The Editor stands like a scarecrow in a field of some unknown plant. She stands with the rigid stillness of a predator, a short line on the horizon. It could be anything out there, but I know it’s her. I had stopped to eat a sandwich from a gas station deli. It oozes mustard and oil into the napkin, leaving a smell that will be on my hands for days. The sandwich ages poorly. It begs to be eaten. I don’t know what to do. I am rigid with the stillness of prey.

The line of her body shudders with a step. It could be any movement, but I know it’s a step- a step in my direction. A small stream of mustard now runs between my fingers and over the inside of my palm, the glacial mass of it melting between folded slices of sun-warmed salami. She is walking this way. She wonders if I will run and I find, in that moment, I’m wondering the very same thing.

‘‘The Interactive Fight-or-Flight Activity Area’ is like a haunted house in that it’s designed with the express intention of funneling would-be customers into a series of interactions that will activate their most basic instinctual response to threat. Philosophically it exists on the same spectrum as a your community meditation center (though well on the opposite end) claiming to stimulate a simple cathartic reflex that has been otherwise lost in the tangle of evolved response.

Unlike your common haunted house (or, for that matter, your community meditation center), ‘The Interactive Fight-or-Flight Activity Area’ encourages the customer to submit fully to their responses, either engaging physically with their would-be assaulter or making a desperate escape. This is part of the process, they insist, and the result builds toward a classification system the mysterious parent company seems to be compiling. Why, you might ask, would it be important to know who will fight and who will run when push comes to shove?

Why, indeed?’

The Editor stumbles to my patch of the earth. Her left eye is sharp, it cuts me to the bone. The right eye is a window into a vacant room. The pistol is there but she doesn’t seem to bother with it. We stand still for a moment.

“You all right?” I ask.

It’s the first thing I always ask.

“No,” I tell her after a minute, “You’re not.”

The Editor nods and drags herself to the bike. She has chosen to fight, though what she fights for or against remains a mystery to me.

-traveler

The next time I see the Editor I pretend not to. She makes as though to hitchhike, standing on the side of the highway with a woozy thumb in the air and a smile on her face. There is other traffic on the road, so it’s not a complete impossibility that I miss her.

But it’s a stretch.

I frame her in the side mirror and watch to see how she’ll respond. Chasing me will mean finding a new mode of transport, digging up my lead, making the long trips across the country alone until she can narrow the distance. It will be a lot more work than she’s become accustomed to, a return to form.

The Editor watches me for a short time, thinking I’ll stop or turn around or maybe just staring in disbelief at her bad luck. When she is hardly a dot in the glass she does it again- she turns the gun on herself.

How many of these women have appeared in morgues now? Has it happened in the same state twice? The Editor is wasting away. I don’t know whether it’s safer to travel with her, to keep her alive for as long as possible, or to travel alone, knowing each iteration is less stable than the last. I’ll have a few days to decide.

‘The modern tourist hardly dwells on the implications of a missile silo, hidden in the earth, as it is, like the upturned barrel of a gun. The system is designed to ease the mind of the normal fears one might experience when considering the country’s devastating power, placed their like a baseball bat near the door. We are allowed to know so little about them, allowed to think so little of what might happen if they were ever to be activated- so little can be said about the modern silos that it’s difficult to think anything about them at all, to even imagine they are really down there. We are told that most are decoys- that this is doubly true for those in our region. They are only scary when considered carefully.

The physical reality of the missile silo manifests in kind. They look like nothing from a distance, like a defunct pumphouse or an abandoned construction site from the road. The details surface only when one ventures past the curb. There can we see that the fences are sturdy and well-maintained and possibly electrified. There can we see the bootprints in the dust, the signs that warn strangers away and quote esoteric government codes with vague and violent consequences. There we can feel the weight of these things, the seriousness with which they should be taken.

‘The Open Silo’ does all it can to inspire this fear in its visitors without the potential for government interference. It claims to be a reconstruction above-ground of what is usually concealed below and it stands like a discarded shotgun shell, upright in the desert sun. Its features include the testimonies of those who have seen war in their homeland, accompanied by detailed specifications of the weaponry used to reshape their country. There is a library called ‘The Dire Conclusions to War,’ that details a thousand possible consequences of launching these missiles in the modern day, the entries there ranging from anti-war poetry to careful, scientific forecasting. There is a haunted village just outside, designed to replicate what life might be like after the nuclear storm finally arrives. It would be a gimmick if not for the seriousness with which it attempts this portrayal. It pulls no punches.

‘The Open Silo’ doesn’t do its job very well. The human mind can imagine the horror of war only after having experienced it firsthand. Its visitors (and there are few of them) can only ever be of two crowds- those who already know, and those who cannot.’

I don’t understand this woman. I don’t know which inconveniences she can live with and which will send her running for the grave. I don’t understand why the pistol is a factor in the Editor’s infinity- whether it’s the force that carves her path, or the forest that seeks to reclaim it.

-traveler

‘A certain small-scale hell exists in the form of a park bench along the Wayside. Provided, undoubtedly, with good intentions- cut with clean lines from American wood and polished to a sheen- the bench has lived out its better days in a single season of use and now decomposes, angrily, in the sun. The winter has sucked the finish from the bench and its planks have bristled, becoming ragged and splintery and light as volcanic rock.

‘The Park Bench Hell’ is nature’s mild protest at the ruthlessness of American infrastructure, at the thick asphalt scabs that itch under the summer’s heat, at being condemned to road verges and medians. It is the inflammation around a wound, the body’s cure-all reflex to perceived infection, making the once-welcoming environment not barren, exactly, but certainly inconvenient to the would-be malignance.

Hold no doubts, reader, the nature on the side of the road does not want you to enjoy it. Every blade of course, brown grass hidden among the greenery is a reminder to keep your shoes on. The ants that emerge under your dirty jeans arrive to keep you from sitting. The carefully placed bird shit, the strange stinging insects, the staleness of your sandwich just seconds after it meets the outside air- this is nature declaring it is capable of ruining a human the same way it ruins park benches, through a thousand miniature violences and infinite time.’

“Fuck.”

The Editor pulls her arm back quickly, yanks her shirtsleeve down over her elbow. She’s opened a bag of potato chips and stripped the plastic from a gas-station ham and cheese. She hasn’t touched either, choosing, instead, to become deeply angry at my assertion that pre-popped popcorn is stale out of the bag, no matter the brand.

“What is it?” I ask, holding out a hand to steady her arm.

She pulls out of my reach and examines her skin.

“Splinter,” she says, “I hate these things.”

“I think my knife has a pair of tweezers,” I say, but the Editor shoots herself and slumps forward into her abandoned lunch.

Blood pours between the slats of the table and across my jeans as I struggle to extricate myself from the bench. I throw up in the grass.

-traveler

‘What is it they’re farming out there? Too short to be corn, too tall to be any number of ground vegetables. You’ve been driving for a while now. Your passenger wakes up long enough to confirm it isn’t wheat, isn’t any number of American cereals. They’re asleep again, unable to answer questions about the strange farm equipment that appears. You know so little about modern farming. You can’t imagine where they pull enough water to satisfy this field, for instance. You don’t know how much water a field of any type needs. Is an acre more or less than a square mile?

Why are there never people in these fields? Why are there so few birds? Why is the equipment unmanned? When was the last time you met a farmer? How do you know they weren’t lying to you?’

The motorcycle coasts on empty for several nauseous miles before the sun finally sets and we find an exit from I-38. We emerge several states from where we started and loiter, for a while, in the parking lot of a gas station. A woman walks her dog in a patch of grass as her child chooses candy inside.

“I’m not sure we learned anything from all that,” the Editor admits, flipping through a copy of Shitholes, “I don’t think that was useful in the least.”

I chew up the last of Alice’s picks and spit the splinters into the gravel. It’s been a while since she said anything to me. I hope she’s resting now.

“You all right?” the Editor asks.

I nod, and we set off toward the next continental breakfast.

-traveler

The Editor and I come upon an RV campground before dusk and grow domestic for a while. We wait out a storm in a round mobile home that would sooner crumble than move from the spot, crouched, as it is, like the dry husk of a cicada. We are both so tired and so unused to the stagnant sunset that neither of us recognize time passing. We set up the living room with second-hand carpets and a scuffed coffee table. We share a bed, keeping a respectful distance between our bodies even in sleep. We take turns washing dishes and, sometimes, we order out for food and grumble at the time it takes to have a simple pizza delivered to the door.

We argue. We fight. Our words spill out in front of the neighbors, in front of the neighbors’ kids. The thin walls of the trailer can hardly hold them. We fill our fridge with vegetables we rarely eat. I grow a little fatter. The Editor grows pale.

The Editor takes to leaving the pistol on the coffee table and I find it casually pointing my direction each time I enter the room. She tells me it hasn’t been loaded for months (“Months?” I ask, “How long have we been here?”) but I don’t know where else she would keep the bullets. I’m sure they are there, in the gun, nestled in the barrel’s perfect slots. I thumb the head of a loose screw and wonder if its curvature isn’t the same as the sleeping lead.

When I move the gun to a shelf I don’t realize I shift it out of the Editor’s easy reach. She’s cradling it in her hands when I see it again, the step-stool chair still drawn across the room to the wall. I stand in the doorway with a pizza box balanced on my palm.

“Finally on time,” I was going to say, having retrieved it myself on a motorcycle that may not have seen use in the last year.

We fight again, the worst we’ve had, and we both determine to leave the other but, because we only have the one means of escape, we go together. And the further we are from the RV Park, the less we remember of our time there.

‘We are led to believe that there can exist a hybrid existence between the permanence of ‘home’ and the opportunity of ‘travel.’ But home is a place, reader, and though it might change it cannot be everchanging. We are animals that require a bolt hole, running from something we know is always just behind us or hiding from the same omniscient predator in caves of our own design. Nature will drive us to safety, and it will always run an ‘RV Park’ aground, scraping the wheels from mobile homes and seizing the engines meant to tow them with poverty and clotted oil.’

-traveler