‘Travelers exiting the south side of Minnesota often find themselves stopping off the interstate in Fishborne, a small but immaculate town, frozen in time by a particularly rigid historical society. So carefully is Fishborne preserved, that a good deal of notice is drawn to a billboard on the outskirts, not far from the state line. The billboard, relative to the town, is an eyesore. Its paper is dry and peeling and it flakes off onto the countryside like diseased skin, sometimes reaching as far as Fishborne itself before being promptly swept into the trash. Its legs are bending and weak, warped by snowfall and wind and the incredible weight that it bears, the weight of hundreds of past advertisements, layered there like the flesh of the earth on which it stands.

This billboard can be rented like any other but, unlike the others, it is never cleared. The result is a less-than-ideal surface for adhesive and the first storm that comes along, sometimes even the first stiff wind, will pull strips of it down, creating the ragged collage that stands much of the year. Residents of Fishborne and of the small towns nearby see their future in these images and invite travelers to do the same (though an individual’s interpretation is kept as secret as a birthday wish).

From the billboard, a certain pantheon has even begun to evolve, the most recent of which is a chicken’s head and body (“Don’t be a chicken, vote ‘yes’ on Prop 84!”) perched on the neck of a middle-aged woman (“Who said we had to choose between youth and beauty?”). For nearly a month, ‘Mama Chicka’ shifted and evolved, her left hand giving way to the tip of a french fry and her chest falling forward to reveal the head of a goat. “Don’t Pay,” she would go on to say, before finally sloughing off into the dirt, “Be an EXIT NOW.”

It is a peculiar business, buying space on the sign. Locals attempt to design images that decay well, hedging bets on the perceived sturdiness of specific sections of the paper slab. The result rarely benefits anyone but the owner, who doesn’t believe in anything but the money he’s given.”

When the Editor and I arrive we position ourselves at the back of a small crowd that surrounds the ‘Sign Outside Fishborne.’ Heavy rain in the area has caused a molting and, even as we watch, strips of paper peel from the surface and splatter on the ground with wet, fleshy slaps. Much of the groups disperses as the sun begins to set, but a few set up camp and the Editor and I join them.

A wind picks up late in the night and I wake to the sound of leaves skittering across the pavement nearby- the mutter of this long autumn, louder for mingling with the drying scraps of old adverts and ashes from the fire.

I wake again, in the dark, disoriented by a massive noise and dragged from the tent by the Editor. A section of the billboard, nearly a foot thick, has peeled down to land as a multicolored log at the foot of the sign. Above us is an old image in its entirety- a black and white logo made up of nested circles and the words ‘Summer is the righteous anger of a star, try “Autumn by the Wayside,” available at your local secondhand bookdealer.’

-traveler

We start by organizing a quick summary of all the variable page 131’s in our collection of Shitholes. The Editor tears them from the spine and we use a stapler at the nearest post office to form a crude new ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’ The Editor laughs at the result, like a phone book left out in the rain.

“We spent so much collective time…” she mutters, “So much thought on the order of entries. We didn’t agree on a single thing.”

Shitholes is not an intuitive book. The entries aren’t alphabetical. They aren’t organized by state or region. I thought, for a while, there might be an underlying categorization, something philosophical, but the groupings held their shapes like clouds in the sky. The meaning I thought I understood was meaning I had projected onto it. I never saw the same cloud twice.

My first mistake was assuming that the author had organized it and, if the author was some version of myself, my second mistake was assuming I would know his thoughts (or some version of them). I don’t understand the Editor, though. I can’t discern any shape in her clouds. There may well be a storm building over me and I would be none the wiser.

“When we did this,” she says, and shakes her head, “When I did this the publisher wouldn’t sign off on the obvious arrangements. The first time it was just vaguely location-based, right? The second was the same, just really fucking specific, like with a table of contents coded to fucking maps. We’ve got to compete with the internet. I thought that’s what they wanted.”

The Editor finds a pair of scissors on the counter and begins to clean the jagged pages of Shitholes 131. A postal worker clears his throat behind us somewhere but we both know better than to turn.

“And then my emails were just pinging back like thirty seconds after I sent them a new draft- like, ‘We appreciate your continued work on the project but we don’t believe the target audience will find the current structure intuitive. Reliance on printed GPS can be difficult to translate to electronic applications…’ Shit like that is what I’m saying. Like, I’m desperate enough to find the coordinates of all the damn places and to organize them by latitude and longitude and throw together a chart for the table of contents and they spend less than a minute figuring it’s a no-go. And then after a month of this…”

The Editor reacts suddenly, pulling her finger away from the pages like she’s been bitten by a snake. She holds out her hand and a thin, bloody line appears across her index finger.

“Paper cut?” I ask, but she is deathly quiet as the blood wells to a drop.

The Editor has ended herself for lesser things, but never in a place so public. The heft of her revolver appears to me beneath her jacket, seeming to move under the leather. Its grip is curved in the gesture of beckoning, its deep cold is begging for the heat of release. A popping balloon will always make me jump and I will never grow used to the sound of gunfire. I brace myself anyway, clenching my stomach and folding my shoulders inward.

The Editor wipes her finger across the front page of the new book and grimaces. She presses down hard to stymie the pain, and when she speaks I realize that my hands are covering my ears.

“What?” I ask.

“Do you have a bandage?”

I don’t know if it’s the Editor’s intention, but the first page of Shitholes 131 is a place not far from the post office, a place we had both already noticed in the gloom of early morning. She scratches dried blood from the paper so we can read the entry together:

‘A woman grew up in Southern Illinois. She grew up in a small town but moved away after high school. She made money, enough to fill a warehouse (though she kept hers in a bank). With a sliver of her success, she returned to her town and built ‘The Land-Locked Lighthouse,’ refusing to place her name upon the thing. It shines for 30 miles on a clear night and pulses behind the winter fogs.

It has become a minor attraction, simply for the oddity of the thing. It draws families in from their road trips and they stay in the town and wonder what the woman must have felt of her home, to spend so much money on a thing that may only provide the smallest boost to the local economy. Must be quite the place.

The locals know otherwise, of course. They’ll illustrate, to you, the distinction between what it means to spotlight a thing and what it means to shed light upon it. A lighthouse is as much a beacon of danger as it is of safe-passage. There is no doubt this one signals warning.’

-traveler

I’m not a traveler at all, not like you. I was born in Wisconsin and I never left the state. All the others were born everywhere else, each one in a different state, I think, and I don’t think they left. They’re out there now but we never meet. Each time one of us dies another is walking by an empty lot and the empty lot me knows all about the dead ones and it makes it hard to think. Harder each time.

It does make it easier to leave. I never tell anyone I’m going.

But it starts in the empty lot because it’s quiet there and most people leave you alone and it takes some time to deal with the baggage of the others and by the time we get to the end there’s a lot of anger. Some of us had it better than others for no reason at all. The world just had it out for some of us.

And then things start to line up. Your face appears, we start to die, and with each ending the narrative clears a little until it’s just the last time we died and the path that brought us to the empty lot. All of our combined histories converge into something that’s like an arrow and that arrow points in the opposite direction of wherever we were heading at the time: back toward the book we finished editing years before.

Autumn by the Wayside

I find you each time the same way I found you the first time: I flip through Shitholes and visit the page I land on. We all came to different conclusions when we edited the book based on information given to us by the publisher and by our own, narrow lives so, even though we always stop on page 131, we always visit a different place.

And you’re always there.

Here’s the thing: we all work for the same publishing company. They can’t not know.

They can’t not know.

-Editor

‘There are many strange things to be dredged from the deserts of Nevada, but ‘The Neon Mound’ warrants an entry for being both relatively easy to find and relatively safe upon discovery. It is easiest to find at night, when the cooling desert air sets the old neon patterns clicking like a frozen lake in the sand and when the lights are most visible under their sheer draping of earth. It is safest when viewed from a distance, as rumor suggests the wind creates deep, secret pits under the glass and that unwise travelers will tumble through, finding the smooth web turns quickly jagged under any weight.

‘The Neon Mound’ is most likely a historical dumping site for Vegas’ flickering signage, but this assumption fails to cover some of the stranger aspects of ‘The Mound.’ What force could have changed the shape of the old glass so that it exists, now, like a crumpled tin can? What current electrifies the sand, so that onlookers can step barefoot among its roots as they flash like a distant storm?

Vegas will not touch ‘The Neon Mound,’ neither to preserve nor destroy it. It flickers on the outskirts, like a forgotten candle, burning low- a mundane thing with dire potential.’

The Editor is quiet for a day and then she starts talking. It’s all nonsense, at first- gibberish in a conversational tone. It doesn’t stop, not until she’s sleeping and even then it sometimes breaks the surface of her dreams so that I wake to her whispering in my ear. After a few days the words rearrange themselves into something I understand, the Editor’s base instincts overriding the disease. She’s been telling me about her life and it’s taking some time because she remembers each loop, now and she sees them side by side.

‘The Neon Mound’ is not the firework show I expected. It pulses intermittently, blue and white. It calms the Editor’s speech and brings her to the conclusion, which is to say, it brings her to her experience in the interim.

-traveler