On his right, he saw a sign for a place that looked open.

“Hold up a sec, I want to stop off and get something,” Jack said as he angled his car into the right lane.

“Oh?”

“Completely—well not completely—but mostly out of beverages at my place, and hell, we might as well pick up some snacks while we’re at it,” he smiled.

“OK, cool. If you still want to stream a horror movie, I’m game, but I must be fed,” she giggled, patting her midsection.

This was going beyond Jack’s wildest dreams. She was a friend of a friend that he’d met over at Hunter’s place one night. She had been dragged along to Hunter’s by a girl named Sandra that Hunter had designs on. Alissa had probably only been there to give her friend an excuse to leave if Hunter had, well, hunted her too aggressively. Jack had been stunned by Alissa the second he’d laid eyes on her as they were entering the apartment.

It was the eyes that had really done it as far as he was concerned. All of her looked good to him but she had really vibrant green eyes that sparkled when she laughed, like emeralds being rolled around in someone’s hand on a sunny day. Eyes like that were the kind of eyes you dreamed about staring into and saying all the stupid crap you’d never admit you’d said when you talked to your friends later. Bad novel writers would spend a page and a half on those eyes.

At first, he’d been too afraid to approach her at all. She had looked completely out of his league and he had figured the poor girl had been dragged to this against her wishes. Not to mention she probably got leched on all the time wherever she went. But as the night had gone on, she had seemed increasingly bored and by herself every time he looked over. The last time he’d looked, she had been petting Hunter’s cat, Satan. Which was another good sign, because Satan rarely warmed up to new people and he had looked about to crawl into her lap. Stupid cats have all the damned luck.

Finally, it hadn’t been lust that drove him to talk to her. It had been more that she looked lonely, and frankly, he had only been talking to people he could talk to any time.

“Hi, you look bored out of your mind,” he had said by way of an opener.

She had smiled. “Well the cat’s nice.”

“Maybe to you. He usually doesn’t like new people. But I figured that was a good character reference, and you looked bored, so I figured I’d introduce myself,” Jack had replied.

She had scratched the cat under the chin, causing an eruption of purrs louder than even Hunter got from the cat, “Do you hear that? You count as a character reference; I may write you down on my next job application.”

Jack hadn’t been sure how to take that, so he had quickly said, “Of course, if you’re not bored, I can always convince Hunter to get another cat and I can piss off and go make friends with it. By the way, the cat’s name is Satan, so maybe you should leave that off the resume. Well, I guess it depends where you’re applying really.”

She had laughed, “No you’re fine, you’re wonderful in fact. I like the cat, but everybody here knows everybody else it seems, and yeah… I was pretty bored. Purring gets monotonous after a while.

And that had been that. They’d talked all through the rest of the evening until the girl she’d come with wanted to leave. Jack hadn’t had a leave option: Hunter always made him help clean up after these things since it was the only way the apartment was ever cleaned at all. But before she’d left, he’d gotten her Facebook and Twitter and a few days of back-and-forth conversation later, he had invited her to the concert by a band he knew she liked that he was indifferent towards.

If it turned out at the end of this that this was a friends thing, he’d live, but… He hadn’t kissed her or anything, frankly, and he was having fun and didn’t want to spoil it by being awkward. At the same time, he was almost positive that they might meet in the middle over a movie later. He really liked her a lot and was damned if he was going to screw this up, either the friendship part or the potentially more part.

The parking lot they pulled into was for a rundown-looking convenience store called “Beer ‘N’ Things.” It wasn’t much to look at but it didn’t have to be. It wasn’t like he was getting a hot dog here and had to risk food poisoning. You took your own life in your hands if you bought things that needed preparation in a place like this. Jack had learned that lesson long ago. He had plans for the evening and they didn’t involve spending the rest of it getting his stomach pumped. Go in, grab a few six-packs of beer and whatever she wanted, along with some nice pre-packaged, all-American junk food, and get out.

The window was so grimy that they could barely see inside. Thankfully, when Jack pushed the door open there wasn’t a robbery in progress, which would have been awkward. He’d have had no way of knowing from the outside and the last thing he wanted to do in life was startle an armed person in the middle of a tense crime situation. What he did find inside was the convenience store that matched the front of the building and the parking lot. Grimy aisles, dimly lit, a cashier who barely took notice of them behind bulletproof glass, all the marks of a dive convenience store. It wasn’t perfect but again, it didn’t have to be. Jack didn’t have very expensive tastes in beer and even the shittiest places carried Corona and Sam Adams.

Once they’d had visual confirmation that there was no robbery, they headed directly toward the coolers. They didn’t make it. They didn’t reach that destination because Alissa sudddenly said, “Fuck it.,” before pulling him sideways into an aisle.

She did that so she could kiss him, which she was in the process of doing even as she grabbed his coat and pulled him sideways.

Both of their eyes were closed when their bodies came to a stop. As far as first kisses went, it was a pretty good one. In fact, it was so good it changed the world. Because when Jack opened his eyes a second later, they were no longer in the aisle she’d pulled them in the direction of. Or in the convenience store she’d done it in.

“Holy shit,” Jack breathed.

“Mmmmmm?” Alissa said before opening her eyes. After which she said, “Holy shit!”

Because it was pretty accurate.

A stone wall had appeared behind them separating them from the nice, normal, grungy-looking convenience store they’d been in a minute ago. The aisle itself spread out in front of them, starting like normal racks of now unidentifiable sales items but slowly turning into stone walls in the distance. The items they could see close by had brand names that made no sense, like “Pain-Os” and “HackedoffFingers” though there were still “Whatchamacallits” even if the packaging looked different. At least the closest racks had packages, further down the racks held just globs of slime and mud and unidentifiable red things as they got smaller and the stone walls behind them got more pronounced. Within twenty feet of where they stood, there just ceased being anything even remotely like a store, and the aisle turned completely into a passageway out of Dungeons and Dragons vanishing into the dark. The sole neon light that had survived the transition sizzled and sparked before flickering out, leaving them with only the yellow light provided by what appeared to be torches set up high in the walls further away.

“What, the, flying, holy, sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, fuck?” Jack said slowly.

Alissa, who was still looking over his shoulder after they had broken apart, pointed.

There was a rack of objects off to one side of the wall that had appeared to seal them in. A sign above it proclaimed it held, “WEAPONS! LIGHTS! DON’T GET CAUGHT IN THE DARK WITH ONLY YOUR FINGERS IF YOU WANT TO KEEP THEM ATTACHED!”

There was another sign dead center on the wall itself written in a combination of big type and practically microscopic type. Jack moved forward to read it better in the flickering torchlight.

“Welcome to THINGS!”

For your convenience and comfort, we have provided a selection of weapons as well as numerous headlamps. All our way of saying thank you for shopping at BEER ‘n’ THINGS!  Don’t worry about bloodstains on the floor—they add ambiance—no need to report it to the cashier; he won’t be coming in to clean up. So, enjoy your adventure! Find the path to the exit and WIN!

(in very small print under that) By entering “Things”, you have released “Beer N Things” from indemnity in the case of loss of life, disfigurement, or any other form of injury, including mental anguish. This does not require a signature. It only requires entering the premises. We checked with a lawyer and yes, we can do that.”

And under that in larger type…

“GOOD LUCK”

Jack finished reading and said, “I stand by what I said a moment ago.”

Alissa nodded, “And I agree with that assessment completely. Should we grab stuff?”

Jack hit the wall next to the sign with his fist, hard. As he shook his hand in pain he replied, “Well we’re not getting out that way, I don’t know what choice we’ve got.”

“Check your cell. Maybe we can call for help?” Alissa said, happy to have thought of a solution that might be quick and easy.

Jack quickly pulled his phone out but could only confirm what she saw when she did the same, “No bars, I guess we go for weapons and lights.”

Alissa nodded and began to rummage around through the various things that lined the shelves. The throwing stars seemed pointless; she would barely be able to hit the broad side of a barn with them. There were no guns, which seemed a shame but there were lots of different swords that she also passed on. Finally, she decided on a baseball bat, with numerous spikes sticking out of it from various different angles. She figured it poked and added concussive force to any discussion—the swords only poked, so it was a comparative judgment call.

She looked up to see Jack carefully hefting a two-sided ax.

“Are you even going to be able to swing that thing?”

He grunted giving it a test swing, “Hey, I’ve got a gym membership.”

That did not feel like the answer she wanted. Especially after he stuffed the throwing stars into his pocket. She saw there were different knives available and she quickly stuffed a couple into her pants pocket and her jacket, “Grab a knife.”

“But I have the stars,” Jake protested.

“For up close,” she replied witheringly as she checked the lights.

“Oh shit, you’re totally right, I’m an idiot,” Jack replied. She noted that he didn’t take the macho route there and argue with her, so point there. But he kinda did go all macho over the ax, so call it a draw.

They took off walking. Alissa was trying not to notice the various dark stains on the floor and the walls. She was pretty sure she knew what they were and she really didn’t want to think about it. She liked Jack, quite a bit actually. If the night had gone according to her plans he’d have had a really good rest of the night. The thing was, how well did she really know him? Talking online was one thing but this was a life and death situation. And here she was with a guy who thought throwing stars would be of any use. Maybe he’d turn out to not be a liability but how could she know that until it was too late? If she hadn’t kept turning down Justin from Ken-Po class, she wouldn’t be in this mess. Of course, she’d probably be in an entirely different mess since Justin didn’t strike her as the “No means no” type. But he did a decent kata and would probably be of more use here than Jack, who was cute and sweet and nonthreatening and she doubted that whatever caused those bloodstains responded well to cute. Nothing could change it now. She’d just have to hope that Jack proved to have hidden depths. Lord knew Justin didn’t. He had open quagmires.

They had come to a T-intersection. Since both directions showed nothing further than their headlamps could penetrate, it presented a quandary.

“Which way. O great and mighty guide?” Alissa asked.

Jack looked deep in thought for a second before saying, “To the right. Call it a hunch.”

She was just about to agree with him when a voice came out of the darkness to the left. “Come ‘ere baby… give us a kiss…” it hissed.

What stepped out of the gloom and into their light was ridiculous but no less lethal-looking for it. Stepping toward them was something that had the shape of a man but composed entirely of sharp chrome spikes. There were no eyes, no mouth, no anything in any direction except spikes (well except maybe the soles of its feet, which were out of sight). Even… you know… that… was just one slightly longer spike in a sea of spikes.

As soon as it knew they had seen it, the spiky monster began to sprint towards them with an amazing turn of speed. Alissa and Jack stood there, still trying to process what they were seeing. Finally, a light bulb went off for Alissa. As soon as the monster came hurtling directly at her, at the last possible second, she just stepped deftly to the side.

At this point, they discovered that the thing must have had spikes on the soles of its feet as well. Its attempts to stop itself sent up little sparks off the stone floor until with a loud clang it hit the wall just past them. And stuck.

“Well that was stupid,” Alissa said.

“Still, if it had managed to catch you…”Jack replied.

Alissa nodded her head, “Oh yeah, lethal. I mean if it had an ounce of brains or coordination we’d have been in trouble.”

They both watched it as it struggled to try and extract itself from where it had stuck into the wall.

“Good turn of speed, I mean to get stuck in stone like that,” Jack said.

“No doubt. Oh well, let’s get going.”

As they marched down the right-hand corridor, they ignored the muffled voice behind them asking, “Little help?”

They walked in silence for a while without further incident. There was no animosity; it was just that both of them were still trying to process this very much so and very truly fucked up situation for one. Not to mention both of them worried about attracting attention from whatever else was hiding down here. Finally, Alissa broke and said, “So, what in the hell do you think this is?”

Jake smiled a bit, “Well, I don’t watch AS much Sci-Fi as I look like I do but if I was to have a guess, I’d say some kind of pocket dimension or something. Why the hell did someone think it was a good idea to put a convenience store over it? Anyone’s guess.”

His light flashed off of something in the distance. With trepidation, they crept a little closer only to discover it was a stack of boxes.

Jack tried to make out the writing, “Are those 24 packs of beer? Are they using this for overflow storage?”

Alissa squinted ahead, “Look a little closer. Read the labels.”

“Milwaukee’s Beast?”

“Sick minds are at work here,” she replied.

“I don’t know. That’s what we used to call it in college,” he replied with a shrug. “Maybe the manufacturer just finally embraced it?”

Their conversation was cut off by a male voice yelling from behind the boxes, “You can’t fool me monsters! I warn ya’  I got weapons! Don’t come any closer!”

The hall that they’d been traveling down was silent for a moment.

Finally, Alissa said in an even voice, “Maybe you shouldn’t have shouted that so loud. I mean we aren’t monsters but that seems to me to be the kind of thing that attracts monsters.”

There was a deep quiet for an additional moment. The kind of quiet that indicates someone is doing mental arithmetic and coming up with the, “I’m a moron” sum at the end.

“You aren’t monsters?” said whoever was hiding behind the boxes.

“Nope,” Jake replied.

Another moment of silence was followed by the noise of something quietly rustling from further down the hall. That quiet was shattered when a human man covered in grit and grime burst through the boxes sending beer cans and boxes flying everywhere. “OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT!!” he yelled as he ran in their direction.

He was almost to them when he fell to the ground, a gray tentacle grasping his ankle.

“HELP!”

Common sense said he might be more dangerous than whatever was grabbing him, considering his previous outburst. It also normally would have pointed out that whatever it was, the horror with tentacles had grabbed the guy, which meant it was now busy and might be bypassed. Unfortunately for Jack, he had a big ax, and common sense had stepped out back real quick for a smoke in the face of the testosterone created by having a big ax. Before he could stop himself, he’d rushed forward and swung the ax at the tentacle which split easily in a spray of something purple that he could only suspect was blood.

After he saw the man scramble off in the direction of Alissa, Jack turned to look down the hall to see what had grabbed him. It could have been described as an octopus. It had the great big eye and it had numerous limbs which usually counted as tells. Of course, it seemed to have more than eight of those tentacles, which was probably a disqualifier right there. Being in a hallway instead of the ocean was another issue, as was the giant mouth below the eye that was full of razor-sharp teeth. All of that seemed to add up to, “Not actually an octopus but I lack the life experience in inter-dimensional horrors to think of anything else.”

Jack had just reached that conclusion and had taken the throwing stars out of his pocket to avoid getting close to it when it decided to remind him as to how far its reach was. The creature did that by wrapping a tentacle around his waist and beginning to drag him towards the drooling maw of teeth.

The throwing stars clattered to the ground, completely useless to him.

Unfortunately for Jack, what was wrapped around him was not the very end of a tentacle like what had caught the stranger but the big thick meat of one where all the real strength was. Not to mention, the way the thing jerked him about to and fro on his way to becoming a quick Jack Snack made it almost impossible to get a good swing in with his ax. He could barely hold onto his lunch, holding on to the ax was only a secondary consideration, using it was way beyond his abilities. The violent motion did not prevent him from getting a look at where he was heading or from being able to consider all of those really long, really sharp-looking teeth. It seemed unfair that those teeth had no problem remaining in focus as he was buffeted about.

Suddenly the monster squalled in pain and released him reflexively. Jack just had time to see the throwing star protruding from its eye before he hit the ground with a bone-shaking thud. He lay there for a moment contemplating oxygen and if his body would ever be able to enjoy its benefits again. As he did, a specific sound got through to him. A meaty, thunking, squelching noise to be specific. Oh, yeah, horrible creature, eat them all! He should probably help do something about that.

He rolled to his feet grabbing up the ax from where it had fallen to the floor. Alissa was brutally whacking away at various tendrils, sending out sprays of purple in all directions with her own multi-faceted implement of destruction. The big main body of the thing was not amused; it looked downright peeved about the whole situation. As much as it looked at anything, since it was squinting hard because of the throwing star striking it right in the eye. Which is why your mother never wanted you and your kid brother to have them and you had to buy them off that one kid who had the dirtball older brother.

Jack viewed the monstrosity’s distraction as an opportunity. He moved in as quickly as his sore body was able and started wailing away on the disgusting thing’s main body with the ax. It kept jerking away its enormous eye instinctively shifting the body everywhere but it didn’t stop Jack from getting some brutal shots in, coating him with sticky purple goo.

The creature let out a squall, its breath catching Jack directly in the face, making him thankful that he didn’t have a full meal. It moved backward with as much speed as it was able, leaving trails of purple blood in its wake. As wounded as it was, it made good time and soon enough it vanished from their lights.

“Thanks for the save there,” Jack smiled at Alissa.

She wiped a glob of purple off her face before replying, “I can’t believe that ninja star crap actually worked!”

“You know, I think I finally figured out what that thing reminded me of,” Jack said.

“Oh?”

“If it had been green, which it wasn’t, this pocket dimension would be served a cease and desist by the Simpson’s lawyers.”

The man who had been reduced basically to rags and a pair of Converse High Tops turned out to be named Kyle.

“So how long have you been here?” Alissa asked.

He shook his head, “I really don’t know. It feels like weeks but with no clocks, the battery on my phone that ran out ages ago and no sun, I just don’t know. I’ve been feathering my headlamp, using it as little as possible.”

“How in the hell do you find your way around here with no light?” Jack asked.

“And what in the hell have you been eating?” Alissa added looking over at Kyle as they walked.

“It’s actually not pitch dark down here, there’s like a low luminescence once your eyes adjust. As far as food, remember those racks from the beginning? You find stuff like that scattered about. I guess it’s less fun if you starve to death.”

Jack looked slightly aghast, “What does that stuff even TASTE like?”

Kyle sighed, “Liver. Even the beer. Either of you got a Slim Jim or something? I hate liver.”

“Sorry. Hey, has anyone but keeping track of turns?” Alissa asked.

“I have, I have a direction in mind,” Jack replied. “I have a pretty good sense of direction.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right. Just a second guys; look up ahead. Oh, and for the record, I agree. Liver is gross,” Alissa changed the course of the conversation three times without regard to anyone’s ability to keep up.

Everyone peered into the darkness ahead of them. But the thing was, it was no longer all darkness ahead of them at all, they could see a square of light off in the distance.

“Holy shit! I think that’s the exit. I never thought I’d see it!” Kyle burst out, practically hopping in place with joy.

He darted forward, only to freeze a moment later. The light had vanished. It had vanished behind the gigantic thing that had stepped out of the darkness. The thing that let out a thunderous roar.

“ROAR!” it said.

It was brown and man-shaped, just much, much bigger than they were. Its skin, such as it was, looked like leather plates. It was indeed something that looked like a thing. Its mouth was wide, its nose almost non-existent, Drool fell from its enormous mouth.

“IT’S SLOBBERIN’ TIME,” it yelled.

Everybody froze.

“Really?” Jack finally broke the silence.

Even Kyle looked disgusted, “I’m going to get killed by something doing comic book jokes.”

The creature roared again before hurtling down the huge hallway in their direction. Kyle darted off to the side, and the creature went right on by. Jack thought this was completely unreasonable. If it had stopped for Kyle they might have been able to wound it critically while it was busy pounding the newcomer into a pulp.

It seemed like even before Jack could raise the ax into a defensive position, the monstrosity took a swing at him causing Jack to flatten himself to the ground. There was a resounding boom when the creature’s fist slammed into the wall. From Jack’s viewpoint on the ground, he could see Alissa sliding under the thing’s bowed legs while it was distracted. Great. Instead of using Kyle as a distraction, everyone else was going to use HIM as a distraction while they ran for it.

The thing loomed over Jack. Looming was something this monster had a natural ability for and it did it well. With Jack prone as he was, the whole looming thing worked even better. The monster brought both fists up to turn Jack into a gooey paste on the floor when suddenly, it paused. It began waving its arms in the air and spinning in a circle.

As it turned completely around, Jack could see that it wasn’t because of a sudden desire to dance badly. Alissa clung to its back by a knife she’d wedged between its plates. The creature was just too damned bulky to effectively reach where she was hanging on, but Jack worried that it would only be a matter of time before it caught her leg or something.

He got up and took a swing at one of its legs to distract it when they went whipping by again. This earned a yowl of anger but didn’t seem to be putting it off its main objective. Very single-minded, which unfortunately for their little crew was probably a good trait for a monster to have.

Alissa called down, “Give me your ax! It’s vulnerable here, but I can’t get the damned knife deep enough.”

Well, easy, he’d be right up there with the ax and just hand it over. How hard could it be? Just climb up this enraged monster and hand her the ax. Easy as pie.

Jack was pretty sure he was about to get killed here.

Saying a quick prayer to whichever Saint looked out for total idiots, he grabbed the creature’s arm as it went flying by and scrambled as high as he could.

“Quick, take the thing!” he yelled.

He had no idea if Alissa had gotten the ax. As the monster’s arm whipped him off he only had the briefest moment to enjoy being airborne. All he knew was that he didn’t have the ax anymore. Then all he knew was that it got really bright with a flash of pain and then it got really dark with enforced sleepy time. 

“While you’re adorable when you’re asleep, we might want to get a move on,” a decidedly feminine voice called out of the dark to him.

“Just five more minutes,” Jack grunted.

“I’d like to think you’d want to get out of here while we have the chance,” the voice said.

All of it came back to Jack, crashing down over him like a tidal wave of weird. His eyes snapped open, then quickly shut again, “Oh sure, the nice stuff had to be the dream. The reality had to be the horrible stuff that felt like a dream. Also, my head hurts.”

“If we get out of here, I’ll get you some Excedrin,” Alissa replied encouragingly.

Groaning, Jack opened his eyes to see Alissa staring down at him smiling. He managed a weak smile back, “I don’t know, this is the best view I’ve had all day.”

She laughed lightly and held out her hand, “Let’s get going, and maybe you’ll get the same view without the horrific surroundings.”

Jack got to his feet begrudgingly. He was immediately happy to see the beast lying there looking deceased and even happier to see the light shining off in the distance without the creature’s bulk to hide it.

“What happened to Kyle?”

She shrugged, “He took off for the light, I let him. Figured if it was a trap, let him find out first since he was so eager. I haven’t heard any screams so I figure we’re in the clear.”

“Good thinking.”

It didn’t take long to cover the last bit of distance. While both of them had their ears perked up, no sounds were forthcoming in front of them. It seemed like the rocky leathery thing was what was supposed to keep them from leaving and both of them really wanted to believe that.

Coming up to the light, they saw that it looked to be a glass door. Better yet, the door looked like it led to an honest-to-God dingy convenience store, which is not a view that usually brings as much joy as they were feeling at the moment. 

Jack pushed and the door opened with a thwop as the weather stripping around it released.

They practically fell out into the store.

A red light started going off. They both ducked instinctively until a recorded voice started squawking, “WE HAVE A WINNER!”

Looking up they saw Kyle pulling stuff off of shelves and the same disinterested clerk behind the glass watching them. He saw them and gave a half-hearted wave followed by a thumbs up.

Stumbling a bit they made their way to his little bulletproof booth.

“What in the hell?” Alissa demanded.

The clerk rattled off in a monotone, “Congratulations on winning the Things challenge. Each of you are entitled to fifty dollars’ worth of merchandise, valid for this visit only.” He paused and added, “Hey, well done, the other guy told me he thought you guys were dead when he came out.”

“To be fair, that thing looked unkillable,” said Kyle over his shoulder as pulled more stuff off the shelves.

“You should warn people,” Jack said indignantly.

Sighing, the clerk replied, “I keep telling the boss we should put up more warnings but the boss never listens. We got just those two.” The clerk pointed to a little placard by the door, and to the floor in front of the aisle they’d vanished down, where “THINGS” had been painted in red but was now scuffed and partially illegible without squinting.

“Why in the hell do you even keep the place open with stuff like that in here?” Alissa asked.

The clerk shrugged, “The boss thought it would be a tourist attraction. You know, like a ride or something. And since almost no one makes it out he doesn’t pay up very much, so he views it as a win. Three in one night is some kind of record I think.”

“That’s insane,” Alissa said.

The clerk managed another shrug, “I just work here sister.”

“How does that even happen?” Jack demanded.

“Look buddy, I make 12 bucks an hour working here, I don’t make ‘understands inter-dimensional portal magic’ money,” the clerk smirked.

“Valid,” Alissa agreed.

Jack turned to Alissa, “Look, I am really, truly sorry this ruined our night.”

She smiled, “Hey, how many people can say they’ve done that on a first date? And, we can seriously load up for a hundred bucks of stuff to hang out with.”

“You mean you’re not going straight home?”

“Well, I am, but only to pick up some clothes. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve got purple glop all over us. But assuming the very earth doesn’t swallow us up next, Netflix and a hundred bucks of booze and junk food. I’d say we’ve earned it!”

I hope the next appointment would go half as well, he thought. I have my doubts.

Andrew Campbell, Head of Operations, remained with him as requested. The two men left the conference room for Dardene’s office.

A few minutes later, Dardene’s clerk announced his visitors. Dr. Marielle Vos, of the European Space Agency and Brigadier General Gregory Holhauer, of the US Space Force, entered Dardene’s office. The parties exchanged introductions and pleasantries. Vos and Holhauer were offered refreshments. Both requested coffee. The meeting began.

General Holhauer fired the opening salvo. “We are here to get you to agree to stop plundering satellites.” Dardene looked perplexed. Vos was embarrassed.

“What do you mean, General? You want us to stop policing space junk?” Rene asked, trying to act surprised.

“That’s what I mean!” blustered the General.

“I would ask why. We don’t touch functioning craft. We are removing obsolete space junk from orbit. We recycle the components and prevent collisions with active satellites.”

“Because the satellites belong to the country who launched them. Your actions border on piracy!” Holhauer blustered.

“General, are you aware of maritime law?” Campbell queried.

“What does maritime law have to do with satellites?” the General replied.

“Piracy is defined under maritime law. If a ship is abandoned on the ocean, whoever finds it can claim salvage rights. The finder files a claim in an Admiralty Court to establish their right to the vessel. That’s not piracy,” Campbell explained.

“And?”

“We are finding abandoned satellites and claiming salvage rights,” Campbell replied.

“Is that the reason for all your claims in various Admiralty Courts?” Dr. Vos queried.

“You are correct, ma’am,” Dardene replied. “There is no specific international law on salvage rights in space. We are applying well-established international maritime law. Claims under maritime law are far from piracy. Numerous Admiralty Courts, including the United States courts, have accepted and adjudicated our claims,” Dardene said in measured tones.

A wave of uneasy understanding washed over Ms. Vos. The General charged on.

“The courts lack authority in space,” the General asserted. “You must cease.”

“Have you spoken to your Justice Department? If there is no admiralty law in space, there can be no piracy. Treaties governing a nation’s actions in space exist. Consequently, courts do have authority, General,” Dardene retorted evenly.

Dardene and Campbell expected the discussion. Rejenerate was an international recycling company. Three years ago, Rejenerate had started recycling space junk. No one had noticed until now.

“If you will come with me, please? We have something to show you,” Campbell said.

The Rejenerate executives led their guests to a conference room. Shrouded items covered the conference table. Campbell removed a shroud revealing a pile of twisted metal and plastic.

“General, who put the stuff in front of us in orbit? You can examine the material if you like. There are gloves on the table.” Campbell said.

The General put on the gloves. He picked up several pieces of metal and plastic.

“Who launched the things you are holding, General?”

“Damned if I can tell,” the General snorted.

“We can’t either. The items are derelict. How is picking up this stuff bordering on piracy?” Campbell retorted.

The General was perplexed. “There must be some way to identify the launching nation.” the general replied with less force.

“There is no way to tell after over eighty years of launch failures, collisions, satellites dying, sunspots, and meteorite collisions. These items were wrapped around each other. Some of the metal was American. Some were French. Other components came from Brazil. No markings or serial numbers. Any of those nations might have launched the items. Or another nation bought components and launched them. Let’s move on.”

Campbell moved to the next pile. He removed the shroud covering a battered satellite with American markings.

Campbell explained, “You are looking at an American satellite launched in the early 1970s. The satellite was not functioning. We brought it back to Earth and filed an admiralty claim. After our claim succeeded, we contacted NASA and offered them the satellite. They declined. We have gone through the same process numerous times. We have dealt with your agency repeatedly, Dr. Vos. So why are you here?” Dardene queried.

“You were in contact with my agency?” Vos asked hesitantly.

“Multiple times. Do you want copies of our correspondence?” Dardene offered.

“Yes, please”.

Dardene called his clerk and asked for copies of the correspondence.

While they waited for the documents. Dardene commented, “In all such cases, we offered to return the satellite. We ask for our cost to retrieve the satellite and ship it. To date, we have had no takers. I don’t remember Black Beard ever offering to return his loot. How are we pirates?”

The clerk appeared with two thick envelopes sparing Holhauer an answer. She handed one to Vos, the other to Holhauer.

“Those are copies you can take with you. Let’s move on to our last example,” Campbell said. He pulled the sheet off the final stack. On the table was a battered metal object. The object was once probably about the size of a beach ball. It was scarred and deformed.

“We found this with no operational systems and no distinctive markings. We X-rayed it and found nothing to identify the launching nation. We have no idea which nation put this in space. How could we tell, General?”

Much of the General’s spunk had dissipated. “I don’t have an answer, Mr. Campbell.”

“We didn’t either. Let’s return to my office where we can talk more comfortably,” Dardene suggested.

Once they were all seated. Dardene restarted the conversation. “We recycle what we find. What we take is obsolete and not operational. Many people think our actions are commendable. I must ask again, why did you come?”

Mr. Dardene’s guests fidgeted. He continued, “A trip to our South Pacific headquarters is no small undertaking. Ms.Vos, you traveled about twenty-three hours, and General, you traveled about eighteen hours.” Dardene said.

“I came because I didn’t believe the reports of your retrieving satellites. I needed to see proof,” Ms. Vos replied.

“Commendable, coming here yourself but your explanation isn’t sufficient. Would you please answer my question?” Dardene asked.Holhauer and Vos exchanged glances.

“I guess I’d better put my cards on the table,” the General conceded. “We know Rejenerate is a privately held recycling company originally chartered in Grand Cayman. You began by recycling the trash building up in the Pacific. Initially, your factories were on ships. You had success. You built a headquarters and recycling complex on oversized drilling platforms around an unclaimed chain of atolls. Am I right so far?”

“Reasonably close, General. Please, continue,” Dardene replied in even tones.

“You branched out to retrieve satellites. You have not contracted with any space company or government for launching or retrieving vehicles. We don’t understand how you can do it. You can’t be launching rockets off these platforms without destroying them. Several space and intelligence agencies have failed to deduce a reasonable answer. We came hoping to find out,” the General finished sheepishly.

“You could have asked our representatives. I will give you a brief overview. I am surprised you haven’t figured it out,” Campbell began. “We use a mix of old and new technologies. Everyone has read science fiction and thinks rockets launch vertically. Has either one of you heard of the X-15?”

“I believe I might have,” Holhauer began tentatively. “Wasn’t it an experimental American aircraft?”

“You are correct, sir. X-15s flew suborbital missions in the 1960s. The X-15 launched from a B-52. We use a similar approach. To date, we use multiple blimp drones to lift our vehicles. The vehicles are unmanned, saving the weight of life support systems. Once we reach the desired altitude, the blimps drop the vehicle. The vehicle falls clear of the blimps and lights its engine.”

“Our system consists of two vehicle types: scouts and retrieval containers,” Campbell continued. “Scouts are placed in orbit from retrieval containers. The scouts are small and work in packs. They are dispatched to a location to search for derelict satellites. When enough items are found and marked, a retrieval container arrives. The scouts refuel from the container and fill it with derelict items. The container returns to Earth. Our recovery fleet retrieves the container” Campbell explained.

“Can we see your vehicles?” Vos asked.

“No. Our design is proprietary. Your presence underscores the value of our technology,” Campbell replied.

“Is there value in space junk?” Vos asked.

“It’s not all junk,” Dardene said. “The electronics are old and worthless.  Most satellites contain gold, silver, or other rare metals. The metals are very profitable.”

 General Holhauer acted like his backbone had grown back and was about to launch a fusillade.

Dardene stopped him. “General, before you make threats, you overlooked something. We have observer status at the UN. Our platforms cover a greater area than Monaco. We granted employees dual citizenship giving a substantial population. Do you want to threaten a sovereign entity?”

General Holhauer wasn’t expecting Dardene’s comment. He wasn’t sure what to say.

“Are there any other questions I can answer?” Dardene asked quietly. Both his guests shook their heads no.

“You are welcome to spend the night. We have suites prepared for you. Our CEO will be delighted if you join him for dinner.” Dardene offered.

Vos and Holhauer conferred briefly and declined. Campbell ordered the helicopter to be readied. In about half-hour, Dardene and Campbell saw their guests on their flight.

Once the copter was airborne, Andrew commented, “That wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

“It was too easy. They could have saved days with a video conference. Touching space junk isn’t a good enough reason. We need to brief Jason,” Rene replied.

Dardene and Campbell entered the office of Jason Ottoson, Rejenerate’s CEO. They summarized their meeting with Vos and Holhauer. They also reported that the scans of the pair’s luggage had revealed nothing extraordinary.

“What would you suggest we do next?” Ottoson began.

“We should push the development of the sky crane forward. The sky crane can launch more containers and may be able to catch a retrieval container inflight. We would be less vulnerable to someone’s navy showing up in our retrieval zone,” Dardene suggested.

“I am not taking the option off the table. But I don’t want to rely on untested technology. You mentioned the retrieval force. Ours is still three rebuilt destroyers?” Jason asked.

“Yes, sir. We abandoned our effort to get a submarine. The problem was the armament. Torpedoes are not plentiful. We may be stuck with surface ships if we want a larger fleet.” Campbell reported.

“How sure are we of the loyalty of the crews?” Ottoson asked.

“Our crews are a collection of competent international rejects. We should be good if they are well paid, well treated, and not badly outgunned. Each ship has a special armaments section staffed by our people. The captains think it’s just electronic warfare. They have no clue what it can do,” Campbell responded.

“I suggest we enlarge the recovery force and start recovering some containers away from our base,” Rene suggested.

“Why?” Ottoson asked.

“A diversion. We plop down a relatively valueless container next to us. At the same time, we drop a valuable container hundreds of miles away. If the ship picking up the container looks like a normal supply run, it may not get much attention,” Dardene said.

“Reasonable idea,” Ottoson responded. Turning to Campbell, he said, “Get me a cost estimate to double our fleet. I need a time estimate, not just cost.”

He continued, “Gentlemen, let’s talk about the unthinkable, the destruction and evacuation of our platforms. We planned for the eventuality. We have added more platforms. More people work for us. I need to know the hardware and procedures in place. I also want our people to refresh themselves on the procedures.”

Dardene and Campbell were both shocked. “Surely you aren’t suggesting …” Dardene began.

Ottoson cut him off. “I am not planning to go anywhere. We don’t know whom our visitors work for. I want to be ready for anything. We may have gotten complacent and sloppy. Report any drone activity to me. I expect drones to start making more appearances. Do not electronically shield our platforms.”

Dardene and Campbell were relieved. Talk about detailed assignments followed. Normal operations were to continue. The sky crane program accelerated.

General Holhauer stood in front of Lieutenant General Henry Zugfahren’s desk. General Zugfahren was the US Space Force’s Chief of Intelligence. While General Holhauer waited, General Zugfahren paged through Holhauer’s report.

“Have a seat, General”, Zugfahren said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I have been through your report. It looks like you went halfway around the world for a cup of coffee. What happened?”

“Sir, that is pretty accurate. I haven’t figured out the reason for my trip. My orders said I was to demand that Rejenerate stop grabbing satellites. I made the demand. They brushed me off. Why we sent anyone is a mystery to me. Sir, do you know the reason for the trip?”

“General, I understand your confusion. Your orders were poorly drawn. We need to learn about their launch technology. We could care less about the space junk,” General Zugfahren replied.

“Was their comment about using blimps to launch space vehicles news, sir? Sounds preposterous to me.”

“Holhauer, you did confirm what we suspected. Let me fill you in. We keep a count of items in orbit. The count is not exact. For months, the number of items dropped significantly. We started to pay attention when we got a report from the International Space Station of a vehicle beginning re-entry. The report included pictures of retrorockets firing. No one we knew of was planning to bring anything back to Earth. We picked up the item on the radar over Australia. It was headed north of Samoa. We thought it was going to open the ocean. We asked the Navy what was around the coordinates where we thought the vehicle would land. After several days, they sent us these.”

General Zugfahren handed General Holhauer an envelope marked SECRET. The envelope held aerial photographs of the Rejenerate complex. Holhauer was amazed.

“Sir, these are old pictures. I know their complex is bigger than this.”

“You are right, General. The Navy had to scramble to find these. A photo-reconnaissance expert found Rejenerate’s logo on a building. A lot of sleuthing followed. Your trip was part of the sleuthing. You and Vos are the first two persons who don’t work for Rejenerate to visit the complex.”

“Your trip wasn’t a total waste. The Rejenerate people were close-lipped. They helped explain this,” Zugfahren handed Holhauer another SECRET envelope. Holhauer extracted a picture.

“Puzzled?” Zugfahren asked.

“Yes, sir,” Holhauer responded.

The picture showed five Rejenerate platforms forming the letter X. In the junction was a rocket lying on its side. A blimp filled each of the other four platforms. Cables ran from the blimps to the rocket.

“The picture shows a space vehicle about to launch. The comment about blimps helped us figure it out. We need to understand their technology. Any ideas?”

“I did not see any defensive positions. Could we ask the Navy to make a show of force? Just talking off the top of my head, sir.”

“Negative. They have UN observer status. If the Navy shows up, people will be screaming at the UN. Did they show you their recovery fleet?”

“No, sir.”

Zugfahren gave Holhauer a third SECRET envelope. Holhauer pulled out another picture showing three destroyers, fully armed.

“That is their recovery fleet. It’s another old picture. It could be bigger,” General Zugfahren commented.

“How did they do that?” asked a shocked Holhauer.

“How they did it doesn’t matter. On the whole, well done, General Holhauer. You won’t repeat anything we discussed without my permission. Understood?”

“Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Has Vos’s agency done anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Is there anything else, sir?”

“No. Thank you. Dismissed.”.

General Holhauer stood, saluted, and left. General Zugfahren had a problem.

The month after Holhauer and Vos’s visit was busy on the Rejenerate platforms.      Dardene and Campbell were meeting with Ottoson in his office.

“We have had a hectic month. I called this meeting to be sure we are on the same page. Andrew, why don’t you start?” Ottoson began.

“Yes, your Lordship,” Campbell replied.

Ottoson cut him off. “Enough with the nobility jokes. I know I have been the Governor-General of Rejenerate since the UN granted us observer status. The nobility jokes are not just old. They are stale and rancid. Now proceed.”

“Right, Governor,” smirked Andrew. “We escalated the development of the sky crane. About a week after Holhauer left, drones began overflying our platforms regularly. We finished building the sky crane but did not want to test it.”

“We have charted the orbits of the active spy satellites as a precaution. We also have reconditioned old spy satellites with our technology. We want to orbit them.”

“Why did you build spy satellites?” Jason asked.

“Another precaution,” Andrew replied. “We will use them to give warning of air or naval forces approaching.”

“We notified the UN. We claim the 200 miles around us as territorial waters and our airspace is closed except for rotary wing emergency landings. We hired air traffic controllers. We hope the drones will back off. We added a fourth destroyer to the recovery fleet,” Rene reported.

“We have identified a batch of satellites we want to retrieve and items we want to orbit,” Campbell added. “Our changed state does not mean we ignore normal operations. What next?”

“This last month, we had been reacting. We need to take the initiative. We need to let our opponents think they fooled us. I suggest we launch a retrieval container using the blimps. We launch when the spy satellites about to go over the horizon. Dusk or dawn are preferred to give poor light. Hopefully, they will think they scored a coup and leave us alone. We launch our satellites and replace some of theirs. We have a batch of items for the next shuttle to take home. We need to get extracted material in orbit for shipment home. Our satellites will seem to replace existing ones and become invisible.” Ottoson replied.

He continued. “We are starting regular helicopter flights to Samoa. They pick up fresh fruit, alcoholic beverages, or anything else. We should have a different destroyer visit New Zealand or Australia every couple of months. I want to show our flag. Do we have a flag and passports?”

Rene answered, “Since Public Relations became the Foreign Ministry, they are dazed. As Premier, I will get them cracking.”

“Andrew, as Defense Minister, what is the state of our defenses?” Ottoson queried.

“The humans generally are enamored with lasers. We think we can do more with our focused sound batteries. We can down aircraft easily. We can’t hold out indefinitely against a naval flotilla. We could make their lives miserable for a while. I would suggest some ‘fighter’ drones just to give the air forces something to think about, Governor,” Andrew replied with an awful cockney accent.

“We’re done. I’ve had my fill of your jokes,” intoned Ottoson regally.

General Zugfahren smiled as he paged through the report he had received. He summoned General Holhauer. Holhauer reported a few minutes later.

“At ease, General. Have a seat,” Zugfahren began cheerfully. “I think we tricked the people at Rejenerate. Look at these pictures.”

Holhauer took a sheaf of pictures from Zugfahren. The images showed a space vehicle launching from a sling connected to four blimps. Additional photos showed the return of the vehicle. The retrieval pictures looked like something from Project Mercury.

“When we withdrew the drone overflights, they thought we lost interest. They launched a vehicle! We got them!” Zugfahren proclaimed triumphantly. “Care for a drink? Your visit played a big part in this!”

Holhauer accepted the glass of scotch. The generals drank to their success.

“I think they took our bait,” Ottoson proclaimed to Dardene and Campbell. “The drones have completely disappeared since our last launch and recovery. Our spy satellites have picked up nothing, including drones. Proceed with testing the sky crane. We can hope they will spend a lot of resources on the dead-end sling method. Most countries have not researched lighter than air crafts in over a century. Since we made our lifting craft look like their blimp idea, they will probably go down a blind alley. Even with our technology, we can barely get the blimps to work. Congratulations to both of you!”

Campbell and Dardene accepted their chief’s praise.

“Let’s get going on testing the sky crane,” Ottoson continued enthusiastically.

“Jason, shouldn’t you be working with our successors? Our tours here are about up. We want to go home,” said Dardene.

“You’re missing a great opportunity. You could extend your tour for a while,” Jason offered.

“We appreciate that. We extended our tours once before. This blue sky and green plants get grating after a while. We want to go home where things are the proper colors. The trip home is over fifty parsecs long, we want to get started,” Campbell said.

“I understand. Get me a plan for your transition and then get going,” Ottoson said in a fatherly tone.

After they left Ottoson’s office, Rene turned to Andrew. “It looks like we are leaving as winners! Could I offer you a drink? I got a new batch of nectar in the last shipment.”

Campbell accepted. They went to Dardene’s apartment. Once inside, Dardene locked the door. He went to the bar, unlocked a cabinet, and produced a bottle of reddish-brown liquid that looked like expired ketchup. Rene filled two glasses with the foaming liquid. While Dardene was busy, Campbell removed his coat, tie, and shirt. Another pair of arms appeared from his armpits.

“It always feels good to get out of that harness, even for a while,” Campbell said with a sigh. “I must get used to using my ancillary arms. When I first got here, I kept trying to use them. I bet I am going to be clumsy.”

“I think I will get comfortable, too,” Rene said, unfastening his tie. “In some ways, it’s good our physiology is close to humans. It makes our work easier. The only problem is female humans’ physiology is different from our mates. I would like to have them here.”

“To our mates!” said Andrew raising his glass. Rene joined him.

“There will be adjustments when we get home. There will be a bunch of new slang to decode. I hope I can make myself understood.” Campbell remarked.

“Me too. Since we are celebrating, let me offer you another rarity.” Rene unlocked a cabinet in the kitchen. He extracted a blue and green loaf a human would mistake for a mold colony.

When Andrew saw it, his eyes lit up. “A protorian loaf? How is that possible?”

“My mate sent it with the nectar,” Rene replied as he cut two thick slices. “I was saving this for the next holiday. But since we are leaving soon, let’s enjoy it.”

“I hate to bring up business,” Rene added apologetically. “How do you think this will play out here?” Andrew asked.

“What the company does probably won’t change but volumes will increase. Our operation is just mining. We discovered that humans discard items we consider valuable. The bales of plastic bottles generate the revenue for maintaining our station. Other valuable things come from satellites. Our commissions have made us rich,” Rene said.

“Since the humans know about our satellite salvage operations, we don’t have to be so cloak and dagger. The retrieval containers are shuttles to our freighters. Using our stealth technology, we coordinate more flights. Volumes may increase, but what we do probably won’t change that much.” Rene concluded.

“I agree.”

Rene refilled their glasses and relocked the cabinet. He raised his glass, “To going home and everything that’s waiting there!”

They drank, dreaming of what awaited them.

On a lower level, the basement carpark of the hospital, a sleep-wary woman has arrived before anybody else and she lights a cigarette. She leans against a pillar opposite the elevators where those nurses and paramedics will soon come streaming out with coolers in tow. She settles into looking unavailable and occupied. It isn’t necessary to know what kid, mother, father, which total nobody these organs once comprised or what nighttime crisis called the surgeons to the operating table and compelled her trip across America tonight. There’s no drag to eliminate when you never let it cling in the first place. This is only a moment, and the moment will soon pass.

The elevator chimes. Its doors open. Everyone’s quickly falling to the task of stacking coolers across the backseats of a legion of cars that have been idling, waiting for their cargo and drivers. They pack them in like oblong luggage, less delicately than you might expect, stacking the kidneys standing up, squeezing in a heart where they can. A lot going out tonight. It all has to fit and there’s only so much space in these compacts to work with. Down the line they go loading each car, leaving the keys and a pen-marked road map in the passenger seat before moving onto the next.

With the first of the fleet ready and waiting on its driver, she extinguishes her cigarette with the heel of her boot and moves ahead. All around her is a dance of headlights and shadows, of thudding doors and hurried orders, of other on-call drivers trudging back to their haunts like ghosts, of helping hands each hoping to make the implausible just a little more obtainable tonight, of all nights, please, please. She soars past all of this along a benign comet’s trajectory through a busy solar system, ignorant to the collisions that never take place, unphased by disaster, by all of it. Take it as the value of her inertia, the absence of impacts for proof that you arrive anywhere at any moment of your life only by acts of graceful momentum. She is a constant hurdling through an uncertain ballet that she can’t believe in but is nevertheless a part of. She is a driver arriving at this car because she goes on.

Her reflection glides through the chrome of the car’s interior as she takes the driver’s seat and closes the door. The itinerary for this vehicle is already planned and written on the folded map on the passenger’s seat as a series of marked highways, specific turns, no stops, one exact destination. Tonight, it’s a coast-to-coast trip, to be made in record breaking time, with a hectic, winding and baffling excursion through the MIDDLE-DISTANCE. Most navigational bearings would never take you through that sliver of twilit territory and if ever crossing the Middle-Distance became a time saving factor, the tendency was to eat the cost and go the long way around.

But as a matter of geography and closing distance, the route is efficient. She can determine no fault of logic as she studies every merger and shortcut running reverse along the map, all the way to its origin and five-letter designation, route JUNTA. That’s fine. Tonight, she can be Junta on a flagship voyage with a cargo of cooling organs, passing through but to inevitably arrive somewhere on the other side.

An East Oregon surgery ward is an intangible image in her mind that only her arrival will make solid; a vague and unformed image the long night travel ahead threatens to steadily obscure mile by mile until Junta completely forgets why it is she’s driving, why this and not anything else. A long trip like this, though necessary to make a living, and for the lives of others, is an endurance run, a bout with protracted uncertainty that only by reaching her destination does Junta ever feel requited, like she isn’t just some mad woman prone to all-night trips with a stack of leaky coolers in the back. Her credentials, the tabs on the car, her assignment and destination, yes, Officer, my registration even, and those organs, are all very much real.

But those organs are here in bad faith. They whisper behind Junta’s back about a plot to slowly let themselves die off. They’ve lost it. Severed from the living rhythm of their warm host bodies and now it’s dark, cold… is this how it is to end, if it hasn’t already? So be it, some are content to think.

And Junta worries, what if it (the non-specific it, too much to account for) what if it all catches up to her? Because when it does—an obliterating thought—it will hit me all at once.

But for now, and for a little while longer, her sanctuary will be buttressed by the factors of time and distance.

Junta drives away from horizons starting to show signs of a world quickly ending in creeping ice, stratigraphically razed, peeling away fleeting human factors, discarded souls escaping their taxing bondage moving, not upward, but across (she watches) latitude and longitude, sent, seeking, disappearing into a bottomless cartoon hole… that Middle-Distance.

The compact she’s riding in groans until it is a monster fastened painfully to a metal, 18-wheel chassis. There is no cargo precious enough to justify this thing’s existence. Looking in one of her side-mirrors Junta can see the rig isn’t steel; it is comprised of bone and reeking meat. Two skeletal arms originate from the cramped space behind the cab she sits in, stretching outward to cover the highway’s span. While she drives, they swat at the sky as though attacked, swinging through clouds of exhaust whose whorls shape into the confusion of a bat swarm, past which these hands grope at a sun that’s fading from bleached-spine yellow to a dying rust red. If the rig she’s hauling is truly living, it seems to be rapidly choking to death.

Four hippie kids and their talking dog barrel down the highway in a stylish green van and match pace beside the abomination. They gawk at her up in her high cab and offer speculations about what a small lady with a look like hers is doing hauling a rig like that.

“Doesn’t it suggest some misunderstanding,” Scooby Doo is first to posit. “It’s obvious, she was never meant for this specific haul! Look to her hands, much too small—the fingers disappear in their journey ‘round the circumference of that wheel. Another victim of the screwball chimps back at dispatch if you ask me.”

“Zoinks, talk about a need for new management,” cautious Shaggy, knowing he’s about to ask a stupid question, “but, ah, you don’t mean real monkeys, do you, Scoob?” Up in the cab, it looks like Junta’s really losing it. She starts grabbing at every knob and switch in the cab, finds a dangling pull cord, pulls it hard and the rig lets blow a megalithic scream. It’s a fine excuse for everyone to ignore Shaggy proper but it is also just terrifying.

“Doesn’t look like she knows what she’s doing. You think she’s licensed for a haul that big?” Daphne looks to Fred for a response, who is locked in a deep motorist’s focus, and his attention won’t be diverted from the challenge of setting pace just out of the range of those sweeping arms.

“There’s really no way you could pilot a machine like that if you weren’t trained for it,” Velma interjects, brandishing, like always, her rational mind against the cartoon logic of a bizarre universe. “Those can’t be moving on their own, clearly there’s a complex mechanism at work.”

But Fred is familiar with Junta’s condition here. He furls his brow while his eyes scan an interior distance for an explanation he can offer. “It’s a sort of long-distance, big-haul madness. These roads can do that to you. I know it because I’ve contracted it before.”

Daphne’s intense curiosity for the mad trucker then transforms into concern, flying from her heart to Fred. “But how can that be true if,” reaching for his shoulder, she hesitates. Vulnerability, Daphne knew, doesn’t look like this in Fred. Wounded and suddenly disoriented, imagining other drivers from his past looking at him the way she was looking at that horrible woman, she insists, “you never told me Freddy!” But that forward and undeterred gaze, the look of a captain whose destined lot is to navigate so that no one else must is telling her to let Fred have his mysteries.

“Just don’t look at it too long, gang. It’s not safe, and the only cure is to arrive someplace. Let’s just hope she makes it and there’s someone waiting for her when she does.”

Shaggy screams, “Fred, watch out,” but he’s entered a slow banking trajectory around the obstacle ahead. Junta, however, inside the monster rig, is gunning straight toward an abyssal hole planted across the highway with no sign of stopping. The gang cover their ears as Junta tugs the pull cord again and the rig starts screaming its head off as it disappears, cab first into the hole Fred has pulled off the road to avoid. Desperate, like vestigial wings in a terminal free fall, the skeletal hands grab at the edge of the hole to hang on, losing bits of white bone on impact.

It manages to hang on long enough for the gang to recompose, get out of the mystery machine and walk a little forward together, where they can watch the tail-end of the rig and those hands slide away into darkness.

It’s a silent desert highway moment, before Shaggy says what everyone’s thinking. “Shit, Scoob. Shit.” The noises of strained bone giving out accompanies a laugh track in the distant clouds, like thunder.

Junta’s car crashes through the backdrop and comes to a sputtering, smoky halt after nearly a mile of chaotic careening and skid marks so dark they seemed to be pure absence peering through tears in the material world. The ordeal is taxing and enough to knock Junta unconscious. Sprawled across the steering wheel, she dreams about something these car rides keep her far away from.

She is walking through some stretch of interstate desert with Anna, tracking the motions of a slow-moving shooting star in the night sky above them. Only Junta seems to notice or care about the comet. She walks ahead of Anna as navigator, eyes on the slow burning rock above, wandering through the desert in erratic loops, sometimes doubling-back when it decides to do that. The comet travels through satellites, space trash and stars, combining its immense heat with their own in fiery collisions, expending their brightness and blinking out forever, carrying on and leaving them in its destructive wake. But that has nothing to do with Anna and Junta.

Junta loves Anna but is so overwhelmed by that feeling, she can’t bear to hear her begging that she stop wandering and just face it:

“Don’t you see,” Anna pleaded, “don’t you feel that we have something here?”

Have something? “Something like what,” Junta bites off without looking at Anna. Stars going out above them only she notices. “Your task in these dreams,” she whispers mostly to herself, “is often to pens—”

“—something together, Junta”

And here the comet, like a flick of a fairy’s magic wand, dips its arcing toward the Earth and heads their way. It moves too quickly for Junta and for a moment she is disoriented. Where did it go? And then, ah, a growing light, not rising from the East, but descending behind Junta out of the Northern sky. She turns around and Anna is silhouetted in the approaching light, but her own features, Junta realizes, Anna can see clear as day. She wears the terror of knowing this burning light will pass through them non-stop, because what little mass their togetherness might comprise is not enough to be its terminus. They are merely points along an arc that this something will sweep through, to obliterate or to gather and carry them away forever.

Junta feels the prickling of tears well within her face but there can be no damp regret or sorrow, no time to feel terror in this burning intensity. Took too long and now it’s too late. There was never enough.

The silhouetted Anna stands patient, holding Junta’s gaze. She doesn’t notice or care about the comet; cares only for the person they love who has at last stopped and now seems ready to face them. Wavering in the heat-light, Anna tells Junta “you deserved more,” and is then completely absorbed.

Junta knows there is always the danger of being absent for stellar occurrences like this. Blink and you miss it, a light a little brighter, a little less. She doesn’t miss it; for at least this star, she is there to witness its last moment. She doesn’t dream about the rest. Mostly to herself, she whispers “I do.”

Her eyes are already scanning 15 seconds into the future, hands locked at ten and two, spine supporting her as the brochure example of great driving posture when she realizes the dream is over. It happens like a jump cut, stitching there to here and then to now. Junta can’t remember waking up.

Headlights barely cut the fog that surrounds Junta’s car, adding a thicker bleariness to her already bleary vision. The radiator hisses, trickling and snapping from the violent careening. She feels a cool liquid pooled in the well of the driver’s seat, seeping through the soles of her boots. And something else, out there, a gothic secret sequestered in tendrils of this swirling mist wails and wails. In her stupor, this all amounts to a question for her eyes, her ears, her skin, about where she is and where she isn’t.

She asks, probing her senses for an impression, where am I?

And they tell her, you are right here, Junta. But they can’t tell her why.

The wreck has upset the organ coolers’ neat organization, and some have flown forward onto the middle console and passenger seat. A few have even cracked open and spilled their contents about the car. A half-kidney on the dash, paddling in a little pooled body of amniotic fluid like a canoe with only one oar, rudders closer to the sloping edge, catches Junta’s wandering eye and pleads for rescue. She doesn’t reach out to help it but it isn’t like she’s reeling either; the kidney slops down and away into the unseen space beneath the seat, escaping Junta’s curious gaze. Straining to lean across the center console, still fastened by her seatbelt, she stares and can’t help but wonder, where did it go? She wants to find out, so she gets herself unbuckled and now she’s free to wander.

Junta exits the vehicle and walks around to the other side, her soles trailing wet impressions on the asphalt road as she does. Three coolers have managed to spill outside the car entirely, tumbling out the passenger door, which somehow opened during the commotion, where they lay scattered and gaping. Inside, the organs are missing and, orphaned like that, the coolers just look confused laying alone in the middle of the road. But Junta’s just projecting here.

She doesn’t realize, can no longer remember that these coolers and their absent organs, are the reason she is out here in the Middle-Distance. Their sad affair is her own, but, blessedly, she’s been out too long to recognize that. In Junta’s state, everything out here is just as it is, configurable. Her shored-up sympathy pulls them into the intimate context of her orbit and to her they become something sad, lonely, hopeful or ruined. But these are just things she finds along the road.

In the high beam light up ahead, something fluttery catches Junta’s attention, and, like a child slipped away from their parent’s guiding reason, she floats along abandoning one distraction for another and discovers a folded road map. Ink from the markings meant to guide Junta through the Middle-Distance hasn’t run yet, despite it being a little drippy. That doesn’t hold her attention, however. What does are the drops, the exploded shape they perfected and always seem to make when they hit the ground, much like her own cross-hatched boot print behind her, and the damp trail of insteps embarking from the wreckage and Junta along the cracked road, into the mist and wailing night up ahead.

Jeepers. What have I forgotten? Was I riding with a passenger tonight, and where have they gone? Ahead into… Full moon territory, gallows-woods, dragged acres for dead crops to gather. Junta sets out. She follows the tracks of a person she can’t remember, compelled forward by the possibility toward another who she thinks is somewhere out there, lost, missing, need to find them. That wailing.

Her running takes her farther in, miles offroad, through bramble and hidden ditches, scrambling over cattle fences into a vast moonlit field of mud. It’s a sea of undisturbed lunar vanity, except the path Junta’s mystery has walked; except the pocks of coyote prints circling the last craterous blemish, a driverless flatbed truck, high beams almost smothered as the whole thing, including its cargo, an actual living suit of armor, a Black Knight, wailing in lonesome panic, hunched, and interred in stocks, is slowly being swallowed by the muck. The coyotes’ mirrored-eyes signal their blinking patience, waiting for the truck to lower to ankle-nipping height before going in. When they peel away poor Knight’s breastplate what do they expect to find, what substance in this third or maybe fourth packfeast, but the same empty expanse to entice their gibbering jowls as the miles they’ve already trekked and will continue to, still hungry and still compelled, forward, forever and on.

Stepping into tracks left by her forgotten passenger at the outset of the circling pack, Junta stops to view the desperate scene from the same vantage. Stellar and meditative, distant and indifferent. But what a strange sight, she thinks before turning away. Soon, she follows tracks to where the field heaves skyward, where the moon hangs and showers light upon a large building, waiting in monochrome. Onward through terrain where a road map isn’t useful, but she keeps it in her pocket anyway.

Boss got hurt on the job.

I don’t know how serious it is because I’m no doctor, but I worry. Ub’s too scared out of his wits to tell me what he thinks and he always tells me what he thinks even when I don’t ask for it and I keep asking for it but he won’t tell me. Boss won’t stop moaning “My head, oh” but there’s no light in the van and I can’t see, so all I can do is try to soothe him, but that’s not helping. My hands are wet from touching his face where the ladder swung and hit him. Boss doesn’t cry, says he never does, ever in my life! but I hope this is tears, and I know Boss can cry. It’s okay to cry, Boss.

Ub cut the wires out back at the museum and when he came around to tell us that all was done, he screamed at what he saw, what already had me and Boss stuck in fright. I turned so fast. Oh, Boss, forgive me, I wasn’t thinking like you always say. After that I dropped the ladder. Then I saw Ub running as if he was to try and tackle the ghost. I did wonder if that would work, if you could just deck a walking shadow. And I guess I started thinking like Boss, like if he got it pinned down, then what’s the next step and the one after that, but Ub just wanted to get the hell away from it and somewhere safe. Ub’s already prone to night terrors, so my heart goes out to him, but he sure dipped like a real fink leaping in the van and shutting us out. Had to schlep Boss all by myself, and Boss is a real heavy guy.

Which means I spent more time exposed to that thing than I’d like. Boss and I, we saw it as it made its approach, weren’t caught off guard like Ub was. We saw it come out of the night, across that muddy field leaving deep imprints in the earth—heavy ones, heavier than it should’ve been making—walking slowly, like it was just learning how to or something. First, we thought it was a guard and figured the jig was up but then we saw how little there was to see about it. Nothing but silhouette, no features, no sounds except each step was drenched like it is when you climb out a pool. But it’s a dry night, and I doubt this thing can swim, its walk being as uncoordinated as it was.

It was slow, never really got that close and I don’t know what it would do if it did. There wasn’t time to go back for the ladder after getting Boss in the van and maybe that’s all the better. He doesn’t see what hit him so soon. Neither I nor Ub, or Boss in his condition, can remember what roads we took to get out here, so we’re stuck. And Ub’s crying, we need an idea we need a plan, and the only idea I have goes No, it’s worse than that. Not stuck but trapped. And Boss always barks, leave the planning to me. Because I’m no good, I could never. So, I tell myself a story no one can hear because I can get away with it. And the story goes, for now, we abide by listening for signs that the haunting is over; silent as its passing is underneath the chattering of Ub’s wind-up teeth. And how, tonight the wind is wailing.

But Junta knows that wailing’s not the wind and what it means when it dissipates into yipping echoes and howling, way back across the field. Now she moves in muddy boots on the concrete path leading up to a multi-storied, columnated building. The STILL MUSEUM, est. 1872, a welcome sign in gold relief informs her, flanked by parallel topiary bulldogs, bereft of their green and common dog colors, and rendered monochrome by moonlight.

Indeed, here’s a no-man’s-land for pigment. It begins with garden flowers, which she then compares to the silver of the gurgling fountainhead and the silver of the licking flames on the silver candle fixtures to the left and right of the museum’s front door adorned with silver handles and silver hinges. The only color—the bravest—that the moonlight cannot leech, as though saying you will have no more of me, is the earthen brown contained in the trail of Junta’s shoes and those she’s followed all night, and which have finally led her here.

Around the Still Museum’s side, Junta observes the tracks taking on a vertical trajectory, up the rungs of a ladder leading to a window on the third story. Paces away, a non-descript van begins to jostle, disrupting the painterly stillness of the place. Then there’s a voice, a man calling out to Junta, going PSSS’T.

He says his name is Kog and he’s got this wild story about him and his buddies holing up in this van, waiting for a ghost to pass by and leave them alone. A real ghost, he emphasizes, it’s a true story. Kog wants to know what Junta is doing out here in the Middle-Distance, if she put up that ladder, if she knows a way out and, if she does, can they help each other. He’s looking to put together a plan, because, he relents, the old one called for bravery he just doesn’t have.

So, they strike a deal and Kog proposes his vision. Junta agrees to go inside the Still Museum to unlock the front door, bartering for a ride out of the Middle-Distance using her map, with a stop-over along the way to pick up her cargo. Once Junta manages to get the front door open, Kog, and a wreck of a man named Ub, will go in and nab what Kog’s calling, some pharaoh’s little kitty. And because his two left feet would make a poor jitterbug with the pedals, he explains, while Junta’s inside, Kog will work on Ub, calming him down enough to drive them all out of there.

They work it out, they get to work. Kog holds the ladder for Junta to climb up, and while she does, he says “glad that horrid wailing died off, was summoning me nightmares for sure.”

To which Junta replies, “I saw it, this terribly lonely thing, but I didn’t stop to help.”

“Heh. Heartless but I’m not much better. Hope you got a hanky if you end up running into what it was me and Ub saw.”

On the last rungs of the ladder, Junta looks behind her along the terrain of the Middle-Distance. It strikes her how unlikely it is to encounter anyone out here at all. What chance, to have gone wandering on this night and along this crowded trajectory. Waking in the wreck a minute earlier or later, would she be the one slipping through this opened window? Would she be here for the sound of boots lightly touching down and splashing in a puddle collected beneath the sill? A moment later or earlier, would the chance to see the way moonlight and her shadow plays on the sleek marble that leads deeper into the museum not have been hers?

Would it be her, if she moved any faster? If she moved faster than this.

Slowly, at first, through this room and on to the next, and the next, past sculptured portals, ranks of doors, galleries, then through silent rooms onto more silent rooms. She leaves centuries behind her as she navigates the Still Museum’s exhibits, searching for someone she cannot remember, searching for life and finding only the interred past of things whose day has abandoned them. Framed living places, preserved living cultures, catalogued living histories, gathered, crated and carried to this place for nobody. She observes only certain angles in the dark, but Junta knows there are more than just these catches, more than is possible to appreciate in the briefness of her passage. If she moved slower or any faster, would there be time to bring the portraits closer to touching and return ancient tools to ancient hands?

Moving through rooms like this brings to her a quiet sensation. The factoring of Junta by rooms of time and distance, the expression of a terrible loneliness she hardly recognizes anymore. In this darkness, isolated in the dim cabin light of her long road trips, held by Anna in the heat of her direct attention, or out there in the hollow space of the Middle-Distance, Junta is continuously traversing such rooms where single moments and rote processes distend into passages of incalculable and unstable dimensions. One room leads onto the next as walls gradually adapt the shape of other vaults, shrinking and expanding beyond her view into all directions.

Not that she can truly appreciate the architecture or the way these rooms have captured her. Flooded as they are with drowned, dull and undifferentiated life that floods her in turn, she fails to apprehend the immense power of seclusion that places her so apart from everything that is, truly, so near to her. And how drab it is to wade through all this interior space. Even if there are collisions, encounters with someone or something, they leave no impression she can sense, no dead crater for her unfeeling touch to trace and wonder whatever might have happened to her. Such a waste of phenomenon spent on Junta in this way. She moves like this through the diffuse night of every room, alone in her eternal approach and never near arrival.

But in the unseen upper reaches of these expansive rooms, a darker suggestion remains unconfirmed: if every room Junta inhabits is just the same, then perhaps there is only one room. A single room dominated by time and distance, whose dimensions are so large that Junta, racing off into any direction, could dwell inside for years without ever discovering a limit or way out. An unending room to contain all her days, or her one interminable night. It grabs her like a limb in a crowd attached to no one when Junta realizes she never actually entered this room. It is impossible to trace her memory in reverse along the path she had spent years following to a moment where a door or portal or gate was crossed. She lacks the comfort of such a regrettable and specific event. In its absence, suspecting that maybe there isn’t an exit, she feels only doom.

The window that allows her and tonight’s moonlight to enter the Still Museum remains in sight behind Junta, only smaller from her far vantage, reduced to a glimmering star point. It consoles her. She realizes the dimensions of the museum are limited and the possibility of an outside bares down on Junta’s awareness of an inside. There is a sudden expansion where every room Junta has ever been in empties out, and entrances, like beginnings for endings, seem to be just echoes of exits. And after all her tumbling through the dark tonight, here is a door with brightness bleeding through its jamb. Gradient amber licks at her shoes while she hesitates to turn the nob. It contains a promise, she truly believes, to transform her if she’ll allow it. So, with trepidation, she turns the knob, steps inside and closes the door behind her.

She has entered some liminal space, an anteroom of a kind for guests to pause and prepare before diving forward into all that history Junta’s just now closed the door on for good. Color is permitted here, she notices, first with the bone-white and auger adornments studding the walls. There are spines for the room’s vaulted reaches, teeth along the balcony’s arched opening to her left, shoulder blades on a hearth embedded in the parallel wall, and elaborate orbital decorations of a door frame, an alcove for balustraded stairs descending, opposite to Junta when she enters. On shelves which crowd the narrowing spaces of the vaults overhead sit a variety of repurposed glass bottles and jars, too high above and too clouded anyway by dust or whatever shedding for Junta to know what they contain. And this is just as well. The amalgams of living tissue, bundled appendages and unborn creatures embalmed within these cluttered containers, for the last time, have turned their small, cramped backs to a world they wish to forget and be forgotten by.

A dim fire persists in the fireplace, over which hangs an elegantly framed mirror reflecting a view of the balcony and the vantage outside. She has seen something in it that compels her to cross the room, to step out once more into the befuddling night of the Middle-Distance. Oblivious of the culture of exclusion and isolation that reigns secretly above her, Junta moves delicately across clay tiling and the familiar trail of damp imprints to reach out, assure impact if it can be willed, with a ghostly image standing on the balcony, so alone-seeming.

Outside, the moon holds a spotlight on shadows amid a strange ritual. It shines clear upon the movements of an esophagus skating through the translucence of an incoherent body. It descends through a shoulder and down the length of the figure’s only arm, dropping off from its hand into the latest in a sequence of jars, set upon a narrow table like potted plants. They bask in just as much lunar light as Junta’s forgotten passenger, whose shape diminishes with every part that’s sloughed into these containers.

Her curiosity takes her past the standing shadow to kneel beside the table, to get an eye-level look at that esophagus and whatever else might be inside the other jars. With its scant humanoid form, the ghost crouches beside her. Its curiosity outpaces Junta, mounting not because of the mystery of the jars, but for the imminent reaction it expects of her. An excised jaw still red from surgery is submerged within the ebbing shadow of the ghost’s bodily form. Pressed this close to Junta, its half-grin could be construed as a greeting. The jaw salivates just inches from her face with eager encouragement for her to watch. Be certain not to miss this one.

But this is an indirect language Junta thinks she’s interpreting. No tongue in that mouth to wag and confirm just how interested in her the ghost really is. Despite this, an amber drool is pooling beneath them. It trails off a long distance back to Junta’s car, and then beyond to abscesses of anonymous cadavers hundreds of miles away. A hard journey that’s harder to return from. Exhausted and collapsing into itself, Junta watches as the jarred throat turns to pitch and a fluid of shadow begins to fill the jar’s volume to its brim.

 Standing and sealing the jar before it can spill, the ghost looms over Junta. Beside the macabre display, it looks almost satisfied, emanating a pride that urges her to remain kneeling and look closer. She studies the jars in sequence, backward and forward, like a sentence whose meaning she is on the verge of intuiting. There is a cool touch reaching through the fabric of her jeans. It’s an amniotic chill she knows, a wet recollection that pierces her confused condition to explain that interred within these glass containers are the cargo organs she is meant to deliver. And they are expiring, or else beginning their departures before she could even reach them.

While watching inky bubbles coalesce and rupture against the jars’ glass, Junta wonders if there is anything inside herself that could compel a person to stop their leaving and remain where they were. If it is there, she cannot picture what it looks like. So, she searches with unfamiliar vision through the dark sheen of glass before her, seeking something honest and innate in its reflection to be shared and embraced. Junta peers through the pitch in search of more than nothing and can only peer deeper.

She is dizzied by this sudden reversal of movement that sweeps her inward. These night dispatches were never taken up to close the distance between her and someone else. They were only the continuous pursuit after an indefinite state. In this movement Junta composes herself; she is as a navigator’s motivation to chart a path through and away, to be the line but never the point, to avoid capture by the design of someone or something capable of encompassing her. She moves to elude definition by another. Tonight, however, all this momentum culminates in delay. In uncertain fractures she has never noticed before, her own reflection hounds her to consider, where have we been led? Through a movement too slow, onto not much of a place, a nowhere that pervades inside her, and peering deeper.

The Middle-Distance occupies a space beyond her sight but a curtain of clouds has moved to block the moon and eclipse everything. Background peripheral and foreground blur with her immediate vision. The entire region turns into the same pitch substance contained in these jars and in a quick, passing moment, all its territory may be traversed without movement, every distance made equivalent before her. Sightless in this blind terrain, Junta feels as though she could be anywhere; all the curvatures of earth are inside her; she holds the intensity of being beside everyone all at once. Then just as suddenly as it happened, the curtain is drawn away, leaving Junta in her glass reflection.

But well past the surface image, through the slight seams formed on the glass, passed into the pitchy nowhere inside, she listens to a deep-throated voice suggest: The places you could reach, Junta, without moving at all.

A clap resounds inside that nowhere space. It races through her skull, threatening to drive her back into that old continuity but its veering is erratic, and she can tell this is something different. Like a bat whose confused screeching works to orient it in dark cave spaces, this internal echo flies after surfaces she cannot see. An intensity, not a movement, emanating inward, not outward, reaching for the unseen limits of that greater room, to its ruined walls Junta thought would close her in forever. Flying over their crumbled ramparts into an eternally unending everywhere within her. No cheap movement; she exudes only speed. Through herself, she reaches out for someone and there’s no distance between them. Inside her there’s enough to hold the ghost and its organs, the whole Middle-Distance with its residents and itinerants and even those people out there in the world waiting on them, waiting on her.

Junta stands. “You have come a long way, I can tell, so you must be tired,” she tells its destitute body. “But there are people out there who expect us. They are alive but only for a while longer, alive in a way that’s not much like living—especially without you.” Inside the shadow pitch containers, glowing cartoon eyes peek, swim and silently return her gaze. “We should go, we risk too much if we just stop.” They swim away, receding into their personal interiors and distances to never reemerge. “Move, let me carry you.” The faceless thing, if it hears her pleading, does nothing. But in what way could she expect a response, without eyes, without a tongue, with a form that’s ever diminishing?

No speech and no body language. What would you say, if you could? Tell me.

“Are you content?” How could you be?

“You’re tired, you want to give up, and now that you’re cut loose, you think a disconnected life is better and this is your chance.” It’s true. This is their only chance to seize control, to determine their own course. Every organ is subject to the influence of a movement that functions automatically to perpetually keep them from failing, from selfishly opting out. A pulsation that confines them to a prison of living health. The movement is constant, though it seems to take them nowhere. The organism overrides whatever selfish desire the organ might have to function for some other purpose. Suicide motivates the organs of this ghost tonight; they harness spite against the resistance to let a heart slow down to the pace of a blinking eye, to speed up and become the flipbook of a caged bird taking flight. It is a tyranny to insist that a lung remain a lung when it might also be something else.

So, remaining still is a motion that seems especially meaningful tonight.

But just the same, conceding perhaps, the ghost does move to pass Junta onto the other corner of the broad balcony where a straight-back chair is placed. Beside the chair it wordlessly stands, waiting with patience for Junta to accept what seems to be its offer for a rest. Between the decorated nodules of the chair’s shoulders, she can see how it frames an image of the Middle-Distance with the crushed perspective of a painting. Her entire journey is depicted with all its distances reduced and folded together. The territories of the field and the band of woods she scrambled over in panic are layered on top of each other, comprising what seems to be just inches of space. Because there are no words the two can communicate with, she moves to meet the ghost and leans with her back turned to it, against the railing where the image before them fills her vision completely. She does not sit, she won’t.

Above these layers winds the road, a dark cut snaking across the canvas where Junta started out on foot. It shrinks to the image’s vanishing point where the moon bows heavily over everything. In the sky, it is the dominant object in the frame. A distorting moon that dictates scale for the night below, holding space together and apart. Suspended between its sloping belly and the asphalt below is Junta’s car with all its scattered cargo. Falling or rising amid an ambiguous state of pre-crash or recomposed ascent. And the night is so quiet; across the flattened distance she thinks the sound of its idling motor might be heard. A familiar humming, far from her, that still seems so close.

Are you coming or going? I can’t tell with you.

You haven’t decided yet, is that it?

Well, you must know by now; no one is going to just wait on you.

The ghost slips away while her back is turned. Its farewell sounds a final surging thrush of substance, rapids of shadow spilling into the last empty jar along the table. Grinning still and chattering, now relinquished, the jaw lands with a buoyant plop. In its last dithered seconds before what happened to the throat happens to the jaw, its own phantom organism sends an itch of laughter along its gums.

Ah, just try to laugh without a jaw. Hilarious; it would have cackled.

A weight in the sky. The midnight vacancy of space which, on nights that are not like this, nights in other places, is cradled serene over land where only a fine scattering of stars occupy the sky, now presses downward onto the terrain, bears itself against the Middle-Distance with the force and presence of that domineering moon. All over there is isolation, and continuous departures and wanderings; a suicidal motion where things appear only to vanish, wherein their vanishing imposes onto presence a frustration of absence, of two mouths mouthing “remove” and “adhere” to each other shoulder inside shoulder, overlapping, compacted and scattered throughout the invisible crowd all over.

At the railing where she leans this atmosphere suddenly grows dense and aggravated. Junta experiences it like a haunting so forcefully against her back, it seemed, that she was threatened with the possibility of being shoved over a ledge. She turns sharply as though to protect herself yet discovers no one on the balcony with her. Despite the unfixable sensation of being rudely crowded into a tight order among other bodies, she walks with an unrestricted gait in her search along the balcony and the connected anteroom for whoever could be blamed. But in a moment, as the same crowding feeling persists and she adjusts. It dawns on her that there is no one here, that she is all alone, and that she is probably the only moving thing in all the Still Museum. Returning to the balcony at a startled pace that almost sends her colliding with the table, which would have sent one lidless jar tumbling, Junta discovers she isn’t just suddenly alone but that she is abandoned.

The last jar is filled; these cargo organs have gone a distance that she cannot follow. Staring into the black nothing, she finds that its warbling surface distorts all reflection, presents images, signs, possible hints for direction but all incoherent. Standing next to the table, feelings of loss flirt with Junta but it’s all too intangible for her to mourn. Nothing here for anyone, especially for her, and she has grown tired of seeking comfort through absent things. Inside her, in that vast everywhere she contains, there is a tangible medium through which she can reach anything, take comfort in contact and touch. And it would be real.

Still at the table looking down at the quivering liquid in the glass container, she reaches out for something to hold—for those who might love her, for those who are waiting for her, for those who aren’t, for a pharaoh’s mummy pet downstairs, those boys outside, and a seal to place upon the jar. With one movement she gathers all these things and takes them with her when she leaves the balcony, headed to the first floor.

And in still silence, black pitch rejects the pestering of moonbeams against glass and will not permit their begging to be let in.

We are gone, Junta is too; just let us alone.

“We can’t trust maps on nights with moons like that.,” she shouts, running out the front door of the Still Museum and jumping in the passenger seat of the van. “Let’s go, I know the way enough,” and Ub peels off. The smell of rubber; you could tell that’s where he channeled his terror. “For jobs like this, you need focus. And now I can appreciate why you always tell us not to think too much, stick to the plan, not second guess nor start improvising. It would be so easy to fly apart at the seams when you see such inexplicable things, when your plan gets away from you as it did.

Boss, take it easy, don’t try to get up. It’s dark in here but you’re safe.

Just listen. Let me tell you. I know you’ll be proud to hear it.

Ub and I, we got that kitty.

But we very nearly left without it. There was a moment, Boss, where, yeah, the plan did fall apart. When you weren’t responding, and it seemed like Ub and I would have to go it alone. We just couldn’t get unstuck from our roles, it seemed impossible without you. Ub could only think of driving, and I was just a pair of helping hands there to hold things when told to. It was like if the two of us could somehow function like normal then you would have to function like that too. But you weren’t waking up.

It was lucky that she came along.

Because when she did, something inside me started to move and, you know, Boss, I started to see myself sort of as I see you. For a moment, when you weren’t there, I was something of a Boss myself. But not actually. I just brought her in on the old plan. It was like you were still there when you really weren’t. We both needed help. It was the only way we could get the job done without you.

She told me her name is Robin. She’s the one who went inside and grabbed the cat.

Then we left. Robin had us moving quickly through the zone, off roads, through parts not on any map. She was charting us a course because neither of us knew the way in, out, or through this kind of space. That was part of your expertise, but you weren’t awake then.

On our way, we had to stop to pick up cargo she had stranded after totaling her car along the main road, north from where we were. Just a bunch of coolers scattered all over the road. I helped her gather and put them in the back with us. (You looked like a pharaoh all your own, I think to tell you, laying still beside those coolers, watched over by a mummified cat waiting for the doors to close and resume its eternal rest.) One of them was leaking, just useless, damaged cargo. Robin reached inside it, handed what it was to me and said, “Here, if there’s any swelling,” and closed us in.

It was firm, damp and cool. I pressed it to your cheek while Robin directed Ub where to go next, and I think it might have helped with your swelling. But if nothing else, Boss, it kept my worry down. Which is just as good, I think.

We were rolling through the dark for some time. Through the window in the partition, I watched Robin guide Ub to avoid parts of the Middle-Distance that were painted by the moon’s glow. We drove along barely perceivable wooded roads, beneath thick canopies, where vision was so poor and Ub really should have slowed down but kept up at Robin’s insistence.

Then we came out into the open, and up ahead I saw a sign welcoming us to the FARM FOR ANIMALS. We passed beneath it, traveling along a dirt road that sloped downward and ended, just ahead, I could see, not at a farm, Boss, but at the edge of a cliff. Before us was just the maw of craggy expanse and overhead the hanging moon.

Before the road could run out ahead of us, Robin asked Ub to pull off, guiding him to this destitute wooden shack. It was all that was left, it seemed, when the rest of what must have been the Farm For Animals slid away or was bitten off the map; at least that’s how it seemed to me. Robin got out, leaving just the three of us, the old crew, alone in the idling car. We didn’t talk, but Ub and I watched as Robin approached the shack and, after knocking, entered. Neither of us said it then because said or unsaid it couldn’t make any sense; but even though the moon was hanging bigger than ever over our heads, its glow was weaker here than anywhere we’d been all night.

It was like we were out of reach, Boss. There were shadows where it seemed like there shouldn’t be. I don’t know if I could explain why but that was a strange kind of comfort. I don’t know. We looked up at it for a long time and all the while my thoughts were empty. Nothing of the usual moon things like astronauts, cheese, distance, ghosts and crimes at night. What we were looking at might as well not have been the moon.

And while we looked, the shack door had opened, and someone stepped out and crossed in front of Ub. A man in blue overalls, his neck held to a stiff tilt, squinting past acknowledgement as he walked with purpose in a direction I couldn’t see. Then, from the shack exited several more men, similarly dressed, but otherwise different. They followed the first somewhere off to the left, toward the cliff edge. Robin was the last to exit and now she too was wearing overalls. Following the group of men, she signaled Ub to bring around the van as she passed.

He moved the car over to where the road disappeared. Through the window, I could see some of the men waiting idly around, speaking to each other without animation. Around them there were chained together various vehicles made for farm work, worn and weathered through time, rusting and in noticeable states of decay. Linked together as they were, with tow cables snaking in a powerful mess that disappeared off the cliff behind their herd, they seemed like ruined beasts of burden who had grazed on everything these indifferent farmers allowed them to reach for. When all the men had gathered, Robin addressed the man with the squint in a discussion I could only hear fragments of.

“Union job.” 

“The waitlist.” 

“Dreaming,” 

“Out there.” 

“Only now.”

The man turned and spoke with the rest of his crew while Robin returned to the van. “We’re getting out of here,” she said, like it was all taken care of, as though we could just drive off into the maw below the moon before us.

Boss, I want you to understand what happened at least as much as I understand it. It feels like I can’t remember, but I do. Just listen.

These men and their machines that whinnied like horses when they struck them to get moving watched the sky beneath the moon without astonishment, like it was absolutely ordinary, as it was yoked like a sleeper’s eyelid that’s delicately drawn open by a nurse or a surgeon just before operating.

Over the puttering of diesel machines, along thin night air, Boss. “Go in,” is all one of them said; the last word anyone has spoken since.

The way your own words get told inside you works differently than how they get told on the outside. This is the difficulty that confronts me, Boss. Knowing what a word holds when it’s on the inside, like a brick that’s laid to something grand, but seeing how it struggles to hold anything and flies away from me when I tell it to you. Well, it’s my terror, Boss, and I haven’t got to tell that before. I’ve been told to, in the past, keep it quiet and so I have. But now I’m going to tell you. Tell you about what just happened and at the same time tell you how I’ve always told myself and never tried to tell on the outside.

Let me tell you, Boss.

It fell over us, covered us, went over us like a blanket and we crawled in under it. And I mean that; there’s no other way I know how to say it. The briefest glimpse of a night beyond a curtained window as the wind, well, opens it like a sleeper’s eyelid yoked. Ub flicked on the high beams and we peered at the space beneath the moon. “Go in,” someone said, and we did.

It fell over us, it covered us, we crawled in under it and have been crawling since that last word someone said. We entered into this undermoon domain.

Ub was showing signs like he might never let up. It took an equal effort from himself and the machinery of the van to drive through terrain like this where there were no landmarks, roads, nothing near or in the nonexistent horizon that the furthest burning high-beam could ever reach. His face was changing, another terror reaction like he’d gone through at the Still Museum when he saw that ghost, but happening too slowly, too mechanically. It was as though the clutch had been leveraged between the hemispheres of his brain until it snapped just to keep things operating.

From the passenger seat, Robin kept her eyes on Ub. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think there was any overt concern in that look. She might have been watching his rapt attention, trying to imagine what he was seeing, because outside the windows there was nothing.

But, Boss, that’s not what it was. Robin was watching out for Ub and at some moment I couldn’t distinguish from the rest of them, here in the dark where time didn’t seem to work, she reached an arm out to his shoulder and said “I can get us the rest of the way, Ub.” She pulled him out of that stasis so steadily, understanding his blinkered reaction with no need for words, seeing him and wanting to help. I don’t think I could have done it, Boss.

After some elaborate maneuvering over each other, Ub got into the passenger and let Robin take over. He stared straight off for a minute but then turned his attention back to me and you, Boss. He didn’t say anything. I just watched him watching me, held him in my vision, glad he was okay.

“Hey, Ub.”

He lifted his arm onto the shoulder of his seat and laid his chin against it, then he said “never gonna take another job like this again,” and rested his eyes.

You must have heard her say it, “this is a truly awful way to get through it.” You were awake then, Boss.

“Yeah, I don’t like it, but it’s how we’re going to get there.” She signals turns, flicks on the wipers, and seems like an expert even out here.

“Just don’t take that to mean it’s going to be quick, we’re not almost home yet.”

“But I’ll see that we get there,” she says. Here, where it’s as dark inside as it is outside, I can’t see anywhere else without Robin, Ub and you, Boss.

If you had watched it from way out here, hovering
weightless over the water, half a mile from shore –

it would have been different. You would have seen
the other side of the clouds, the tops of the snowball

clouds brushed in green gold. But being, as you were,
alone in a fishing boat rumbled in shadow, you saw

only a thousand shades of dark driving you to the red-forests,
shelter from the coming rain. I wanted you

to join me in the amber water. But you never looked
my way. Had you seen the hills of snow on the upside

of the storm, you might have remembered what
playing felt like, you might have returned to your

fishing boat full of dreams, captain of a
mighty ship en route to conquer paradise.