MEETING DEATH AT THE RED LIGHT

I spotted death in Prospect, standing beneath the flowering dogwood. I could not decide who was the more beautiful.

The summer sky was bloodless.

The same couldn't be said for the whitetail deer. Its organs were recycled into carrion, strewn across the state highway like the ashes of love letters.

The engines idled, a chorus of hushed whispers.

I beckoned out to death. Noiselessly it approached. I reached into my center console and produced Charon's token: a crumpled 5$ bill found in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. Death reached out its hand, and I deposited charon's token into it.

"Speak." said death.

"O lovely death, what is there left to write about the endless roads? What is there more to say about the blood vessels coursing through the city? What more to say about the roadkill which gasps for breath, or the peace of nightfall on the country backroads? What should I make of this asphalt nation, the roads which are nothing but mausoleums for the twisted remains of glass and metal, in which human flesh melds with human creation in a final coffin? How can I say what I must say: that the tale of America is not a tale of empire, of villainy or heroism, but a tale of roads? And why-- death, grant me this at the end of it all-- why do we fall so deeply in love with the things that kill us?"

A choir of engines hum in unison. The vultures laugh. Whoever dies: they win.

Death speaks with a voice of caramel.

"You can't understand the answers to these questions. You are young-- you won't understand the roads until you have cried tears of bourbon and bled rivers of fry oil. Until you shit coal-- until you have swum in the burning lake of moonshine-- you won't understand a damn thing about the roads."

"I can't--"

"Who are you?" Asked death.

"I am the cockroach who refuses to die." Said I.

"Wrong."

"I am a human animal-- nothing less or more."

"Wrong."

"Who am I?" I asked.

Death reaches out, resting its hand across my cheek. For a moment, I feel the warmth that children feel.

"You are a driver." Said death.

"You won't understand until you are the one who is roadkill."

"Your whole life is behind you, and your whole life is ahead of you. The unknown road, a one-way drive to me."

The light turns from blood to grass. The engines roar-- the hum transforming into a screaming metal horde of cicadas.

"So drive it." Said death.