‘If ritual magic is anything like making bread, which is to say all it requires is the correct physical components moved in specific ways and under specific circumstances, then it follows that someone could eventually build a ‘bread machine.’ Imagine a series of rune-carved gears, a pre-programmed voicebox, a selection of turning crystals, and a liquid piping system to rival a modern espresso dispenser, all acting to mirror the magician’s dramatic flourishes and guarded recipes. Magic, broken down in such a way and re-constructed with an eye to practicality, becomes less flavorful almost as a necessity, but it does not disappear altogether and that distinction presents an opportunity for those of us who like bread, but do not have the patience to bake it.

A legitimate ‘bread machine’ is said to exist as a bygone relic in the City Museum of Birch, Colorado. ‘The Birch Fortune Box’ might well be a clever campaign to drum up donations for the Historical Society, offering a pay-what-you-will price structure that does not leave room for doubt as to whether the quality of a fortune will be directly related to the generosity of the person requesting it.’

If I could be described as having a set ‘way,’ Birch, Colorado and its rundown museum would very much be out of it. Accessible only by the most tenuous of mountain passes, I spend three days in a dirty motel to the east before the current storm weakens enough to allow for traffic through to the town and I find, upon arriving at another, dirtier motel, that the pass has closed neatly behind me like a set of ominous supermarket doors.

Birch is little more than a gas station, a bar, and a handful of houses loosely connected by a series of roads that disappear under the snow in the hour or so it takes me to settle into the room and shower. I see no one younger than 40 for as long as the sun is up.

Shortly after dark, the lights in the motel flicker and go out. From the window I see they are out all over town and I have resigned myself to three granola bars and an early night when the woman from the front desk knocks at my door with a bowl of soup and an extra blanket. She tells me they’ll have the generator on before long and she laughs when I tell her I plan on seeing the museum in the morning.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas Day,” she says, “And Charlie’s spending it with family. He won’t be back to open the museum till the storm clears.”

The storm continues for four days and I rest in a room that is often, that is almost always, warm. I build a snowman and I become known around town- a well-mannered stranger that has become trapped by the storm. People learn that I’ve come to visit the Box and the anticipation of my fortune seems to grow with each passing day, not because they truly believe in the power of the thing (though some surely do) but because the novelty of my situation eases the monotony of a frozen town.

The woman that owns the motel (I’ve never asked her name) comes to my room at 8:00am on the fifth day.

“Charlie came in late last night and I’ll be damned if Linda weren’t at his door at the crack of dawn this morning to get those museum doors open. Best be headin’ down there or he’ll be short with you for all the hubbub you’ve caused.”

It is not my way, to cause undue hubbub, so I leave for the museum a half hour later and find Charlie is short with me anyway (who can blame him) and make my way into a basement where The Birch Fortune Box collects dust.

It is an old, iron thing with a slot like a postal box for taking money and a slot like a papercut for distributing fortunes. I carefully slip a twenty dollar bill inside and then haphazardly dig the change out of my pockets and out of the pockets of my bag and, finally, I add a dime from under the Fortune Box’s informational sign.

I approach the Box’s heavy crank, nearly four feet in diameter, and turn it only a few inches before there is a click and the tinkle of some hidden bell and I see my fortune peering out from the ancient metal.

“Attempt 31,” it says, “Seek the Park Rangers for assistance.”

There is an address on the back.

-traveler

‘In the same way a book written on lead might be called the world’s densest novel, ‘Uncommon Hazards’ claims to be the nation’s most challenging round of miniature golf. It is a grueling experience (in ways which the author will reluctantly leave unspoiled for those who wish to visit) that only lightly wears the skin of golf, but it must be admired for the thoroughness with which it achieves its vision. ‘Uncommon Hazards’ employs blurred lines and psychic gut punches in the humble task of adding a few points to your score. Its courses are degrading and its staff is apathetic at best.  It is not a game any sane person would play twice.’

Without the author’s warning I would have assumed that when, on the first green, my ball was sucked up into the mouth of a cement clown where it was subjected to some sort of industrial grinder and returned a lopsided mess, that there had been some sort of mistake, that I would be issued a replacement. Thanks to the author, I was not surprised when an employee told me I would not get a refund, but that she would waive the ‘Ball Replacement Fee’ since the damages may have been due, in part, to the facilities and not entirely to my neglect. I putt the non-spherical ball in circles around the smiling clown while an angry man and his two daughters respectively huff and whine, waiting their turn behind me.

First round: 25

The second course is a clear, straight rectangle just ten feet long but the moment I approach the green a siren goes off and I’m asked to evacuate. I stand in the parking lot with someone who claims to be a manager for 15 minutes before he, having received no clear indication from anything inside the establishment, suggests we return. When we do, I find the second green is littered with invisible magnets, the most powerful of which is embedded in the hole itself, meaning that my final shot is actually just my having to press the levitating ball (presumably containing a magnetic core) forcibly into the ground for a few seconds so that it ‘counts.’

Second round: 31

I spend forty minutes in the liminal space between courses as a young man ahead of me talks loudly on his phone, which he holds pinched between his head and his shoulder as he attempts to play the round. He drops the phone every few minutes and dusts it off, continuing the conversation as though nothing had happened to interrupt it. The green is simple enough- crooked in several places and dotted with small, cement obstacles. The man weaves his ball around them over and over, unable to muster the fine motor coordination necessary to guide the thing to its goal as long as he’s preoccupied with the call.

At the forty minute mark I see that the man’s ball has not received the same rough handling in the mouth of the clown as mine and I take to the green myself, lining up a careful ricochet.

The man protests:

“Hey! I’m not quite done here buddy!” he says to me, and then, to his phone: “Yeah, some asshole’s trying to cut me in line at Hazzards.”

It does give me pause, but I take the shot and continue taking shots as the man’s outrage grows, as he waves his phone and hurls insults and generally hovers about- never stopping me physically but doing his best to disrupt me at every turn.

Third round: 12 (and over an hour of my time)

I’ve set up on the fourth course, which appears to be a series of sand-filled tubes, when the father and his daughters reappear behind me and take up their act again. One of the girls stands so close that I feel the leg of her plush horse graze the back of my knee and the man’s salty breath rustles my hair and all of the stress of today and of days before comes to an explosive head.

I shout at them, first degrading their employment at the course and briefly veering into broader, less meaningful abuse before receiving a powerful blow to the jaw and being escorted from the premises where a manager and I spend 30 minutes hashing out whether this is being done ‘in character’ or if this is an official banishment from the establishment.

It is the latter.

I walk back across the parking lot, fingering the lopsided golf-ball in my pocket, and find the bike silent, as it has been for several weeks.

-traveler

“Three pick-up trucks approach. One is red and two are silver. Three men leave each truck for a total of nine. Another man appears from behind a tree, the tenth. They each wear their hair short except, for the tenth man who wears no hair at all. They do not hear me, though I am in their speakers. They do not feel me, though I am in the air. Each man carries a red, plastic tank of fuel in their left hand and each carries a large blade in the right. They look at each other, but do not speak. They move in harmony with one another, not as though this is something they planned, but as though each truck and the men inside arrived to do the same thing at the same time by happenstance. They cut through the foliage with their blades. They widely ignore the sting of the fern. The red truck’s radio ceases to function. The cab of the red truck fills with smoke. The men do not look back, they continue through the greenery to the base of the tower. Each man bleeds and each man ignores his blood. One man falls to unconscious at the base of the tower. The others continue. One man becomes tangled in the ferns. The others continue. Eight men spread fuel at the base of the tower. Eight men begin to cut pipes and cords with their blades. I believe it will soo-”

-final transmission of the radio

My driving has hardly improved, despite many months on the bike. I am not a confident driver (not a confident man, generally) and I wear my insecurity like a flag. I waver- I hesitate in a way that is contagious. My driving is unpredictable, even to me, even in the best of situations and now, I am speeding. I am late. I haven’t been late for anything in a long, long time.

I’ve had so little to be on time for.

‘There was no little uproar regarding ‘Rolling Hills’ when it was pitched to Roberts County, no little uproar when the designs were approved and, yet, there is no shortage of customers now, in the early years of its functioning. They have their marketing team to thank for this success, using words like ‘economical’ and phrases like ‘environmental impact’ and never using words like ‘cheap’ and only strategically using the word ‘subsidized.’

The designer is not so coy. Emma Red happily confesses that ‘Rolling Hills,’ sometimes referred to as ‘The Jukebox,’ is to the dead what housing projects are to the living- an inexpensive, no-frills semi-solution to one of America’s many crises. Despite the hundreds buried in the hillside, ‘Rolling Hills’ has only 20 gravestones, each fitted with a subtle electronic monitor. The interred are assigned numbers, and those numbers are assigned timeslots, schedules of which are freely available from the website. There, you can track when your loved one will rise to their promised six-feet under (having previously been much deeper), and you can leave flowers on a stone that bears their name (for the time being).

At the current occupation, a body will rise to the surface five times each month and remain there for 10 minutes, though its said that a small donation might speed the dead on their journey.’

I arrive just as the ground in front of ‘Stone 4’ begins to vibrate, as the name, Alice Cantrel, dims from the screen. I wait for something to happen- a haunting or an enlightenment- but Alice rides her pine box quietly back into the depths of the hill and is replaced by a stranger body.

I shake the vial of toothpicks, nine, and I set off back to the bike. There, the radio breaks a long silence:

“I may be in trouble, traveler. I will try to describe the end, if you will listen.”

-traveler

The Stranger trips over his own shadow and it scatters out from under him.

I realize two things, then:

-I would never be able to do to the Stranger what the Stranger did to me. I don’t know why I thought I could.

-This is a stranger, but it is not the Stranger.

This man is younger, he has darker hair and a full set of teeth. He is not as tall or as thickly muscled. He has all the mannerisms of the Stranger and the same substantial shadow, but this is a different man.

The air cracks and a bullet buries itself in the trunk of a nearby tree. I’m buffeted by shards of dead pine, sucked dry by the vampire fern overhead. I scurry to the safety of thicker trees and my ankle lights up in pain. Falling, I feel the tendrils of the fairy fern tear out of my calf. There is another shot- one that likely would have found its mark if I had been standing.

I stay low to the ground, out of sight of the stranger and that much further from the predatory ferns. The man lets out a frustrated yelp and the canopy shakes as he fends off prying tendrils. There are bones in the treetops- I see them now that the light has changed.

“Throw out you gun,” the man says, “And step out here.”

My heart stops for a moment- the man assumes I was smart enough to bring a gun, that I would know how to use one if I had it.

“No,” I yell, crouching behind a thick stump, “You… throw down your gun.”

The man yelps again and yells- “Fucking plants!”

“They, uh, won’t stop until I tell them to…” I say.

“Fuck you,” he says, “I’m not an idiot.”

“Why are you here?”

“Same reason as you,” he says, and I hear him edging closer, picking his way across the underbrush, “The book, right?”

“Who told you to burn this place down?”

This stops him.

“Somebody already tried that,” I tell him, “Look what happened.”

“You a park ranger?” the man asks, taking another step closer.

“What?”

“A park ranger. Now’s the time to tell me if you are.”

“I’m not a park ranger.”

“Didn’t think so,” he says.

I take a breath, preparing to run, and the pick falls from my mouth. As it hits the ground, a tangled mass of fern and bone swings down from the trees, shuddering past me to the ground. The man is not more than a few feet behind me, but he is distracted by the sudden appearance of this ghoul and with that moment, I make a terrible decision.

I make finger guns at the man and yell: “Stop!”

And, against the odds, it works.

The stranger doesn’t wait to see if I have a real gun. He reaches down and seems to pull his shadow over himself and, with that, he is gone. I am left alone with the fairy fern and the hanging skeleton of an unlucky hunter.

I search the ground for the pick, for what was little more than pine mash when it fell, but it has vanished. The fairy fern attempts a lazy pursuit as I hike back to the road, but falters at the edge of its infestation.

My mind is elsewhere, replaying the events of the last year and wondering how many strangers I have passed without realizing there could be more than one.

-traveler