SHORT STORIES

From Vices and Versas
From Plaintiffs and Pontiffs
ROADKILL 2016

 These country roads all look the same to me. I'm driving down County Road 57—are you saying there's at least 56 more of these? Why? Long stretches of farms go by, an occasional serrated line of trees, and run-down buildings that are either abandoned or a tragedy to live in. All of it is pointless, a complete waste. That's the impression that I'm getting as I drive through—thank God that I was arbitrarily born in a city. In a city, there's a lot of nice buildings to remind you—hey, that's why we're here. I need that in my life. Right now, I'm completely out of my element.
    It's a dirt road, County Road 57, rough and full of surprises. I feel confident that my car isn't built for it. The patter of rocks hitting my car, kicked up by the tires, is giving me anxiety. It would probably be better if I slowed down, but my heart disagrees—I drive faster, full with the intent to get out of this place.
    My cellphone starts to ring, and I am relieved. Civilization is reaching out to me with its long, forgiving, electromagnetic tendrils. And the caller ID says that it's my darling—what could be better? I spare a hand to answer.
    For some reason, she's already halfway through a conversation by the time I've answered. I don't understand this woman, and I've been trying for a very long time. I tell her to start from the beginning, and she reproaches me with shameless vulgarity that I'm not doing a good enough job of listening. Then she resumes right where she left off, not backtracking even an inch. I'm in a rare mood, so I humor her. Not doing a good enough job of listening? Now I'm listening really, really hard. Like, I'm not just using my ears anymore. I've repurposed my eyes to capture sound, and my nose, and my tongue—even my heart. Your reverberations, darling, have replaced my sinoatrial node. Congratulations.
    The result is, unfortunately, the most intense static I've ever experienced in my life. Maybe my reception's bad, I don't know. Time slows down, and I feel every wave. It's pulsating, violent, consuming me. And then she speaks, and I realize that the previous waves, as intense as they were, were only silence—her voice is infinitely more unsettling. It becomes an indomitable screech, frequencies a human has never before experienced. All my senses become deaf, instantaneously.
    As it happens, I'm still driving, hurtling down some dirt road at an inadvisable speed. Is it even County Road 57 anymore? I don't know, I blacked out. “Excuse me, darling,” I say. “I heard you too much for a second, there.” Then I see an intense glint of light directly ahead of me, I panic, and veer of the road. The ground disappears for a moment—why is this a ditch? I hit the opposite bank, my car collapses in on itself in mysterious ways, and I black out again.
    I am awakened by the sound of a voice—my initial thought is that it's my darling and I'm missing her words again, which hits me like a defibrillator. “Listening!” I shout. “I'm listening!”
    “Oh, good,” the voice says, very raspy, very masculine.
    Is my hearing that damaged, that she sounds like a man now? I'd have a hard time living with that. Or is she with another man? “Who's that you're with?” I ask, then realize that there's nothing in the hand still clenched against my ear—my phone is gone. So is my windshield—was my phone ejected from the vehicle? It wasn't wearing a seat belt. I'm so very disoriented. It takes me a while to realize that a phoneless voice would imply that there's someone nearby.
    “What happened?” I ask, although I don't see the source.
    “Thought I was a goner, for a moment there,” the voice replies. “You come barreling down the road like that, and I kinda froze up.” Then it laughed, a deep, raspy, contagious-sounding laughter. “Always wondered what it's like for the critters. Just like a deer, all froze up.” My car door opens involuntarily, and finally he appears, extending a hand to help me out of the wreckage. I take it, because I don't know what else to do, and he hauls me out like a cadaver.
    After I regain my bearings, I get a good look at him. He's dressed in overalls that have lost their original color—they are now the color of dirt. And his skin is the same, he's just a single color, tawny, dirt. He's missing a majority of his teeth, and for whatever reason he's carrying a shovel over his shoulder. He turns slightly, the shovel's metal head catches the sun just so, and I recognize the glint that had caused me to abandon the road. If the man hadn't been carrying a shovel, I would have killed him thoroughly. He's the same color as the road, after all. I want to explain to him how dangerous that is, but I know that the way I had been driving can also be construed as dangerous, so I let it go.
    “I need to find my phone,” I tell him, very matter-of-fact. “I was having an important conversation.”
    His face wrinkles up horrendously—maybe he's confused. “Well, alright,” he says. “That's your business, I suppose. But you sure you're alright? You ran into that ditch pretty hard.”
    “I'll be fine, so long as I find my phone.”
    “Okay.”
    I get back into the wreckage of my car, and start digging around under all of the seats, and in the crevices between the cushions, and all the other places where things tend to get lost. I find nothing. It's wishful thinking, though—I return to the worst-case scenario, where my phone went through the windshield.
    I don't have a lot of hope for it. Modern phones aren't built for accidents. In the past, whenever artsy people made metaphors about the fragility and transience of things, they always invoked the flower. Life is like a flower, a young woman—a flower. Very soon, the more perceptive artist will start replacing these references with phones. A young woman is a phone—can't drop it more than a foot without its screen shattering into useless fractal patterns. And I've dropped my phone more than a foot. I hope my darling forgives me. I start searching in a ten-foot radius around my car, but quickly have to extend that to twenty feet, then thirty. I never find it.
    The stranger watched me the whole time that I searched, leaning on his shovel, methodically chewing on something that I don't want to have identified for me. I return to him, after giving up. I say, “Do you live nearby? Do you have a phone?”
    He considers it. Then he says, “Yeah, I got a phone. You want to use it?”
    “I'm going to need to call a tow truck,” I say. That's the solid truth. I don't want to be stranded in this place for a second longer than I have to.
    “Well, alright,” he says. “Follow me. But I've got something to tend to, first.”
    It strikes me as ominous, but I don't have very many options. If this man doesn't help me, I'll have to find another, and there's no guarantee that whoever I found wouldn't be even worse. “Lead on,” I say.
    He takes me to the dead, rotting body of a raccoon. That's not a joke. And he uses the shovel to scrape it up, morbidly, before slinging it across his back. Then he says, “Okay, back to my place,” and we set off along the side of the road.
    I'm following from slightly behind, which means that I've got a breathtaking view of this raccoon. At first I don't know why any of this is happening. What could he possibly be doing with a piece of roadkill? If he's going to eat it, I will turn around now and just live in my totaled car for the rest of my natural life. Then I thought that perhaps he's doing charitable work—the carcass was in the middle of the road, and he's moving it for the benefit of drivers like myself. But if that's the case, why not just deposit it on the side of the road, where it would be perfectly out of the way? That's what I end up asking him. “Why not just throw it over here on the side of the road? Where are you taking it?”
    “I have a place for 'em,” he says. And that's all I get.
    He takes me another half mile away, until we arrive at one of those abandoned-looking buildings that I had so recently been criticizing in my mind. There's nothing but a screen door for the main entrance, and furthermore it has a gaping hole in it. With the chivalry of his kind, he invites me heartily in, although he doesn't go in himself. He at least has the decency to keep his dead-raccoon shovel outside—he instructs me, from the porch, where the phone is. “I'll take care of this, then I'll see you.” Then he walks off.
    The phone is mounted on the wall, a corded relic. It's baby blue, although the handle and the earpiece are stained the same brown that seems to pervade this man's life. It's disgusting, but I have to make the call. I manage to dial for an operator, and they direct me to a tow shop. I give the man there some vague directions about where I think my car is, and he tells me that he'll be there shortly. Everything is resolving itself.
    After I hang up, I pick up the receiver again and dial another number. I need to finish the conversation I was having with my darling, and let her know that I'm okay. I might have a concussion, but I'm okay. She was saying something important, though, and I missed it.
    There's absolutely no way for her to know the number I'm calling her from, and yet she's already yelling at me from the moment that she answers. No matter how I try to defend myself from her accusations, I take a solid beating. Before long I'm feeling horribly demoralized, like life isn't worth living. She doesn't deliver the killing blow, though. Instead, she tells me to hold on a minute, and then the line goes silent on her end.
    The silence lasts longer than a minute. I'd like to leave this horror-movie house, but I can't do that until she lets me go. My anxiety grows, and I wait.
    She doesn't return in time, though. The man gets back to me first. He doesn't have his shovel anymore, but he has a sly grin that's even worse. He whispers to me, although we're probably the only people within ten miles, “Would you like to see something?”
    Would I like to see something? No, I wouldn't, but he'll probably kill me if I decline. “I'm on hold,” I tell him. That seems like a good excuse.
    “The phone reaches the back yard,” he replies. “That'll be far enough.”
    I'm committed, then. I say, “By all means,” and we go out the back door, which is even less of a door than the front one.
    The scene that presents itself, it's the most terrifying thing that I've ever seen. The back yard is literally filled with the corpses of animals. Some look fresh, almost alive, some are just piles of organic matter, like they've been there for years. I can identify several raccoons, although I don't know which one is the recent addition. There's a couple deer, lots of cats, too many skunks. There's armadillos, which I didn't even know we had in the area. There's even a solitary bear, formidable even in death. And a countless number of squirrels fill all the gaps.
    It takes me a long time to get over the content, and recognize the form. They're arranged as the pieces of a very large chessboard. The bear, appropriately, is the black king. White's king is nowhere near as impressive—quite the unfair advantage, I think. Why? Why is this happening? What is going on?
    “I've been collecting them for a while,” he says. “Do you like it?”
    Do I like it? In an infinite number of universes, it's the most disgusting possible thing. The smell—the smell hits me all at once. I should have kept my nose as a surrogate ear, because at the very least these massacre of the senses doesn't make a sound—the only mercy. It's as silent as death, and the man is smiling at me like it's the greatest secret ever. His masterpiece, his life's work.
    “Why?” I ask. That's all I can manage.
    “Why what?”
    “Why do you do it?”
    He becomes surprisingly philosophical, and blows my mind. “You know, all these animals don't understand roads. They can go any direction, and that's good enough for them. Only humans go from A to B. They live far away from things they can't live without, so they need roads to take them there. Animals don't get that at all. So they end up on roads at the wrong time, and get run over, yeah?”
    “So I wanted to do something for them. To give meaning to their death. So I arrange them in, like, dioramas. It's a game of chess today, but I'm about to change it since I got the new raccoon. You see that old car over there? Doesn't work anymore, otherwise I'd loan it to you. Anyway, what I was thinking was that I'd pile them all up on it. Pretty ironic, right? A car killed them, but this time it will be them taking over the car. It's a lot of work, but I think it's worth it.”
    Jesus Christ. I have to leave. But my darling hasn't returned to the phone—if I hang up now, her wrath will never end. And I'm tethered like an animal, the kind of animal this man likes to scoop up with a shovel and add to his above-ground graveyard. I'm on the verge of the hardest decision I've ever made in my life.
    Deceit, that's what I end up falling back on. “Oh, you're back,” I say into the receiver, even though no one's on the other end. And then I hold up a finger to the man, as if to say, “This will only take a minute.” Then I walk back into the house, making up more sentences as I go for my fake conversation.
    When I'm back inside, I actually hang up. It was so hard to do, but I did it. And then I dial the police. In a quiet voice, in an appropriate whisper, I say, “Can you send someone to wherever I'm calling from? I get the distinct impression I'm going to die here.”
    The officer asks questions in return, and I have to convince them that I'm not overreacting. In the end, they agree to send someone. Feeling much safer, I hang up. And the man is standing directly behin me.
    “The tow truck should be there by now,” I tell him. “I should head that way.”
    “You never told me what you thought,” he replies. There's a genuine sadness underlying his voice. He's made a piece of art, and shown it, perhaps for the first time, to a fellow human being. It's a lot of vulnerability, and requires a lot of trust. And I haven't answered.
    I tell him, “Keep working on it. Editing is key. More than that, practice. Can't always succeed on your first try. But I have a lot of faith that, some day, it'll be really good.”
    I'm not sure if this is actually reassuring to him in anyway. It's meant to be, since I don't want to die, but I've also very expressly avoided direct praise. It's a thin line that I'm walking.
    Something in his soul resolves itself. He snaps out of his vulnerability. He says, “I can walk you back to your car, yeah?”
    “Won't be necessary.”
    As fast as I can, I leave. The tow truck finds me, and I go back to the city. I get a new car, a new phone. I try to salvage my tenuous relationship with my darling. Everything works out.
    But my curiosity can't control itself. Months later, I go back. I don't remember the road names—they all blur together—but after some deep searching, I find what has to be the place. It's abandoned. All the furniture in the house is gone, and there's only a paint silhouette on the wall where the phone used to be. It has to be the same place, though. Brave as I can be, I enter the back yard. And there's nothing there.
    'Nothing' is an exaggeration. There's a stain of death on the ground that no amount of time will heal—plants don't grow here. A hint of the smell remains. But even the old, rusted car is gone. Everything is gone.
    Maybe calling the police was an overreaction. A clean slate, though, is always a good thing.