Chapter Three - Doctor

I awoke, if I ever was asleep, staring into a clipboard that hovered above my face. The guy wasn't wearing anything that would identify him as a doctor but I figured he had to be – he had that look of someone that studied your personal areas. A curvy woman with horn rimmed glasses and a rat's nest of hair stood next to him. She smelled of roses dipped in clorox.

"I said do you often have this loss of consciousness?"

"Sorry?"

He looked at the woman, she grimaced, he said something under his breath.

"I see. You have had another one." He wrote something on the clipboard. "Do you remember coming in here? They told me you were in a diner." His thick grey mustache danced as he spoke. "You don't seem to have any injuries, except for that nasty cut on your forearm. I thought about stitching it but thought that --"

Three parallel steri-strips were pasted against the partially scabbed over gash.

"Shit. My knee!"

I threw back the white sheet, unaware of my nakedness. The woman didn't turn away but lurched forward, her eyes widened.

"You been having problems with your knee?"

I ran my hands along the smooth, unbroken skin covering my left kneecap. I glanced at my right, just in case I was wrong. Neither of them had a scratch.

The doctor glanced at the clipboard. "Have you had problems with an addictive substance? Previous psychological treatment? Exhibitionist tendencies?"

The woman smiled at me.

I brought the sheet back to cover myself.

"Francine, I think you should--" the doctor started.

"Who brought me here?"

"You were in your truck," said the still smiling, kind of leering, woman. Francine seemed about right somehow.

"What do you mean in my truck? You said I was in a diner. Who brought me here?"

"Now take some breaths. We don't need you passing out again. "I'm Doctor Little. Don't you recall our previous conversation?"

"I've never seen you before."

"Some men drove here from the diner. I guess they put you in the truck. You must have left the keys in it, so they drove you here."

"Who did? Where are they now?"

The doctor and Francine exchanged glances.

"Are you feeling feverish?" Francine asked.

"Now Francine, you took his temperature already, and it was fine."

I closed my eyes and tried to remember back to before. In the diner, we were drinking water. Her face grew large in my mind.

"The woman, with the really white skin... where is she?" I asked.

The looks on their faces told me that if I didn't start making sense, they'd be ordering a full brain scan and psychotic strip down. Or Francine would be stripping something.

"Really, Mr. Stilton--"

"Who is Mr. Stilton? That's not my name."

"Oh," a quick glance over to Francine,"there was a note, in your pants, we assumed that was you."

"What note?"

"Mr. Stilton, if you have a previous condition it would help us diagnose any..."

"Stop calling me that."

I threw back the sheet and swung my legs over the bed.

"Where's my pants?"

Francine, taking in another eyeful, turned away when I met her gaze. She went into an adjoining room and came back with my jeans. She laid them on the bed. They were dirty, but bloodstain free.

"Underwear?"

"I'm sorry, we cut those off, we had to see if you had some, um, internal injury that would account for your, uh, condition." He ran his hand over his mustache and coughed.

"Condition? Wait a second, what kind of doctor are you?" I took a quick glance around the room, no tongue depressors, no blood pressure machine, and it had a funny smell. The poster of the kitten hanging from a branch clinched it. "You're a vet!"

"Well, of course. The only medical doctor we have comes by every two weeks, unless there's an emergency. We thought of calling her but we couldn't find anything that would warrant her..."

"Am I done here?" I wanted to ask why they hadn't cut off the jeans. Something told me it was Francine's decision to slice the underwear.

"You're free to go anytime. But don't you think you should stay a bit? We could call the other doctor if you wish."

I pulled on my jeans, riding bareback, what the hell.

"My wallet? Or did you have to cut that too?" I glared at Francine.

She scurried into the other room and came back with my keys and my wallet.

"If you wanted to find out who I was why didn't you just--" I stopped as I flipped through several bills and the faded photo I'd been carrying for years.

"Something missing?" The vet asked.

"Where is it?"

"I assure you, we took nothing. What are you missing?"

"Which one of you swiped my I.D.?"

"We wondered why you didn't have any."

"Until we found the note," Francine reached into her breast pocket and took out a folded yellow square. She handed it to me, her fingertips, long nails with a daisy yellow polish, stayed a few extra seconds on my palm.

I read it.
We found this man sitting outside his truck in the parking lot of the diner. He said his name was Stilton. Then he passed out. Please help him. We have to leave for a family reunion.
It was signed, Chris and Kelly. A smiley-face was drawn at the bottom.

"We were gone to lunch, just egg salad sandwiches that Francine's mom had made. And when we came back there you were in your truck. Out cold. I guess these people drove you and your truck here. When you didn't wake up, they figured that was the best they could do. So they left."

"For a reunion." Francine added.

There was no phone number or address on the note. The letters were hard to read, a pen almost out of ink – under the smiley-face there was another word that I couldn't make out.

I thought of what the girl with the white face told me about escaping time.

"What does this say?" I asked.

"We couldn't figure that out either. Francine has a guess."

"Clarkesville."

"Never heard of that, where?"

Francine gave an awkward smile. "You know, like that old song. The last train to."

My head had been pounding ever since I gained consciousness. It now threatened to burst and spray brain matter across the vet's office.

"You have any pain killers?" I bent my knees, stretching out my legs, forcing blood flow back into them.

"Mr. Stilton, we cannot give medication without –"

"Just some damn aspirin."

Francine fished around in her pocket and brought out a blister pack.

"These will probably do something," she said.

Doc gave her look and reached for the pack. I pushed him aside, grabbed the pills, and jammed the note in my pocket.

"You should stay and get checked out," Francine urged. "People aren't all that different than dogs."

"I've had all my shots."

Francine ran her tongue over her lips. I made a quick exit, almost running by the time I went through the door. The doc yelled out, saying I should go get checked out by my regular doctor. I spun out of the lot, spitting gravel chunks at the sign with the little dog and cat in doctor outfits.

I pushed the speedometer on the truck as far as it would go, keeping one eye on the temp gauge. I popped the pills out of the pack and downed them. I trusted horny Francine that they were actually for pain, and not flea and heartworm – or fuck, some sort of pet viagra. The road ahead shimmered, in the distance a pair of buildings looked like splotches of overripe fruit against a sky the exact shade of the empty ice cube holders in my fridge back home. It was a weird thing to remember. I hardly remember what my place looked like. As I whipped by them, I spied a thin man on scaffolding, slapping orange paint with a huge brush. I could see the droplets splash and hang in the air before settling on the weathered surface. I shouldn't have been able to see that.

I urged the pedal down farther – having no idea where I was going, if I'd find the sedan again, or what I'd do if I found it. I flipped the switch on my radio, filling the cab with harsh guitar rock and some guy screaming. I turned it up and pushed the speed over 85. The temp gauge jerked. The pounding in my head softened to brushes on the edge of a snare. Shush-shush.

I passed a green Pontiac, driven by a redneck with a buzz cut and a tattoo of the queen on his neck. As fast I was going, certain images moved in slow perfect clarity – like some Einstein relativity problem. I perceived moving objects as if they were standing still. But the large granary in the distance appeared to be moving away from me. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, and tried to refocus. When I opened them again there it was, the black sedan, it popped out of nowhere, less than a quarter mile ahead. There were no access roads that I could see – it was like it dropped out of the sky. Somehow, I knew I'd come across it. Just like last time. And probably some other times that I couldn't remember.

I pulled in close behind, following the s-curve of the road, and tried to peer into the back window. The sheen on the glass reflected back light, not like a mirrored surface, but fragmented like cheap Mactac for bathroom windows.

The granary pulled in front of me after the curve, or that's what it looked like. Spireton. A handmade sign was drilled into the post underneath the town name – Corn and Bacon Festival, Aug. 3-5. The sedan pulled into the lot of the Spireton Hotel. I followed.

I watched the back door open and a white leg appear. I started to wonder if that vet had give me some sort of sedative, or even a hallucinogenic. Movement played tricks on my eyes. Trails of colour swept behind her legs as she approached the truck. I rolled down the window.

"Come on in. You look like you need a drink."

The sedan idled. I cranked my neck and tried to see inside.

"Just the two of us," she said and winked.

I saw every lash move on her white face.

<<<<>>>> 

New Chapters of Bent Highway will appear weekly (or more) at this blog. Please, comment, share, or give a shout on twitter. (Or like the link on facebook... people are still on facebook, right?)

Chapter Three - Teaser

It's exciting to me as Bent Highway gains speed (and readers!) - thanks to all who have joined already!

The saga of M continues this weekend, as he struggles to understand what is happening, and what he is part of. Here is a brief teaser for the upcoming chapter.

As always, drop me a comment, a share, a like, some toast, whichever.

Chapter Three - Doctor

I awoke, if I ever was asleep, staring into a clipboard that hovered above my face. The guy wasn't wearing anything that would identify him as a doctor but I figured he had to be – he had that look of someone that studied your personal areas. A curvy woman with horn rimmed glasses and a rat’s nest of hair stood next to him. She smelled of roses dipped in Clorox.

 
"I said do you often have this loss of consciousness?"
 

"Sorry?"

He looked at the woman, she grimaced, he said something under his breath.

"I see. You have had another one.” He wrote something on the clipboard. “Do you remember coming in here? They told me you were in a diner." His thick grey mustache danced as he spoke. "You don't seem to have any injuries, except for that nasty cut on your forearm. I thought about stitching it but thought that —"

Three parallel steri-strips were pasted against the partially scabbed over gash. 

"Shit. My knee!" 

I threw back the white sheet, unaware of my nakedness. The woman didn't turn away but lurched forward, her eyes widened.

"You been having problems with your knee?"

I ran my hands along the smooth, unbroken skin covering my left kneecap. I glanced at my right, just in case I was wrong. Neither of them had a scratch.

The doctor glanced at the clipboard. "Have you had problems with an addictive substance? Previous psychological treatment? Exhibitionist tendencies?" 

The woman smiled at me.

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Full Chapter this weekend...

Chapter Two - Arrow

I don't know how long I'd been driving. Shit, I don't know how long I'd been doing anything. Time stretched out like a line of cut paper dolls, except there were long gaps of nothingness – somehow the doll chain hung together, but then things disappeared in the space. Things like my memory. Or even my senses.

I was cruising at seventy-five when I came upon the black sedan. The temp gauge needle crept up, but I stared it down and it held its position. The sedan looked familiar. Maybe my dad had owned one all those years ago. It shone in that vintage sort of way, the fins as sharp as spears. The sedan flashed its brake lights and I hit mine in reflex. Wait, how did I know that car? My father never drove anything that big. This was from somewhere else.

I was almost tailgating, so I figured I better ease up before we were clinking bumpers. I needed to either get some distance from the car, or floor it and pass. A dark shape popped up in the sedan's back seat, filling the rear window. I strained through my bug-splattered windshield. What the hell was that? A chalk white face appeared next to black shape, and a pair of bowed lips glowed against a woman's stark skin. The image hit me so hard that I slammed on my brakes. I fishtailed the truck. Even as I spun, I still cranked my head to stare at her face. Those bowed lips swelled to the size of a bleeding watermelon, and I heard them speak aloud, not like a memory, but like she was in the truck cab with me, her cool breath in my ear. The words didn't form sentences.

"Black...soft... earth...flesh...green...far."

The truck slid across the shoulder and slammed into the ditch.

Like the holes in my brain, the missing dolls in the chain, none of it made sense – but it meant something. I was so mesmerized by her voice, I barely felt the truck slam to a stop. My foot had been on the brake the whole time. Forgot to pump my way out of the slide. Forgot? I was frozen.

The truck was old school, weighed as much as a Sherman, still, it was a miracle I didn't roll.

My arm started to throb. When I turned to look at it, the skin puckered up and grinned at me. A trickle of blood slipped under the scab and drew a serpentine line down my forearm.

I finally knew one thing. Last night I had talked to the chalk woman and met the black beast.

The half-ton's engine stalled, but I didn't turn it over again. I sat in the ditch thinking about those bowed lips. I remembered asking her the question.

"What was your name again?"

No response.

I tried again. "Last time I didn't catch it. We talked in that bar in Yellowburn."

"I didn't give it," she'd said.

I had met her more than once. Met her and talked with her. I closed my eyes and pictured a smouldering house trailer, then it burst into fire, her running into the field, me after her, then that big beast toppling over me. Was that where the gash on my arm came from? Teeth or claws, what ripped the flesh?

My skull throbbed like someone had hammered a four inch spike into it. I cranked the engine, pulled out of the ditch with the tires spinning, four-wheel drive my ass, and headed down the highway.

They say your body remembers a lot, but not in ways that can be put into words. Right now the part of me that slammed on the brakes when I saw the sedan wasn't sending telegrams to the figuring-shit-out part of me. I trusted my legs more than the swiss-cheese brain.

The general weirdness faded as I picked up speed and the road straightened into an arrow. The sedan was long gone. Driving was the one thing that calmed me. Tires humming on the asphalt were a hundred times better than those vibrating loungers at the mall, and there wasn't a salesman with food court breath next to me in the cab saying how I couldn't live without one. Hate those sons-of-bitches.

Money was running out and I'd probably have to start looking for a job again. I'd eyed a few help wanted signs over the screen door of the countless road diners I visited. The greasy bacon and eggs didn't change as I drove across the country, but the people did. I had met some characters.

In Holdfast there was the guy who channelled John the Baptist. He kept telling me to repent, make my ways straight and all that. I didn't think I was that bad of guy – so I challenged him a bit. He was drinking hot water, no tea bag, steam rose from his beard on every sip.

"No one thinks they're all that bad until the time comes."

"Time comes for what?" I asked him.

"Exactly," he said.

Then he started spouting off in what was either an ancient dialect or the D.T.'S talking. After I left the diner, I passed him in the parking lot. He crunched down on something that I hoped wasn't a bug.

Then in Breeston there was the girl at the gas station doing a goofy dance to no music I could hear. She dressed somewhere between 1970's hippy funk and depression era rags, her ripped jeans hanging dangerously low, threatening to be shaken right off her ass at any moment. I was hypnotized by the movement, and considered offering her a ride. When I walked up to her, the dance intensified and her hair swirled around like she was either having a hell of a time or was on the border of a seizure. I kept walking.

I had seen this country through gas stations, hotel bars perched next to giant granaries, diners that served the same plate of eggs and burnt toast, played the same tinny country twang over the radio next to cash register, and general stores that doubled as liquor vendors in towns that had no reason to still exist. Like the dancing gas station girl I had a soundtrack, sometimes it came from my truck radio, but most times I carried the tunes around in my head. I never sang along. The guitar lines pulsed through my head as I passed through another empty town.

And then there was the chalk girl. That white skin glowed in my brain. Why did I know where I met the dancing hippie chick, but I couldn't place her? Maybe it was too recent – names and faces piled up in the corners of my brain like cords of wood, only with relative distance did one tumble out of the pile for closer inspection. Maybe this was why truckers look dazed at the stops. I had thought it was tiredness from the road. But maybe something started to happen when you saw so many places, so many people, and everything blurred together like the dotted line that became a stream of yellow piss underneath your tires – that still didn't explain the black outs. Who was she, why was she in the car with the beast?

A soundtrack of swamp rock pulsed in my mind. I was so lost in the dizziness of my own thoughts that I almost missed seeing the black sedan. I slowed down, u-turned and pulled into the parking lot. A weathered sign read Riverside Diner. I looked across about a hundred miles of bald prairie and didn't see even a hairline creek. It must have been a metaphor or a yearning hope.

As I walked past the sedan in the lot, my boots kicked up gravel that tinged against the gleaming hubcaps. My knees buckled and I dropped to the ground. What the fuck? I braced my hand against the driver's door and pressed into it – it was like touching dry ice. I tried to pull my hand back but it was stuck to the metal, burning and cold at the same time. I pulled hard and the flesh ripped. As I fell, the ground opened and swallowed me into the blackness.

*     *     *

I woke up staring into cup of coffee with a spiral thread of cream making its way to the edge.

"Are you well?"

Before I looked up, I'd already pictured the colour of her skin, those red lips, a shock of black hair slashed across her forehead.

"What's happening?"

"Are you still blacking out?" Her voice had a reverb to it–wet and bassy.

"I don't understand... why?" Sweat gathered in the crease of my forehead, my hands shook. "Last night... we talked and –"

"It's probably best you're not remembering a lot right now. It'll come back when it needs to."

I watched her lift the water glass and drain the contents in one long gulp. I expected to see a lipstick stain on the glass when she placed it back on the table but the glass shone spotless. An image flashed in front of me, a crisp blade splitting flesh, my flesh, a heavy shape pinning me against damp ground. And then her voice from across the table, not within the image, speaking to me.

"... time will not follow its usual path once you've slipped across. You're fighting to keep things linear. That is what your body is used to, one thing follows another, like your ABC's and your one, two, threes. But this isn't that. It's going to be disorienting for a while. Oh, and caffeine doesn't make it any better."

She slid a glass of water in front of me.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what's happening I--" I didn't even know what to ask.

"Just drink."

I sipped at the edge of the glass. The ice bumped against my lips and reminded me of my hand on the sedan door. Then, as I drank, I closed my eyes and saw the highway, the ditch, the brake lights of the sedan, the Dandy diner, the fan – I watched it all in slow reverse and it led me back to last night. We were in a dark room, wood and smoke, a bar I guess. There was the tall man with the broken nose, with the knife that cut across my arm, no... it was my leg, but then the flesh closed around the knife, and the blood disappeared into the wound. Then there was the wolf. It started to pull together – something about time, how they had found a way to get past it, through it, to dive into the stream like a series of rapids and ride along until you spilled out at a different point, a different place on the road. Except it wasn't an ordinary road. It was bent... in space and time.

"I saw you in Breeston." I said. "And before." A final tile slipped into place. "Time – you told me I could escape it if I wanted. Things didn't need to be this way."

"What way?" she asked.

"They don't need to follow," I said.

I felt my leg where the knife had gone in. The memory became crystal. His voice was in my head, guttural like he had a ton of phlegm that he needed to expel.

"You straddle the line, your body, your blood, needs to be in both places. That is why you need to be cut. That's what he said."

"Uh-huh. Drink some more water."

"Why the wolf?" I asked.

Chalk girl smiled. She asked the waitress for some more water, and could she have a bit more ice this time?

"It's falling into place for you. The wolf, as you call it, is needed to keep you here."

"Here? Place or time?" My head still spun.

"A bit of both." She twitched, her elbow jerked out in a brief muscle spasm. "I have to leave."

I stood and pain shot through my knee. I collapsed back into the booth. The waitress heard the noise and rushed over, almost spilling her tray of water.

"Are you okay?" She set down the tray, the ice made soft clinks against the glass. "Whoa, you should probably go see a doctor about that."

I followed her gaze to my left knee. It was stained deep red and glistened as fresh blood pumped from the cut. The diner went out of focus and I felt myself slide out of the booth and onto the floor. The waitress yelled something but I couldn't make it out.

I fell into another space.

<<<<>>>> 

New Chapters of Bent Highway will appear weekly (or more) at this blog. Please, comment, share, or give a shout on twitter. (Or like the link on facebook... people are still on facebook, right?)

Up and running... and a teaser

So we are up and running with Bent Highway - I say "we" as a bunch of you either came by and read the first chapter, or just took a look to see what has happening. Either way, I'm glad to have you along for the ride.

The new DC chapters will be coming fairly quick at the beginning - as much as I love revisiting and adding to the story, I am also anxious to get writing the second half.

Here's a teaser for Chapter 2 (Arrow), coming at you mid-week. Drop me a line here or on twitter. Or just wave, I see you out there.

Chapter2 - Arrow

I don’t know how long I’d been driving. I don’t know how long I’d been doing anything. Time stretched out like a line or cut paper dolls, except there were long gaps of nothingness – somehow the doll chain hunt together, but things disappeared in the space. Things like my memory. Or even my senses.

I was cruising at seventy-five when I came upon the black sedan. The temp gauge needle crept up, but I stared it down and it held it’s position. The sedan looked familiar. Maybe my dad had owned one all those years ago. It shone in that vintage sort of way, the fins as sharp as spears. The sedan flashed its brake lights and I hit mine in reflex. Wait, how did I know that car? My father never drove anything that big. This was from somewhere else.

I was almost tailgating, so I figured I better ease up before we were clinking bumpers. I needed to either get some distance or floor it and pass. A dark shape popped up in the sedan's back seat, filling the rear window. I strained through my bug-splattered windshield. What the hell was that thing? A chalk white face appeared next to black shape, and a pair of bowed lips glowed against a woman's stark skin. The image hit me so hard that I slammed on my brakes. I fishtailed the truck. Even as I spun, I still cranked my head to stare at her face. Those bowed lips swelled to the size of a bleeding watermelon, and I heard them speak aloud, not like a memory, but like she was in the truck cab with me. The words didn't form sentences.

"Black…soft… earth…flesh…green…far."

<<<<>>>>

Chapter 2 - More to come

Chapter One - Zippo

I clacked open my Zippo and held it under the bent coffee spoon. I curved the diner utensil for maximum impact on the flesh. The blue flame danced. I wasn't  thinking of anything, just following the reflections and the metal turning colours. I glanced at my arm and back to the flame. It was like stepping off the edge of a cliff and then pulling your sneaker back. Or not. Did I have the guts to put hot spoon to bare skin? It was now or never. Here I was speaking to my body, and it gave zero fucks about me. The barely scabbed over gash snaked my forearm like trails of ancient rust across my translucent skin. The gash grinned at me like it was about to break wide open and gush red ants. Fuck it. I was going to cauterize the mother.

Crazy shit like that had been going through my brain for over a month, or maybe longer. Bugs out of cuts, snakes out of my ass. I didn't keep track of these things. For me, time was a dog's breakfast shoved in a blender and spun out like a crazy woman's quilt. I knew it had been at least a year since I first started driving the road. I think I had that part right. But there were no guarantees.

The handle of the spoon warmed in my hand. The heat would make me drop it soon. It was ready. Metal on flesh, I could already smell it. I didn't think about the razor pain that would be slashing through me in three seconds. I had to make damn sure nothing would bust out of there.

"Honey, what in the hell are you about to do?"

I jerked back, slammed my lighter shut, and plunged the spoon into the coffee. I shook my hand, the skin already red from the heat.

"You need a warm up, you just gotta ask."

The waitress was pushing forty-five, but her hair spilled across her shoulders like she could still make them weep at the 7-11. A badge dangled off one of her pointed breasts and shouted at me Dandy Diner, and underneath in a curled script that made me wince, Janine.

She poured the coffee into the cup that held my rocket hot spoon. I swear I could hear metal sizzle when I dunked it into the murky brew – Not that I trusted my senses.

"Good and hot now. Anything else?" she asked.

I shook my head. I waited for her to say something about somebody having a rough night or some other corn-pone inquiry – you out slamming cougars against the rose bushes again? I shouldn't be hard on poor Janine. She probably had herself a trailer park boyfriend with a pack of cigs rolled up his sleeve, a tattoo that said bitchin' and a piece of shit car that he treated better than her. What the fuck did I know?

Here's the thing: between the black patches of my so-called memory and the pictures in my head that were soaked in fluorescent dye, I couldn't tell if I had had a rough night, week, month or life. Now how in the Christ have mercy was I supposed to tell Janine that?

I sipped my coffee and considered that I'd finally lost it, checked into that faraway hotel in the sky, which was a helluva lot worse than the one in California, and a damn sight harder to check out of.

I finished the last greasy egg before it slid off my plate, and guzzled the coffee. My body and mind ached bad enough for it to be a hangover. I had some shady back alley memories of downing a bottle of something. But where the hell did that cut come from? That was one big-ass scab – good thing it healed so quick. Overnight, I guess. Or in minutes. An image flashed through me of a dark animal with yellow teeth, snarling and snapping and then a flash of silver. Then it was gone. My brain leaked hallucinations.

I paid and left. My truck was still parked in front of my room at Dave's Lucky 7. This morning I had walked across to the Dandy after I woke staring up into the ceiling fan. Watching the blades going round and round, I thought, damn, that's my life right there. I needed to do something. I thought the same exact thing when I left my job as a used car washer, which was after I left the job as the clean-up guy at the Burger Pit, right after I left being the ass manager at the hardware store. That's what everyone called it, the ass manager, no abbreviation needed or implied. It was a big joke around there. Larry in plumbing said you gotta laugh at something or one day you're going take a #4 titanium large bore Phillips screwdriver and gouge your eyeballs out. Larry was one of the cheerier employees. I woke up one morning to the thought of being thirty-three and not amounting to a damn. Each job I'd taken was lower in the evolutionary career chain. Soon, I'd be begging to be the poop scooper in the Shriner parades. I had to do something to kill this boredom before it took my soul, my being, my everlasting sense of whoever the hell I was and flushed it down the crapper – probably one sold by Larry.

That's when I got in the half-ton and started driving.

It was fun at first, drifting around, a few changes of clothes in a red vinyl suitcase, a couple of books to read if the motel satellite wasn't showing anything juicy. I had a few bucks saved up from the shit jobs. I didn't need much. That's what I told Harold, the only guy that even came close to the friend category.

"So you're taking off, just like that?" he asked.

Harold took a slurp out of his lime Big Gulp. I swear he went through three of those a day and had the acne to prove it.

"You gotta job somewhere else, M.?" Harold shortened everything.

"Nope. Just leaving."

"Alright then. Stay between the lines."

Pretty damn tearful farewell. That was a year ago, right, I knew that at least. Before the black-outs started happening I even knew the month, and ran about fifty percent on the day of the week.

Today the whole calendar was an arctic white.

<<<<>>>> 

New Chapters of Bent Highway will appear weekly (or more) at this blog. Please, comment, share, or give a shout on twitter.