"I'm here to take you to The Other Side," the chicken said, cocking its head toward the thin strip of road. 

        The man looked around himself, then blankly ahead at the road for a moment.  It looked newly paved, and mirages shimmered in the desert heat just above the hot blacktop of the highway that disappeared out of sight in both directions.  To either side of it, the parched clay ground baked in the sun like a kiln. There was nothing all around, but this terracotta desert that peeled and cracked like a bad sunburn, and the road. And the chicken.

        "Is this a joke?" the man said.

        "No," said the chicken, "This is the punchline."

        The chicken turned and started walking across the road.  The man saw little choice but to follow.  He didn't bother questioning its motives.

        It crossed slowly, all awkward bony legs and bobbing head, strutting its way across the solid lines painted on the road--no passing allowed.  So the man stayed behind, taking one step at a time as the chicken bobbed in front. Slowly and deliberately, one foot at a time, like a bride or a pallbearer. Step. Pause. Step. Pause.

        A pool of grit and sand had collected by the edge of the other side of the road. Red clay dust whirled up around their feet as they stepped off the pavement, and settled on the man's canvas running shoes.

        "Now what?" he asked.

        "Now wait."

        "For what?"

        "Yes, exactly. Now stick out your thumb."

        Uncertainly, he obeyed the chicken and raised his arm, thumb outstretched.  He wasn't sure which direction he was facing, and couldn't guess which way the flow of traffic would be when or if it finally came.  The sun had been directly overheard for far longer now than he felt like it should have been. Black shadows with hard-edged outlines pooled under his feet.  He could feel his scalp beginning to burn, and was quietly thankful his hair felt just a little too long, and might save him from some of the sun. He wondered hopelessly if this highway was even still in use, and how long it had been since the last vehicle passed--long before they'd arrived--and if the drivers here carry water on board, and as time passed while the sun failed to, about other less coherent things. Sweat started to soak his thin cotton shirt and black dots began to dance at the edge of his vision.

        "Keep your arm up," the chicken interrupted his thoughts harshly. The man was startled, and looked at the chicken and then his hand, which had sunk absently almost to his side. The sun still sat right over head.

        "Sorry," he mumbled, and shook the tingle out of his right arm, then raised his hand again. He wondered blurrily about the mechanics of heat stroke. But the chicken seemed to think this was important, and who could argue with that.

        A black square appeared, like a dead pixel, quivering on the horizon in the heat off the road. Its shadow clung underneath it.  The man raised both his arms and waved them above his head plaintively as it started to resolve into shapes and colours and became a huge, bullish transport truck, bright blue and chrome, well-maintained.  The truck's horn acknowledged him, echoing over the flat, empty desert like a prehistoric roar.  The man picked up the chicken under his left arm as the oversize truck got closer and started slowing down to stop. He stepped back from the road and shaded his eyes with a hand, as several tons of shining metal took their considerable time to hove onto the shoulder and stop.

        He peered up at the window and windshield, but they were tinted opaque black. Against the shine off that chrome, he thought. The passenger side door swung open and a woman just a little bit too old to be called young anymore looked down at the man from over the seat and smiled brightly.

        "Well? Hop in." she called, then leaned back up into the truck. The man climbed up the metal ladder steps into the truck and settled the chicken on his lap.  It tucked its head under its wing. She offered him a gallon canteen she kept slung over the headrest of the driver's seat, and he started to gulp back the cool water like he was trying to drink the whole gallon in one swallow.

        "Don't down it too fast; you'll just make yourself sick and just throw it all up again," the driver advised, and turned the key in the ignition. The truck shuddered and began to rumble back to life and motion. "I'm Sharon. Sharon Watt," the driver said conversationally. "So. What's your name?"

        The man opened his mouth, then closed it again, startled and rather worried. He had no idea what his name was. He hadn't known it earlier, either. It just hadn't seemed odd not knowing until she pointed it out.

        "You do have one?"

        "I...I'm...Adam. My name is Adam." He thought for a moment. "Freeman. I'm Adam Freeman." It would do. Sharon looked at him curiously.

        "Right...thanks. Think I got that, won't need to repeat it for me again."

        "Sorry."

        "Don't be. You alright?"

        "Yeah, I think I'm fine now. It's much cooler in here."

        "Good. Well, Adam Freeman, pretty soon we'll be hitting this truck stop up ahead, and I'll be stopping there to fill up the tank and such-like.  You can get your bearings, clean yourself up, and decide where you wanna go from there.  Keep riding with me, or head out on your own."

        Adam looked down at the chicken in his lap.

        "Is that where I'm going?"

        The chicken looked up, annoyed to be awake, and clucked shrilly.  Adam was surprised, then confused, and watched it suspiciously.  The chicken only stared at him dumbly through black glassy eyes, its head on one side.  Sharon glanced away from the road to look at Adam again, this time with serious concern.

        "Must have been pretty hot out there for you today.  You make sure you rinse off in good cold water when you go to wash up, if we don't get this heat off your brain I'll see you certifiable."

        Adam nodded and stared distantly out the passenger-side window. On the distant edge of the cracked clay desert that formed the horizon, the sun was finally setting.


        When Sharon's blue big-rig growled and sighed into the gravel lot in front of the truck stop, Adam had to look hard out his window into the darkness to see why they'd stopped. There were no other trucks there, and Sharon had parked on the far side of the lot from a small, low building. A lantern hanging on a post supporting the roof over the front porch provided the only light. Adam could only just see the building's outline.

        Sharon unfolded a stiff, black sheet of vinyl, and propped it up in front of the windshield, as a blind keeping passing lights from shining into the truck cab.

        "I'm gonna gather some trash around the cab I gotta throw out. Hamburger wrappers from lunch earlier, that kinda stuff. You need to get yourself taken care of, so don't wait for me. You just go inside the store there and ask for the bathroom," she clapped him on the shoulder and smiled, "Tell 'em you came with Sharon. I stop here with guests all the time."

        Adam nodded and hopped out of the truck, the chicken squawking indignantly under one arm.  He looked up and the moon was barely visible, a thin, narrow slice, like a clipped fingernail.  The constellations were indistinguishable in the confusion of stars, like the faces of strangers blurring together in a crowd.  It seemed like there were too many of them.  His breath hung foggy in the cold desert night.

        Rough gravel crunched underfoot as he approached the store porch. His sneakers scuff scattered clumps of scraggy weeds clambering for air out of the edges of tire ruts.  The wind was cold through his shirt.  The details of the building began to resolve to clarity in the lantern light. It was a long, low shack made of weathered grey wooden siding, its shingles sliding from their places like loose teeth.  Behind it, a circle of old fence posts leaned drunkenly, supporting the crossbeams around a penned-off field with water troughs and hay bales. Adam could just barely hear the sounds of sleeping animals, grunting and shifting their weight around the stalls from a row of three small out-buildings along the field's far side.  The store had steps out front, made from two stacks of cinder blocks with boards across them. They led up to the deck of the front porch across the full front of the building, complete with wooden rocking chairs and a small card table. The front door was carved wood coated in polished red lacquer. It creaked back and forth slightly on old hinges in the light night-time breeze.  Adam pressed a hand against the frosted glass windows set in the door, and it swung inward easily, a hazy yellow light pouring out.

        A blonde woman a bit older than Sharon looked up from a book she was reading, sitting on her bar-stool behind the counter by the register.  The yellow light was from a bare bulb in a socket that dangled guiltily in the middle of the room.  The hum of refrigerators came from the back storage space, and the smell of stale beer and truck-stop sandwiches came from a dusty freezer case against the far wall.  The blonde woman glanced back down at the book for a moment, scanning the text with a finger, then back up. She eyed Adam curiously.  Somewhere in the store, a tinny, metallic whine wheedled out of a radio, so distorted by interference that the song was unrecognizable.

        "Yessir?" the blonde said tiredly. Adam caught himself and mentally shook himself awake.

        "I'm just looking for a bathroom. I came with--"

        "Sharon, I presume. It's always Sharon. As to the bathroom," she continued, "It's for paying customers only. But, tell you what...I'll take that chicken. Got a few out back, and could use another. Give you a couple coins and everything."

        He looked confused at first. He'd actually forgotten about the chicken. It had gone quiet as soon as he got out of the truck.

        "Yes. Please, take him. Her. It." Adam put the chicken on the counter, and pushed it towards the woman.  The woman took the chicken, hands confidently around the wings and the thicker part of its body at the breast. She turned without another word and walked out the back door.

        Adam looked up at the alleged 'jackalope' heads on plaques near the ceiling behind the counter. The aisles behind him were stocked seemingly at random, with things like Cheetohs and Pop-Tarts along side some very serious-looking knives and guns. There was everything from children's toys to electronics to beer to jewelry.

        It was a little too quiet for a while, alone with the chorus of electric humming, but the shop owner returned a few minutes later, without the chicken, and dropped the promised coins on the counter. They were both huge, as coins go, and in the relatively limited capacity that Adam could tell, solid gold. One of them Adam recognized as a Spanish dubloon, or at least looked like what he imagined when he pictured a dubloon. The other coin he couldn't even hazard a guess. It was almost three inches across and had writing in some other language inlaid in bronze.  The profile of an unfamiliar stern-faced man wearing some kind of officer's cap was printed on one side, and an ornate decorative vase on the other. He shrugged and took the two coins, shoving them in the pocket of his jeans.

        "Bathroom?"

        "Go out the back door and turn to your right. Here's the key." she said, giving him a long, square wooden dowel about an inch across with a single key on a keyring attached to one end.  It was about the length of his forearm. Adam excused himself out the back door.

        He passed the corral and the animal sheds, feeling a barnyard's worth of glassy eyes observing him curiously. On his right, an oil lamp hung from the back wall of the shop, illuminating the sign for the unisex bathroom. He turned a sharp right, unlocked the bathroom, then locked himself inside and started to collect himself. He turned on the sink and ran the water cold, then splashed it over his face and down his neck until it soaked through his shirt.  "A cowboy shower" his mother used to call this when she took him camping as a young kid: when you soak enough to  cool down and feel a bit cleaner, mostly just the face and hands, without really washing yourself.

        Adam leaned over the edge of the sink thoughtfully, and with a deep breath stuck his head under the cold running water and remained there until his breath ran out, enjoying the relief from the dry of the desert, and the grit leaving his skin. His hair flicked water over his shoulders and across the mirror as he snapped upright at the waist. He wiped the water from his eyes, and ran his fingers front to back through his hair.

        Carefully studying his face in the mirror, not sure whether he actually recognized it or just knew that he should, Adam searched the inside of his own head for memories, like a tongue probing a sore tooth. There were a couple of things, but nothing helpful. It was all simple, daily things, spread over his whole life to that point: his mother on that camping trip, the deer he saw in his back yard very early in the morning on his eighth birthday, the colour of his first car and of his first girlfriend's favourite hoodie slung across the back of the passenger seat, the number of roommates he'd had in college, a long thin gravel road bordered on both sides with dense stands of pines competing shoulder-to-shoulder for space, and the sudden circle of his car's headlights on--

        Adam inhaled sharply. He'd hit a sharp point and could remember nothing else. The tongue had found the cavity in the tooth, and recoiled at the pain of touching it.  He shook his head, flinging water from his hair again, and dried around his eyes with the heel of his hand.

        Above the sink was a mirror. It was scuffed, vandalized (Lucy evidently hearts Mike, he observed layered over the other scrawls in red nail polish), and cracking at the corners. Adam took stock of his unfamiliar reflection. Blue eyes and black hair, shaggy around the ears and back of the neck. Tall. Broad in the shoulders and lean, with plain clothes on the cheap side.

        He started digging through the pockets of his jeans, dumping the contents on the counter between the sink and the paper towel dispenser to his left. First there were the two coins from the blonde woman, of course. Then a brittle black plastic comb. He had a handkerchief in his back pocket, about half of it covered in motor oil stains. A number of crumpled receipts followed, mostly for food and gas stations, and one for a car rental. It was badly creased, and the phone number and address were unreadable. He'd never heard of the business name before.  Patting himself down once more, he found one last thing: a room key, with a number and address tag on it. Whether it went to a house, apartment, hotel, boarding house room, or shed, Adam couldn't guess. He gathered it all back up and put it back in his pockets, then picked up the wooden bar holding the bathroom key, and went back into the store, passing under the wet light of the oil lamp.

        Sharon was inside, talking with the blonde woman like old friends. They didn't see Adam enter, and he stood still for a moment observing them from behind the corner of the ice machine by the door.

        "I know, Steph, but did he seem OK when you were talking to him?" Sharon said, "He wasn't making much sense when I found him."

        "He'll be fine," Steph said confidently. Her elbow was propped on the book she was reading, and she rested her chin on the palm of that hand. It was a playful gesture, that made her suddenly seem younger, like talking to Sharon took her back in time. Steph's hair was blond turning platinum, put up with a lot of hairspray. Sharon's thin, fine hair was auburn--just beginning to salt-and-pepper--and cut very short, tucked up under a baseball cap. Steph wore floral prints with ornately painted nails in black and white art deco-like patterns. Sharon wore red flannel and plain blue denim.  She leaned on both elbows on the counter in front of Steph, crossing her arms between them.

        "He was fine," Steph said confidently, "You worry too much. He should be back any minute. And I cut him a deal."

        Adam took that as his cue. He coughed lightly, and Sharon and Steph both turned their heads to him, a little sharply. The metallic clank of the keys echoed around the store as he dropped them back on the counter.

        "Uh, hey..." he said, and it hung in the air for a moment like a strange smell, "Am I interrupting something?"

        "Nah, we just didn't see you there. Anyways, I gotta get going," Sharon said. She turned back to Steph and smiled at her warmly. "See y'later, sugar. I'll be back by tomorrow night."

        "And I'll be waitin'." Steph chirped, smiling back. Sharon leaned over the counter, and kissed Steph lightly on the lips. "You get outta here now, or you'll never leave."

        Sharon stole another quick kiss and headed back out the truck, beckoning Adam to follow. He hastily followed her out the door, nodding good-bye to Steph, who didn't notice him. Her eyes were already back on her book, with its unmarked charcoal-grey cover. Without taking her gaze off the page, she flipped open a key-chain knife and began to slice into a pomegranate.

        "What'd you decide?" Sharon asked him, as he caught up with her on the way to the truck.

        "Decide?" Adam asked hesitantly.

        "Yeah." Sharon said, opening the driver's side door, turning on the power in the cab, and unlocking the passenger side. "You know what they say: nobody rides for free. If you're staying on with me much longer, I'm gonna need ya to pony up."

        "Where are you going?" Adam asked. He glanced through the window as he pulled the door shut, into the endless badland night, and reflected that it didn't matter very much.

        "There's a city up ahead, Linn Borough, and the warehouse is there. I should be there dropping off this load by tomorrow afternoon." Sharon gestured behind herself towards the trailer of the big rig.

        "Then I guess I'm going to Linn Borough." Adam reached into his pocket and took out the two strange coins he'd gotten from Steph. "This is the closest thing I have to money."

        "I know," Sharon said with a knowing smile, "It'll do just fine." She took the two coins from Adam, and threw them in the glove compartment with a number of other coins. An even number. The glove box shut with a click, and Sharon yawned.

        "I've gotta get to sleep if I'm gonna get to Linn Borough on time tomorrow. There's only the one bed back there," she said, pointing behind her with her thumb. Adam looked behind the seats for the first time, and noticed a small bunk with a locked cabinet above it. A hotplate sat on top of a mini-fridge behind the driver's seat, and a TV and VCR sat on the floor behind the passenger seat. All them were plugged into a powerbar that was plugged precariously into a single outlet on the floor between them.

        "Don't let me intrude," Adam quickly supplied.

        "It wouldn't be too much of a bother, if you wanted to share the bunk tonight, and I promise there wouldn't be nothing happening." Sharon glanced back at the light from the window in the door of Steph's store. "You're not exactly my type."

        "No, no, it's fine. I'll sleep here in the passenger seat."

        "Well, suit yourself. That seat reclines, at any rate, so you can lay back comfortable. Pull the top lever under your seat on the right side. The top lever, mind. The second will move the whole seat backwards and knock over my TV."

        Without another word, Sharon went into the back of the cab and dropped herself into the bunk. Adam pulled the top lever beside him, and pressed back on the seat. The hinges dropped loosely and the seat fell back into a sleeping position. A few moments passed in silence, before a thought occurred to Adam, and he rifled in his pocket for that room key.

        "Hey, Sharon?"

        "Hm?" came a sleepy murmur from behind him.

        "Do you know where..." he looked at the key in the beam of soft yellow light through the driver's side window. "...37 Morten Street is?"

        "Number 37 itself doesn't ring any bells," Sharon muttered, "But Morten Street is in downtown Linn Borough."

        Adam frowned at the key. Having nowhere else to go, he'd go to this room. Room 7, at 37 Morten Street. His room, presumably, or at least had been at some point. And he'd find out what sort of man was Adam Freeman.

Adam didn't fall into sleep, but dissolve. A slow, cold tingle that rose from the tips of his fingers and ended on the edges of his consciousness. He had dissolved down to the tiny, shining speck of his own awareness, and he burned in a lightless void. 

He felt that he was hurtling at a great speed, in furious circles in the darkness, pulled in orbital arches by centrifugal force. There were others around him, all spinning around a central point, and they were all as small as him. He was the smallest mote of himself now, smaller than an ant, smaller than dust. Smaller than an atom. 

An electron. A single electron spinning around a nucleus that to him was impossibly vast. All just parts of a single atom. There were more atoms, there had to be.
Perhaps even entire molecules of them.

His thoughts turned outwards, and so did his flight, untethered from its course, like a moon slingshotted out into space as a comet by its own orbital decay. On a subatomic level, all objects are mostly empty space. He flew through that empty space like a rocket. The eclipsing sun of his nucleus began to diminish behind him as he flew faster and farther, though to a larger, wider viewpoint he'd never even left. Somewhere in his wake, he heard his nucleus and the neighbouring atom cry out.

Heard them, or just felt them, the enormous vibration of their voices. They were titanic to him, planet-like, orbited by little moons who were just like him.  Adam's human voice--which he only dimly remembered--might have sounded almost like this to a gnat. But they were afraid, and he could feel their terror like an earthquake.

"I've lost an electron!" one shouted at the other, "We're about to explode!"

"No!" the other said, "Are you sure?!"

"Yes," said the first, "I'm positive."


Adam's eyes snapped open at a heavy-handed shove on his shoulder. Sharon was there, shaking him awake in the overcast grey light of the morning. 

"You really must've been tired. Feeling better? We're already at the warehouse, you've been asleep since Steph's. She made a sandwich for you." Sharon gestured towards the dashboard. There was a ham and cheese on white bread with mustard and lettuce, crusts cut off, diagonally sliced, wrapped in cellophane and with a post-it note on top. In the translucent reflection of the sandwich in the windshield, he could see there was a smiley face drawn on the post-it note, and a big flowery signature from Steph. Another note was stuck to the middle of the steering wheel, this one with the addition of a heart with an exclamation point in it. Sharon's half-finished sandwich sat on the dash just behind the wheel. Adam took his sandwich, unwrapped one corner, and started to eat.

"So where are we?" he asked Sharon between bites, as casually as he could. He had the nagging feeling this was something he shouldn't be thinking about, like scratching at it would make it worse.

"Told ya. Linn Borough."

"And where's Linn Borough?"

"Right in front of you," she said slowly, gesturing widely with one hand at rolling chainlink gates  that stood half-open around the warehouse lot. "Road's right outside the shipping area."

"But what state is it in?"

"It's...it's fine. I suppose. I mean, it has its problems--"

"No, like province, state, territory, county, republic, principality...kingdom?"
Sharon raised one eyebrow and looked over his shoulder at the incoming road that lead between the warehouse lot and the highway. There were no other trucks coming down the line to fill up the empty lot. Now that Adam thought of it, he wasn't sure he'd seen anyone on the road at all but Sharon and her big-rig, but that was beside the point. 

"There's nothing else around here," Sharon added, "Linn Borough is in charge of itself. Has a mayor. Just a main highway to Linn Borough..."

"Where do you haul from?"

"Pardon me?"

"You said you're dropping off in Linn Borough. Where did you pick up? Where is the other warehouse? What are you hauling?"

"Well, what it is, is...fabric. Mostly. Let's say it's fleece. And it came from Linn Borough. This is all Linn Borough. Sort of. Technically. Like I said, it's the only thing around, so it's in charge of everything around here. So the whole place is in Linn Borough, except that's Linn Borough City. So I picked up the load in Linn Borough, and I drop it off in Linn Borough. Where else would it go?"

"What's past Linn Borough?"

"The desert. And you should know better than anyone," Sharon muttered. She was starting to sound annoyed.

"What's past the desert? If I kept going straight in any direction what would I find? What's the postal code of your warehouse? What would someone write on a letter to send it to me? I mean, where actually is the desert?" 

"Damnit, Adam, the desert is everywhere that isn't Linn Borough city, and Linn Borough city is everywhere that isn't desert! How many times do I have to say it?!" 

Sharon was angry now, and Adam couldn't quite pin down what he did to offend her. She picked up the uneaten half of her sandwich from the dashboard and continued eating it, staring straight ahead. 

After a moment, she aggressively wrenched the station knobs of the truck radio. They settled on nothing but a constant crackling static hiss. She rapped her knuckles against the steering wheel steadily, as if the whitenoise had a rhythm. Adam decided to drop it. 

He surveyed the lot through the passenger-side window as he ate the second half of his sandwich, an excuse to avoid eye contact with Sharon. It was bordered on the side opposite the gate by the back wall of a wide single-story warehouse. About a dozen loading bay doors lined the wall, most of them closed, except one about halfway along the row, that was open for Sharon to back her trailer into and unload. The centre of the lot was haunted by the sharp yellow haze of bug-filled halogen lamps that drew attention to themselves with sparks and crackles. 

When he finished eating, Adam opened his door and dropped onto the gravel, his sneakers crunching and his door thumping shut behind him. He rounded the front of the cab, that was dull grey with dust.  As he was walking away, he heard an electric whirring. It was Sharon rolling down her window. 

"Look," she sighed, "Com'ere." Adam walked back around the front of the truck to the driver's side. She opened the door, and looked down at him apologetically. "I'm sorry. I forget sometimes. But you're a nice boy, so I'll point you in the right direction. After you head out the gate, turn right. Go up that gravel path and it'll take you round the front of the building. You came in on Highway Y10-South Track. That joins to the the main street right there, straight shot downtown. Morten's right in the middle of everything, so you should find it pretty fast. Take the bus. Just go on through, it's the Sunday Express." she said as if that explained everything. She smiled warmly, "Good luck."

"Thanks..." Adam smiled, still uncertain exactly what they'd argued about.


The street in front of the office building attached to Sharon's warehouse was a dead-end that terminated near their front door. By the curb at the very end of the cul-de-sac was a bus shelter, a red metal structure with walls of opaque tinted Plexiglas. The street was lined on both sides with driveways down to supposedly identical warehouses, whose windows were dark and shuttered like sleeping eyes. 

There was nothing obviously special about the bus shelter. A metal and Plexiglas box as large a few feet on a side. Adam stood inside it for a couple minutes, staring absently off into the distance, waiting for some sign of the bus. As his attention started to wander, he searched futilely for a bus schedule, and found none posted inside or outside the bus shelter. The only thing at hand was a newspaper sitting on the middle seat of the uncomfortable busstop bench. It had "SUNDAY EDITION" spelled out in huge type. There was no headline and no specific date. Adam picked it up and paged through it for anything about the schedule for this Sunday Express, but it plunged directly into a complex discussion of local politics that assumed too much background knowledge to make sense to Adam. He tossed the paper back on the bench, and considered returning to Sharon and asking for transit directions. She'd already given him some, though.

"'Just go right on through...'" he murmured, and turned around to face the back of the bus shelter.

Standing face to face with the Plexiglas panel, he tentatively took one more step. His nose disappeared into the back wall of the bus shelter. His hand, his arm, his leg. He closed his eyes, and felt impelled to hold his breath. It was like stepping through a sheet of ice water. Stepping through a chilly pane, and out the other side...

Back through the entrance to the bus shelter, the way he came in. He looked around, standing outside the bus shelter again, but with the bus already sidled up at the curb. Its door was open, and he looked down to see his arm outstretched, with a transfer already in his hand. As he stepped onto the bus, the driver glanced at the crinkled transfer and waved him onto the bus. The doors closed behind him, and he took a seat by the window as the only passenger. 

The bus started to drive, and Adam watched the warehouses and factories pass. The bus lumbered past a sign directing traffic one way to downtown Linn Borough, and the  other back out to Highway Y-10 ST, and Adam leaned back in his seat, to watch the main part of the city come into view. The street began to widen, and grey smoke above a cityscape grew out of the horizon like a fungus. 

Linn Borough seemed dirty and oddly crowded together given the  massive sprawl of empty desert he knew surrounded it, presumably on every side. Pieces of the city seemed built on top of other pieces, with some parts of the city in a visibly more developed state than others. Aside from looking unfinished and cramped, Linn Borough was impossibly huge. The red flat of the desert that peeked between the squat grey warehouses had disappeared in the outer suburbs of the city to be replaced by identically made-up lawns and houses, and past them, the cement hive of the city marched away into the distance.

Adam tried to picture other cities he'd been in. The last city he'd been in. The city where he'd gotten that car rental business card. There had been oak trees in front of the lot.

Oak trees. Not a lot of those here. Not a lot of those for  hundreds and hundreds of miles, or more. Oak trees in front of the rental car lot, a road lined with pines. He peered out the window of the bus, catching glimpses between the last few factory offices of the cracked clay blurring past as they drew in to the residential areas. He had nothing in his head between his drive through those coniferous forests, and being addressed by the chicken on the hard-packed clay. But he could see there had sure been a lot of distance.


When he got off at Morten street, number 37 was mercifully close at hand. It turned out to be a bar, a pub-style place called "Morten's Flask". Adam paused outside a moment, wondering why he'd have the keys to a bar. The cluster of small copper bells hung over the door clamoured  sharply as he went inside.

A grey-haired head that was red in the face with annoyance peered from the next room.

"ADAM. GODDAMN. FREEMAN. Where in hell have you been, you haven't been in for weeks, I've left dozens of phone messages, you probably didn't even listen to them!" The short, balding man who he assumed to be his manager scuttled out from a kitchen in the back. He was wiping his hands on a dish towel, that he threw over one shoulder. "Do you have any idea how much heat I've had from covering for you?! They've wanted to fire you since you missed your first shift. I kept talking them out of it, and they weren't taking it anymore. This was literally the last chance. I'd just gotten off the phone with your damn answering machine again, trying to tell you as much, when you came in."

"I--I'm sorry. I'm, uh...really sorry. I guess I had some..." he paused, groping for an excuse, "Some things going on," he finished lamely.

"Yeah, well," his manager snapped, though the man was beginning to relent, "I guess it's somewhere we all go at some point. But you better have a good damn story for me. You even left all your crap here after your last shift before your little disappearing act. It's under the register."

Adam swallowed nervously.

"I'm sorry," 

"You wanna apologise?" the man sniffed, "You can do it by getting your ass to work already. Help get ready for the evening rush. Yep, people are gonna be crawling all over this place any second," the man said, gesturing around at the booths and barstools, then hurrying back into the kitchen. 

Adam stepped behind the bar and looked under the counter where the cash register sat, and found a backpack gathering dust. He unzipped it, and inside was an apparently random collection of things he didn't recognize, and in fact much of it looked like garbage to him now. There were receipts, pocket-sized notebooks, crumpled napkins, small coins of denominations that also weren't familiar to him, a flashlight, a green plastic army-man, another set of keys that he assumed were for his apartment, a pinecone, a bunch of small stones, and strangely, several entire fistfuls of acorns. A watch sat at the bottom of the bag, which he put on without a thought. It felt natural around his wrist.

He opened one of the notebooks, the newest-looking one that wasn't full yet, and started reading, hoping he'd find some kind of useful information. It was mostly grocery lists, reminders about errands, schedules for pay cheques from Morten's Flask. Only one note stood out to him, purely for its oddity. It was on a separate piece of paper that was stuck between the pages of the notebook and fluttered to the floor when Adam began to turn the pages. It was on a small black notecard, with a short list written in red pen with what was clearly his handwriting: "TO DO: BUY MILK. GET MAIL. FIND GOD". Adam stared at it a moment, trying to make sense of it, and had no idea why he'd write something like that. He threw it back in the bag, zipped the main compartment closed, and pushed it back under the counter.

Adam figured he'd better get down to what he was told was his work. He picked up a clean towel from beside the narrow bar sink and began to rinse out pint glasses and mugs, and arrange them on a slotted stainless steel rack that glinted in the low light. His hands worked automatically, and his eyes began to explore the reflection of the room in the mirrored bar-back. The green bottles and neon signs that sat against the mirror overlapped the room's reflection like a collage. The bar was decorated in warm wood worn smooth, and from the manager's kitchen he could smell barbecuing. The bar-top, seats and tables were classic woodgrain with black metal. The walls were lively red brick to about waist high. Above there, natural wood sideboards holding quirky knick-knacks wrapped all the way around, interspersed every few feet with mirrors in vintage frames. 

Among the collection of conversation pieces that sat on the shelves encircling the room, Adam spotted one just to his right, where the bar counter ended. It was an old kid's toy model of the solar system, and it looked a bit beat-up, even missing the earth. He took a half step back from the counter and scanned the floor. The little blue metal ball had rolled across the floor when it fell from its axis, and was resting under the sink, just beside where his foot was. He thought about reaching down to retrieve it, but didn't. The little planet, rolled out of its orbit, had reminded him of the dream he'd had, last night in Sharon's truck. A shiver reached up his spine. He tore his eyes away, casting them up to the bar-back mirror and ordering himself to think about something else. As his hands washed out one shot glasses one after another, his eyes wandered the bar's collection of vintage mirrors.

Over his shoulder, he noticed one right across from the bar mirror. They reflected each other, smaller and smaller and smaller, until they diminished out of sight. For the second time, he thought of his dream.  For the second time he tries to shake off the chill it gives him, and turns to distract himself with cleaning the bartop. 

The wood of the bartop was aged and refined, and full of intricate patterns and whorls in the strong, smokey lines of the grain. The tree must have been ancient when it was cut down, he mused. The swirling pattern of the grain seemed to warp the counter and create the illusion of a twisting, pitted surface, though as he polished it with the crisp white cloth, he could feel it was smooth. The cloth trailed like the tail of a comet behind his hand as he wiped the bar in wide circles. 

As his attention was lost to the wood of the bartop, his hand began to slow. The knots had a certain mottled quality that made their shapes evade the eye. The edges seemed to squirm and wriggle whenever his vision would try to get a grip on them. The shadows would shift around, and if he relaxed his eyes just a bit, then in every knot he could see a tiny face. Empty eyes, mouths open. Twisting around trying to look at him. Adam blinked forcefully, trying to dispel the image, and glanced at his watch. 

It had stopped ticking.

Behind him was the small sink, and just barely a finger's width from mouth of the tap, a droplet of water was suspended in the air like a freeze-frame. It was solid as a glass bead. 

The light in the warmly decorated pub seemed to be fading away, and the normal shadows of a room--under tables, in cupboards and corners under the bar--grew into the space the light left. Their growth was crawling and organic, like the vines that grow up over stone houses and eventually crush them to rubble. Vines of thready, hollow night. Wherever he put his eyes, it seemed to hold still, tense and waiting, but when each patch of darkness would slip back into his peripheral vision, it crawled as if it were a mass of spiders. Outside the windows, a fog was starting to roll in. Slowly and cautiously, he took the last mug from the sink, and put it on the rack with the others. There was no clink of glass. He tried to call out for the manager and could make no sound, like the breath was pulled right out of his throat.

Adam felt small again. Not like the dream, not sub-atomic and explosive. Just small. Like a mouse watching the shadow of a cat as it stalks closer around the corner. He could feel the cat drawing closer like an eclipse passing over the sun, a cat with sharp sickle claws, with bright eyes like scalpel incisions, with a razor-sharp smile, a whip-tongue and words like knives. 

This was not like last time, and it wasn't someone like Sharon he was waiting for this time. It smelled wrong. The air was pungent and metallic. It felt held in place by force like this moment wasn't frozen, but bound and gagged with a gun to its temple, like the second-hand of his watch was desperately straining to break the silence. Outside, the fog had rolled in thick as smoke and completely blocked out the light. The darkness that had crawled out from between floorboards and under doors turned towards the fog and started to flow into it, like a river rejoining the sea. 

This time would not be like the first. Something was coming through the fog. Adam stood perfectly still. So that maybe the fog would pass him by. So that the darkness would creep back into its corners. So the faces would melt back into the wood of the bartop.  

But the world was turning grey, and the wrapping tendrils of dark were more real than he was, now.

So, the dark wound its feelers around his legs. So the faces in the counter twisted towards him like diseased plants growing towards the sun. So, the black fog rolled up to the door of the bar and stopped, billowing like a cape outside the window. So, Adam held his breath, as seconds uncounted by the clock seem to stretch into eternities, because he knew it was here now. Right outside, and it wants to come in. So it will.


So, a man walks into a bar.