TWELVE MINUTES from where you stole your first quiet breath from a soft breeze, there is a road most people only see once, if they see it at all. It winds and whips and slashes through acres upon acres of towering trees begging to become lumber. The asphalt is clean, pristine and it collects dew on rocks, smooth with the suspicion they shouldn’t be. When the sun rises, it peeks through hills upon rolling hills you’ll never see anywhere else, and crests leaves that whimper in someone else’s wind.

If you ever stumble across it, you won’t notice, not at first and maybe not ever. Sure, you’ll smile and laugh and knob the radio a bit with your father’s gnarled hands and wonder why the radio is screeching clean static, chaos splayed across the airwaves. You’ll catch your breath in your throat as the scent of metal on metal sears your nostrils shut with a peculiar heat. You’ll squint and wonder why the whole world’s exposure has slipped down a few scant degrees, not enough to notice, but too much to ignore. And then you’ll breathe again. You’ll round a corner and, as quickly as it came, the world will cool, the air will freshen and God will turn the sun back on and you’ll forget. You’ll forget so quickly and you’ll drive yourself crazy, tell yourself you’re seeing things that aren’t there. You’ll rub your eyes with your free hands, press your fingertips against the still the ridges of your nose and you’ll inhale acid floating in the air. You’ll try to shake the cloud that’s been hanging off your shoulder since you knew what it meant to want.

And maybe you’ll notice it’s a bit heavier this time, but maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll go on and you’ll never see the road again and you won’t think of it.

But he’ll think of you.

Because maybe you’ll notice, just out of the corner of your eye, just when your hands are scurrying across the wheel and just went the world starts to turn a bit more slowly, that there’s a man sitting on the side of the road in a suit whiter than sin without a fleck of dirt marring the perfect creases that hang with a bit too much confidence just between the frosty space where the soul should sit in your eyes. You’ll see that he looks old, but not any kind of old you’ve ever seen. His age, you might think to yourself if you were particularly observant, isn’t written upon his skin, but scrawled in the whites of his eyes. His cataracts are colder, more piercing than the ice blue pools of freezing rain that sit just below their cloudy surface.

If you look at him for too long, you’ll feel yourself begin to shiver and shake and you’ll wonder why the sun has given up on you entirely. Your hands will vibrate off the smooth leather of the wheel you built just after your sixteenth birthday and your car will jolt to a sudden stop. You’ll listen to idle in the quiet for one delicious moment as fire combusts below and then the mass of metal and machinery will sputter once, twice and then never again. You’ll watch steam rise from the hood in tiny bombshells of light and cloud and sound and you’ll wonder, for the first time, why the light cascading through the trees is the color of the blood coursing through your veins.

*********

Find the end of this dark story in SN14: Twilight Zone, coming out soon!

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