Somewhere in the southeast, the Editor and I fall for a ‘Faulty Road Sign’ and end up on I-38 (which shouldn’t exist). The author of Shitholes includes this little byway as an addendum in the book where one might only find it if one were looking. One would think that, in most cases (including ours), a reader would only attempt to look for it if their GPS had already failed them and if their internet search had already suggested that there were no I-38, and if the only mention of the road online were several pages into a pirated PDF copy of the Shitholes appendices at which point one might turn, frowning, to their own copy of the book and find the entry there, clear as day.

Put simply, a reader will most likely learn about this trap after it has sprung.

‘It can be assumed that there are a few misprints in each lot of road signs that the Federal Highway Administration has produced and, just as a mis-made cell might spiral into cancer, these signs make their way into the system, forming great, redundant interstates that weigh on the taxpayer like a tumor. These ‘Faulty Road Signs’ are distinguishable from their official counterparts only by the absence of a small holographic sticker on the back and, more practically, by simple context clues.

‘Why,’ you might ask yourself, ‘does I-67 consist only of a series of on and off ramps?’ ‘Why does I-21 post minimum speeds as 40 mph when it remains largely unpaved?’ ‘How many times does I-33 split into carpool lanes, their tolls increasingly expensive and their passenger requirements increasingly bizarre?’ ‘For how long does I-38 proceed with a mild right curve toward a sunset that never quite dips below the horizon (shining, always, in the eyes of the driver)?’

You will not likely find the answers to these questions, but you might rest easy with the knowledge that, in asking them, you have narrowed your location to just one of the dozens of feral American roadways that stripe the aging country like varicose veins.’

We burn a pile of books on the side of the road, all copies of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ from paths the Editor insists we have left to be overgrown. We are not cold and the books were a nominal burden- the Editor burns them with the grim pleasure with which she sometimes considers the gun hidden in her jacket. I’m not sure she remembers revealing it to me at the ‘Parade,’ and neither of us have brought it up since.

It was a gun that made me leave the Stranger.

The Editor prides herself on the narrative layout of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ and, in the few instances that we have been drunk together, the conversation will turn inevitably to this achievement. It happens again at a bar off I-38 where every menu item is misspelled and the locals move like spiders in short, unpredictable bursts.

“It’s about the reading experience,” she says, her voice the loudest thing in miles, “A normal travel guide is written like an encyclopedia but this is a narrative. This,” she says, jabbing a finger in the appendices, “is the friend that pushes you into the lake when you hesitate on the rock. This is the intervention from on high when you’re too spineless to take the last step into the unknown.”

Light from the sunset pierces the window. Its reflection off the laminated menus makes it difficult to see her expressions clearly. Her eyes well up when she speaks like this, though I haven’t seen her cry since our first encounter at Yellowstone. I shift and the light reflects there, instead. Her eyes are so full that the slightest movement might set them overflowing: an arm around her shoulder, a pat on the back, a hug. I don’t offer any of these things and her gaze remains thick. Flooded.

We’ve been moving backward on the interstate for an hour, carefully straddling the shoulder, though we’ve seen no other cars. We pulled off for a break here, seeing that the lot exited from the left as though its common enough for travelers to be re-tracing their drive. The Editor became drunk immediately, almost as soon as she walked through the door. I took my time- two paths to the same place. We can’t leave until we sober up and, while we wait for that to happen, we drink.

“I don’t care what you think,” she continues, reading disagreement in my relative silence, “I’m proud of this thing. I’m proud of what I made here. This is a work of art- a book like nothing else that’s come out of our company. I couldn’t be more proud.”

Her insistence on the word speaks, to me, of a deep-seated denial- of a story she tells herself to sleep well at night or to return from the dead. I do think she’s proud, but I think that might be the only positive thing she experiences, which makes it difficult to feel complimented when her face breaks into a wide, weepy smile and she says:

“You should be proud, too.”

-traveler

‘South Dakota boasts a peculiar slogan, ‘Great Faces, Great Places,’ and they would have you believe this was in sole reference to Mt. Rushmore. Beyond this, they would have you believe that Mt. Rushmore accounts for all of the stone faces available along the Wayside and that it is the creation of a species that, admittedly, so enjoys seeing itself that a great portion of its artistic endeavors attempt what a mirror or camera or a well-programmed 3D printer could create in an instant. Can you imagine, reader, if we were not alone in this motivation? Can you imagine the statue of a buck fashioned by its own hooves, the pointed horns a still-green pine branch that shivers in the wind and the eyes, black stone?

The truth is that there are faces everywhere and there are more faces every day- the warped faces in the wood grain of your childhood wardrobe, the crude gaping mouths of cliffsides and ancient trees all early stages of the same phenomenon. These faces did not always exist but, having recognized the faces in the Black Hills, the nation can no longer contain them.

The first time the faces were brought to the attention of America’s colonizers occurred when a pioneering woman named Leana Brookings fell into a sinkhole that she hoped would lead her to gold. In excavating several similar pits nearby her family revealed the face of a great uncle, screaming (or yawning) at the cloudless sky (the initial pit being just one of his deep-set eyes). So struck, were they, with the dread of deep space and dark water (seeing something so familiar made monstrous) that they set to leveling the land. The second recorded incident was of ‘The Overhang Smile,’ a beloved natural fissure observed by the denizens of a canyon settlement. The fissure is said to have dissolved in a sudden rockslide, killing a man and simultaneously revealing his own smiling face below the rough caricature that had previously been the center of sentimental stories (most of which seemed to suggest the white man had always been in the Black Hills).

The faces occur on a small scale as well, looking down from cavern ceilings, their gaping mouths serving as handholds to unwitting spelunkers (whose lights make shadows and faces of everything in the dark). Some emerge, smooth and cool, from river-washed stones. Others break fully-formed, a blight in the crystal hearts of local geodes. No matter the size, the faces play on the human psyche like an itch- sometimes fearful like the crawling of an invisible insect and sometimes annoying like the peel of a dried scab. In either case, the faces seem to call a viewer to scratch and, in either case, the scratching only seems to worsen the condition.

Aside from Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse (which emerges inevitably despite a concerted private effort to demolish it), undamaged specimens can be viewed in a shallow cavern outside the ‘Gas n’ Begone.’ Zelda Flanders, owner, does not publicly advertise the faces but will sell you instructions to the trailhead and rent you a flashlight with the same demeanor a conservative drug-store cashier might employ in selling condoms to a nervous teen. She will offer no rules to guide your tour, secretly hoping that someone will do away with the silent audience that darkens her property like mold in a closet.’

– excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

The Editor chews slowly, her eyes drooping and unfocused. Syrup glistens at the corners of her mouth and her voice is thick.

“I’m fine,” she says, “Just tired. And this place… is gross.”

A young woman walks behind us and she slides a pancake onto the Editor’s plate. The air is thick with melted butter. I’ve hunched my shoulders to protect my own eating area and I take small, regular bites. When I’m not eating, I hold one of the few of Alice’s remaining picks between my lips. This appears to be one of the few acceptable non-eating activities.

Unfortunately, the pick seems to invite conversation, so I eat instead, feeling the edges of my inner-self expanding uncomfortably.

The Editor gags in her chair and I try not to let her disgust spread to me.

‘There’s no magic greater to middle America than a pancake feed. Ostensibly for charity, these events probe the deep stomach of the corn-fed lower class to fund causes few participants will remember past the drive home. In truth, a pancake feed represents the classic capitalist trade-off: money for cleansing.

The cleansing ritual of the ‘Pancake Feed’ involves the three-part dedication of time, sacrifice, and debauchery (making it distinct from those that require only one of the aspects, say, the sterile donation of money by mail, the hammering of a few nails in the skeleton of a charity house, or the straightforward gluttony of an all-you-can-eat buffet). It is an archetype (in miniature) of the American dream in which the lower-class is encouraged to show up, to invest money, and to reap the promised benefits (in the form of the nation’s principle cereal grain, no less), failing to realize that it is the lower-class working behind the scenes as well: a sloshing-about of money in an already shallow pool.

All this to say that the ‘Eternal Pancake Feed’ is an American abomination. 2019 marks its 32^nd year of continual pancake production, locked in place by a single participant, Edith Baker, who has consumed pancakes at a steady pace since the fateful July 4^th on which it began. Baker has grown to an enormous size and has not responded to attempts at communication since the late nineties when she apparently said “Pass the butter, if you would.” A conservative estimate suggests Baker has eaten 24 tons of pancake in the last three decades, all for the entry price of two U.S. dollars. The feed continues as long as she eats, fueled by a certain sense of obligation to uphold the ‘all-you-can-eat’ promise and, no doubt, by grim curiosity.

Despite opening the ‘Eternal Pancake Feed’ to further customers, the event ceased being charitable, or lucrative, a long time ago. It has bankrupted the food bank that it once partnered with and remains a minor drain on the state’s budget: a single citizen’s mindless greed funded by taxpayers through the exploitation of a minor loophole.’

“She’s like those little Venus figures.”

The Editor’s sudden interjection catches me off guard. Alice’s pick slips from between my teeth and lands upright in the soft flesh of the pancake on my plate.

“What?”

“Like the… the fat women they dig up. The old goddesses.”

I look down the table at Edith Baker, who sits at the head. I wonder if she sat there originally, knowing what was to come, or if they’ve since moved the table to indicate her legacy. I retrieve Alice’s pick and suck the crumbs from it.

“The Venus statues never had faces,” I say, “No mouths to eat with.”

“No mouths to talk with.”

“You think ancient humans had pancake feeds?”

“Just a comment,” she says.

It’s good to hear her talking, I realize. It’s the first unprompted thing she’s said since I found her again.

-traveler

The Editor does not reappear for quite some time and I lug her books aimlessly into the south, where autumn is warm and dry. She has left her journal behind, the book she uses to keep track of the differences between Shitholes editions. The first hundred pages are beautiful, looping scrawls- as clear as the night sky. The writing degrades, though, her form as well as her words. By the end she’s writing in a shorthand so frantic it might as well be code. She has predicted I would read this all, someday, and she rails against me when she remembers to. The Editor insists that I tell her once I have and is so sure that I won’t.

She’s right, of course.

I wonder what she thinks of me, sitting as she does on the bike.

There is a picture of us on a rollercoaster- a place ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ said was haunted by spirits from all over the country.

‘What?’ it asked, ‘You don’t think ghosts can have fun? Free from mortal concerns, the previously-fearful departed have no reason not to try these things. Though, spirit photographers have captured increasingly long lines…’

The Editor has no interest in the places we visit, only the order in which we visit them. Had she asked why I bought the picture (priced steeply at $29.99 for the smallest option) I would show her that my family’s dog sits just behind me, its semi-transparent tongue dripping ectoplasm into the wind. The dog, I would explain, was alive when I left. But she was old, so…

So it’s not a surprise.

I have not pressed the issue, though, because behind the dog and behind the Editor, as far back as the camera has captured, the ride seats are busy with her own spirits, each stern-faced in turn. I look at the picture, and I wonder if the new Editor is the one I should tell. She doesn’t seem to think these little deaths matter in any iteration, and truthfully, each Editor is identical to the last. I would not have guessed there was a tally and, faced with it, I’m not sure what it means.

-traveler

‘We are assured, as children, that the vast majority of our fears are unwarranted and that the world is a mundane place so when, as adults, ‘The Parade of Strangers’ arrives in town, we hardly bat an eye.

Is it the celebration of some secret society? Is it a memorial for a forgotten war? Could it be a charity event or a publicity stunt? For whom do they raise the money? What are they trying to sell us? Perhaps they are a friendly, if underrepresented, religion, celebrating some esoteric holiday that the government refuses to recognize. Perhaps they are a roving militia, re-distributing their apocalyptic supplies.

They are none of these things, or, they are a lurching chimera of them all. ‘The Parade of Strangers’ descends upon a town much like a spat of rain: with no motive except to move through it, on the way to destination yet defined. Like a spat of rain, we endure it.’

As always, there are websites that track these things- a website that tracks and attempts to predict the movement of ‘The Parade.’ It is estimated to be three and a half miles long when we check, moving south down I-75 at about 40 mph. We approach its tail and break from the interstate as soon as we begin to see candy on the ground. It sits in sticky piles on the median.

Believe it or not, it’s the Strangers that began the great American tradition of throwing candy from a parade. It is an act that is quintessentially strange, invoking the early-American disregard for litter and an unwarranted trust for white American men. We’ve learned better, since then, and now we warn children that Strangers are exactly the sort of person you shouldn’t be taking candy from. Candy can only mean an ulterior motive, kids, unless you’re paying out of pocket. A candy debt to the Strangers is not something you want on your file in ‘The Secret Bank.’ Low entry, high interest.

No easy bankruptcy.

It would be time-consuming and difficult to try to pass ‘The Parade of Strangers’ from behind but the next best way forward still means bisecting it at some point. We settle on a suburb of Louisville, hoping to cut through early, but the motorcycle isn’t taking well to hauling the little trailer of books (the Editor, herself, weighing next to nothing behind me and refusing to wrap her arms around my waist), so we arrive late and find we’re just in time to see the dead-center passing through downtown. It’s visible from miles around, a flock of birds hovering overhead like a sugar-starved thunderhead.

Seeing it, again, I may as well be back in ‘The City of Strangers.’ They have taken most of it with them, the King’s skyscraper looming over the little suburban townhall like a schoolyard bully. Candy rains down from broken buildings as they are pulled along the street. It shatters on the ground and leave dents on the cars parked along the road. The whole thing is noisy- the rattling of broken candy and the roaring of diesel engines as they struggle to pull the buildings through Main Street. Someone is playing music but its volume relative to everything else makes the gesture seem sarcastic and threatening.

Nobody has come to see this parade, but nobody attempts to stop it. It’s another day in the world and another person’s business as to what this is all about.

“There’s an opening up ahead,” the Editor shouts behind me, “You’ll have to be quick.”

The Strangers eye us as they pass, smirking at the bike’s exhaust and the idea that we might find a way to cross. I breathe heavily under the helmet, fogging the inside. It wouldn’t have been hard for them to learn my license plate, the make and model of my set-up, but it wouldn’t be like them at all to consider the details. As unlikely as it may be, I think any one of these men could know me by my face, or by the way I walk, or by the way my shadow lies a little too thick on the ground. I look ahead to where the Editor has spotted the way through and I ready us for the charge.

Much as we both assumed (though these suspicions often remain unspoken between the Editor and I), the Strangers try to close the gap the moment they realize we’ll be trying to slide through it. Whether they recognize me in the moment, or whether this is just their way, the truck engines spin screeching rubber into the pavement with the effort of the Strangers to jolt forward. Candy rains down maliciously, then, cracking the headlamp and sticking in the treads of the tires. We skid through the rainbow hail and I topple the bike on a hidden curb. I rise quickly and see the Editor struggle.

Her left arm is broken.

The Strangers seem to lose interest now that we’ve crossed but I am careful to leave my helmet on. The Editor pulls painfully at her own and eventually allows me to remove it for her. She frowns at the dangling wrist and glances between the trailer and my covered face.

“Can I trust you with these for now?” she asks, “I don’t really want to travel on this arm.”

Before I can answer, before I can begin to guess the time it takes for a broken bone to heal, the Editor pulls a small pistol from her bag and levels it with her head, spraying a nearby van with blood and brain-matter.

I swallow my gum.

The Editor exists in all timelines- she’ll be back when I make a decision that sends us down a new path. I admire her fearlessness for that time in-between, but shudder to think of it myself.

-traveler

“This isn’t right, either.”

The Editor stands over me, dozens of books piled between us. This represents a few boxes’ worth of her collection of ‘Shitholes,’ which supposedly includes a single copy of every edition. The books arrived by mail on the same day, each in its own padded envelope. It’s standard practice, she told me, for her company to send her a published copy of a book she’s edited. Usually just the one, though. The Editor believes she stands at the nucleus of a supposed multiverse.

We all want to be special.

“What’s not right?” I ask.

“The chronology,” she says, “I think we’ve cut out as many good endings as bad ones.”

Alice’s pick breaks between my teeth, the shattered middle soft as a paintbrush against my palate.

“I thought…”

“I know,” she says, “I thought I had it too. There’s just too many to keep them straight and every time I read one I think I remember why I put it in that particular order and… Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re still trying to kill me,” I say.

“What?”

“You’re still trying to kill me,” I tell her.

And the second time I say it, I know it’s true.

‘Save for those that wind through the larger, carefully-tamed National and State Parks, most beloved trailheads are crowned with what appears to be a low tangle of rusted barb wire, as though the way were once forbidden but time and negligence have thrown open the doors. The wire reappears often, in twisted piles at the bottom of unexplained pits and in creaking strands, half-absorbed by the cancerous bark of old trees. This is ‘the Devil’s Grapevine,’ an American weed so widely spread as to be subtle, but as mischievous as poison ivy.

The great North American network of ‘Devil’s Grapevine’ maintains a core in western Alabama, a well, of sorts, from which all its tendrils spring. Wind passing over the well greets the human ear like whispered intimacies. Some would have you believe these are rumors, snagged from the skin of clumsy hikers. To visit the core is to submit yourself to the shallowest concerns of all who have felt the sting of its thorns, twisted, as they are, by the paths that brought them there.’

“Don’t be an idiot!” the Editor shouts, “It’s just the wind.”

She throws a copy of Shitholes at my head, its pages exploding across the field. The spine snaps down on the bridge of my nose and by the time my eyes regain focus I realize she’s right.

“Sorry,” I say between my fingers, “But you were trying to kill me.”

“You should hear what it’s been saying about you,” she says, sneering from behind a hardcover.

“I said sorry.”

“A fifty-fifty reduction isn’t that bad,” she reasons, “It means we haven’t done any harm, and we’ve narrowed the future choices down a bit…”

“But…”

“But,” she admits, “The majority of the remaining good timelines, the ones where you live, they all take you back through the ‘City of Strangers.’”

“What? Why would I go back there?”

“It’s different now,” she says, “The city is moving. It’s like a… barricade. And it’s standing between us and the end of this book.”

-traveler

‘Much as the scientists of Copernicus’ era recognized the necessity of standardized measurement, early Americans understood that democracy, as a man-made concept, was abstract at best. Unlike the iron resolve of their former monarchy, a ‘free’ state encouraging free speech and free interpretation of the Constitution allowed for the chance that an amount of well-natured ‘silliness’ could derail the thing entirely.

Silliness, at the time, existed in a country that suffered a perpetual ‘witching hour,’ when the veil between the spirit world and the world of mortals was at its thinnest. The forests of America remained untamed and were thick with darkness and superstition- superstition being the catalyst of a good, pioneering prank. Come April 1^st, farmers would dress as witches and miners would dress as ghosts and, come April 2^nd, it was a coin-toss as to whether those people had gotten a good laugh or been burned at the stake.

It was with these cautionary tales in mind that the nation’s founders instituted the ‘Fool-Safe Zone,’ an acre of land and a group of families that would dedicate their bloodlines to preserving serious discussion and curating a set of understood facts, acting, essentially, as a magnetic north to America’s reality. Theoretically, when the world churned out some new madness, the States could look to the ‘Fool-Safe Zone’ much in the way we grasp desperately for the bus’ handhold as it lurches over uneven terrain. In practice, of course, the founding reality of the ‘Fool-Safe Zone’ was more like magnetic north than could be understood at its creation- neither was as fixed as was imagined.

Now, the ‘Fool-Safe Zone’ serves as the exact opposite of its intended purpose. It lives on, almost cult-like, an inbred society of humans that holds to facts as they were understood in the 1700s. It is an illustration of what might happen if we take ourselves too seriously for too long.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘[traveler] was a sales associate at ‘The Tchotchke Closet’ when he departed, suddenly, on the narrated road trip that would eventually become the collected ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’ Though presented here as a simple travel guide, his unpublished musings reveal the tumultuous journey that occurred behind the scenes, including a battle with addiction and a near-fatal accident just months into his travel. He contributed to several other guidebooks from the road, among which are ‘Dark Games to Play at Your Local Buffet’ and the critically acclaimed ‘DEAR GOD DON’T DRINK THAT.’

‘Autumn by the Wayside’ is published with the blessing of [traveler]’s parents, who forgive his wordless departure, and of his sister, who does not.’

I read this all the first time I was handed the book and I’m sure I must have read it again in the meantime but it is, admittedly, a crisper page in a book that is dirty with my fingerprints. I did read it again after the accident, sometime in that hazy month of mending bones and physical therapy. At that point, when it confirmed there was an amount of my own destiny between the pages of Shitholes, I assumed the passage had given up the few secrets it contained and, like an idiot, I hung the last line on a wall in the living room of my soul:

‘Autumn by the Wayside’ is published with the blessing of [traveler]’s parents, who forgive his wordless departure, and of his sister, who does not.’

I assumed it meant there would be an end to this, an end in which I would return home, having paid for a conservative haircut and a truck-stop shower, to sheepishly greet a family that would cry and yell and eventually embrace me and welcome me back into the house I grew up in. I worried about my sister, of course, but it would be like her, like us, to agree on the line as a little nod to the months it would have taken her to speak to me civilly. I would have apologized a thousand times by then over a thousand cups of coffee and she would have said, finally, that she was still so sure I would disappear again and she would make me promise I wouldn’t, that my traveling days were over. I would make that promise and we would write that line together, a line like a scar, that would heal the hurt but serve as a reminder that the hurt once was. We’ve always fancied ourselves world-class writers.

I read, somewhere, that an editor helps a writer understand their own work and, now that I’ve met my own, I couldn’t agree more.

This passage is an obituary.

-traveler

‘‘The Last Sectioned Diner’ holds on to its title by a thin, legal thread, relying on its history (claiming to have served any number of politically relevant smokers and yellow-fingered authors) to allow for an indoor smoking section to exist in a state that has long banned them. Rumored to be the result of a technical clause in this ambiguous heritage, the ‘Diner’ has instituted a system far more complex than the smoking/non-smoking binary of young America, opting, instead, for a floorplan described as ‘fractal’ and ‘endless’ in its most recent review by the local fire marshal.

A favorable dining experience at ‘The Last Sectioned Diner’ requires no little cunning on the part of the customer, for each categorized section is likely nested within a dozen others. In order to understand the destination, one must understand the many branching paths that led one there in the first place.’

The non-violent section is, inexplicably, positioned as a sub-section of smoking- that much I recognized almost immediately. Is it calming effects of nicotine? A worry that spilled ashtrays might cause fires? The waitstaff won’t say (and I’ve never been one to needlessly bother a server). All this to say I noticed the smoking the moment I arrived.

The rest, I’ve learned over a week of waiting.

This, for instance, seems to be a section that discourages speaking above a whisper. It’s a section that does not offer wine but does have an extensive kid’s menu. This is a section that enforces a certain dress code, I found, when I arrived in flip-flops and pajama pants in the middle of the night- attire that wouldn’t be out of place at many 24-hour diner chains- and was offered a seat in an area that could not entirely rule out violence but was judgement-free, at least. Seeing the people dining there was like seeing my own soul laid bare and I was soon escorted out for quietly thinking that I must be better than them, for swearing under my breath that I would take the time to pull on jeans before returning.

There are static things about the diner as well. The walls that separate the sections do not reach the ceiling- they terminate in frosted, floral glass about six feet above the floor so that the smell of smoke is always present, no matter its origin. The menus are laminated and spiralbound, their pages sticking together with the residue of a recent cleaning. The tables are always mildly wet, the coffee always weak but plentiful. The cream is always in the little unspoiling plastic tubs, stacked neatly into a little ceramic bowl. It always takes two or three to bring about any change in the coffee’s flavor and they pile like insect shells as I wait and sip coffee and eat pie. I order a steak each time, not because I want it, but because I need an easy out for when she arrives.

It is impossible not to judge someone who orders the steak at a chain diner.

The Editor arrives on the eighth day, lead to my booth by the server. She is shaking, but not for any of the physical harm she has been subject to in the previous weeks. She is shaking with the effort of suppressing her anger. Cracks in the booth’s plastic cushions split and widen as she slides in across the table. My mug rattles as her feet connect with the supporting bar below.

“I’ll be back with that Shirley Temple!” the server croons.

The Editor winces.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her as the older woman turns to the kitchen, “They don’t allow judgment here.”

“Fuck you,” she says.

“How do you keep catching up with me?” I ask, “You tricked me the first time and now I can’t turn a corner without running into you.”

“We’re on the same path, now,” she says, “I know which book you have and that’s all it takes.”

“Are you going to tell me why you’re following me?”

Her drink arrives, dripping red.

“I’ve made myself clear.”

“You edited ‘Autumn by the Wayside,’” I say, “And you think I have something to do with it.”

“You wrote it.”

“You’re the second person to say that,” I tell her, “But I haven’t written anything.”

“What’s this?” she asks, pointing to the napkin under my elbow. I’ve scribbled my observations about the ‘Diner’ there: “A favorable experience at ‘The Last Sectioned Diner…”

“That’s different,” I say, stuffing the napkin into my pocket, “I write what I see, but the only reason I’m out here is because I’m visiting the places in Shitholes. The first I heard about it was the day someone handed it to me.”

“This isn’t you?” she asks, and she opens the back of her copy to the author bio. The pages are crisp and white and the man in the picture is me.

“That picture changes.”

“Bullshit,” she says, “I was the one that had to edit your teeth back in.”

I reach out to touch the unbroken spine of her book but she snatches it from my fingers.

“But it was already written…”

“You wrote this!” she seethes, “You’re writing it now! You will write it! That’s what’s happening. You’ve been writing yourself in circles and some of us are stuck in the loop with you, you selfish fuck! We’re circling the drain!”

“Calm down,” I tell her, noting the gathering of waitstaff at the edges of the section, “I don’t want you following me- I’m on your side! How do we fix this?”

“You die,” she says, “That might work.”

“How else?” I ask, “Can’t I just finish the book?”

“You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said,” she snaps, “There’s more than one version of the book and the one you’re writing now ends in disaster.”

“What?” I ask, “What’s wrong with this one?”

My own copy is gray and warped with water damage. It seems unsanitary to place it on the table.

“Ever wonder why the bio in your book uses the past-tense?” she asks, “That’s because we publish it posthumously.”

“You’re trying to kill me before I die?”

“Let’s just say that one of the nicer versions is a hell of a lot shorter than the rest.”

“But it’s not the best,” I say, confirming what I guessed in her averted eyes, “The best version is different.”

“The best version is complicated,” she says, “It’s long.”

“It needs a skilled editor.”

Her eyes flick back to my face and her grip tightens on Shitholes. She opens her mouth to speak when the server interrupts us with my order.

“A steak?” the Editor asks, eyeing the dry slab of meat on the table.

I try to warn her, but a condescending smile already grows across her face.

“Sorry,” I shrug, as the waitstaff descend upon her, “But you know where to find me.”

-traveler

She attacks me in the subway of a city while I try to find ‘The Rat Museum.’ I push her into the path of an oncoming train.

She overturns my rented canoe and pulls me into a lake which is rumored to have flooded a town. With her rope around my neck, I am dragged underwater until I think I see the ghostly buildings of ‘Old Fredericktown’ swimming in the depths, but her lungs give out before mine do. I use her body to jettison me toward the surface.

She chases me through ‘The Bear-Proof Field’ until we each fall to the traps, just a few yards apart, and while I pry the jaws from my leg she rakes the ground with her fingers, stripping her ankle of flesh in an effort to reach me. I leave her to bleed out in the dirt.

The Woman is still limping the next time I see her. She hobbles in front of the bike as I swerve to take a familiar gray road, going well past the posted speed limit. The front wheel strikes her just as the world loses its color and we fly forward together, the heavy frame of the motorcycle spinning back up and over us. There is a moment of weightlessness followed by a good deal of pain.

The world is still gray when consciousness returns. I’ve landed in a ditch, spared serious injury by the thick mud there, churned up by run-off from the snow-capped mountains. The Woman, when I find her, is not so lucky. She is on the side of the road, undoubtedly dying again.

Her bag is at her side and, in it, I find the same objects- a shattered phone, a broken hairbrush, crushed make-up, and a ratty copy of Shitholes. I also find her wallet, tucked away in an inner pocket. I find her ID and recognize the name immediately.

This woman is the editor of ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’

My revelation is cut short by a sudden, sharp pain. The Editor has twisted her body in such a way that she is able to weakly bite the top of the hand that supports me on the asphalt and she takes a piece of me when I pull away, struggling to my feet.

The gray world has shrunk to a small triangle in an attempt to expel us. Its corners have stuck on the bike, the Editor, and myself, but it will collapse soon and we’ll be pressed out somewhere along the side of the highway. I walk to the motorcycle and grip the handles, hoping it will be enough to ensure we end up in the same place. The world shifts until it’s only a gray line that connects me and the dying woman. She sees me, because I am the only thing left in this transient reality to see.

I circle the entry for ‘The Last Sectioned Diner’ in her book and toss it to her without thinking. It lands on her broken ribcage and she curls into a ball and the sight of her pain makes me forget what I had planned on saying.

The last she sees of me is an apologetic grimace and a half-wave.

-traveler