With some rough calculations, I gather that there is about $2000 between the men that play the game. The $2000 more or less shifts between players, though the bulk of it sits between two men: Caleb and Sebastian. The rest of us are used to losing a little every night- ten bucks here, twenty bucks on a rough couple of rounds. Sometimes we even come out on top, but the longer I watch, the more I see the money sliding across the table to those two.

Nobody seems to mind.

Eddie stands outside my motel room, his lanky silhouette framed by the open door, breath emerging in a fog. He worries about the woman next door- it’s been a long time since I’ve heard her pacing. He tells me how Sebastian created the game:

‘Sebastian worked night shifts at some shithole gas station, right? Some place way out on the highway, out where there isn’t any light but headlights and the fucking stars. Not the sort of place where people come twice, caters mostly to truckers and families on holiday and people on the run. Thing is, he says he started seeing patterns in the folk that came around for gas and jerky.

A guy comes in looking for scissors, says he can’t get the package of his new earbuds open without’em. Guy comes in a month later- different guy, same story. Another guy’s always looking for some flavor of chips they quit making. A woman comes in to buy gardening gloves every three weeks. Who buys gardening gloves at a gas station? Who needs’em in the middle of the night?

So these people are all different but they’re all fulfilling roles. They’re acting out parts. He starts to see the whole thing like some sort of TV drama, starts to know what to expect. He writes’em down, doodles little pictures of’em. So the Scissor Man, like, the card, you know? The Scissor Man is pretty regular so there’s a few of him in the deck. And he’s not tied to the moon so the card’s black. The Chip Eater only came around when the moon was, you know, getting bigger. So the card’s yellow, like the moon off the highway. And he never finds what he’s looking for so he’s a losing card.

Sebastian says he near offed himself when, all said and done, he figured there were really only 48 types of people that ever came in off the highway. Said the same about people in the daytime, too. We’re all just a Scissor Man or a Dusty Shade or a Gas Guzzler. All of us just fit into those 48 slots and some of us are so common as to be around every corner or so useless that nobody wants us shitting on their hand and eating up their chips.

Only thing that kept him sane was getting away from that gas station and making it all like some game he gets to play with dudes at the end of the day. Makes it about money again which, I suspect, we all kinda think it’s about, really. Play some cards, make some money, right? You in for this Friday? I’ve got a good feeling.’

I have seen Sebastian eyeing me across the table and, before I could take it personally, I’ve found him eyeing the others. He sees us in the cards and he plays us like his hand, pegging each man at the table with his gas-station archetype.

Friday comes along and I flip a hand of Amorphous Children, one of each suit. It’s impressive, maybe the best hand I’ve played in my time at the table, and it wins me several hundred dollars in chips and a few stinging back slaps. Not unexpectedly, I begin to lose again. Sebastian knows the ins-and-outs of the game and of the men. It would take years of play before I was able to win against him consistently. Instead, I try to lose in a very specific way, conceding round after round to Caleb, even when I may have otherwise held out.

Suddenly, Sebastian’s eyes are on Caleb. He understands something has happened, but not what. Maybe Caleb is a Gibbous Dusty Shade. Maybe he’s the Walking Drunk. Sebastian tries to reconcile the change with the archetype and he fails. By the end of the night, his system has begun to crumble. He makes violent, clumsy plays that ruin Caleb and allow other men to win. He pays no mind to me.

I wonder if he would tell me my card and, at the same time, I dread knowing.

-traveler

Something is coming. I feel it before the men tell me, before even Eddie, who is so loose-lipped, let’s slip that the little games we play every Friday night are building to something bigger. Finally, at the end of a particularly slow round, a man named Matthew clears his throat and asks:

“Think we can fit a Saturday game in next week?”

The others cough and nod and scratch their ears and one by one their eyes turn to me. They have spoken of this already and agreed. They’re asking me.

“I’ve got nothing planned,” I tell them, and I wonder if they can hear my heartbeat dancing in my chest.

I win the next round.

Last week was close.

Last week, during a bathroom break, I asked about the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ and they pretended not to hear me. I asked and Caleb put out a cigarette, hardly halfway burned, and suggested he might take an early night. The whole game was called early. I packed my bags and lay awake in my motel room, listening to my neighbor pace and cough. I stared at the white bulk of my backpack in the moonlight and I considered the tenuous allegiance of man.

And then, the next day at the store, it was though nothing had happened. I had gotten off with a warning and I spent another sleepless night shuffling cards until they warped and split. Now, as the motel’s digital clock ticks itself toward a crimson 3:00am, the pocket of my jeans buzzes with a message from Eddie:

‘We’re in charge of food for Saturday.’

And then:

‘Barbecue.’

My seasonal employment at the store does not grant me any particular discount on its products so Eddie, with his name thickly embroidered on his breast, accompanies me to the back in order to ‘negotiate’ with the Meat Department. As a stocker, I am more than familiar with the labyrinthine warehouse in the back of the store- a place that is too large and too convoluted to exist in the shell it presents to the outside world. I have seen, occasionally, the once-white door of the Meat Locker, these visitations always preceded by a stark drop in temperature. I have seen Veronica, the manager there, her apron stained red and her eyes glittering.

“She kept fucking whispering to customers,” Eddie explains, pushing through a wall of stacked toilet paper, “And, like, it’s not against the rules. And we thought she had some mental thing so they didn’t fire her. And… Jesus!”

Veronicastands in a pool of pink froth, running a rag back and forth across the cooler’sdoor. She wrings the cloth onto the floor and dips it in a bucket at herfeet, the liquid there tinted red and steaming.

“Veronica,” Eddie says, holding a box of cereal to his chest as though it will ward off her eyes, “Me and some of the guys were, uh, looking to barbecue this weekend. Think you can hook us up?”

Veronica does not turn. She drops the rag into the bucket and leans forward to rest her head on the door, as though vexed by Eddie’s request. Eddie himself has been moving backward, his footsteps so small as to be imperceptible to the eye. I stand several inches ahead of him, now.

Veronica turns, finally. She is tall- taller than me- and her arms are long and lanky. Her face and hair, where they touched the door, are stained red. Red, too, are her hands, her apron, and her eyes (the latter as though she has been tired for a long time, or sad). Eddie’s box of cereal collapses under her gaze and he sets it back on the shelf, crooked and leaning. He clears his throat and says:

“Seems like They should give you guys gloves for that.”

It’s an absurd time to invoke the capital ‘They’- ‘They’ being the store’s faceless administration and this being a lowest-common-denominator conversation starter. I tried, once, to complain that ‘They’ were taking their time fixing the punch-out machine and was quickly shut down, having not yet earned the right to complain. Eddie, a veteran, derides ‘Them’ in the lull of every conversation. Something tells me Veronica, who wipes her forehead with the back of her hand (smearing the red stain down over her eyelids) does not care for, or even know about, ‘Their’ policy on wearing gloves.

And yet, she smiles. It’s a mean smile, one that reveals a row of sharp, crooked teeth as she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and slips a tie from her wrist, but the meanness is not for us.

“Youknow what They did?” she asks, “They told me it wasn’t my job to wash thedoor. They said to leave it for the night crew. This,” she says, gesturing to the red mess around her, “This is myday off.”

She draws gloves over her red, dripping hands.

“So, you guys need some meat?”

I think of Veronica’s hands as we play the game.

The novelty of Saturday is that we do not stop to eat. We leave great, greasy prints on the cards, we smear them with sauce and saliva and spilled beer. We play a deck until it sticks to itself and will not come apart or until we suspect an opponent has learned to identify the important suits by the crust on their edges or by their texture and smell. Marinade and cigarette ash congeals on the table. The smell of charcoal hangs in the air.

The meat makes me sick, the sheer quantity of it. I excuse myself to the restroom and see my own face stained red and streaked with ashen warpaint.

Alice’s picks rattle incessantly. The bike rusts in the motel parking. The pages of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ wilt like the petals of a dying flower.

This is all taking too long.

As long as I lose more than I win I will always be less than a friend to these men.

Time to start winning.

-traveler

I lose money, but not so much that I lose my room at the motel. A week passes and, with it, several more games. I lose less, but my relationship with these men remains purely transactional. I see their interest wane as my money does. Eddie is the exception- he seems like the sort of guy that could use a friend. I do what I can to fulfill that need.

The apartment in which we play has a room set up for the game. There are layers of ritual underneath the crushed cigarette butts and plastic chairs and I trip over myself trying to maintain these unspoken traditions. A man always coughs when someone enters the room, for instance. A toilet-stall cough- a polite, if unnecessary, acknowledgment of another soul’s presence. I have the cough, now, and I could not let Eddie into my room without a small croak.

Someone must always be smoking. This one was difficult for me- I learned only as the room became tense watching a curled cigarette turn to ash on the edge of a plate, a full pack having materialized near my elbow and a matchstick having perched itself between my lips. I lit up (my first in a long time) and the collective sigh of relief snuffed the failing cherry at the table. I won the next three rounds.

Behind each chair (and, so, behind each man) is a picture of a nude woman and it is customary to call these women by their names and to ask them for luck when the deck draws foul. The men at the table regard these foldouts with worship and fear. Upon returning, too early, from drinks on the porch, I found a man, Caleb, on his knees in the room, pleading with a woman named Candy that he win the night’s pot. Perceiving me in the doorway, he coughed and rose on stiff knees. He had been weeping, but he was not ashamed. I regard Candy fearfully, now. I dread the eyes of the women on my back and the eyes of the men on the women. They are everywhere- looking out from the magazine racks in the check-out lanes, peering from the calendar in the motel lobby when I go for a cup of watery coffee. Always the picture of a woman, always the eyes of a man. Eddie points them out to me, sometimes. He laughs and rolls his eyes.

Ilaugh, too, and I cough and smoke and stare and ask the women favors and callthem by their names. They see through me and I begin to lose, but my lossesendear me to the men and so I stay the course.

-traveler

No, no. This long autumn has tried to turn me away before. No wall has been too high to climb, no bramble too sharp or thick to press through. Now this- kept from a place for lack of a friend, for a failure to be in the know. There is time for friendship, I think. For the lowest bar of friendship, anyway. I dredge my resources, picking through the leaves and mud of the Wayside until I’m sure that I’ve narrowed the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ to a region that spans four counties. I rent a room in the center at a motel that accepts long-term guests. I pay by the week. I set out to make a friend.

It has been too long.

The woman in the room next to me will die there. She tells me as much, but anybody standing in her doorway would know without having to ask. She is painfully old and her sickness hangs in the air around her like a dark cloud. I dare not go into that room and she dares not leave it. We are of different worlds.

The farmer in the room on the opposite side is a young couple the next morning. They are friendly and impermanent- good for practice, though I see them toe the threshold of my room and I wonder what cloud hangs about me.

I drink, alone, at bars. I read books in the park. I take the bike apart and put it together again, exchanging pleasantries with a group of older men who sit and sip coffee at the edge of the parking lot. They see through me- are disturbed by my appearance each morning. I am a ghost, here, narrowing my haunts.

Itake a seasonal job at the local store to make up for three-week’s failure-pay at the motel: bagger,stock-boy, department store jack-of-all-trades. It’s simple work, unionized ifI stay on after the holidays. I wash my uniform in the sink and dry it in theshower. People learn my name.

Myname is the bait, a distraction from the looming prison above it, from the flimsystick-and-string trigger. Sometimes the anticipation is such that I hold my breath without realizing, turningblue as I slide boxes of turkey stuffing onto shelves. The world is filled witha nervous darkness. Hold your breath long enough and it creeps in from thesides.

Another stocker emerges from the shadows and mistakes my sudden exhalation for a gasp of fear.

“Easy,man,” he says, “Didn’t see you was in the zone.”

“Just wasn’t expecting anyone there.”

“You play cards, man? Got a game tonight, need some players.”

“Sure,” I tell him, “Where?”

He wavers at my eagerness.

“You know how to play?”

“Yeah.”

“You play for money?”

“Sure.”

His eyes narrow but the trap has already dropped around him.

“All right, bro. Sunset Condos #9. Come by after your shift. Name’s Eddie.”

He points to his name- embroidered in lush green thread. I point to mine, scribbled on a plastic tag.

Eddie’s not there when I arrive, but they’re expecting me all the same.

“Who’s this broken-faced asshole?”

“A friend of a friend.”

-traveler

I lose weeks searching for the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ but find nothing about its entry real or truthful. Nobody I speak to has been, but many know someone who has. Because I know nobody, I am forbidden from finding it.

-traveler

The worn treads of my bike do not take well to the streets of Bakersfield, Indiana- a place known, colloquially, as ‘Fast-Food City.’ The pavement darkens half a mile outside its borders, appearing wet despite the driving sun and releasing thick vapors that hang lethargically as a low fog. A small brush fire burns on the side of the highway, emitting angry hisses as I empty the contents of my water bottle into it. The flames spread until I stomp them out.

There are more fires leading to the exit ramp, fires that would require more than the work of a single man’s boots. I ignore them and take shallow breaths as I pass through the smoke.

The bike skids coming off the ramp but I hold a wobbling balance and blame the poor visibility. It skids again at a stoplight, the tires sliding across the road as though caught in an early autumn’s frost. I stop, again, and run my fingers across the asphalt. They come away slick with grease.

‘‘Fast-Food City’ is home to a neon skyline and a rubbery, prismatic sunset. To say that pictures do not do it justice would be misleading, because the pictures are beautiful and, in a just world, they would reflect the degeneracy of the place that once called itself ‘Bakersfield.’

The fall of Bakersfield proper began in 2012 with the completion of a spiraling highway off-ramp that fed into its outskirts. Unsurprisingly, the few fast-food restaurants there began to see a dramatic uptick in drive-thru business and their growing fortune caught the eye of the city’s entrepreneurial crowd. Something went wrong (what that something is has been fiercely debated in economic circles) and the growth of Bakersfield’s fast-food industry hit no upper limit.

When the few vacant lots had been filled, the need for on-the-go burgers and tacos and dippable pancakes was still enough that it was lucrative to transition existing businesses to meet the new demand. Coffee chains expanded, like a cancer, to consume the grocery stores they had once been embedded in. Banks began to deliver sub sandwiches through their aging pneumatic tubes. The sewage system began to clog with oil and fat.

‘Fast-Food City’ exists in a sort of capitalistic feedback loop. Its infamy now attracts as many customers as its restaurants and it chugs along, adapting to the strange niche economy with the purchase of specialized machinery to warm its congealed arteries in the winter and to regulate the apneatic release of its hostile atmosphere.’

The roads become perilous with a slick, rainbow sheen so I pull off to the side and proceed toward the center of the city on foot. I am the only one walking and I attract the uncomfortable gaze of passing drivers- they watch me weave my way around gray puddles and collected piles of fryer scrapings. My clothes grow heavy and my mouth accumulates an uncomfortable coating from the air.

Most of the restaurants I approach have been sealed up except for one or two drive-through windows. Through the film on the glass doors I can see that many of the dining areas have been converted into dormitories. The businesses themselves exist in ‘neighborhoods.’ There will be nothing but cheap tex-mex for a few blocks before some invisible border marks the edges of a sandwich district.

I squeeze through an alleyway and into something that must have once been a massive parking lot. Now it’s dotted with coffee booths, each manned by a single barista. They, at least, seem open to serving a man on foot. The woman I order from is friendly. She doesn’t let on that there is anything strange about this place or work. I want to ask her where she sleeps- whether she grew up here and knew Bakersfield before the fall. I’ve worked customer service, though, and I know what it’s like to be asked personal questions by a stranger. I know what it’s like to have my place in life outlined by a person I serve. I’m not here to save anyone or to tear them down. I’m here to see the fountain in the middle of town and to wash the greasy coating from my insides with a coffee and to leave.

The woman points me in the right direction and offers me a day-old scone, which I tuck into my bag for later. I make it to the fountain just as the sun begins to set and watch its strange transformation. The water, or what was once mostly water, slops thickly into the base at daytime temperatures but congeals at nightfall, exiting the top in yellow, sputtering curls until the pump can no longer handle the strain and grinds to a halt somewhere below. Come morning, the fountain will warm and be fully functional by the time the restaurants are changing out their breakfast menus.

-traveler

Much of what I feared might be true of the ‘Museum of Cleverly Disguised Traps’ is confirmed when I find the entry door locks behind me, that a soft ticking like tightly wound gears throbs from the walls and the floor. Just three steps forward and a thin dart flies from the grounding aperture of an electrical outlet, embedding itself in my calf. The leg goes numb and becomes functionless. A self-paid entry machine around the corner refuses to unlock the next section of the ‘Museum’ until I feed it three dollars in quarters. It delivers an electric shock through the last coin before sliding back the bolt.

The door is heavy and difficult to move with a bum leg; it opens into the living room of an old log cabin- heavy furniture, wooden floors, and an electric fireplace. I stretch myself between the entryway and a stool, hoping to keep as many escape routes available as is possible. In the last moment I see that two of the stool’s legs are on hinges and I fall forward in my effort to set it back down without triggering whatever insidious device it is bait for. The door closes and the room is quiet except for the constant, subtle ticking of the walls.

From my position on the ground I see several trip wires and a section of the floor that is very likely a pressure plate. Like the chair, two of the stools are on hinges and another has its legs sawn most of the way through (which seems, to me, more of a prank than a trap). Most concerning to me is a small glass globe perched on a high shelf among several other knick-knacks. The arrangement of the items (and their being glued to the shelf, I find, having carefully dragged my dead limb across the room) suggests a hidden track of some sort- the start of a vicious Rube-Goldberg machine that becomes too complicated for me to fully understand as long as it remains dormant.

And remain dormant it will.

I take the globe from the shelf, with the intention of disarming the trap, but its base sinks into the shelf and the books below it begin to topple into each other. I reach out to stop them and prick my hand on something sharp- a hidden needle on the cover of the book. My arm goes numb and the final book falls from the shelf and strikes the pressure plate.

The floor opens beneath me and I drop through.

There is a bedroom below the cabin- a mattress softens the fall. I wait, with bated breath, to see if my violent entry has furthered the machinations of the activated Rube-Goldberg above but, if it has, its only result is the closing of the trapdoor above me. I check my unfeeling limbs for injuries and then eye the new area suspiciously. It is, by all accounts, a room in a modern, 4-star hotel. Leaning over the frame of the bed, I spy a door but when I throw a pillow in its direction the entire thing falls forward out of its frame and squashes the pillow flat. It closes slowly, with the predatory alertness of an alligator.

I have one more pillow to spare.

I wrap my hand in the pillow case and slide the drawer out of the side table near the bed. It, like the doors of this place, seems to resist my opening it. Inside is a Bible and, finding it free of needles, I thumb through the pages until I come across a scribbled note in the back.

“WE POWER THE MACHINE.”

I toss the Bible to the opposite side of the room and see it peppered with needles from an outlet under the desk. The desk itself collapses and a meringue pie, hidden in its base, is catapulted into the opposing wall at the head-height of the average American male. I grit my teeth and wait for the feeling to return to my leg, at least.

After half an hour, I see that the drawer has begun to pull itself back into the table and I understand the Bible’s note. I sleep in the bed and wake to find the ticking in the walls has ceased and that I am able to walk upright in stiff, careful steps. I pull the exit door down just enough to crawl through- winding the springs of the ‘Museum’ just enough to power the traps for a few minutes. I wait, and when the ticking stops, I make my way toward the exit in similar, stuttering excursions.

‘There is nothing subtle about a mousetrap- it relies soles on the allure of the cheese to capture its prey. So, too, does ‘The Museum of Cleverly Disguised Traps’ rely on its bait to convince visitors that they will be clever in visiting. So prepared are they to prove themselves better than the machine, that by the time they realize they have been baited by the challenge of simple traps, they will already be assimilated into the clockwork of a thing that is far more complex.’

-traveler

‘There is nothing forbidden about the fruit that rots on the branches of ‘Delaney’s Orchard.’ On the contrary, the ‘Orchard’ happily offers its fruit to any who might take it. But ‘Delaney’s Orchard’ is also a cemetery and the roots of its trees are known, on occasion, to churn out the bones that rest beneath them. So there is nothing strictly forbidden about the rotting fruit, but there is a certain taboo.

There is also the rumor that, on occasion, the citrus fruits impart sour premonitions, and that those who taste them become so fearful of their impending misfortune that they seek out crises for the relief of having them over and done.

It’s said that, on occasion, the peaches will contain the middle knuckle of an old skeleton in lieu of a pit, that biting through to the bone of the fruit is no different (tactilely speaking) than biting through to the bone of a human being. This knowledge is a poison that makes a peach of soft-skinned friends.

It’s said, on occasion, that the apples are as grainy as an old television screen.

A local science teacher collected worms from ‘Delaney’s Orchard:’ worms for dissection. Each had developed a skeleton of its own- a thin squirming spine and ribs like the legs of a centipede. This quirk of nature was celebrated briefly and then buried in the appendix of an encyclopedia (a process not unfamiliar to the residents of ‘Delaney’s’). On occasion, the skeletons of worms make their way to the surface and embed themselves in the soles of visitors (rising through rain-softened earth, they say, though the author would argue that it’s more a matter of turnabout).

The trees in ‘Delaney’s Orchard’ waveeerily in the wind and, on occasion, they seem to wave of their own accord, shaken bythe poltergeists of migratory birds that choked on the bones of the worms in a naïveenthusiasm for foreign cuisine. In their confusion, the bird-wraiths sometimes landupon the tree upside-down and shake the roots instead (churning out the bones,as previously noted).

Temporary entry into ‘Delaney’s Orchard’ is free and interment is cheap. The fees pay for the toil of a skeleton staff (so to speak), who work to bury and re-bury the dead. They work day and night and their work is never done.’

-excerpt, ‘Autumn by the Wayside’

‘The world is through with playcenters. Its children have become too fat, its parents too hurried. They retire now, a slow migration to the American west where a prismatic limbo squirms and coils and degrades in peace, leaching its bitter revenge into the countryside.

Just three hours west of Brookings, ‘The Playcenter Recycling Facility’ twists like an ancient worm, emerging from the earth in knots of lurid plastic and psychedelic, sun-bleached towers. A small warehouse presses itself against the boundary of the property and purports to be the key functioning piece in the recycling process, but the rainbowed landscape only grows, bulging further into the sky with every year.

Trespassing on the ‘Facility’s’ grounds is forbidden, in theory, but every few months a bright tube hangs down over the fencing or burrows up from the dirt, pressed outward by the growing mass. The curious may enter here but are advised to listen for the ‘Facility’s’ employees, who come around occasionally like gardeners to trim back the encroaching maze.’

It’s a few weeks of circling the area before news of an emerging tendril surfaces on an otherwise abandoned internet forum, another day of surveilling ‘The Playcenter Recycling Facility’ before I feel confident that its cameras aren’t functional, or if they are, that nobody responsible is watching. Three people enter the through an orange tube that has erupted on the ‘Facility’s’ eastern side. One person exits and I can’t say for sure whether it’s one of the three.

I am the fourth to enter on my watch, slipping into the dark orange tunnel and following its curve under the fence. My goal is to find an exit early, to squeeze along the outside of the ruinous architecture, but there is no clear exit- only the occasional window, the size of a child’s smiling face.

I become irrevocably lost and spend the night in a tower, curled in a dirty quilt. The boundaries of the facility seem impossibly far away. The sunset casts shadows in colors previously unknown. The plastic sings a creaking song and eventually I sleep.

Daytime in the ‘Facility’ is oppressively warm and the greasy handprints of past children slide from the walls and pool in unlikely places. I am haunted by the spectral scent of french fries and burgers while my own food, what I brought with me, is rationed in portions that only serve to make me hungrier.

The idea that I might die in the ‘Facility’ ceases to be a joke.

I find, at the center of the tubing, a massive lake of plastic balls and I watch long enough to see it shift. I refuse to enter, but having found it once I spend the next day avoiding it, taking new paths, climbing and sliding, only to find myself returned to its shores. There is a force like gravity at the center of ‘The Playcenter Recycling Facility,’ and it holds me there for a time.

Hungry and tired, I find myself facing a slide in dark purple. It is steep and I am high, high up in the labyrinth. It will take me to the exit, I think, or to the lake. It has the promise of finality about it and, at its precipice, I am ready for an end.

-traveler

Pickett’s home is deeply stale, his windows painted shut and taped up with plastic. Something moves between the floodlights outside: one of the dogs made indistinct by the cloudy film. The second follows the first- they are nervous and pacing. They realize they have been duped. One growls and the growl builds into a half-hearted bark. The other turns and they are quiet again. How would they describe this dilemma to their master? Better to let the evening’s events unfold as they will. Better to let the master sleep, to gamble on catching the intruder upon his retreat.

One dog stoops to smell the ass of the other.

I revise my narrative: the dogs are idiots. My getting across the yard seemed a lot like luck, and I’m not lucky. This makes more sense. The dogs are just bad at what they do.

A profound feeling of relief comes over me, the same dirty relief we’re taught to resist as a child. This is the relief in seeing that we are better than a situation, not because we’ve risen above it, but because the depths of the world are infinitely low and the odds will statistically fall in our favor some of the time. I do not become a better person for fooling the dogs, but I feel like one.

Pickett snores, which is wonderful for me. It provides a baseline for the success of this intrusion. I listen for Alice’s rattling in its lulls and pull a stretch of carpet from the living room floor, distracted by my reflection in the black glass of an old television. Beneath the carpet, a trapdoor, and beneath the door, a stairway that takes me deep into the earth. I emerge into a place (too big to be a room) that is occupied by statues as far as my feeble light will reveal. Pickett has taken the pieces in a semi-circle from the stairs, inadvertently recreating a theatre in the round. One stands out from the rest, centered as I am on this dark stage.

A statue of Pickett himself.

The statue of Pickett is strange- the form is undoubtedly his, but its details blur and self-censor under the cone of my flashlight. Nearer, I see the details are absent entirely, that they have been eroded. The stone is smooth where I touch it: along the face, over the brow, across the fingers. These places are smooth for having been touched many times before.

Alice’s missing pick peers out from a pile of dust several yards away. From it, I find an entrance to ‘The Maze of Secret Rooms,’ an unsuspecting fissure in the stone that gives way to cramped mildew and creaking wood. I slip into the stone like the Stranger once did in a cave very much like this one.

Thinking of him gives me no relief.

I leave my own statue in Pickett’s yard. I have shrugged off stranger things than that. Let him haul it back into the earth where it can be in peace with the others. Let Pickett be with his business- he isn’t the first man to find his fortune under the ground or to be so worn by it.

-traveler