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
