‘‘Tony’s Crab Shack’ is well known among New Englanders and, like any semi-iconic business on the east coast, there is no consensus as to the quality of the food or the worthiness of the atmosphere. For some, ‘Tony’s’ is the exact sort of slap in the face that modern dining needs- an egoless counter-cultural experience that other restaurants approach and fall short of. Dissenters mostly find the place gross.’

Carl is the mascot of ‘Tony’s Crab Shack.’ A crab, obviously. Red and cartoonish. An statue of Carl looms at the front of the restaurant and a quarter-scale but otherwise identical statue stands just inside, made of the sort of laminated rubber one finds in mall playgrounds, all grease and candy curves. Steam and butter thicken the air, even inside the ‘dressing room:’ the core aspect of ‘Tony’s’ novelty.

“We’ve got your bibs right here,” the hostess says. She’s brought eight of us in together: a family, a couple, and myself. “How many of you have been here before?”

The couple raises their hands and the rest of us look around uncomfortably. The ‘bibs’ she’s pointed to are full-length rubber gowns. They’re sleeved and tight-fitting, made of the sort of material that pulls up sleeves and tugs at arm hair. The hostess continues:

“Well, as I’m sure you’ve heard, ‘Tony’s’ is a messy place. A real pig-sty. It’s a place for people to eat messy things like they’re pigs in the mud.” The hostess runs her hand over her arm. “We have these bibs for you, if you want them. Some people don’t care. Those are the people we like best.”

Everyone but the couple puts on the bibs. We stand there, squeaking and sweating under the heavy rubber, while the hostess secures ties in the back.

“We’ve got to makes these tight,” she says, emphasizing the word by jerking the knot behind my neck. “Sometimes the butter drips down your chin, down over your throat, and you don’t even realize. Sometimes the butter makes its way up your sleeves, or it splashes on your chest. It gets everywhere, you know. The butter.” Something is seeping under the door behind her, thick and yellow. It congeals in the cool air let in from outside as we entered. The hostess sees us looking and nods: “It’s going to be slippery inside. Watch your step.”

‘Tony’s,’ as far as I can tell, has repurposed an old smoking/non-smoking divide to separate those of us who choose to eat in the industrial bibs and those who eat in grease-stained clothes, slopping crab meat and butter into their mouths with bare hands- pulling biscuit crumbs from the hair on their chest or scooping lost bread rolls straight from the shimmering wood beneath them. The couple is taken to a table, there. The man takes off his shirt.

I’m taken to the bib section and I turn to see that the family has declined to enter altogether. I see them struggling to untie the bibs just before the door closes, the hostess watching them with unfiltered disapproval.

The table I’m given sits in a far corner, holding only a small tea candle that I worry will set the place ablaze. Words have been carved into the heavy wood in front of me: NO MENUS. Butter thickens to white in the scrawl.

A waiter approaches, face obscured by a rubberized hazmat suit. They flip open a notepad, where, on the first page, they’ve written the word ‘Ready?’

“Have you ever eaten here?” I ask.

The waiter slowly nods their head, rubber gliding on rubber.

“Is it good?”

The waiter leans in close, braces their body against the table. Grease seeps from the slick seam around their neck. It drips onto the candle and the flame sputters out. Someone moans behind the divider. An insect struggles to fly in the thick air.

The waiter nods.

“Dinner for one, then,” I tell him, and within a minute or two I’m enjoying a pretty decent bucket of crab legs while someone approaches a climax, physical or spiritual, just out of sight.

I pop in my earbuds and eat until one of them starts to slide deeper into my head than seems advisable. I leave and shower at the nearest truck stop, which has stalls dedicated to showering off a ‘Tony’s’ dinner butter-sweat. I throw away my clothes and spend the night with Hector in the thin forest out back.

The GPS tracker on the bike ran out of battery nearly a week ago. This morning, it came back online. The Stranger has found it- has charged it- and he’s still on the move, which means he’s keeping a close eye on the device. He’ll hear it if it pings.

I pull up a morse code cheat sheet on my phone and start to type out a message. If ‘Tony’s’ has taught me anything, it’s that a little preparation and an open mind can redeem something that would otherwise leave a bad taste in my mouth.

-traveler

I wake to the shaking claustrophobia of the trunk of a car. Not my first time. Hector is in his kennel at my feet. He sniffs casually at my toes and settles back into a snooze. Not his first time either. Come to think of it, he spends much of his time in a shaking cage at the back of the motorcycle where the air is fresh, at least.

I probably should have re-homed him before something like this happened.

A low, sustainable worry persists in the back of my mind as I check the usual means of escape and find them unlikely to work. The trunk is secured closed. My hands are tied behind my back. My pockets have been emptied of everything that might prove useful. Nothing to do but wait and worry just enough.

The worry spikes a bit when the car stops. Spikes a little harder when I hear the sound of a woman crying near the car. Someone, the Stranger, exchanges words with another man. They come to some agreement, change their tones to gratitude, and the car begins to move again. The voices, the man and the crying woman, fade.

Over the next fifteen minutes there are more. Two men scream at each other. Something shatters against the side of the car and someone shouts an apology. There is a lot more crying before we seem to pull away from people altogether. I think about how thirsty I am- quite. I gauge my hunger- peckish. Without being able to see my watch I’d say I’ve been in the car a few hours at most and I put together where the Stranger has taken me. It was where I’d been heading anyway.

‘Going by many names as a necessity, ‘The Break-Up Arches’ describes a recurring series of sandstone formations, large enough to permit two or three people but small enough that, when a given arch invariably collapses, unlucky visitors are more likely to receive serious injuries rather than, say, die.

Why stand there at all? For the pictures, obviously, or for the promise of pictures that do not come since few will stoop to bringing a photographer to document one of the most raw, if common, romantic experiences.

‘The Break-Up Arches’ is a place for ending relationships, made famous by a very early attempt at a wedding, this one forever preserved in black and white film. The picture captures the chaotic moment when the bride-to-be experiences her the last straw as it pertains to the slovenly-looking man beside her. He reels from something she has spit in his face. She turns, preparing to walk off. The arch above them is cracked through, is coming down on top of them both.

Circulation of the picture, newly digitized, in the early 2000s sparked a tradition for taking a ‘loved one’ to ‘The Break-Up Arches’ to call it quits, the reasoning being that the blow will be softened by the amount of thought and care it takes to orchestrate such an end or that the sandstone holds calming properties or that it just makes it easier to start the conversation, given that there will be a half dozen other howling couples around to get the point across.

Nobody said the reasoning was good, but the state of Utah seems to support it. They change the name of ‘The Break-up Arches’ on all roadside signage at the start of each season, giving it the name of a forlorn poet so as not to raise suspicion about whatever spontaneous road trip one unhappy lover has arranged for the other.’

It’s not a bad place to kill a person, really. People will be seeking privacy. People will be screaming and crying. Arches will fall and, despite what the guide says, it’s only a matter of time before they bury a person alive. The Stranger can torture me, kill me, and bring an arch down over my body. He’ll be across the country before they even consider it might be foul play.

The car rolls to a stop and I prepare myself for whatever’s about to happen. I hear footsteps outside and then a knock on the trunk. The Stranger speaks:

“I know you’re waiting to hit me in there,” he says. “You’ve probably wormed your way out of the ropes and are ready to jump me with a knife you had up your ass.” A flicker of embarrassment. This guy thinks I’m way more capable than I am. “I just want to talk, so I’m going to let you out with this fancy key-fob and you’re going to come slow.”

The trunk pops and I strain quietly against the ropes that bind my wrists and ankles.

The Stranger interrupts after a few moments: “If you’re going to play hard to get I’m going to play hard too. Come on out, now, before I have to do something drastic.”

My mouth isn’t gagged but I can’t quite bring myself to explain the situation to the Stranger. Hector hisses loudly somewhere in the darkness of the trunk.

“All right,” he sighs, voice weary all of the sudden. “I guess that’s the way it is.”

There are two loud blasts- a shotgun, I think- and then absolute silence as I try not to feel where I’ve been shot. After a moment, I decide I must be dead or entirely unharmed.

Then, the first rock hits the car.

I renew my struggle against the rope as the arch comes down over the vehicle, dust trickling in through cracks in the car, old and new. When I conclude that frantic strength under immediate threat of death is no better than the frantic strength I had used on the drive over (and under a more long-term threat of death), I notice that the arch has stopped falling and I’ve survived that as well.

It takes a few hours, but eventually I pry my shoe off and unlock Hector’s cage with my toes and slowly undo weeks of don’t-chew-rope training by convincing Hector that the rope around by wrists is actually fair game. Another hour of scrabbling in dust and stone and we surface under a starry sky and to the sound of some broken-hearted man whimpering nearby. He helps us the rest of the way out and we pay back the favor by listening to the sad story of how he emotionally neglected some poor woman for a year before she drove him to the arches to break it off.

Once I convince him there will be other woman to neglect in the future, I go about digging Hector’s kennel out of the trunk and my bag from the passenger seat of the crushed rental. My bike is, unsurprisingly, nowhere in sight. I pull up an app on my phone and see it, or at least the small knock-off GPS locator I stuck under the seat, is heading west.

It’s midnight by the time I slump back in the rubble and scratch Hector’s head. Then, it hits me.

Maybe he did just want to talk.

-traveler

‘‘Oh, you think nature is the only force that can create a proper waterfall? You think natural waterfalls are superior to manmade falls by default? You don’t think that the same civilization that harnessed atomic energy, that carved the faces of dead men into a mountain, that molded chickens into monstrous meat-fruits, can also make some water pour from a high place to a low one?’

This is the attitude with which ‘Grace Falls,’ an artificial waterfall placed, ostentatiously on the outskirts of Las Vegas, was constructed. Thirty stories high. One hundred feet wide. An average flow of 115,000 cu ft/s and pressurized such that its water doesn’t fall, exactly, but is jettisoned downward onto a reinforced cement floor where it vaporizes into a fine mist that occasionally coagulates into a vicious, if not predictable, thunderstorm.

‘It is the horrific reversal of a hydroelectric dam, wasting energy and water alike,’ raves The Clean Energy Coalition (‘raves,’ here, being used in the less positive, near hysterical sense).

What The Clean Energy Coalition can’t deny (though they’ve tried) is that ‘Grace Falls’ is a fairly impressive feat of engineering and it is absolutely mind-boggling to see in life. It roars like a tornado- is capable of bursting a man’s ear drums if said man were to approach the fall’s landing. It is capable of pressing a man’s body through a metal grate, effectively turning him into a series of gruesome hot dogs if said man, disoriented from the damaged ear drums, were to continue to charge forward under the water. It is capable of turning the man’s wife and eldest son into hot dogs as well, and the family’s lawyer too, as was demonstrated by a freak accident that wildly benefited those who own and operate ‘Grace Falls’ some weeks after the initial, less suspicious freak accident.

‘It will turn you into hot dogs,’ reads a sign just past the lower lookout and often obscured entirely by the mist, ‘It will turn everything you love into tubes.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside.

‘A decade on, ‘The Poetry Silo’ is less an exhibit and more a warehouse for storing the world’s largest roll of thermal paper, making it something of a hybrid stop by Wayside standards. Those who come to view the enormity of the roll- to gawk at the constant pace and precise movements of the poetry receiver- are likely experiencing a fairly normal roadside attraction. Much of ‘The Poetry Silo’s’ facilities are dedicated to these people because they spend a lot less time and a lot more money than most of the Wayside travelers who come to read and, even worse, comprehend the words being spouted by the poet.

The poet is nothing more than a receipt printer gone awry in such a way that it mocks coherency. It babbles about the history of the world, pulling off neat metaphors and complex rhyme schemes just often enough to make up for the nonsense it tends to espouse otherwise. Members of certain factions would tell you that the nonsense is all just technique that has yet to reach fruition, the suggestion being that it might be a part of a very long metaphor or a very very complex rhyme scheme. Madness is just unfinished genius, they will say, and of course nobody can prove them wrong because several other factions carefully guard the poetry wheel, insisting it can’t be examined in full until the poem is complete.

As it stands, nearly 75% of the poem has been conclusively recorded elsewhere, initially by scribes and now via a specially programmed stream cam (and the scribes, still, but their work is redundantly spiritual). The missing 25% is all nearer the center of the wheel- output from the first few years when nobody paid the poet much attention, thinking it would give up sooner rather than later. Only the first line is still exposed- a little slip of paper readable from the hollow at the center. It says: ‘First let me tell you a thing you should know-’’

The trouble with getting into ‘The Poetry Silo’ these days is that there is an enormous waitlist, made tremendously long for people who can’t claim to be a member of one of the many quasi-religious factions that seek truths in the words of the poet and, therefore, receive priority access. My arrival is the culmination of a year’s work, insinuating myself into the most inclusive of these factions, the Nowists, whose particular urgency is due to their belief that the only important words in ‘The Poetry Silo’ are those between the poet and the wheel. The real poem is an ever-adapting prophecy, the meaning of which can only be deciphered by the individual reading it in the moment.

It’s a pretty thought and one that tends to generate a lot more hand-wringing and a lot fewer turf-wars than any of the other factions who want to expose or keep hidden the words in the center of the wheel.

So, I’ve spent some time in the Nowist forums and have even attended a few meet-ups when they’ve aligned with my travel and now I have a reasonably believable cover as an exuberant, if novice, Nowist. When I flash my credentials at ‘The Poetry Silo’ along with the various forms necessary for religious entry, I get the usual bureaucratic hemming and hawing that the process necessitates but am actually let through fairly quickly (assuming you discount the year’s work building up to it).

What the entry doesn’t quite drive home is the actual enormity of the poetry wheel. In a decade it has reached the sort of size that gives you butterflies just looking at it and it’s somehow made bigger by the sight of the burned-out little receipt printer that chugs along, spewing words onto specially grafted thermal paper wheels so that there are no gaps in its telling.

When the initial awe wears off I step up close to the visible strip of poem as any good Nowist would be expected to do and I keep Hector tight on his leash in case he gets any ideas. It takes me a moment to remember to read the thing wheel-to-printer and another to pace my reading with the speed at which words are spewed forth and it’s around that time that I recognize at least three metaphors for the Stranger and at least a little foreshadowing of the imminent danger presented by himself, resurrected, and his silky/dark demon rabbit thing.

By then, they are on me.

-traveler

I’m not spooked by the offerings of ‘The Gift Shop,’ at least not as immediately spooked as several testimonials suggest I ought to be. Like any gift shop, the items on display are specific enough to mark the occasion for which they are purchased, but not so specifically tailored to individual experience as to be uncanny or even really all that meaningful.

And maybe it’s a quirk of my life that leads to this initial anti-climax. ‘The Gift Shop’ is a Wayside destination and its offerings are souvenirs from roadside diners and shitty public rest stops and strikingly beautiful forests. I can see how it might be strange for someone who has lived a normal life to find postcards addressed from their kitchen and snow globes featuring the building in which they work. That’s the experience most people have, here. My journey has made it redundant. Or maybe this is its truest form. There aren’t many gift shops off the Wayside. Maybe this is how ‘The Gift Shop’ justifies its existence as part of the fragile highway ecosystem.

It’s a comforting thought, actually, because that might mean that I’m the key to aligning it.

‘Have you ever found a slip of paper on the floor of your home? A slip of paper with a series of numbers and a logo for ‘The Gift Shop’ thermally printed on the back? Fear not and keep that receipt on hand. Without it you won’t be able to claim the picture taken of you in your living room, on the toilet, sleeping soundly in your locked room, or doing any number of tasks, private and mundane. The longer you wait to claim it, the longer it sits up there on the screen for any old passerby to see.’

What gets me first is the realization that the cheap, dark-furred rabbit plushies are not dark-furred at all but sun-blackened little Hectors. With that, the uncomfortably intimate picture begins to unfold in all the little details I’ve overlooked. A t-shirt with all of the names of destinations I’ve visited so far. A bottle opener inscribed with the date I sobered up for good. A take-apart toy truck. An angry Stranger doll. A manga series where I am cast as the cynical protagonist and Hector is my wise-cracking pet.

All of the personalized pencils and pocketknives and key chains are in my name. All of the taffy is spun in flavors that I’ve tasted on the trip. Honey. Tree sap. Asphalt. Blood. There is a boardgame in the shape of the all-seeing eye. It looks boring. Everything is overpriced. The cashier is cloying in his salesmanship. I buy a pound of blood taffy so he’ll leave me alone and am off again before he can trick me into buying more.

It occurs to me, late in the evening, that I don’t think I’ve ever tasted asphalt. Not really. The thought drives me to the road which tastes much as I suspected it would.

– traveler

‘‘The Saltlick’ in eastern Wisconsin takes its name from the enriched blocks of salt humans sometimes set out for deer or livestock to see them through the winter. This is despite research that suggests it contains no sodium and ‘research’ that suggests it doesn’t taste salty at all- just nice. In fact, that ‘The Saltlick’ just tastes nice is all that people can seem to agree upon aside from its drab physical characteristics which are as follows:

It is a rough cube, four meters to a side, made smoother for the concave northeastern portion where visitors tend to lick. It is white and rough like a cat’s tongue. It doesn’t smell and is no warmer that the air around it.

It is appealing to look at- that’s something strange to say- and it’s difficult to leave un-licked. Impossible, really. There are signs up near ‘The Saltlick,’ warning visitors before they approach too close and fall under its compulsion. It’s unclear whether these signs have been posted by visitors who have undergone the lick, or those that have somehow resisted. If it’s the former, one might suspect the lickers are aware of some boon to be had by licking and are likewise aware of ‘The Saltlick’s’ massive, but limited, supply. It it’s the latter, well, perhaps the licking changes a person. Perhaps it changes a person in ways only unlicking loved ones can see. And maybe they have a point. Nobody puts up signs encouraging visitors to lick ‘The Saltlick.’ It does fine on its own.

People who have engaged tongue-wise with ‘The Saltlick’ show minor, but lasting health improvements. No miracle cures, of course. Nothing is that simple. It tends to right vitamin deficiencies. It tends to lower blood pressure.

The traditional saltlick is set out by farmers. Ranchers. Deer-leaning nature voyeurs. The most powerful argument against visiting ‘The Saltlick’ can be found on the final sign warning of its proximity. It asks:

‘Who set this out for you?’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

Thistle Creek Manor is bordered by a decrepit white picket fence, hardly a few feet off the ground. Still, they use a crane to lower a goat over the fence and into the yard and the woman operating the crane crosses herself as the goat’s hooves meet the earth.

“It’s like Jurassic Park.” Our guide chews the chinstrap of his hat. “But, you know. Ghosts.”

That’s not at all what this is like. He pulls open the bed of his truck and starts handing hula hoops out to the afternoon’s tour group. I take mine, purple sparkles, and am surprised by the weight.

“We fill these with salt. Kosher, just in case that works better.” He nods to a woman that may or may not be Jewish and a few of us shift uncomfortably. “You’re going to be tempted to just carry this around, but that means your fingers cross the salt circle so, instead, we’ll fit you up with a harness.”

The harness is a series of nylon straps, sewn in such a way that they can be looped around the hoop and attached to the neck/shoulder area. After some work, the salt circle hovers at waist-height. Assuming I stand still, anyway. As soon as I move, the hoop starts to bounce back and forth and my feet, at the very least, spend precious seconds outside the arcane protection. Our guide notices my skepticism and steps in:

“Our guys are pretty slow,” he says. “But if you’re worried, it’s best to drop down with the circle until the danger passes.”

A man- a fellow traveler, scoffs behind me. He’s scoffed a few times already, skeptical for an entirely different reason.

“That goat seems fine,” the scoffing man says. He points and I see the goat is, in fact, standing patiently by the gate, waiting to be let back out into the world. The goat recognizes our attention and tilts its head. Then it tilts its head further, into a slow, but undeniably complete, rotation.

The scoffing man shuts up.

‘‘Thistle Creek Manor’ picked up a few poltergeists after a murder/suicide led to a bit of a death cycle. The ghosts of the first incident instigated a few more murders and on and on it went for four decades until the internet really kicked in and real estate agents were no longer capable of skimming over the manor’s ugly past. As is the case with spirits and sea monkeys, the bigger ones eventually consumed the smaller and they remain their still, aware, and unhappy, that they have been monetized.

There have been some human rights complaints about this last point but the owners of ‘Thistle Creek Manor’ insist that the poltergeists are demons in the Christian tradition rather than actual human spirits. This statement has raised other concerns but, with no legal basis to pursue them, ‘Thistle Creek’ turns a neat little profit with next to no overhead.’

The tour of ‘Thistle Creek Manor’ is off-putting, mostly because the tour guide vacillates between horrific anecdotes and what seems like a blatant disregard for our safety. He tells us a story about a visitor that, crossing his salt circle, vomited so much that they could see the bottom of his stomach crowning from his throat. He tells us about a woman that fell through the floorboards and had her salt-hoop shucked off her like corn. They found her three months later, catatonic and forty pounds heavier for reasons that could not be scientifically explained. The guide says they worried, for a while, that the floor incident was the poltergeists getting creative but that it hasn’t happened since, so…

The tour is off-putting as well because the goat follows closely behind, leering and spinning its head if we watch for too long.

We spend an hour in ‘Thistle Creek Manor,’ waiting for something to happen and nothing ever does.

“It’s a little like whale watching, that way,” the guide says, though it’s certainly not. “To make up for it, you can stick around to watch me exorcise the goat.”

I’m the only one to take him up on the offer which, had I realized, I probably would have bailed like everyone else. There’s a shed out back for exorcisms where the man straps the goat down and chants some words and waves a stick.

The goat dies.

-traveler

‘North Carolina’s ‘U-Pick’ is described as both a museum and a farm in its myriad digital and physical listings. Neither descriptor quite tells the whole story. Like many of the destinations on the Wayside, ‘U-Pick’ is more an experience than anything else. We might call it an interactive exhibit. We might liken it to ASMR, albeit a little more hands-on. Many people claim it’s therapeutic. They call it a release.

North Carolina’s ‘U-Pick’ is a hall where people are paid to sit in swimsuits and wear masks- to bare skin and to maintain a semblance of anonymity. Paying clientele arrive to empty the pores of these masked bodies and to peel away whatever scabs they might have. This lasts until the discomfort is too much or they have nothing left to pick at (or until a four-hour shift is complete). Visitors are given gloves and masks and aprons if they prefer them. There are some rules about bleeding and some signs that act as a sort of safe word. Otherwise, it’s a first come, first serve affair and so there is generally a line out the door as each shift turns over.

The rule most in conflict with the traditional u-pick model is that visitors are forbidden to take their discoveries with them. Too many fetishists. Too many witches. Too many men in lab coats, looking for anonymous donations of excrement and DNA.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Nobody knows who posts the signs for ‘FREE COFFEE,’ and nobody is entirely sure whether they’re advertising the liquid or the site itself. Government authorities have recommended against ingesting anything taken from ‘FREE COFFEE’ but then, the government has always been reluctant to give anything away for free.’

What the guide fails to mention about ‘FREE COFFEE’s’ signage is that it varies wildly. There are cardboard signs everywhere, stapled to trees and lampposts, littering the ground. The letters are marked in a dozen different styles. ‘Coffee’ is sometimes- is often- misspelled. Sometimes I find pieces of paper that just say ‘free’ or ‘coffee’ and I have to wonder whether it’s long-term advertising or just pieces of a single sign that have been separated.

During the news, yesterday, between weather and sports there was a commercial advertisement. Just the words ‘FREE COFFEE’ on a blue background for three straight minutes. I’ve seen a billboard or two. The phrase comes up on coasters and once there was a voice on the radio: ‘FREEEE COFFEE!’ ‘FREEEE COFFEE!’ It’s everywhere and has been for some time.

So I finally make my way to ‘FREE COFFEE,’ which is in Colorado (and none of the advertisements mention that). It’s late autumn and cold and there’s some snow on the ground, mixed with mud and maybe coffee. There’s an old metal pump in the ground, there, and a spigot. Both blazingly hot to the touch, I find out just a little too late. Paper cups litter the area, crisp and uncrumpled. I take one from the ground and shake a pine needle from the bottom. I make sure Hector is out of range and I pull on gloves to work the pump. The lever resists, gives, and resists again, like I’m pulling rubber from the ground. After I struggle through three pulls, hot, brown liquid erupts from the spigot, fills and knocks over the cup, and melts the snow around it.

I grab another cup and brace it with rocks. This time, when the spigot vomits ‘coffee,’ the cup stays upright.

I wait a few minutes for the coffee to cool and then quickly transfer it to a third, less melted cup for tasting. It’s pretty good.

The advertising peters off after that, which is a concern in and of itself, but I try to put it behind me. Granted, there’s a lot already back there.

-traveler

‘There is nothing miniature about East Iowa’s ‘Miniature Bowling Alley.’ The qualifier is meant to draw comparisons to ‘miniature golf’ – to communicate that this is not your normal bowling alley, but one in which Rube-Goldbergesque set pieces will aid or impede plays.

The ‘Miniature Bowling Alley’ is actually massive and convoluted, its lanes crossing and crisscrossing and generally overstaying their welcome. The weight of the balls. The length of the courses. The constant, uneven crashing of gutter balls. Nobody has scored a perfect a game simply because so few people have finished.

Much of the ‘Miniature Bowling Alley’ has fallen into the sort of disrepair one expects to see in the latter stages of a sports venue’s life. The plastic chairs are scratched and sticky. The food is lukewarm and overpriced. The people who work there never seem to leave. They blend in with the furniture, maintain a stoic indifference that is occasionally interrupted by something like blind existential panic.

The panic is timed with the orrery finale of the ‘Miniature Bowling Alley.’ The 18^th hole requires that nine bowling balls, unlocked at various stages previous, be aimed and timed such that they orbit a massive and vaguely sun-decorated center ball. Nobody knows what’s supposed happen if this succeeds because it’s a near impossible ask and because, when it nearly did happen in the late seventies, the man behind the shoe counter threw himself into the lanes to block the shot: an action he was contractually obligated to take.

Labor laws have changed in the meantime but then, interest in bowling has declined. Most now visit the ‘Miniature Bowling Alley’ to engage with the lesser obstacles: a lobster that playfully squeezes rogue balls, a literal cannon, an industrial clown with bowling pin teeth that gnashes and chimes. This hardly seems to comfort the owner who is very, very old and yet still paces the orrery, still grips the railing when a young couple-in-love tries for a clumsy win. There is no doubt he will throw himself in front of a winning shot. No doubt it will kill him.

Then, there will be no one to stand in the way.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside