‘The child-free have a difficult time understanding ‘The Baby Zone’ which is, by all appearances, a dark, baby-sized cavern accompanied by a crudely painted sign indicating its designation as ‘for babies only.’ Someone without children would assume that, under no circumstances, would any caring parent allow their baby to enter ‘The Baby Zone’ unaccompanied. Why would they?

Well.

Babies seem to love it in there. They come out, usually within a day, happier and healthier than they were when they entered. These are facts, verified by grimacing pediatricians and child psychologists, all of whom are bound to admit what they are witnessing but who also feel obligated to say they do not personally recommend babies enter the cavern. If pressed, those same doctors might also admit that babies who have spent a day or two in ‘The Baby Zone’ at any point of their lives tend to make more money as adults and rate themselves as happier than those children who were (and here the doctors airquote) “deprived” of ‘The Zone.’ 

So, to those travelers unburdened by parenthood, the situation is not so clear cut, is it? What parent doesn’t want the best for their child, even if it means making decisions that feel like risks?

It should be noted that ‘The Baby Zone’ rejects the notion of fur-babies, which is to say, it kills trespassing dogs. 

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘It’s commonly held that the closing of hole in the ozone layer can be attributed to proactive climate-centered educational programs in the nineties. It was an overall win for humanity who, in a moment of unusual clarity, banded together to tackle a problem that was a little too abstract to understand fully but that seemed bad all the same. 

It’s uncommonly held that ‘The Ozone Hole’ didn’t close all the way. It’s complicated, so, in the tradition of those old PSAs about hydrochlorofluorocarbons, we’re going to use a fairly simple metaphor: a zipper.

Say a sheet of cloth separates two spaces and, in the center of that cloth, there is a zipper. When the zipper is pulled open, things that belong in one space can move between the two. Pretend these things are bad- like mosquitoes. The closing of the hole is a lot like the closing of the zipper- especially in regards to the tiny little hole that will always be present where the zipper meets the end of the track. See, humans didn’t unzip the ozone layer, we tore it. Then we installed a zipper and mostly-fixed it. That tiny hole is still there and available for public viewing in Northern California.

Sometimes, a mosquito squeezes through.’

It’s probably wrong to say that ‘The Ozone Hole’ is the attraction, here, because unlike other impressive nothings (like the Grand Canyon, for instance) this hole isn’t even particularly visible by contrasting surroundings. ‘The Ozone Hole’ is more about the viewing tower, I suspect, a ten-story honeycomb of rickety metal with a lot of ‘risk of fall’ signs plastered about. The tower is impressive in a way that makes people who climb it seem impressive even though it’s a pretty low risk affair.

It’s popular with drone users, unfortunately, so there’s the constant whining of little motors and the constant feeling of being watched and knowing that your sad, sweating self will likely be posted on social media somewhere. I arrive at the top just as one of those drones whizzes across the platform and seems to disappear entirely.

There is a shocked pause. A shared look between those of us who saw it happen and then the others hear the pause and see the look and note how abruptly quiet it became.

“Did that drone just fly through ‘The Ozone Hole?’” Someone asks. 

Nobody wants to say that it did. A sign nearby explains a lot about what the ozone layer is and what a hole is in that context. It stops short of explaining that a drone could not ‘pass into it’ and ‘disappear’ but that’s what seems to have happened. 

Then, the drone reappears and it’s different than before. It moves slowly, as though intelligent. As though emboldened. As though awakened. 

It takes in the six of us on the platform. I’m still on the stairs and I consider throwing myself backward, not for any rational reason but for an overwhelming instinctual fear. The same instinct holds me in place, however, as the drone completes a full circle sweep. 

Then, there is the blast of a gunshot. My ears ring and my face is pelted with little shards of drone plastic.

There is a ranger behind me- he’s already holstered his gun. His partner is on the ground, speaking to the drone’s owner. He has the man at gunpoint. 

“Y’all see anything?” he asks, and we shake our heads. He nods, “Well, careful not to slip on your way down.”

The drone’s owner is attempting to run. The ranger on the ground is chasing him.

The ranger on the platform taps my shoulder. “Have I seen you around?”

“Probably,” I tell him. “I know some of the guys at the station.”

“Probably not anymore,” he says. “Let’s not meet again.”

-traveler

‘A place for the collector. A place for the too-poor-to-travel. A place for the husband who needs to make his husband think he’s been somewhere other than the place he’s actually been. ‘GetawayAgain’ is a souvenir resale shop with several small branches, a thriving online shop, and a headquarters in central Kansas, where absolutely nobody does any real vacationing. 

‘GetawayAgain’ is a hidden treasure to most of the American population but is well known among students of business, its success being proof that a market can be made for anything. The founder, Elisa Milner, got her start hosting vaguely-appropriative theme parties for small corporate gatherings and found it was cheaper, overall, to buy previous-year’s souvenirs from wholesalers than current-year’s actual party goods. When she was asked, during a confrontation at a particularly egregious Hawaiian-inspired luau, whether she had even been to Hawaii, she simply said ‘yes’ and cited the décor as evidence. That’s when she knew she was on to something. 

Now anyone can have a shelf full of colorful knick-knacks from faraway places and can brag to their app-dates about the mountains they’ve climbed or the resorts where they’ve told other strangers about the mountains they climbed. The trick Milner stumbled upon is that the need for going somewhere in life is pretty easily mitigated by having been somewhere already, at least in the eyes of others. At ‘GetawayAgain,’ anybody can have gone anywhere for a fraction of the price.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

My first impression of ‘A Collection of Solid Metal Cubes’ is haphazard. The cubes are positioned as though they’ve simply landed where they were thrown, though there are a lot of solid metal cubes to see and some of them are bigger than me. My second impression is something like dangerous, because I had to sign a waiver to walk among the collection and I also have to wear a hard hat which would, I suppose, protect me from about 30% of the cubes in this collection but which would do very little to save my fragile body from the rest. Which is not to say I trust the small cubes, either. They are, by and large, holding up the larger ones and a number are jammed at odd angles like cocked dice. 

The internet says the collection is haunted by the ghost of someone who died among the cubes. It’s not something I thought too much about before I stepped into the lobby where there is one wall entirely dedicated to vehement refutations of the ghost (but not the death). It all ended with some ‘tips’ for when the ‘ghost’ might be spotted, all of which were some form of ‘just ignore it.’

I hear a voice nearby- a man saying “Help.”

I grit my teeth and turn to check it out.

‘A bit of a strange one, this collection. Billy Ellis claims he never went out of his way to collect solid metal cubes but that he found a small specimen in the summer of 1978 and, pocketing it, initiated some sort of torturous pattern wherein his everyday life is often interrupted in some way by a solid metal cube and that these predicaments can only be solved by his adding it to the collection. The seed cube, that initial little box, is said to lie somewhere in the center of the collection still, and when asked why he hadn’t tried to part with it, Ellis suggested that a much larger metal cube had shifted on top of it, making it quite difficult to reach. When he was reminded that the larger metal cube’s shifting onto the smaller one seemed to match the same perpetual-obstacle pattern that led to the collection in the first place, Ellis coughed up three small metal cubes and began to weep. 

These days, Ellis mostly keeps to a small house, tucked away on the same property as the collection. He can sometimes be seen moving between the two locations, no doubt adding another mysterious find to ‘The Collection of Metal Cubes,’ off I-90 just after it leaves Washington.’

The man has his finger wedged between two small cubes which are, themselves, wedged between two larger cubes and so on and so forth. The setup looks like it’s got enough potential energy to flatten a car but the man promises he’s only just a little jammed, that he was reaching for his cellphone when the pile shifted. I ask him his number so I can call the phone and he tells me the battery’s dead. I ask him if he’s the ghost and he says ‘no’ but seems a little put out. 

“Did you read something in the lobby that said I was a ghost?” he asks. 

“Yeah.”

“Do I look like a ghost to you?”

I take a step forward and motion to his leg, which is just a little more transparent than a person might suspect of a solid, terrestrial creature. 

“Yeah.”

The man’s about to retort when we both hear a family with kids coming out of the lobby. We agree, without having to really say it, that it’s best for me to go. I don’t want some stupid kid taking out a loadbearing cube while I’m nearby, and he doesn’t want to put the work into convincing me he’s not a ghost just to perform some ghostly mischief.

This is the way I like my visits to run: weird, but agreeable, which is why I’m more than a little upset when I find a small metal cube in the toe of my shoe the next morning.

-traveler

‘‘The World’s Largest Revolving Door’ spins at the Monster Mart outside Columbus, Ohio. This specimen is a relic from way back when Monster Mart made a point to have the largest something-or-other in each store as a publicity thing and this location seems to have survived the bankruptcy of the brand and the nationwide closure of stores. 

‘The Door’ itself has been turning steadily since the mid-nineties when malls and superstores still seemed timeless. It was closed for a while in 2002 so that the rotation could be automated, this in response to an incident in which striking employees staged a weeks-long sit-in on the entrance side of the door, inadvertently trapping customers on the exiting-side of the door, many of whom succumbed to starvation. The literal dead weight of these unfortunate shoppers then caused a similar incident for the striking employees, who had intended to give up the protest when supplies ran low but were stuck long enough to resort to light cannibalism instead.

Luckily for modern shoppers, the slow rotation of the electrified ‘Door’ is strong enough to shuffle even the largest pile of human remains in a rough, linoleum half-circle until non-unionized employees on either side can extract them before the tragic wedge closes itself off to the world for the next 14 days. 

Yes, that’s right. Two weeks is about how long it takes for the door to make a half-rotation. Pack well, traveler, and be prepared to pay out your nose for supplies inside. Monster Mart knows it has a captive audience.’

Look, I see the door and that’s enough. No way I’m spending a month of my life inside it to check it off the list and my research suggests that there’s nothing special about the Monster Mart itself except for their steep mark-ups and a tendency to engage in something like indentured servitude. 

A couple is gearing up for the long haul as I’m turning to go, each laden with heavy packs and some of the small, flat trolleys I saw advertised online (allowing a person to sleep while being slowly pushed forward by the rotation. They see me watching so I wave and wish them luck and about that time a new wedge breaches from the exiting side and a similar-looking couple stumbles forward, all pale and skeletal from underpacking. 

Maybe it’s the angle of the closing wedge but the male half of the healthy couple sees these two collapse on the pavement and he recoils. The woman he’s with has enough time to make a confused sound before she’s pushed into the door, leaving him outside. The next wedge is fast closing and he looks at it and looks at me and says:

“I should probably go in after her, right?” and then he looks at the prone couple, shielding their eyes from the harsh light of the sun, and he stays put. 

-traveler

‘On the outskirts of Baltimore there exists a venue that embraces the intense (and expensive) flattery one might expect to receive in a Japanese maid cafe. ‘Take a Win’ is a boardgame café where customers are invited to sit down with a stranger for a long afternoon of being naturally better at an arbitrary, if not enjoyable, activity. Its employees are trained to lose and they’re trained to lose in a variety of ways depending upon the package you select and the money you’re willing to put down.

The standard package offers an easy win and an amicable opponent. A little extra pays for a decisive win against a sore loser. A little more than that, and the loser is so sore they might sweep the pieces off the table or otherwise make a physical scene while you, the victor, gloat. There are short packages for short games and long packages for those six-hour marathons. There are serialized packages for trading card players who like to lose a game here and there for the sake of realism, but want to dominate overall. Once a month, ‘Take a Win’ hosts a tournament, auctioning off the winner ranks. It regularly sells out, and this is why:

People like when the expected occurs. More than that, people are lonely and unsure of their abilities. More than all of that, even, people who indulge in games are generally more open to the experience of pretending and pretending is exactly what is necessary for a game at ‘Take a Win’ to be satisfying.’

I’m pretty bad at board games. Bad at every part. Like, maintaining an understanding of the rules. Like rolling the dice in such a way that they don’t fall off the table and clatter across the floor. The employee who takes me under his wing starts to sweat just twenty minutes in. 

Losing against me is going to take everything he’s got.

-traveler

Way back in 1958, the Mickelson Steel Company created a life-size display of what the 2008 should look like if, in their estimation, people continued to invest Mickelson Steel for all their construction needs. This display looks a great deal like the usual fifties-era guess: bubble glass, flying cars, and a great deal of chrome. The display is big- a façade the size of a city block. Old mannequins lean against the steering wheels of their hover-vehicles. Robots speak on video phones that are still anchored to the wall by a cord. It’s all pretty well done, in my opinion, and it’s all pretty hopeful except, I suppose, that all the families are nuclear and all the mannequins are white. 

A display like this makes a great side-of-the-road attraction. It’s quick, it’s bigger than you expect, and it’s aging in a way that makes it just a little nostalgic.

What makes it a Wayside attraction is that Mickelson Steel did it again a fews years later. And again a few years after that.

They got pretty good. 

‘They got REALLY good. By the time 2019 rolled around, the sixties-era displays were looking a little uncanny. Modern cellphones and sedans the shape of melted butter. Media that appeared both angry and joyfully pornographic. A man in a crowd with a gun in his hand. A latter display even included some hygienic social distancing, meaning that they were still going just a little too far in their imaginings. Mickelson got some government side-eye for that prediction, but the Mickelsons had given up on steel and business before the turn of the century and were happy to stand before committees and explain to the men in black that showed up at their houses that they were only ever extrapolating from informational trends and that the information necessary became more abundant each year. 

They said a lot more than that, actually, indicating that the gift of foresight might also have been handed to their bloodline by some vague divinity while also fending off allegations that the old Mickelson Steel Mill had been converted into residences for a cult that continued to create these displays. 

The practical result of all this is that a traveler in central Texas might stop off at ‘The Mickelson’s Future,’ a catch-all for the dozens of completed displays that now make up a quilted sort of city block in the middle of nothing else. The author recommends taking the tour backwards.

It’s happier that way.’

The Mickelson’s artists have gotten pretty good with realistic wounds over the years, I’ll say that much. They’re due for a new display later this year, from what I understand, and that’s putting us within a stone’s throw of 2100. I’m hoping for more bubble glass but if their predictions for 2050 are anything to go by, humans won’t have the sort of eyes that necessitate transparent windshields. 

And, hey: they’ve diversified the mannequins. 

-traveler

‘Most insects don’t live very long. Setting aside their low average life spans and their fragile bodies and the dangerous environments in which they go about their daily lives, bugs are just not very well liked. The world is out to get bugs, even though we’ve already begun to recognize an amount of detriment from their absence. One wouldn’t think a sort of retirement would be in the cards for denizens of the insect world.

One would be wrong, though. An insect is allowed to retire when it is found inside another creature’s home and escorted out, rather than killed. Upon exiting the home, the insect makes its way to ‘The Place Where Bugs Go When You Throw Them Outside’ and, there, would live out the rest of its life in peace if it weren’t for all the tourists ruining it, nowadays.’

I suppose I should be thankful that insects understand the irony of unwanted visitors in the closest thing they could collectively call home. The glimpses I get of ‘The Place Where Bugs Go When You Throw Them Outside’ suggest that it is something of a honeycombed habitat, surface-level and underground. Satellite images suggest wildflower fields and forested acres are embedded within. Leaked government images indicate there may also be corpse fields for the scavenger species and, worse, cultivated mammal herds for parasites. It’s all very environmentally friendly, though, and without human involvement, humane practices don’t really factor into the project at all.

I’m escorted off the property by a motley swarm of stinging insects. Chased, one might say, but it does feel like the insects and I are going through the motions. They catch and release, hoping we will carry the favor forward.

-traveler

‘‘SOULFOOD’ is a matte black cube on four white wheels, looking for all the world like a car pulled from a children’s drawing (this child only had a black crayon). The windshield, if it exists, is matte black and indistinguishable from any other surface. ‘SOULFOOD’ has a habit of departing suddenly and in a direction that doesn’t seem like its front (though, given the identical sides, it’s difficult to say where any indication of its front or back comes from). ‘SOULFOOD’ has a habit of appearing in unlikely places, usually sandwiches uncomfortably between two other eateries but sometimes in the middle of a forest or at the top of an icy hill. It’s not a particularly welcoming sight, but it smells great.

There is nothing outwardly frightening about ‘SOULFOOD,’ if you discount the above description. It doesn’t exist in a way that flies in the face of established reality. The windshield thing could be the result of paint or glass or cameras. The odd behavior could be a form of guerilla marketing. The smell could be talent, plain and simple. What frightens people about ‘SOULFOOD’ is that they don’t seem to accept any sort of acknowledged currency. They serve food for… free?

The question mark, here, indicates a widely held suspicion that ‘SOULFOOD’ is taking ‘something else.’ Something that isn’t immediately missed.

This may be the most comforting thing about ‘SOULFOOD.’ This taking- this manipulation of customers in the process of taking- it is the cornerstone of every modern eatery, really. ‘SOULFOOD’s only crime is doing it in a way that draws undue attention.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Wished for gold, was transported into sealed, underground cavern.’ ‘Wished for youth, became a child.’ ‘Wished death upon enemies, killed in massive explosion with others.’

‘The Garden of Monkey Paws’ doesn’t feel the need to go into details about these events. It doesn’t try to explain how monkeys’ paws work or that ‘The Orchard’ exists as a means of producing them. It is simply a collection of extinguished paws along with short descriptions of their results. It’s a cautionary tale for those of us willing to read behind the lines. Potentially a guide for those who can’t.

‘Don’t try to pry the fingers from the fists at ‘The Garden of Monkey Paws.’ Outside of the occasional burst of malicious irony, the magic doesn’t return to the monkeys so easily. Knowing this, ‘The Garden’ loses what little allure it might have had. Outside of a few large-scale wish botches (we won’t spoil the surprise), the entire facility is devoted to a striking and disturbing display of dead monkeys. It smells like it, too.’

The paws are arranged by general wish categories. I spend a good deal of time in a room in the back that deals with wishes regarding love and sex. Irony can be particularly cruel in this vein of wishing and, for some reason, ‘The Garden’ has chosen to paint the nails of the monkey paws involved.

Rumor has it that the staff are open to bribes, that monkey paws ‘fall off the back of the truck’ all the time. Honestly, you couldn’t pay me to travel with something so dangerous.

Just as I’m about to wrap up and head to the camper, something moves in my peripheries. I turn and my absurd first thought it that someone is flagging me down from across the room. It’s a monkey paw, of course, opened like a blooming flower.

Then, with the sound of a creaking door, they all open at once.

The lights go red and a siren sounds. ‘The Garden of Monkey Paws’ shakes as its emergency doors begin to close. There’s shouting outside before a voice comes on over the PA system:

THIS IS NOT A TEST. THE PAWS ARE ACTIVE AND DANGEROUS. MAKE NO WISHES AND RETREAT TO A DISTANCE OF ONE MILE. CLOSURE WILL BE ATTEMPTED IN FIVE MINUTES.

The shouting is clearer outside, the curators arguing over what appears to be a long script for a carefully worded wish that would re-close all of the paws without room for malicious irony. The thing is, irony works a bit like an explosive. The more it’s compressed, the bigger it tends to blow up.

Someone is weeping inside ‘The Garden,’ cursing the cruelty of the universe between sobs. Someone got greedy and tried to make a wish. He won’t be the last.

I’m happy to put ‘The Garden of Monkey Paws’ behind me- to put the whole concept behind me, really- and, as far as my phone can tell, there are no more entries in the guide for monkey paw-adjacent destinations. The book is changing all the time, though. I find myself less sure of anything the longer I travel.

-traveler