But I think it’s time to put this project to bed for now. I can’t say I’ll never come back to it, but I think it’s time to move on.
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
He didn’t know much about where he was, other than it was dry and hot and full of electrical poles tethered by sagging lines marching alongside an endless road. A highway, where he’d run out of gas and out of ideas, so he thought he’d just wait a while until something came for him or he for it.
He looked down that endless road with a head full of ghosts, because that’s all he’d left behind. People, places, tastes, smells. Not many sounds for some reason. The only sounds here were the stretch in his denim and the gravel hiss of his shoe soles when he shifted his feet on the blacktop when his legs got tired, or rummaged around his pocket for something. That something was usually a two-dollar Zippo, to ignite his dwindling collection of smokes, the last one of which was crimped between his fingers, smoldering.
His stance became tiresome once again, so he adjusted his feet once again, his backside leaning against the car he hadn’t bothered to learn the model of, though all he had to do was check around back where all cars proudly brandished their namesakes in bold silver. Sure, it could have come off in the chase through the town with the storybook gabled houses, where he’d fishtailed his way down Main Street as onlookers leaped to safety, losing their icecreams they’d just procured from the little shack with the vanilla swirl for a roof, and he all the while unable to see his pursuer in the rearview because the back window was webbed with a bullet hole for a bullseye that had been the passage for a bloodletting and brainletting projectile, which had ended a man who had tried to strangle him from the backseat and failed.
Sure. But he didn’t care much for cars, anyway. Not much for names, either. Hell, he only remembered his own due to the ghosts in his head screaming it all the time.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, got a whiff of the sweet tobacco, and couldn’t resist a drag. He held it in, wondering why any other kind of smoke would choke him up, set him to hacking his lungs out, but the kind stored in these little white paper sticks held him like a warm blanket. If he didn’t have to breathe, he would have held it in forever. Maybe that was a sign he was done with living. Or living was done with him.
No gas in the nameless car to keep the nameless man going compounded that portent.
He took another drag, found his cigarette had gone cold so fished for that Zippo again. He discovered something else. Metal, sure. Produced fire, sure. Fit snugly in the hand, sure. But not what he was looking for. Still, he took it out. Weighed it in his hand. Checked the cylinder. Held it up to his eye and peered through each and every chamber to see the sunset landscape of dirt and rock and shrub captured in circular glory. He didn’t look away. Trapped the horizon and everything above and below in an ecosystem of his choosing. One so small he could rest it on the tip of his finger if he could pluck it free. Too bad he couldn’t.
He channeled his boyhood dreams of one day pitching ball in the Majors and tossed the revolver into the weeds and the thoughts of turning it on himself along with it. He wasn’t a cliche. He wasn’t going to sit here and ponder bringing about his own demise that would conclude with a slideshow of melancholy faces weeping over the boy that could have been something.
His dad always said he was something. His mom, too. Both with a shake of their heads, eyes downcast because they coudln’t believe what they’d brought into this world.
“Something,” he said. The word tasted like blood from the inside of a cheek scored by wisdom teeth. Looked like the blood caught in the web of the nameless car’s back window, as it opened in front of his eyes like a grasping hand, then a closing hand, then nothing at all but the view of slumbering hills.
He flicked the Zippo open, sparked the tinder, placed what was left of his last smoke through the flame, and inhaled. Down the endless road something glimmered on the last ray of sun before it ducked behind the hills.
He didn’t know much about where he was, what he’d driven, or where he’d go, but he did know what a windshield looked like angled to the sky just right to catch its beauty, and what a beauty it was.
His tongue too dry to douse the cigarette, he snuffed it with a pinch and put it in his back pocket, maybe half an inch left to the filter. Teeth looking clean in the side mirror was no surprise on account of him not having had a single bite in days. His hair, though, groomed proper despite many nights sleeping against a cracked leather headrest twisted more ways than a pretzel was a surprise.
His smile looked genuine enough. The eyes were what made it so, corners trampled by crows. Shirt dusted but not stained. Pants weathered smooth.
He looked to where he’d thrown the revolver and his thoughts. Empty or not, it could do some convincing if his smile didn’t. His thoughts had even less utility, so he decided he could do without both and let them lie. A shed rattler skin tumbled by like it was autumn.
He turned his head to spit, but came up empty, just like the cylinder.
“Something,” he said, before heading down the endless road toward what was coming for him, ghosts skulking through his gray matter folds in the throes of conversation. They said his name. They said other things, too. But he didn’t listen, because listening had never got him nowhere, and he had somewhere to be. Something to do.
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