“Fuck you and your goat,” Steve said as he pulled the tailgate of his truck closed.
“You already did,” Sheila replied, “And neither of us liked it all that much.”
Steam rolled off of Steve’s head in waves, like bay fog in a particularly transitional zone mixed with distant wildfire smoke and just the tiniest bit of secret government seeding. His face, ruddy to be certain but always a normal color, began to glow an unnatural orange between the rain drops. He sputtered, and it was twice as bad as it normally would have been because of the rain on his emberic face.
“I never- I – I – I-“
“Ah go on, you big fuck,” Sheila said. “Get off before you make up any lies.” She grinned, her teeth daggers through the misty rain and diffuse morning light, and Steve felt the physical force collected by the disparate elements come together and sandblast his being. The cold didn’t help. Or maybe it did: the numbing sensation running from his hair to his boots was having some kind of effect, and standing knee deep in the refuse of his truck bed probably wasn’t the ideal foundation to sort out what kind of effect that was. He leapt, heavily, over the side and failed to land gracefully in the wet mud next to her. The squelch was rivaled in dignity by the flying cheesecake detritus that lodged itself inobtrusively in his beard. “Home for supper then?” she asked, reaching out and picking a glob from the side of his beard. He nodded. She threw the glob at him (where it lodged on his nose), kissed him on the cheek, turned, and walked back to the house behind her.
Steve, a man used to such things but still bewildered by them, shook his head- to express the bemusement he felt to some larger metaphysical audience- then shook his head- to get all the mud off, droplets of semi-liquidity pinging against the ground, the sides of his truck, and the lengthening mud at his feet in a symphony of clean filth- and whistled. An enormous schnauzer the size of a smallish bear- covered in mud to the degree that its color was indeterminate, its shape discernible merely as ‘ovoid’- loped from the mist and launched itself in one fairly fluid motion from the ground over the truck’s closed tailgate and into the bed. Mud spattered everything, including Steve, who repeated his shaking routine before climbing in the cab and turning the key in the ignition.
Some might argue, and many have, that this sequence of events is impossible. We tell you they are not, and for evidence point you at the preceding paragraphs. It’s important to remember that the universe is infinite, and therefore one must first respect the exercise and second remember that once it’s on the metaphorical page it has to be dealt with whether you like it or not. “A schnauzer the size of a bear leaping over the tailgate of a truck?!” you say, indignation creeping into your reedy voice as your attack ramps. “Big dogs don’t jump like that! And besides, do you know how big a bear is?!” To which we say, certainly we do, and smallish ones are the size of the dog in question. We sit, as they say, at an impasse, to which we must reply: fuck you and your goat. And unlike Sheila, you’ll never really know.
Steve laid his head back on the headrest and let loose a sigh from the slimy inner bowels of his being. The dog stuck its head in through the middle sliding window, always open and the root of the whiff of mold now as much a part of the truck as any of the myriad parts attached back at the factory in the early days by Japanese robots. Then it licked his ear, the giant tongue scraping across the side of Steve’s face like a towel coated in sandy petroleum jelly. The sticky feeling would be there for the rest of the day, no matter how many times Steve washed, and this realization called forth another sigh. The day would be a sigh sort of day, he reasoned. Then he put the truck in gear, raised one hand in the brief utilitarian recognition of state-change familiar to all long-time humans, and drove away.
Fishtailing through the cratered mud, Steve pressed harder on the accelerator, hoping, as he hoped every day, to be going fast enough by the time he reached the crest of the low hill at the end of his driveway that he might catch air and fly for a few, glorious moments. He had managed it once, long ago, but that had been a different time. A dryer time, a time when the truck hadn’t been several oil changes short and the dog hadn’t weighed enough that an airline would record it as two bags on the manifest. He once again failed to manage his own less professional flight and the futility of his life settled back into its accustomed place, a damp blanket across the feet of an otherwise middling existence.
But then, as sometimes happened, the panorama past the trees of his hillside estate caught him, blindsided him into appreciating something beyond the mechanics of flight or a solid insult traded with Sheila before a routine trip back into the city. The sun, rarest of sights, shone through a sliver of cloudbreak and glanced off the surface of the wide, shallow lake in the valley below him. Bright green plants, low and clinging, overwhelmed the burial pyre in the parking lot of the Tesco in the center of the small town nestled on the shore. Trees ringed the edges of everything. A flock of birds passed across the whole of it, lending a charm to the scene that might have won someone with the proper eye an award- or a contract for postcard work at the very least, Steve thought, guiding his truck around a bend and losing sight of the scene for a moment. The dog panted heavily in his ear, and for the millionth time Steve considered picking up a book on electrical engineering so that he could try to fix his truck radio. Instead he reached up and scratched the huge animal’s chin. It responded by licking him across the side of the head, saliva coagulating along the lines of Steve’s bones, which he wiped with the shoulder of his shirt.
Forest road stretched ahead of him, shaded in the ways forest roads have been since the invention of forests, and he settled back into the padded seat of the truck, allowing peace to invade his mind on this, his daily commute.
Towns arrive quickly when you’re lost in thought. They speed up, according to the physics of the universe which is to say just physics, when you aren’t looking for or expecting them, even when you travel to them every day and even when they hold no particular value to you at whatever time you happen to approach them. Stop thinking of a town and suddenly you’ll be there, whether you like it or not. Steve never did, and his daily commute took the full sixty-three minutes every single time.
When he pulled into his parking space, his manager Mary greeted him from inside her minivan. her hair was now long and unkempt and the hole in her skull almost completely concealed by the growth from above. He pulled the keys from the ignition, waved at her corpse, and got out of the cab. The schnauzer had already leapt out, truck suspension springs rebounding as though someone had removed a refrigerator, and was waiting patiently for him at the back as Steve stepped around, opened the tailgate, and pulled out his dolly.
The question of what you would do if everyone around you died has always been at least a little bit blinkered, because honestly the answer- nine times out of ten at minimum- is “Die also and with them for the same reason.” There’s not a lot of leeway in the reality of that hypothetical situation, but we tend to lean towards the unlikely. It’s a fair lean, especially given that at some foundational level the question is supposed to be finding something out about the recipient. But I wonder how many of us hear that question and immediately assume the likely explanation, rather than dismissing the reality first. “I will never die,” the thinking goes, “And certainly not before I say.” That’s not quite how death works. But we think, as an intellectual sort of postulate, that a lot more people than might admit it would legitimately just end it for themselves and chase their fellows down whatever rabbit hole death constitutes. It’s a touchy topic, but at any rate it’s worth thinking about so that you’re not ambushed by the impulse when your healthy mom and newborn daughter die the same week while you keep trucking. A simple consideration. Steve leaned his convertible dolly back and walked to the town square across the street.
Parking was never a problem for Steve. When there aren’t many people and there’s not much to do, inside the home county anyway, parking becomes less a problem to solve and more an adjacent necessity. For Steve, entire driving life lived within a twenty mile radius (that is a forty mile diameter, 1257 square miles, give or take) and with basically only the people he had known his whole life in it, parking had always been much more about arriving than searching. So it was now, even as he had some walking to do. His car was where it belonged, his feet did the rest, and he hummed Born This Way loudly while thrumming his dolly through the puddles and disregarding the creepers growing up around everything from the lamppost where he’d kissed Sherry McGonagall to the bar where he’d lived for a week in his third year of marriage. The first marriage, the one not to Sheila, the one that ended with Sheila and basically the world, though the two were not necessarily related. He didn’t like thinking about that, not in any kind of particular way, and he shifted his gaze back to the forward position and focused on the Mayor’s Building in front of him. It was Wednesday, after all, and Wednesday was the day he went and saw the Mayor.
