The Highway
Dustin Bailey

 



 

 

    Above the highway was an unwavering fulsome mist with a half crescent lemon moon and glinting stars which blanketed the dark night like a canopy protecting the stolen primer plastered ’81 Skylark that the three had been barreling downward inside for what seemed to have been forever. The tires slashed and peeled at the dark asphalt with not a direction or a belief guiding them but the car’s headlights piercing the wasteland.

 The highway stretched intensely through the horizon leading to the most pertinent conclusion that was outlined by the edge of the world. Fifty million feet of terrain covered by a highway that had been carved by man and paved by the world's infinite approach for wanderers to travel the earth. Over the cement were tears of strays hanging onto time and searching for directions to the questions of life. On some of these roads were lives trapped in the cement, beyond the road were choices.

         Murphy peered through the stained glass window from the back seat full of community college brochures and deferred Perkins loans. Murphy had reasons in mind for stealing the car and leaving behind all the things he always found himself hiding from. These places he could someday conquer and this urge to find these things had begun to overcome Murphy and it was beginning to take him all around the world.

“Crying,” by Roy Orbison, roared through the solely working speaker. An unbearably numb feeling washed over Eli sort of like a tidal wave crushing him to the bottom of the ocean and the sensation was so potent and powerful that he couldn’t breath. Eli's heels penetrated violently into the floorboard, his perspiring hands desperately gripped the steering wheel, and his eyes gauged the radiant lights that flickered on the dying stale horizon. The initial light had seemed blurred and foreign. Eli watched clouds roll, overlapping the stars, and he felt as if the world was breathing and unfastened by the house that was built by the vanishing daybreak, and he watched himself in reverse momentum and now was becoming a visitor in his own life.

“Eli slow up a bit,” Kris pleaded with a slight croon, while putting on her big black sunglasses.

“Keep driving, we’re almost there,” Murphy echoed. Eli locked eyes with the dim impression through the cracked rear-view mirror.

“Where-is there,” Eli squeezed through his blistered lips.

“Light-n-up, I know the way,” Murphy said evenly flat with less determination.

During their ceremony of debate about turning themselves in, Murphy decided that they had gone further than any other kids had ever gone, and the panic Kris the little Vampire Girl felt seconds after Murphy turned the car’s headlights off and decided they would drive until there were no more roads forced a searing wave to travel the length of her body. Murphy told Eli to leave the lights off so the three could learn to let their eyes adjust to the whole road not just the parts they could see with their eyes.

 

Marijuana permeated though the car as Kris pulled a half smoked joint out and flung open her Zippo to re-light. The cherry tip sparked a direct glimmer, revealing the side of her pale skin. White smoke coiled densely through her nostrils, and she placed the joint again to her moist lips. The windows began to fog up leaving a thin white paste and Kris with her index finger wrote through the mist, Permanent. Kris moved around a lot in her miss-spent torment not because she was looking for anything in particular but because she was always prepared to get away if things got bad.

             Silhouettes of trees swayed effortlessly in the vast open land, malevolent eyes glinted on both sides of the road, and tiny rodents scurried across the group’s lit path. It was honestly no surprise to Eli when a few weeks ago Murphy called up from his trailer, and told Eli that he was stoned and really bored, and that they should steal a car and just “Go man.” Paradise. Two thousand miles of road. Fresh air. Plenty of sunshine. Nothing to do but drive. Eli hesitantly asked as “Come as you are,” burrowed faintly from the other end, “Why?”

Murphy’s famous last words, “We may have to live on this earth for a long time. I don’t see us dying young, so if we’re stuck here- On what terms do we live?” Murphy was a liar. He made up names of people he had never met and places he had never been that followed stories that never happened and what began following around his facade made it hard for him to keep up with his own made up legend. Eli listened to the request of a boy fed up with sitting around wasting away, glaring up at his posters from his single size bed and too aggressive to idly lie around watching anymore music videos on MTV, letting his greatest talent slip away.

 

     The Skylark propelled passed old gothic farmhouses and cemeteries fenced in by six foot iron rod prods that caged lives that seemed to Kris to hang in the air. Kris was called the little Vampire Girl and she lived in disrepair because she would do anything to live forever. Then out of curiosity, boredom, who knows what, she began to cut herself to prove her existence, something about the blood leaving her body soothed the burden. She lived hard and her body struggled to keep up.

                             Eli read in horror when he passed a billboard of a dead fetus with enormous hands strangled around the umbilical cord. The words, “Your children are not your children,” were spray painted in valiant gray letters above the baby’s head. Eli’s guilt was only in the belief that nobody would ever find out.

The car began exceeding time, incessantly breaking laws, and gaining ground as if the past was catapulting the lost children inside the infinite empty future.

Two hazy nights had begun to pass, and the emptiness that was left inside that crumbling car was despair, and it was destroying their attempt at protection. Murphy was helping it by not turning back. Six eyes stare dreadfully at the revolving asphalt. Kris glared so long, her emerald green eyes with spots of brown lined with red veins became damp and the two lanes blurred into one.

“You wake up one day and forget where you fell asleep at,” Eli said rubbing his eyes, his voice gritted with bleakness.

“I dreamt a while back that I tied my parents to a chair and made them watch me cut my body all up!” Kris barked half stoned.

            “Don’t you see we’re missing the point? It started out about one stolen car and now it’s so much more.” Murphy screamed out with a quiet authoritative tone. Kris’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Eli bristled with anger.

            “What are we going back to man, nothing. Nothingness, so don’t stop we don’t have much more time.” Murphy said with tough passion through the car.

            “Dude-I don't want to do this any more.” Eli hissed locking eyes with a twitch of an arched brow.

            “Come on, be cool. I don't want to leave this car.”

The car sped on until the three’s eyes were sliced through by the boldness and power of two words, and seven letters, and Eli cried out as he hit the brakes harshly, “We truly are God's unwanted children. I knew it,” and the car spun off the road and into a ditch. Puffs of brownish dust filled the air.

            “There is no fucking way, it’s an illusion,” Murphy bawled out, half fallen into the back seat, craning his head up at the sign. Kris thought he said confusion until she closed her eyes and when she opened them again, the sign was still standing, and it said: Dead End.

            “Empty? All this time,” Eli whispered tapping the emergency lights to the idling Skylark.

            “We blew it,” Murphy said with a broad guarantee that all he believed in was lost.

            “No we’re all just passing through.”

Kris interlocked her fingers with Murphy’s, as the sun grew from sight, lavender clouds drifting flat in the wind, and the upper tip of the sun shines a fiery gold ambient, the air began to cool, yet it was still dry and the sight was vastly open for the line of eye view. The day light clocked in for the morning shift.

 

        For a long moment nobody said anything they just stared motionless over the land, but all Murphy could hear was the clicking sound of the emergency lights that filled his head with a drizzling picture of lividity taking place in the body of the owner of the Skylark he had killed. Before Murphy picked up Eli and Kris he had wrapped the body in a wool blanket and dumped the lifeless corpse into the trunk. Murphy had stolen the Skylark the same way he stole Kris and Eli’s future. That night carried with it the burden of rebels where dreams lie and the highway was a dark place derived from death and lies. Kris and Eli just didn’t see it yet. That’s the truth. Murphy’s truth

 

 

Copyright © 2005 Dustin Bailey
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"