The Road to Nowhere

They came down from the sky into that place of waiting. The great bird metal and screaming held them fast to the tarmac while the sun died slow and red beyond the windows. Hours. The man watched other passengers, their faces like masks in the cabin light. Children crying. The woman beside him read the same page of her book again and again.

When they finally released them the air hit like a wet fist. Thick. Breathing underwater. The rental car desk girl had eyes like a dead fish and handed them keys to something that might have been blue once.

South then. Into the belly of the country. The highway a black tongue unrolling before them and the rain coming down like the sky had split open and was bleeding water. The wipers beat a death march against the glass. Useless.

Trucks passed them like leviathans, their spray washing over the windshield until there was nothing but white water and the sound of wheels on pavement somewhere beneath them. He gripped the wheel and felt the car wanting to leave the road, to join whatever procession of the drowned moved through that darkness.

Ghost lights appeared and vanished. Cars with no souls driving them. He thought of the dead they would see tomorrow, dressed up and powdered like dolls, and wondered if those drivers had already made their appointment.

The hotel stood on Main Street like a broken tooth. One hundred and fifty years of slow dying. The stairs groaned under their weight as if the building itself was in pain. Their room smelled of old tobacco and older grief.

Below in the alley men fought over whatever it is men fight over when the world has forgotten them. Bottles breaking. Curses in the dark. Sleep would not come.

She turned to him in the bed that sagged like a broken back.

I thought we had died, she said. When you were driving and I couldn’t see anything but that white water. I thought the plane had crashed and we just didn’t know it yet. I thought we were driving into hell.

He lay there listening to the voices below. The sound of fists on flesh.

Maybe we are, he said.

Outside the rain kept falling on a town that had been dying since before they were born, washing the streets clean for no one.

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