Marooned - Surreal Fiction

As we laughed and talked, she did make eye contact with me, but I never got a good look at her eyes.

I, for whatever reason, was glad. I wanted her to be safer. I don’t remember much of the conversation after that. Time moved differently on Route Forty-Four, especially with her. Months passed on the outside while we talked for maybe an hour. Or, perhaps we talked for months, but it only felt like an hour. The most I can recall are long periods of laughter in which the night’s events seemed to drown. Half of her face stayed facing away from me. The most that I could make out was the soft turn of her nose and the careful curve of her chin. As we laughed and talked, she did make eye contact with me, but I never got a good look at her eyes. I didn’t notice or care at first, but as time passed, I became more and more curious. I could sense something beckoning at me from behind her pupils. But, as I worked up the courage to look, I felt a buzz in my pocket, and a voice spoke through crackles.

You see, dear reader, I was intent on getting her back. That man, thing, had taken her with his brutality.

Anxiety would not have covered what I felt in the moment, driving with Cecil. The symptoms were the same, but the feeling was entirely different. My hands shook as I bounced my knees. My neck kept flipping from side to side as I looked for something that simply wasn’t there. Black passed, more fogged than ever, as I became stranded in this wasteland. You see, dear reader, I was intent on getting her back. That man, thing, had taken her with his brutality. The only moral thing to do was proceed with courage into the danger set before me. 

His maniacal laughter rose as a chopper in the night sky, flying with the wind.

Darkness blasted by us. The wind chewed at me through the rider in front of me. His maniacal laughter rose as a chopper in the night sky, flying with the wind. I heard the other gang members do the same behind me. The road was empty, so lanes were optional. We moved as a wall. The lights of the oncoming town approached at startling speeds. I felt myself instinctively crush the rider’s ribs as we picked up more speed. He laughed harder. Down long stretches of patchy road, I would not have realized we were moving if not for the winds fighting against us. We passed the town and continued forward. My body tensed. My heart thumping in my chest, I closed my eyes and let whatever was to happen occur. 

"I turned to face that soft light at the end of the road and started hiking along the treeline with the wind shrieking at me. I covered my face and turned away from it as I strode toward that small diner..."

"Sweat and booze raped the drywall. Far into the evening, the event had shifted. A well-intentioned get-together, a vacation from whatever suffocation plagued the week, had, through conscious eyes, become an amalgamation of apathy and blame."

Art is sterile and dying with the world. It seems that industries are moving further from reflections of truth that capture the world at its core, toward subjective quilts, woven loosely from concepts invented to create the most comfortable experiences available.

Lastly, the people will start having visions of angels. Great, powerful things that radiate light from all, shielding their faces. The people will take refuge in these visions, but it will not do them good.

I would imagine large eyes sitting in the sky, blinking only when I dozed off during my long drives. 

I only ever traveled north and south using Route One. It was the highway I knew the best, and there was comfort in traveling the same route day after day, week after week. All I knew for sure about the other highways was that they ran into parts of the landscape that were rarely explored. My imagination told me that the only footprints ever found on those roads were the tracks of people who had the unfortunate luck to break down there.