be distrustful. He becomes untrustworthy himself. The author’s repeated lines suggest more sinister changes. Is there a monster shaped of Clay that we do not see?

I ask because I am a reactionary man and I am sure that I was pushed into the valley by the stranger. He has been in my shadow all along.

I am nearly blown over by the wind and I press myself against the rotting trunk of an old tree. My old copy of Autumn by the Wayside, the book given to me by a man who recognized my name, slips from my arms and explodes on the ground, its entries scattering into the storm. I catch a single page under the heel of my boot, an entry for a place called: ‘The Oasis.’

-traveler

Not much is put forth about a man from the north, the sheriff of old Saskatoon

‘Cept for the warning, that his smiles in the morning hid th’monster he’d be after noon.

Sheriff Dan Clay wasn’t always that way, was wary of tossin’ round lead.

And that hesitation lead to daily damnation and a bullet-shaped hole in his head.

 

See, back in the day, the younger man, Clay, believed in a world that was right,

So he didn’t think twice, bout’ a man playin’ nice, when it came time for pickin’ a fight.

Faced with Charles o’Keefe, a liar and thief, Clay steadied himself for the draw,

But, impatient and surly, o’Keefe pulled his gun early, and lived on as a scourge to the law.

 

The dead man, Dan Clay, might have seen his last day, but woke to a devilish grin,

“There’s a small price to pay,” said the devil to Clay, “But it might get you kickin’ again.”

“If you come around often, I’ll spare you the coffin, let’s call it a second each day,

At noon you drop in then it’s right back again- no need for a good man to stay.”

 

“For you to be reckoned, all I need is that second, for most it’s a lifetime and then some.”

And just as he planned, Clay took Satan’s hand, without having heard the addendum.

“I thought I should mention, a minor extension- though it works out for you quite as well.

See one Earthly instant gets wrung out and twisted and ends up a whole year in Hell.”

 

Made the fool twice, Clay struggled to rise, and he covered his wound with his hat,

And as for the sin that’s followed him since, he hoped that the badge covered that.

And he’s done plenty fair, by the town and the mayor, but everyday just about twelve,

Sheriff Dan Clay spends a year of his day serving time on his sentence in hell.

 

As though fate had planned it, O’Keefe and his bandits, crossed motives with Saskatoon law,

And knowing the grief, that follows O’Keefe, Clay faced him once more at the draw.

“We’ll fire at noon,” laughed the murderous buffoon, but, ignoring his normal seclusion,

Clay cut through his laughter, “How’s one second after, to avoid any repeat confusion?”

 

In the thick high-noon simmer, O’Keefe seemed to remember, the facts of his previous crime,

Said, “I woulda’ sworn, a dead man would learn, how to judge the wrong place and wrong time.”

Clay made no reply as the seconds ticked by for he knew what high noon had in store.

And faithful O’Keefe, the second-rate thief, pulled his trigger the instant before.

 

Now some blame the liquor, but Clay seemed to flicker, to even the soberest folk,

He was gone for a flash then, with sulphur and ash, reappeared in a black plume of smoke.

Dan Clay looked a fright, with his mustache alight, and the hellfire lickin’ his heels,

He said “I won’t debate, that the place wasn’t great, but the timing, at least, was ideal.”

 

Clay made it brief, and he buried O’Keefe, and he gave up the badge and the post.

And he gave up the gun and the favor he won and eventually gave up the ghost.

Not much is put forth about a man from the north, the sheriff of old Saskatoon

‘Cept for the warning, that his smiles in the morning hid th’monster he’d be after noon.

 

-traveler

‘If Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’ were to have a terrestrial cousin it would undoubtedly be the storm that persists on the ‘Edge of Disaster,’ an ominous ridge in Western Colorado. Fed by a series of mountainous lakes and a quirk of airstreams, the unnamed storm churns in its valley like a thick soup, trapped in a constant approach of the ridge.

Standing at the ‘Edge of Disaster’ is a humbling experience. One feels awe, initially, and then perpetually until the awe begins to feel more like tension and eventually, stress. The ‘Edge of Disaster’ perfectly triggers a series of instinctual fears that are not meant to be sustained. Some find catharsis at the ridge, a resetting of perspective, but most find the prolonged anxiety follows them off the hillside, like a ringing in the ears.’

I looked up weather patterns before I arrived- I do that a lot, actually, but it makes for boring reading so I don’t include it in the posts. This storm never quite escapes the valley but it does, occasionally, slosh up the sides, smearing moisture up along the walls and ridges. That’s been the case recently so I donned my rain gear and wrapped my pack in plastic. I crinkled my way to the ‘Edge of Disaster’ and felt the heavy storm-fear in my ass (like the sudden drop of a roller-coaster, but cosmic and grim).

I was on my own at the ‘Edge of Disaster’ so I, unwisely, played chicken with instinct and I timed myself watching it. It is hard, in a way that’s difficult to describe. I have lived through storms; that’s a different feeling altogether. I have lived through storms.

The ‘Edge’ is reinforced with unmarked cement which seems like a good idea but may provide a false sense of safety. I stand too close and topple over the edge, blinded by fluttering plastic and pushed by my shadow. It watches as I tumble into the valley and slip beneath the storm.

I come to in the mud, far below.

-traveler