“That’s a real pro-job!” says the Red Neck Shaman, “A real fiberglass beauty.”

The whole upper part of him has disappeared into a metal crate, one of several. There is a sound of rummaging, of a great deal of metal turning over and over. A rusted handsaw pushes over the edge and clatters to the ground.

‘Not that one,’ I hope, quietly, ‘Not that one.’

A cold draft pushes under the sheet door and across my naked upper-half. I shiver and rattle the ramshackle table I am attached to, attached by a metal vice pressed deeply into the cast on my arm. It has cracked under the pressure already, which I take as a good sign. If the cast will give easy under the vice, then it shouldn’t take too much sawing.

“There are well-intentioned denizens that live by the wayside, people and businesses that mean little harm and, in the grander scheme, do little. ‘The Red Neck Shaman’ is one of these people. Questioned about the authenticity of his title, ‘shaman,’ the man will agree with the common definition and say little else. When asked about the ‘red neck’ portion of his offerings, he simply calls your attention to the headquarters of his business, a rented storage shed, and the source of power for his more intricate tools, a car battery. The Red Neck Shaman’s services are worth more than his asking price but his asking price, reader, is very little to begin with.”

The Red Neck Shaman, still hidden in the steel box, goes very still, leaving me with the sound of my breath and the squeaking of my nervous sneaker on the cement floor. He hangs there, bent limply in half at the edge of the thing, moving not a muscle. I bring my hand, my good hand, to the vice and consider releasing it. The iron there is thick and cold and, to my surprise, vibrating very slightly. As soon as I feel it in the vice, I feel the same vibration in the metal of the chair, in the air around me, in my skeleton, deeply buried under flesh and clothes.

“Found it!” the Red Neck Shaman says, animating suddenly.

The hum has gone and the skeletal man in red flannel emerges with a hack saw, no less rusted than its cousin on the floor. Thankfully, he unfastens the blade and pulls another out of plastic, settling on an old stool to switch them out.

“Was that hum the spirits?” I ask, wincing at the potential idiocy of the question.

“That were them!” he says, “Some like to misplace my tools, others like to find’em for me.”

“In that regard…” I begin, “Are the spirits usually more helpful or… mischievous?”

“Spirits’s mostly just folk like you an’ me that’s passed,” he says, “Plenty’a assholes among’em.”

“How did you get into this line of business? Shamanism?”

“Done what they told me an’ started makin’ money doin’ it.”

I try to stretch but the vice grip restrains me. The hack saw is coming together quickly in the man’s callused fingers.

“How specific are the spirits when they talk to you? What do they say?”

“You heard’em just now.”

“But it just sounded like a hum to me.”

“Gotta tune it in jus’ right.”

“You mean like a radio?”

“As good an’ analgee as any.”

“Could you actually use a radio to hear them? As a medium?”

“Not ‘less they got miker-phones in the life beyond. Otherwise I’m all the medium you ought need. Now…”

The Red Neck Shaman examines the assembled saw in the dim lantern light and shrugs before wheeling over on the stool.

“Real pro-job,” he observes again, flicking the cast with his broken fingernail, “Makes a man wonder what a feller like yerself’s doin’ comin’ to a feller like me.”

“The spirits can’t tell you?”

“They said ain’t none my business but it don’t stop me from wonder’n.”

“Trouble with insurance.”

The old saw blade clatters off the table as the Red Neck Shaman looks on.

“Good n’ bad spirits alike don’ take well ter lying, sir, but I’ll leave yer business yers and get to mine. Do this right n’ you ain’t gon’ feel a thing. Do it wrong and you feel a bunch.”

The blade’s teeth bite into the cast and my arm moves painfully back and forth despite the man’s attempts to hold it in place. I wonder, too late, if I should have given the bone more time to set.

I grit my teeth.

“Wouldn’t ‘medicine man’ have been more apt?” I ask over the sound of sawing.

“Medcin’ man’s a term steeped in genner,” he grunts, putting his weight into the motions, “Don’t set much an example to my daughter, fer instance.”

The saw’s teeth graze my skin and the Red Neck Shaman halts himself before I can warn him. He clips the connecting bridge at my thumb with bolt cutters and the cast splits up to my elbow.

“We’re gon’ have to get a tad intermate fer this next part, I’m ‘fraid,” he says, pointing to the length of plaster that extends up to my shoulder. “I’ll take’er slow.”

Smelling of moonshine and exhaust, the man hacks away at the plaster from a position over and behind me in the chair. He mutters to himself and to me and to the spirits, invisible, as he works.

I try not to let my teeth chatter.

Slowly my arm emerges from its cocoon- hardly a butterfly but free, after a long time, from constraint. The tender skin feels out currents of air, otherwise unknowable. Perhaps these are the man’s spirits, coming to observe their colleague’s work.

“Stinks t’high heaven, don’it?” he says, pausing thoughtfully before adding: “Spirits say that’ll be ten bucks.”

-traveler

“‘Charlene’s Haunted Crafts’ is, by no means, truly haunted. It is a Halloween store, open year-round and run entirely by the owner, an old woman named Charlene. Charlene takes it upon herself to dress as a witch might, a stereotypical witch I should say, donning a pointed hat, a velvet cloak, and a tiny pentacle pin. She maintains a distinctive character while inside the store, responding to jokes with a shrill cackle and speaking to her fat Maine Coon as though it weren’t sleeping. There are cracks in her façade if you know where to look, the witchy guise a gaudy plastering on a thing much stranger than it seems. Look carefully, reader, or do not look at all.”

One might have expected that ‘Charlene’s’ would be the sort of business that is open four days a week from 11 to 4:30 (and closed at noon for lunch). Without that personal foresight, my first visit to the little shop consisted entirely of staring in through the display windows at the tiny, orange-painted trinkets there. Having had my fill, I hefted my pack and limped off to find my own lunch.

Returning in the late afternoon I find Charlene at the register, hunched over a wooden jack-o-lantern and a small pot of black paint. Her Maine Coon watches from a shelf above, flicking its tail in tandem with the brush strokes and sniffling at the cobwebs it inadvertently pushes into the air. Neither pay me much mind as I walk the aisles and eye the layers of thick, white dust.

It is uncomfortable for me to be in a shop, on my own and without any reason but to browse. Small wooden pumpkins are low on my list of needs. I don’t have a house or a truck to celebrate Halloween in and my pack doesn’t exactly want for more weight or sharp edges. The thing is, I used to work in a little shop like this and even I could tell when somebody was looking with no intent to buy, I could tell just about right away. If Charlene has been running this place for as long as I assume she has, she probably felt me coming down the street.

“Do you paint all of these?” I ask, circling around to the front of the store and feigning interest.

She does not look up at me.

“Do you…” I begin, thinking my voice had been too quiet, “Do you paint everything in your store?”

Still nothing.

“Ma’am…”

“Oh shut up,” the woman says.

The woman behind me, that is.

I turn and see a squat woman, hardly a witch in baggy jeans and the short, pointed hairstyle tween boys and computer-savvy grandmothers begrudgingly share. She frowns at me, continues frowning, and then turns to the woman at the counter.

The woman at the counter is a doll of some sort, intricate in assembly and coloring but entirely unmoving as she hovers over the craft. The cat above her has frozen, warped, and flattened itself on the wall- a painting of a cat, an optical illusion. I move my head from side to side, step backward to the door but the cat persists in unreality. Now, from this angle, even the woman loses some of her detail.

“I thought she was alive,” I tell the new woman, “She’s…”

I hesitate before saying ‘realistic’ because now I can see the fake rubber skin and the cheap stuffing that pokes out of the seams on her wrist. The cat, above, is peeling from the wall behind them both, painted ages ago.

“In the shadows it seemed like she was real.”

“She?” the woman, Charlene, I suppose, asks.

There’s nothing at the counter but a backpack, a jacket draped off the chair. Two rolls of gift wrap lie where her arms once did, or where it seemed like they were. The cat is a water stain, the ugly type you ignore because you’re afraid of exactly how much it will cost to fix whatever is causing it. It is faintly the shape of a cat, but that could be said of anything of that size. Cats take strange shapes.

I shift onto my bad leg, reassured by the pain, and shift off again. I face Charlene.

“I think Halloween is getting to me,” I tell her, forcing a chuckle.

“Must be, we’re halfway through November.”

“It’s… snow…” I say. I say it aloud hoping it will keep the conversation going.

The shelves are covered in fake snow, not dust, and the jack o’lanterns have stacked into snowmen. I wipe my brow, nervously.

“You can’t use the restroom,” Charlene says.

“What?”

Something meows in the store and I look desperately around. The water stain has all but disappeared.

“You can’t use the restroom. Lay off the smack and get a job, it’s not too late to turn your life around.”

“I…”

“You don’t think so?”

“Well, yeah,” I say, agreeing more that a theoretical version of me, a smack-addicted version, would do well to get off the stuff. That it wouldn’t be too late.

“Off you go, then,” she says, “Best be out before I call the sheriff.”

I leave quickly because, drug-addled or not, I have reason to avoid the law. The air is colder now, the sun well on its way to our neighbor’s morning. I check my watch and see that it is November, that Halloween passed as a ghost might- quiet and disconcerting. I shiver against the cold and the psychic stress of the last few minutes, days, months.

Charlene taps on the window behind me, taps with her costume jewelry rings.

Used to be I could drive somewhere warm and shake all this off.

I start to walk, instead.

-traveler

“How long have you been in my radio?”

Hooked haphazardly into a car battery, the old truck radio flickers and seems to lose power for a moment. After that moment, an answer:

“Have you always thought that a thing must be inside your radio in order to hear it?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I am a projection,” the voice says and I can hear the old chuckle in its tone.

“So why project into my radio? Why did you come back after the drive-in?”

“Because I could.”

“You couldn’t before?”

“Not in a sense.”

“What do you mean by that?”

The radio goes dark again, I am cast into the moonlight. In this, the forest that took the use of my arm, I listen to the wind and to the crickets. The radio cracks and the voice returns.

“Do you know of the town, Boone, in North Carolina?”

“No, is it famous for something?”

“It’s not famous for anything.”

“So why mention it?”

“So, could you have gone to Boone before I told you it was there?”

“Yes.”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t know about it.”

“So you could only go to Boone by accident before, and now you can only ever go there knowingly. Now that you know Boone exists, you can go there anytime and as often as you like.”

“You’re not going to explain yourself, are you?”

“There’s not much to explain, owner of the… oh, hmm… I don’t know what to call you; there’s very little to your name anymore.”

“You can call me whatever you want.”

“Well then, traveler,” the voice says, its tone soft and knowing, “Where are we off to next?”

Well.

It has been some time, reader. It may not seem that way to you but that is the magic of staggered release. I stagger even now, on a leg that recovers slowly because I can’t seem to keep off it. I type with one functioning arm. Can you tell?

The accident did a number on me and it put my travel on hiatus. It has been three months since I was pulled from the truck and dragged up to the road by a fifteen-year-old driver-in-training and her blood-phobic father and about eight weeks since I slipped out of the hospital, a rattled John Doe to the bitter end. I am the burden of the taxpayers now.

They’ll find me eventually.

At the egging-on of the radio I hid my wallet and my cellphone in the trunk of an old tree they leaned me up against on that fateful night. The truck’s plates are dead-ends, not because I am a mastermind but because I bought it from a man on the internet who didn’t have papers and I never bothered to make up papers of my own. The tags have long expired but nobody cares to check when you drive the speed limit, always just the speed limit, and when you’re white and plain and from a different state.

That’s what I assume, anyway.

My worldly possessions have been reduced once again to the contents of my bag: a copy of ‘Shitholes,’ a flashlight, two pens, and that damn comb. Add to that my cellphone and my wallet, recovered from the tree, and the truck’s disconnected radio, heavy and sharp for all that it’s currently useless. Minus the truck itself, of course. Now I rely on the kindness of others to get around.

There is one more stop, while I’m here:

“‘The Somerset Honey Bucket’ advertises itself like a refinery, its pamphlets featuring well-dressed, middle-aged couples smiling and holding small tasting cups. It would be easy to mistake their beverage of choice for scotch or bourbon, some sort of whisky, literally anything but the truth. The truth is that this is a destination for families with sweet teeth in their genes, for people who want to try their hand at tasting soil quality in a quarter cup of honey. Tour the grounds, cut the sugar with a waffle, and then leave lest you become stuck, stuck like the ghost of its founder.”

Thankfully, ‘The Honey Bucket’ has a bus service to shuttle prospective visitors from town to its estate a few miles on the outskirts. Free of charge. I wait for the bus on a Tuesday afternoon, the matinee, hoping I’ll be on my own.

I’m not.

A few large groups gather, organized and led by a guide. Several couples orbit the denser masses. There are children and the children stare. Everybody looks, but the children look closely. They see me and they know something is wrong.

As soon as I knew I would be back on the road I shaved and cut my hair. I pressed a shirt and dusted off my shoes. In the mirror I thought I could pass as a respectable somebody whose life had recently taken an unexpected turn.

I still look every bit the man who failed to.

My arm is in a sling, dirty since my abrupt departure from treatment. An old gash becomes a new scar over my right eye; I wear a boot and walk like a cartoon pirate. I have taken the next step toward the archetypal drifter, a man whose story is discredited before he even opens his mouth.

And, reader, the man on the book has no scar.

“All aboard,” calls the shuttle driver, a lumberjack behind the wheel.

I jump to the front of the line and then, quickly, to the back of the bus. Despite the crowd, I find I have a seat to myself.

We are not on the road long before I move to scratch under my cast and find my hand coming away from the faux leather with a sticky tug. Pulling up my boot from the floor elicits a tactile ‘snap’ usually reserved for movie theatres and food courts. Nobody else seems bothered, so I try to distract myself with scenes from the window, filtered through a thin yellow tinting on the glass.

As we pull into ‘The Honey Bucket’s’ grounds there is a cacophony of soles twisting on the sticky floor. A child, set into the aisle by his mother, falls on its hands and struggles to right itself.  I grimace, inwardly, when it finally stands and pulls a toy to its mouth. I try not to touch anything with my bare skin and still my clothes hold to the seat with the near-imperceptible grip of a sticky-note.

I am the last to leave the bus.

My hand sanitizer is gone, lost in the crash or the slipping away that followed. It is with sticky fingers that I miss it now, compulsively rubbing my hands on my pants and trying to seem inconspicuous in the crowd.

Several employees greet us in the lobby, their shoes pulling noisily on the polished wood. We hover as a group on the entryway rug, avoiding the floor. I feel, at once, validated and concerned.

“Welcome to The Somerset Honey Bucket!” one of the employees says, a woman in her late thirties, “We thought we’d start here with a quick tasting before we get you on the tour.”

The man behind her has a trayful of little plastic cups, each filled with a tablespoon or so of honey. He holds it forward with a little flourish.

“Volunteers?”

There is an obscene amount of hesitancy. I look around and wonder why these people showed up if they weren’t ready to drink honey out of a cup and if they weren’t led here by Shitholes. Maybe this is the low point on some tour package, something a company uses to fill out the odd day in the middle. A mom tries to push a disinterested middle-schooler ahead but he twists back behind her with a practiced movement and goes back to looking at his phone. Someone chuckles self-consciously. Light music plays in the lobby.

“You,” the man says, looking at me of course, “Come try one.”

I look at the others and now, rather than avoiding eye contact, they’re giving me encouraging smiles and little thumbs ups. I smile back, or give a confused frown (difficult to know), and take a resigned step forward. My shoe immediately sticks on the wood and pulls away noisily. I approach the tray and choose a cup at random.

“Ah,” he says, “Interesting choice. This is a top-grade pale amber, looser than what is often available commercially. Some people say a loose honey indicates a lazy queen but that hasn’t been my experience at all. I can introduce you to the bees that made this.”

“Uh,” I say, “Thanks.”

In the time it takes me to offer a good-natured cheers to the crowd behind me the woman steps forward with a metal bowl- a spittoon.

“I’m supposed to spit this in there,” I clarify, and she nods.

There’s a lot wrong with the situation but I am aware enough to see this isn’t the time to point it out.

I take the honey in my mouth and, at the egging-on of the connoisseur, swirl it around. It’s sickeningly sweet and about as consistent as olive oil. Sooner than is probably proper, I spit the stuff into the woman’s bucket and it trails in thick strands between my lips and the metal. I wipe my mouth with my sleeve, too late to see the proffered towel with The Honey Bucket’s logo embroidered near the hem. I cough twice, inhaling some of the honey as I do, and then straighten to give the crowd a watery-eyed thumbs-up.

Go for it, guys.

My jacket is streaked with honey already. I excuse myself to the bathroom while the rest of the guests make their way through the tap’s welcome offering. I rinse out my mouth with water and feel better, despite the broken man in the reflection. A child is crying outside.

The kid’s hair is matted to its head and there is a sticky puddle of honey on the floor. The parents console it but try to keep the screaming youth at a distance that will spare their clothes. Everyone looks uneasy, a few look outright upset.

“So!” the woman says, failing to read the room, “Shall we tour the grounds?”

I mostly ignore the history of Somerset’s honey economy, we all do. They take us through the factory, show us the hive, bring beakers of honey and bees to lights so that we might remark on the incredible purity, the golden yellows and deep ambers of the liquid and on the dainty stripes of the insects. We start to get distracted; the place has honey in the air. Before long we’re covered in a layer of something, something like day-old sunblock and sweat. Everything becomes sticky and our stomachs turn each time our smiling host pulls out a new product to sample. The child cries quietly now, its tears moving thickly and at a snail’s pace.

Faced with mutual suffering, the groups have warmed to me. They spare their skeptical eyes for the Somerset folk and let me trail behind them, just another lost soul in a honey factory.

“And there you have it, everybody,” the woman is saying, “A sweet taste of traditional America. Now, I’d like to open the floor to questions!”

“Who owns this place?” I ask and a man behind me misunderstands my genuine question for a thinly-veiled, ‘let me speak to your manager.’

He lands a jovial thump on my back and then takes a moment to pull his hand free from my jacket. The whole process sends sharp jolts of pain through my shattered bones. He whispers an apology.

“The owner?” the woman asks.

“Yeah.”

“She’s… busy.”

“I wasn’t asking if I could see her, I had just read…”

“She’s outside,” the man blurts out, “Out back. She watches the sunset around this time in her chair. Go on.”

“She’s not…”

“Go on.”

“She’s not dead?”

“Of course she’s not dead,” the woman says, narrowing her eyes at me and continuing to stare as she addresses the crowd: “Any more questions?”

There are no more questions and as we file into the gift shop I find the people have grown wary of me again, wary in response to something in the question I asked. I sneak away while everyone looks over vials of honey and plush bees to take home to their families.

An old woman sits just outside a fire exit, rocking slowly in her chair. She says nothing as I stand next to her, watching the sun set over the orchard. When it finally slips under the horizon, casting us into a translucent twilight, I notice her rocking has stopped. Her chair has stuck to the floor in a backward-leaning position, her legs swing weakly and her eyes just stare and stare ahead.

I quietly grip the back of the chair, and when nothing changes, I gently pull it free, setting her rocking once again. The woman grips the arms of the chair, her thumbs rub nervously on the wicker arms.

“Sun…” she mutters, “Sun like a pancake’s what I used to say.”

“What?” I ask, and she just starts screaming. Screaming and screaming.

Screaming and rocking.

I sneak back around the building to the parking area. I look for a long time at the empty gravel lot. My bus has gone.

I am stuck, reader.

I am stuck.

-traveler

There is nothing but static on the radio and I drive that way for a long time, the volume on low and the heat on high. Occasionally I’m encouraged by a ‘pop’ or a ‘click;’ twice there seems to be some sort of background jingle but, with so much white noise, I may be making it up. At least once I definitely hear a man’s voice but my surprise keeps me from understanding what has been said, if anything was said at all.

The way is forested, now, and lonely. It’s just past noon but a gray sky means it might as well be dusk. A rain drop falls every couple minutes, splattering on my windshield. The clouds can’t seem to make up their mind as to whether I’m here or not, as to whether it’s worth raining now or waiting a while for more like me to come.

I wouldn’t mind the rain.

I pass another sign: ‘For Information Tune Radio to 980 AM’

I check the radio, run a pass-through of the 970-990 range, and settle again on 980’s static. The truck has been on cruise control for nearly fifteen minutes as we wander smoothly around gentle curves and over small hills. The radio cracks again, buzzes, and then fades back to static. I tap the dash affectionately. There is no reason to rush.

‘For Information Tune Radio to 980 AM’

‘What kind of information, though? That’s the question you should ask yourself as you drive through Somerset Forest on your way across I-90 and see the many signs and their humble offering. We live in the information age, there are more words in the air than flies, than birds, than leaves falling from the trees. Sometimes we are informed against our will and that may very well be the case for you in Somerset Forest. If you’re reading this, be warned.’

I’m not sure I believe in the idea of forbidden knowledge. Secrets, sure. I understand why people keep secrets. I’ll also accept the idea that there’s plenty of information out there that I don’t necessarily need, that would just take up mind-space and offer no real benefit. Hell, I recognize that some of that information might concern things I’d rather not know; this trip alone has provided a fair share of regrettable experiences. That’s trauma, though, that’s something different entirely. I’m thinking mind-rending knowledge- Book of Genesis type stuff. If we’re talking about an idea that’s universally harmful to the extreme, that can’t be forgotten or rationalized away- I call bullshit.

And I think I’m in a pretty good place to judge.

By all accounts I follow in the footsteps of my future self, led by a book that I am destined to write. Much of what I have seen so far has suggested that the book itself is not a prank, that it has been written honestly and about places that are very real. It could be that my name was attached by the man who handed it to me, that he was able to manipulate a photo for the author credits so that I look more mature and less tired. Cleaner. He could have done the same with any book.

If I’m to assume, though, (and I do, sometimes) that what the man said was true and that a path of some sort has already been laid in front of me… well, you would think that would have taken more of a toll.

The clouds part for the sun and its light filters sideways through the trees. I lower my sunglasses, one hand on the wheel, and squint my eyes against the sudden strobe, the forest’s shadows on the pavement. The road is clear and straight.

I think mortality is the giveaway, or, I agree that it is. I’m certainly not the first to think it. We should be much more fearful of our own mortality than we are; it is inevitable and often more imminent than we assume. We already know that we will die and if that’s not enough to rend minds I doubt anything else can. Humans have evolved to be fantastic endurance runners. Maybe some of that has gone to our head- maybe we run from thoughts too. We are the great rationalizers, our comprehension wired with a kill-switch.

The radio quiets down and I think I hear the man’s voice again. It’s too garbled to make anything out; I raise the volume and slide the tuner back and forth, coaxing the distant-sounding words up and out through the speakers. Without understanding any one word I recognize the sound of a commercial, a tone that only seems to exist in advertisem-

The road pulls out from under the truck, a sudden, sharp turn. The world spins, the sun and the earth orbiting me in mad directions. There is an impact and I’m gone for a while.

Nobody finds me in the meantime.

The sun is setting when I open my eyes again. There is a great deal of pain. The windshield has shattered and a tire rests at an odd angle in front of me. I hang awkwardly in my seatbelt, the truck lying on its passenger side. I reach out and turn off the blinker. The radio still plays static; I hadn’t noticed until now.

My left arm is very broken, my hand draped limply over my stomach. I can’t seem to move any part of it. I try to adjust my shoulder and, when that doesn’t work, I try to pinpoint the trouble. Somewhere, distantly, I recognize that I may have entered shock. I try to remember if that’s something that can be solved, or even recognized, internally. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

A part of my forearm next to the elbow has emerged from the skin. A skeletal part, a great sharp piece of bone. It hurts the moment I see it. I wonder if it shouldn’t hurt more and then it does.

I start to cry.

It’s difficult not to despair, reader. I’ve found it difficult, even under normal circumstances, not to despair.

Circumstances have worsened exponentially.

My truck is as broken as my arm; it, too, holds up its skeleton to the fading light. We are united in a grim toast.

I pass out again.

I recognize the static before anything else. I try to open my eyes and realize they are already open. It has gotten dark, dark except for the dull, back-lit tuner. I remember, suddenly, why I woke up.

Somebody was laughing.

“Hello?” I try to say, the best I can do with a dry throat.

There is nothing. No footsteps or birds or anything.

And then the man’s voice on the radio, lost in the thick static. The tuner has been knocked to the left, its needle hovering near 972 AM. With a great deal of effort, I reach out my hand and adjust it to the right.

“-ggested to approach corners cautiously and to be aware of wildlife that may be crossing the road, particularly at night. Please do not throw cigarette butts or other waste from your windows as you enjoy the natural beauty of Somerset. Thank you for visiting!”

The voice fades into a jingle and then picks up again.

“Welcome to Somerset Forest! You’re tuned to 980-”

I close my eyes. The voice sounds familiar, some D-list celebrity doing charity work for the park service. I run through sitcoms and commercials in my head. I try to remember what audiobooks I’ve listened to recently, what commercials I’ve seen.

“…recommends flashing you lights when approaching dangerously narrow…”

The pain comes back in a burst. I wander in and out of shock. It’s impossible to concentrate- I consider and forget a hundred ways to save myself.

“…recommends flashing…”

My right hand can’t seem to find the seatbelt mechanism. I wonder what the short fall to the passenger side would do to me if I was able to free myself. I take a deep breath and hear the ragged wheeze of my lungs. The truck is quiet, the radio lit but silent. The man’s voice returns after a moment.

“Owner of the blue pick-up,” it says and it chuckles, “Heh, heh, heh.”

It’s difficult to tell how much of this is actually happening.

“Owner of the blue pick-up, why don’t you go ahead and flash those pretty lights of yours?”

-traveler