Beyond the Road

*For Halloween, but mainly for Dan, without whom this story would never exist, because it happened to him (with a few of my artistic embellishments). Like I said, worked real hard on this. Hope I did the vision justice. 

               A driver drives southbound-east in a car, shoving crusty chips in the corners of his cheeks. The bag of grease lounges on the passenger’s seat and the driver dips his hand in periodically, licking vinegar crystals off his fingers from the sea-salt snack. His other hand padlocks around the steering wheel, drives onward.

His glasses fall to the point of his nose; eyes fixated on the pulsing potato chips and not the road ahead—those circular discs of caloric pleasure. The fatty deposits at his sides expand his smallish figure. The groan in his belly growls deeper.

The radio dial flickers neon blue and reverberates off the lens of his frames onto the road before him. He watches as the light casts its image on the lane. Not a single car is seen through any mirror or window. For the first time in fifteen minutes, the driver’s gaze turns towards the road. Yellow stripes coast in the center. Trees shuffle at his sides; the trees are midnight blue. His eyes return back to the silver insides of the potato bag. The glare from the radio disappears.

              The digital dial of the clock blinks four o’clock in the morning. The sky is bitter black—awfully black for the summer, he thinks in a moment of focus. 

The potato bag is nearly empty and so is his stomach. He regrets not opting for Arby’s. Only two more hours to go to get out of upstate alone. He knows these roads though, so he spares his attention span to his salty snack for the moment.

He thinks: Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

He thinks: Not on that road!

And he wonders how he can be the only person even on the road. He feels a tick in his throat at the thought. Or maybe just salt edging down—cutting indents in his esophagus like Goldschläger—stinging from the vinegar. He dismisses all thoughts like a dream that has not fully formed, blowing smoke like the hookah-smoking caterpillar. He sees something in the road. Something fuzzy, something within the same hallucination: shining—the purest white of light. He looks forward, toward the road. The white shifts to blue.

Two little girls holding hands at the shoulder of the road, in the grass—standing and staring, mouthing sounds but not saying them. One is older than the other, taller. They wear white cloth nightgowns, barefoot with dirt on their shins. The driver drives towards them, but it hardly feels like driving. No more chips, but that would not be on his mind now anyhow.

He cannot see their faces. Those are last to form, he remembers the ghost tour-guide in New Orleans saying just last week. Black strands of their hair blow in the breeze. Are those their smiles? He feels hypnotized. Actually, he feels nothing. Nothing but air.

            He drives past the two sisters, as he would later think of them, drives past fast and within seconds. Looking out his review mirror to the shoulder, in the grass; they are gone—no longer there.

Nothing but air.