A Story Nobody Reads
“How much longer to lug my body around?” your brain asks, or is it the mind on a warpath with the body. You’re tired of being hungry, tired of defecating, tired of verbal diarrhea, tired of bleeding in sync with the full moon, tired of this story that nobody reads, tired of the rattling bodies on the back of the pickup, tired of bouncing on a bumpy country road.
They are not skeletons and this is not a closet. Just a couple of dead guys, bad guys, in battle fatigues, terroristas perhaps, the someone’s-always-out-to-get-you kind. Who the hell picked you to drive them to the burial site? And where the hell is it? They wouldn’t bury the enemy with everybody else, would they?
Your invisible passenger riding shotgun asks, “Are the dead folks still the enemy?”
You laugh. Like hell. You laugh when nothing is funny, you sob when nothing is sad, you obey the road signs, the word from on high to shut the fuck up and get with the program. You love the program with all your shriveled heart, you make sure everybody knows that. You especially like the chapter where they cut up all the earth on Earth, distributing the parts still dripping blood to landowners with security forces and guns and assault weapons and lots of smooth shiny bullets designed to create more bodies to bury on prohibitively expensive property formerly known as land.
You slide into the pit, reach for the dirt piled up on either side and sweep it back down on yourself, an ancient ritual, before coffins and urns and headstones and keepsakes, before they foisted the funeral industry upon every gunshot victim and canon fodder, hospital-bed fatality and roadside kill — billions of dead, you know, lucrative, you know, even without the ones buried already in the ruins of bombed out apartment blocks.
Are they going to pasture the doomed cows on the vast expanses of the burial grounds set aside for the billions? Are they going to clearcut the remaining forests to make wooden coffins and space for graves deep enough to keep the hungry coyotes from unearthing the dead?
The bouncing bodies on the back of the truck sound like a pile of tree logs, which explains the mournful tune carried by the groaning trees swaying in the wind on both sides of the road, the clouds tearing across the night sky, nothing to see even with the vehicle’s bright eyes staring blankly ahead, demanding of nowhere to show itself.
Out of the same nowhere a lone amorphous figure raises a thumb at the side of the road. Wow, you think, you’ve got the thumbs-up from a complete stranger, someone with an incomprehensible handle lurking in virtual shadows, its perfect heart-shaped heart turning red when you click the “like.”
The passenger riding shotgun in the cab with you is quiet like the night, quiet like the wolves crossing the road in the bobbing distance. You try to strike a conversation even though you’re not the friendly type. People scare you as much as microbes, but you love your passenger, your heart is overflowing with love for a being you can never touch. Can love be an idea at least some of the time? You can’t bear to see the silence and the darkness flirting shamelessly as they twirl together on the dance floor.
“Hi,” you say, “I’m Leasa. What’s your name?”
“It,” says the stranger.
“It? Is that like, your preferred pronoun?”
It shakes its head.
Mmm. “How’d you spell it?”
“Just E.T.,” It says.
“Doesn’t sound like how it’s spelled.”
“Tell them at the DMV.”
You mull it over. “They registered you as Extra Terrestrial?”
It shrugs.
“Do you know what’s extra about you?”
Nothing. It’s quiet like a fish despite being a land animal, quiet like the night after they killed the woodland, the owls, the moths, the bobcats.
You try another tack. “Where are you from?”
It takes a moment. “Nowhere?”
“Me too, I’m from nowhere, same place. Have we met before?” It allows a tentative shake of the head. The ghosts of the wolves crossing up ahead are gone and it’s really fucking dark on this godforsaken road, an ancient relative of concrete and plastic and herbicides and cruelty galore.
You ride on the back of the pickup and behind the wheel at the same time. The passenger seat is invisible and totally off limits. Invisible shit is scary, like microbes and things that muck up the difference between what’s virtual and what’s real. If it’s real, a raised thumb on a lonely road on the outskirts of nowhere should mean thumbing a ride, right?
A woman alone, bleeding or not, you never stop for strangers, especially not ones lurking in the shadows in the middle of the night ready to pounce on you with an axe or a machete or, in a pinch, a dull kitchen knife. Someone’s always out to get you, even members of the security forces, who are, after all, men with guns and assault weapons and enough explosives to raze sky scrapers and mountaintops to the ground — always to the ground, you know, like shot-up birds and airplanes falling from the sky, you know, helping to clear the way for the vast burial grounds spreading far and wide between the fenced horizons of prohibitively expensive property formerly known as land.
“Land belongs to everybody,” protests a character in an old movie as she’s being hauled away by the cops for trespassing. You don’t get to ask if “everybody” includes the wolves, the spiders, the owls, the millipedes, the trees, the microbes trespassing with you in the pit while you’re taking selfies with dirt up to your chin.
The notion of thumbing a ride flashes in your mind. You hit the brakes and slowly back up to the spot where the hitchhiker was last seen wearing battle fatigues. No one’s there, no body of any kind. If you blinked you could make out a slight motion through the blur of your tears and the torrential rain pelting the windshield.
You lean over and open the passenger door and the hitchhiker materializes beside you. The invisible wall between you has vanished. You have no idea when It or They climbed in. They never divulge their gender or suggest they’re nonbinary. You’re not aware of their social media handle. “Pretty stifling, huh, the virtual space, init?” the echo chamber squawks.
You should open the driver side door and get out, but you don’t. You stay put even after all the oxygen has been vacuumed out of the cab. You’ll be sitting there looking ahead, pondering what it would take to toss your body off the back of the truck and roll it down the weedy bank into the woods. Will the landowners show up with their guns? Will they let the coyotes come around?
You laugh, you cry, like hell. Nothing is funny and nothing is sad. You sit there wondering what made you drive in a moonless night down an abandoned evacuation route with no numbers and no streetlights, only groaning trees swaying in the wind on both sides, their canopies leaning over to touch each other over the bumpy dirt road. A haunting funeral hymn is drowned out by the silence of the dark. The air is electric. It always is. It ends like a story that nobody reads
