He looked down the aisle to see the young woman picking a Heinlein novel from the bookshelf. She wore a cardigan and jeans with high boots and carried a large burgundy purse. Her glasses, helping the floppy, grey wool hat hold back blonde curls, were of almost the same shade of wine as the bag. Her blue eyes scanned the back of the novel. He couldn’t help saying something.
“A girl like you is seriously contemplating a Heinlein novel?”
She looked up at him and smiled a huge, big-toothed grin. “What’s wrong with Heinlein?”
“Oh, nothing’s wrong with him; I was commenting more on how a beautiful girl is reading hard science fiction.”
She blushed, but that enormous, goofy smile remained. “Well, a friend mentioned him. Something about being a pillar of modern science fiction.”
“Well, your friend would be right. Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein were the big three. But this one,” he said, shifting his own small stack of books to one hand and pointing, “is like ninety-four percent politics.”
“Really? I’d heard giant bugs and battle armor.”
“And you came to buy it? You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever met.” He pushed his own glasses higher on his nose and brushed his dark hair back from his forehead. “I mean that as a compliment. I mean, you’re just not the type I’d profile for a sci-fi novel about the military’s role in conflict between ideology of communism and capitalism.”
“Well, I try to stay recent,” she laughed. “The Cold War seems like a good place to start.”
He grinned and held out his hand. “I’m TS.”
“Well, TS,” she said, pausing to shake his hand, “I’m TA.”
“You know, you look kind of like...”
“Yeah, I know,” she cut him off, blushing again.
“Is that because you are...?”
“Yeah,” her blushing continued, and her eyes twinkled.
“Well, you’ve got good friends if they’re suggesting Heinlein.”
“Thank you!” she kept beaming. Her phone started to ring, and she dug for it. “Gah, I need to take this, and probably need to be on my way. It was great to meet you, though!”
“And you, too. Have fun with the book.”
“I’ll try! Thanks for the compliments!” she said, and turned away, answering her phone. “Yeah. No, the bookstore still. Yeah, a guy I just met said the one I picked out is really good.”
He continued browsing, more excitedly than before. He moved into the philosophy section to ensure that she was out of the store by the time he approached the counter. Purchasing his books, the cashier asked him if he knew who had just come through. He nodded, but kept mostly silent as he walked out of the store into the brisk fall weather. He had just encountered a delightful pretty girl, and that made for a good day.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Twists!
So I've stopped with the serial. I was playing a lot of things too close to the chest, and, because of that, I couldn't really find a voice I liked. Maybe I'll come back to it someday when I'm not so angry about the true subject matter; maybe then it could be kind of funny. Right now, it's simply aggravating and petty. So I wrote this instead! I think it sounds like me, which makes this piece a first in quite some time (if I could count the number of drafts I've started to put together as an extension of Aaron's story and thrown away because I can't stand the tone...). But, for anyone who's heard my twist on a fantasy story - so, Jennifer (who hasn't ever read this blog, to my knowledge) forever and a half ago - this would be very close to the beginning. But the premise is different from anything I can think of in the vein of Lord of the Rings: it's an alternate world (like Middle Earth, I suppose) on which mammal and avian evolution never really got started, so dragons are just the extension of what we have now as cattle or horses or birds or, as evidenced in this piece, squirrels or monkeys. Also, dragons evolving along a humanoid path became Elves - saurian elves! Can you picture that? It's pretty cool. I guess; I'm biased, though. Anyway, there are three "races" of Elves, in the sense that there are Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid humans - I assume they could interbreed, and probably often do - at least between two of the three races. Anyway, in the past, one of the three was a warrior caste and served as a unified, independent military led by an Elf called the Archon. The Archon is like a demigod - he's been directly touched and used as a mouthpiece (thus the name) by the Demiurge, some entity from "beyond" that claims all of creation as its own. So he's like a warrior-priest that won't die because he was used as a freaking conduit by the divine to commune with the Patriarch, the leader of the Moren-dur (or the Plainsfolk, or the Plains Elves), and the Matriarch, the leader of the Barath-dur (or the Forestfolk, or the Forest Elves, Wood Elves, what have you). So, anyway, somewhere along the line the Matriarch and Patriarch decided the Archon was an insane heretic, and formed their own armies to combat his, eventually locking all the warrior caste's survivors inside a peninsula of obsidian and basalt along the southern coast of their main continent (there might be more, but I think I've got an insane idea as to where and what the Continent is, though). The prisoners, the Archon included, vowed to escape - particularly since his heresy was based on his claims of a future threat that he intended to spend millenia preparing for - and eventually do with the guidance of a creature called a Ngyar, which claims its kind to be from "beyond time."
Anyway, that's a lot of unnecessary prologue. Enjoy!
'Twigs snapped as the group of people moved through the forest. Long, bulky rifles remained shouldered as individuals clattered and crouched to tree trunks. Insects buzzed through the damp air, hovered near pools left by the near perpetual rains of this part of the Continent, were snatched midair by leaping forest dragons. Silence fell over the group of people, water dripping and sliding over waxen leaves, gurgling in tiny rivulets down the mossy, vine-choked trunks of the vaguely tropical trees. One of the people stood and tapped the glass visor of his gasmask with a scale of his dragonskin glove. Another tapped his own visor several trees away in a different pattern, lost in the perpetual twilight of the undergrowth. Clicks swept east and west along the staggered line of soldiers, then abruptly ended.
A forest dragon yawned in the low branches ahead of the line. Another rushed past it, hurtling along the branches with singleminded purpose, barreling past its sleepy cousin, its body slung long as it bounded from tree to tree. A flash lit up a small portion of the undergrowth, and a crack reverberated amongst the thick tree trunks. The bolting dragon split in half, blood spraying up toward the canopy, the halves of its body falling to the forest floor. One of the tall, lanky soldiers rushed forward, doubled over, to recover the dragon's body. A scream radiated from north of the line, dozens of creatures emitting a banshee's wail as one. Arrows and crossbow bolts suddenly filled the air of the undergrowth, coming from both the ground and trees ahead. The soldier dashing forward threw himself to the mossy forest floor and rolled to a tree's trunk, clutching a bleeding wound on his chest. No shots returned against the onslaught of aerial wood. The hail eventually stopped.
A figure dropped from the canopy upon the wounded soldier. He tried to raise his rifle, but had it kicked away. The figure stooped and laughed. The soldier grabbed from the chest wound – arrowhead protruding from his chest through the dragonskin tunic – to the ceremonial bone knife on a boot sheath. The figure grabbed the knife from the soldier's hand, forced his arm to the tree, and nailed his hand to the wood with the knife. The soldier's screams were muffled by the mask as the figure grabbed the soldier's face and slammed his skull against the tree several times, pulverizing it.
“Turn back!” the figure barked, its voice echoing into the forest. “You were imprisoned for crimes past, you were locked away for a reason!”
The figure stood tall, sticking its muscular chest out. It was a man, naked from the waist up, loincloth covering its pelvis, blue paint intricately streaked across its chest, legs, arms, and face. Along one leg was a quiver, strung over its back was a longbow. Its ears stuck righteously to the sky, defiantly wide of the earthily-colored quills that crowned its head. It stood in a posture of challenge to the soldiers.
Clicking again reverberated along the vague line of hidden soldiers. One stood, rifle above its head, and walked slowly toward the challenger. As it approached, it lowered the rifle by the stock and removed its gaskmask. She was classically beautiful, with pouted lips and thin lines of browscales and wide eyes. Her long ears were tied together behind her head, just beyond the black, short cut quills of a soldier. She stood, challenged gauging the challenger in the low light of the forest floor.
“I was born into imprisonment. My mother and father were born into imprisonment. Their fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers – surely – were born into that same imprisonment. I was born into a world without natural light. I was born into a world of warrens carved from the living rock of the southern peninsula. I was born into darkness because of the likes of you. You and your ilk have taken from each and every Deru-dur here and still working within your prison the right to a life. You have cast aside your own race's Archon of the Demiurge-”
“You dare,” the man bellowed. “You dare reference that foul creature as my creator's Archon?”
“I reference him as history would reference him: the mouthpiece of the Demiurge, cast aside for alleged heresy. And I fight for him. He fought for him,” she pointed to the dead soldier with her rifle. Then, referencing the soldiers behind her: “They fight for him. And we will not turn back.”
“Then we will fight!” the man screeched again.
“You should surrender,” she said quietly.
“HA!” Laughter sprang from the trees to the north. “We defend Barathoth with our lives, in the name of the Matriarch.”
“You should send word to the Matriarch that you are besieged by overwhelming force, that the Archon has unleashed magicks unimaginable, that his armies shall march unimpeded across this continent once more.”
The man again laughed. “And what magicks are these? The staff you carry, perhaps, is it charged somehow? Do you bring spirits forth from the ground, do you harness the powers of the sky or oceans?”
“So you do not yield?”
“We yield for no army! We yield for no felled Archon of ages past!”
“So be it,” she said softly. A whistle found its way from a pouch at her waist to her lips. She blew, and forest dragons skittered. A flash lit the undergrowth to the east, accompanied again by that sharp crack. The man's grinning face suddenly dissolved into a red mist, his mostly decapitated body slumping to the forest floor. The woman had disappeared back into the brush.
Banshees wailed again in unison, and arrows flew forth in fury. The earth itself rumbled and shuddered as wood filled the damp air. Trees were pushed aside as four-legged machines walked forward to the north. The machines were of different designs: one with a roughly humanoid torso atop the walking platform with one arm shoving aside flora as a shoulder-mounted cannon fired into the forest ahead; another with a plow placed at its front, mowing down trees as masked soldiers followed along at a rapid clip, rifles at the ready; a third hefted dual axes, crushing all before it, hewing a path through the undergrowth.
“What if we come upon a settlement of those new creatures – those humans?” a lieftenant asked of the woman who had accepted the challenge.
“We give them,” replied she, redonning her mask, “the same ultimatum: stand down or be dealt with.”'
Anyway, that's a lot of unnecessary prologue. Enjoy!
'Twigs snapped as the group of people moved through the forest. Long, bulky rifles remained shouldered as individuals clattered and crouched to tree trunks. Insects buzzed through the damp air, hovered near pools left by the near perpetual rains of this part of the Continent, were snatched midair by leaping forest dragons. Silence fell over the group of people, water dripping and sliding over waxen leaves, gurgling in tiny rivulets down the mossy, vine-choked trunks of the vaguely tropical trees. One of the people stood and tapped the glass visor of his gasmask with a scale of his dragonskin glove. Another tapped his own visor several trees away in a different pattern, lost in the perpetual twilight of the undergrowth. Clicks swept east and west along the staggered line of soldiers, then abruptly ended.
A forest dragon yawned in the low branches ahead of the line. Another rushed past it, hurtling along the branches with singleminded purpose, barreling past its sleepy cousin, its body slung long as it bounded from tree to tree. A flash lit up a small portion of the undergrowth, and a crack reverberated amongst the thick tree trunks. The bolting dragon split in half, blood spraying up toward the canopy, the halves of its body falling to the forest floor. One of the tall, lanky soldiers rushed forward, doubled over, to recover the dragon's body. A scream radiated from north of the line, dozens of creatures emitting a banshee's wail as one. Arrows and crossbow bolts suddenly filled the air of the undergrowth, coming from both the ground and trees ahead. The soldier dashing forward threw himself to the mossy forest floor and rolled to a tree's trunk, clutching a bleeding wound on his chest. No shots returned against the onslaught of aerial wood. The hail eventually stopped.
A figure dropped from the canopy upon the wounded soldier. He tried to raise his rifle, but had it kicked away. The figure stooped and laughed. The soldier grabbed from the chest wound – arrowhead protruding from his chest through the dragonskin tunic – to the ceremonial bone knife on a boot sheath. The figure grabbed the knife from the soldier's hand, forced his arm to the tree, and nailed his hand to the wood with the knife. The soldier's screams were muffled by the mask as the figure grabbed the soldier's face and slammed his skull against the tree several times, pulverizing it.
“Turn back!” the figure barked, its voice echoing into the forest. “You were imprisoned for crimes past, you were locked away for a reason!”
The figure stood tall, sticking its muscular chest out. It was a man, naked from the waist up, loincloth covering its pelvis, blue paint intricately streaked across its chest, legs, arms, and face. Along one leg was a quiver, strung over its back was a longbow. Its ears stuck righteously to the sky, defiantly wide of the earthily-colored quills that crowned its head. It stood in a posture of challenge to the soldiers.
Clicking again reverberated along the vague line of hidden soldiers. One stood, rifle above its head, and walked slowly toward the challenger. As it approached, it lowered the rifle by the stock and removed its gaskmask. She was classically beautiful, with pouted lips and thin lines of browscales and wide eyes. Her long ears were tied together behind her head, just beyond the black, short cut quills of a soldier. She stood, challenged gauging the challenger in the low light of the forest floor.
“I was born into imprisonment. My mother and father were born into imprisonment. Their fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers – surely – were born into that same imprisonment. I was born into a world without natural light. I was born into a world of warrens carved from the living rock of the southern peninsula. I was born into darkness because of the likes of you. You and your ilk have taken from each and every Deru-dur here and still working within your prison the right to a life. You have cast aside your own race's Archon of the Demiurge-”
“You dare,” the man bellowed. “You dare reference that foul creature as my creator's Archon?”
“I reference him as history would reference him: the mouthpiece of the Demiurge, cast aside for alleged heresy. And I fight for him. He fought for him,” she pointed to the dead soldier with her rifle. Then, referencing the soldiers behind her: “They fight for him. And we will not turn back.”
“Then we will fight!” the man screeched again.
“You should surrender,” she said quietly.
“HA!” Laughter sprang from the trees to the north. “We defend Barathoth with our lives, in the name of the Matriarch.”
“You should send word to the Matriarch that you are besieged by overwhelming force, that the Archon has unleashed magicks unimaginable, that his armies shall march unimpeded across this continent once more.”
The man again laughed. “And what magicks are these? The staff you carry, perhaps, is it charged somehow? Do you bring spirits forth from the ground, do you harness the powers of the sky or oceans?”
“So you do not yield?”
“We yield for no army! We yield for no felled Archon of ages past!”
“So be it,” she said softly. A whistle found its way from a pouch at her waist to her lips. She blew, and forest dragons skittered. A flash lit the undergrowth to the east, accompanied again by that sharp crack. The man's grinning face suddenly dissolved into a red mist, his mostly decapitated body slumping to the forest floor. The woman had disappeared back into the brush.
Banshees wailed again in unison, and arrows flew forth in fury. The earth itself rumbled and shuddered as wood filled the damp air. Trees were pushed aside as four-legged machines walked forward to the north. The machines were of different designs: one with a roughly humanoid torso atop the walking platform with one arm shoving aside flora as a shoulder-mounted cannon fired into the forest ahead; another with a plow placed at its front, mowing down trees as masked soldiers followed along at a rapid clip, rifles at the ready; a third hefted dual axes, crushing all before it, hewing a path through the undergrowth.
“What if we come upon a settlement of those new creatures – those humans?” a lieftenant asked of the woman who had accepted the challenge.
“We give them,” replied she, redonning her mask, “the same ultimatum: stand down or be dealt with.”'
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Variations on a(n Historical) Theme: Part II
Second Part: “The Spirit of Radio” - Wherein Alex begins his grand adventure.
'The day had just started to drag on as Alex put things in order. His basement bedroom at his parents' house was starting to look more like living quarters and less like the burrow of some large rat. The bed was shoved into the corner with a digital clock on the nearby windowsill, books and compact discs were strewn about the floor and piled onto the duo of lackluster bookshelves at odd ends of the room. There was no order to the books, just a simple, accepted acknowledgment: a couple-three bibles of varying translation and condition mingled with textbooks which touched on Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism; Stephen King and Neil Gaiman novels were cluttered alongside some of Alistair Reynolds' space-opera epics; Far Side collections shared shelf space with Kant and a much-worn double feature encompassing the Mill treatises “Utilitarianism” and “On Liberty.”
Ancient audio equipment shared as much real estate as the bookshelves, speakers that made better furniture than sound production equipment flanked a television stand. Next to these stood a long, thin teardown table made of white plastic. Beneath this sat the behemoth that was Alex's desktop computer tower – atop it, the vast black portal that was its monitor as well as a keyboard and mouse. Keys and a dated-looking mobile phone filled the majority of the mouse pad, and the shattered-but-functional remnants of a touch-operated mobile music device clung by umbilical to one of the PC's several forward USB ports.
“And where are you going again?” Alex's mother was a worrier, which couldn't be said of everyone.
He shrugged, shuffling papers, deciding which manuscripts were worth reworking and what of his prose work was garbage, and responded with a single word: “South.”
“That's a lot of area.”
“Yeah, it's most of the country,” he sighed. “I get the feeling we're headed to Pennsylvania or West Virginia or Tennessee or something. Maybe northern Georgia. Maybe I'll even get to see Blood Mountain, see about finding that crystal skull or cyclopean sasquatch.”
“What?”
He looked up at her, blinked, and realized that he'd just rambled off a good chunk of a Mastodon's third album. “Nothing.”
“No, you said something about a skull. Are you sure this trip isn't about black magicks or ritual sacrifice or anything?” Alex's mother's concern never failed to simultaneously astound, alarm, and – ultimately – confuse him.
“Mom, allow me to recount a short tale for you,” Alex started, putting clothes and books into a duffel bag. “When I was fourteen, my friends and I started looking into Dungeons and Dragons. You told me that the game would end up responsible for my death: that the authorities would pull my half-starved, probably asphyxiated corpse from the maintenance tunnels beneath MSU because we would wander said corridors fighting imaginary monsters. No matter how much I claimed to understand that the monsters only existed in the context of the story on paper, like a book, and that I would be a combating these monsters on paper only to allay your fears, you insisted that we research what can essentially be called the Church's view on the game. And do you remember what finally made you decide to let me play?”
“No,” she shook her head, playing with the doorknob as he slung the pack over his shoulder and pocketed the phone, keys, and MP3 player.
“Your mind was changed by a thirty-something employee at a local hobby shop, who laughed in your face when I told him what you thought of the game, and summed up play sessions as essentially a poker game with less alcohol, fewer cigars, bigger cards made of flimsier paper, and dice.”
“Oh,” she replied halfheartedly.
“Besides,” he kept going, walking past her into the furnished basement. “That wasn't the game you should have been trying to keep me away from. Player characters can be driven insane by occult horrors in Call of Cthulhu.”
“That doesn't make me feel any better about this trip!” she sputtered as he reached the small foyer which branched off to kitchen, garage, utility closet, and laundry room. He put down the duffel and started sliding his feet into pair of old-timey Clarks. After tying the shoes, he stood and held three fingers up near his shoulder in a Scout's salute.
“I solemnly swear not to intentionally kill, or intentionally allow the death, of any person – or of any animal not intended for sustenance.”
“What about self-mutilation?”
“Mom, I'm not even going to acknowledge that one.” With that he opened the door to the garage, waved to his friends in the waiting vehicle, and turned back to his mother. “Bye, I'll see you in a few days. I'll call from wherever we stop tonight.”
“Okay, Allie, I love you!”
“Yeah,” he choked out, nodding. Those were tough words for him to hear, and tougher ones to say. They always had been; not least because he was entirely convinced that no single person had ever meant them toward him.
# # #
“So why are we taking twenty-three?” Alex asked, peering up over the seat backs toward the dash, trying to catch a glimpse of the directions they'd printed off after having watched the I-96 exit fly past.
“Why not?” David asked from the front seat.
“Because it makes no sense. I-75 hooks up with just about everything southeast of Michigan, and we would have taken sixty-nine over to ninety-six, or at least we would have just hopped onto 96 back there if we were headed west.”
“I'm still not entirely sure why we haven't told him where we're going. I doubt he'd know what was going on if we did,” Michael asked through bites of cherry Pop Tart.
“Yes,” Alex played along, “I am ignorant of all things south of Cedar Point, including people who may or may not live there.”
“He has to figure out what he can on his own. He'll get where we're going soon enough, I'm sure, but not exactly for whom.” George was driving and searching the airwaves for some radio station suitable for the drive. He finally settled on a country station, to the chagrin of the other passengers. “This might do us.”
Talk turned to school. David was in graphic arts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, George was finishing out a history degree at the same school, Michael was waist-deep in a chemistry program at U of M's Flint campus, and Alex was dissatisfied with being three quarters of the way to a Bachelors of Science in Psychology from Central Michigan University. He seemed to be the only one who hated what he was learning, which didn't help his inherent feeling of isolation.
They drove south, eventually jogging several tens of miles to the east to hop back on I-75 just north of Toledo, verbally ribbing each other and being a general pack of twenty-something hooligans. George, while he drove, kept jumping between pop and country stations, as though trying to single one voice out of a crowd. Alex started to doze, and had the strangest dream of sitting on a park bench next to a pretty singing girl. He accepted that the imagery probably had to do with the radio, and let himself fall asleep as the sun sank beneath what had become Ohio's horizon.'
'The day had just started to drag on as Alex put things in order. His basement bedroom at his parents' house was starting to look more like living quarters and less like the burrow of some large rat. The bed was shoved into the corner with a digital clock on the nearby windowsill, books and compact discs were strewn about the floor and piled onto the duo of lackluster bookshelves at odd ends of the room. There was no order to the books, just a simple, accepted acknowledgment: a couple-three bibles of varying translation and condition mingled with textbooks which touched on Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism; Stephen King and Neil Gaiman novels were cluttered alongside some of Alistair Reynolds' space-opera epics; Far Side collections shared shelf space with Kant and a much-worn double feature encompassing the Mill treatises “Utilitarianism” and “On Liberty.”
Ancient audio equipment shared as much real estate as the bookshelves, speakers that made better furniture than sound production equipment flanked a television stand. Next to these stood a long, thin teardown table made of white plastic. Beneath this sat the behemoth that was Alex's desktop computer tower – atop it, the vast black portal that was its monitor as well as a keyboard and mouse. Keys and a dated-looking mobile phone filled the majority of the mouse pad, and the shattered-but-functional remnants of a touch-operated mobile music device clung by umbilical to one of the PC's several forward USB ports.
“And where are you going again?” Alex's mother was a worrier, which couldn't be said of everyone.
He shrugged, shuffling papers, deciding which manuscripts were worth reworking and what of his prose work was garbage, and responded with a single word: “South.”
“That's a lot of area.”
“Yeah, it's most of the country,” he sighed. “I get the feeling we're headed to Pennsylvania or West Virginia or Tennessee or something. Maybe northern Georgia. Maybe I'll even get to see Blood Mountain, see about finding that crystal skull or cyclopean sasquatch.”
“What?”
He looked up at her, blinked, and realized that he'd just rambled off a good chunk of a Mastodon's third album. “Nothing.”
“No, you said something about a skull. Are you sure this trip isn't about black magicks or ritual sacrifice or anything?” Alex's mother's concern never failed to simultaneously astound, alarm, and – ultimately – confuse him.
“Mom, allow me to recount a short tale for you,” Alex started, putting clothes and books into a duffel bag. “When I was fourteen, my friends and I started looking into Dungeons and Dragons. You told me that the game would end up responsible for my death: that the authorities would pull my half-starved, probably asphyxiated corpse from the maintenance tunnels beneath MSU because we would wander said corridors fighting imaginary monsters. No matter how much I claimed to understand that the monsters only existed in the context of the story on paper, like a book, and that I would be a combating these monsters on paper only to allay your fears, you insisted that we research what can essentially be called the Church's view on the game. And do you remember what finally made you decide to let me play?”
“No,” she shook her head, playing with the doorknob as he slung the pack over his shoulder and pocketed the phone, keys, and MP3 player.
“Your mind was changed by a thirty-something employee at a local hobby shop, who laughed in your face when I told him what you thought of the game, and summed up play sessions as essentially a poker game with less alcohol, fewer cigars, bigger cards made of flimsier paper, and dice.”
“Oh,” she replied halfheartedly.
“Besides,” he kept going, walking past her into the furnished basement. “That wasn't the game you should have been trying to keep me away from. Player characters can be driven insane by occult horrors in Call of Cthulhu.”
“That doesn't make me feel any better about this trip!” she sputtered as he reached the small foyer which branched off to kitchen, garage, utility closet, and laundry room. He put down the duffel and started sliding his feet into pair of old-timey Clarks. After tying the shoes, he stood and held three fingers up near his shoulder in a Scout's salute.
“I solemnly swear not to intentionally kill, or intentionally allow the death, of any person – or of any animal not intended for sustenance.”
“What about self-mutilation?”
“Mom, I'm not even going to acknowledge that one.” With that he opened the door to the garage, waved to his friends in the waiting vehicle, and turned back to his mother. “Bye, I'll see you in a few days. I'll call from wherever we stop tonight.”
“Okay, Allie, I love you!”
“Yeah,” he choked out, nodding. Those were tough words for him to hear, and tougher ones to say. They always had been; not least because he was entirely convinced that no single person had ever meant them toward him.
# # #
“So why are we taking twenty-three?” Alex asked, peering up over the seat backs toward the dash, trying to catch a glimpse of the directions they'd printed off after having watched the I-96 exit fly past.
“Why not?” David asked from the front seat.
“Because it makes no sense. I-75 hooks up with just about everything southeast of Michigan, and we would have taken sixty-nine over to ninety-six, or at least we would have just hopped onto 96 back there if we were headed west.”
“I'm still not entirely sure why we haven't told him where we're going. I doubt he'd know what was going on if we did,” Michael asked through bites of cherry Pop Tart.
“Yes,” Alex played along, “I am ignorant of all things south of Cedar Point, including people who may or may not live there.”
“He has to figure out what he can on his own. He'll get where we're going soon enough, I'm sure, but not exactly for whom.” George was driving and searching the airwaves for some radio station suitable for the drive. He finally settled on a country station, to the chagrin of the other passengers. “This might do us.”
Talk turned to school. David was in graphic arts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, George was finishing out a history degree at the same school, Michael was waist-deep in a chemistry program at U of M's Flint campus, and Alex was dissatisfied with being three quarters of the way to a Bachelors of Science in Psychology from Central Michigan University. He seemed to be the only one who hated what he was learning, which didn't help his inherent feeling of isolation.
They drove south, eventually jogging several tens of miles to the east to hop back on I-75 just north of Toledo, verbally ribbing each other and being a general pack of twenty-something hooligans. George, while he drove, kept jumping between pop and country stations, as though trying to single one voice out of a crowd. Alex started to doze, and had the strangest dream of sitting on a park bench next to a pretty singing girl. He accepted that the imagery probably had to do with the radio, and let himself fall asleep as the sun sank beneath what had become Ohio's horizon.'
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