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Carpool
Down in the Dirt, v149
(the September 2017 Issue)




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Negative Space
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The Man That Comes Around

Leandro Pereda Felipe

    A cloud of smoke fled through his thin lips, battered and chapped by the cold. The bitter wind enveloped his form, biting into his bare arms and his florid cheeks. A thick veil sailed over the summer grass and the flourished trees that got lost into the night sky. A blinding light came into view. The boy squinted and rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hands. In front of him stood a truck, flaming wings painted on both sides. The horn blared sending the cicadas into a perpetual silence. With a screech, the passenger door swung opened and the boy climbed into the darkness of the cockpit and the sound of Johnny Cash playing on the radio. The driver shifted smoothly into gear and the truck launched forward.
    “Where are we going?” the boy asked after a while.
    “Nowhere,” the man replied.
    “Where’s that?”
    “Between here and there.”
    “How long will it take?”
    “Who’s to say,” the driver said. “We cannot rush fate, neither hammer it nor bent.”
    The truck skidded down the poorly lit road and away from the other hitchhikers that moved like shadows through the ridge alongside the truck. The boy saw faces cloaked in anguish, melting and mixing constantly like black tar. He saw a woman tried to cling onto the side-mirror and an old man failing to keep up with the speed of the truck, getting lost behind in the darkness. Others floated down the road. Lost. Going nowhere. The boy looked baffled, yet he felt safe. He was glad to be confined inside the comfort of the truck and by the presence of the stranger with the silver tongue.
    “Who are you?”
    “The man that comes around.”
    “Do you have a name?”
    “I’m no one. I am everyone.”
    “Where do you come from?”
    The driver glanced up, his face covered by a cowboy hat that glared orange with the light of the dashboard.
    The boy didn’t understand. “Up state?” he asked. “I hope’s not Jersey?”
    The driver croaked a laugh. “I come from where the sun kisses the sea and the moon beholds the land. I come from a place men cannot understand.”
    “Can I go there?”
    The driver sighed. “One day, perhaps,” and continued onwards, sailing through the abyss.
    The boy hadn’t noticed that the road had disappeared. He looked forward, eyes squinting to the point he could see stars. But there was nothing but a void of darkness that surrounded the truck that not even the headlights could pierce through.
    Awareness sunk into him.
    Bam! Bam! A lightning strike of metal.
    The scent of burnt rubber and melted plastic filled his nose. The taste of blood his mouth. He looked at the driver, who had placed the huge hat on the dashboard, his face revealed for the first time and looking straight at him. The boy’s eyes adjusted to the dimness inside the truck as he gazed into the empty sockets where once laid his eyes. He saw his past, his future, and his present. He saw the flashing reds and blues as if looking through the rearview mirror. He could see the scrap of metal wrapped around the tree trunk and the smoke rising into the air. He saw the black body bag that laid solemnly on the asphalt get slowly swallowed up by the fog.



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