My driving has hardly improved, despite many months on the bike. I am not a confident driver (not a confident man, generally) and I wear my insecurity like a flag. I waver- I hesitate in a way that is contagious. My driving is unpredictable, even to me, even in the best of situations and now, I am speeding. I am late. I haven’t been late for anything in a long, long time.
I’ve had so little to be on time for.
‘There was no little uproar regarding ‘Rolling Hills’ when it was pitched to Roberts County, no little uproar when the designs were approved and, yet, there is no shortage of customers now, in the early years of its functioning. They have their marketing team to thank for this success, using words like ‘economical’ and phrases like ‘environmental impact’ and never using words like ‘cheap’ and only strategically using the word ‘subsidized.’
The designer is not so coy. Emma Red happily confesses that ‘Rolling Hills,’ sometimes referred to as ‘The Jukebox,’ is to the dead what housing projects are to the living- an inexpensive, no-frills semi-solution to one of America’s many crises. Despite the hundreds buried in the hillside, ‘Rolling Hills’ has only 20 gravestones, each fitted with a subtle electronic monitor. The interred are assigned numbers, and those numbers are assigned timeslots, schedules of which are freely available from the website. There, you can track when your loved one will rise to their promised six-feet under (having previously been much deeper), and you can leave flowers on a stone that bears their name (for the time being).
At the current occupation, a body will rise to the surface five times each month and remain there for 10 minutes, though its said that a small donation might speed the dead on their journey.’
I arrive just as the ground in front of ‘Stone 4’ begins to vibrate, as the name, Alice Cantrel, dims from the screen. I wait for something to happen- a haunting or an enlightenment- but Alice rides her pine box quietly back into the depths of the hill and is replaced by a stranger body.
I shake the vial of toothpicks, nine, and I set off back to the bike. There, the radio breaks a long silence:
“I may be in trouble, traveler. I will try to describe the end, if you will listen.”
-traveler
