Movement at eye level drew his gaze to a spiderweb strung between the pump and a support column. A spider that looked very much like a human molar was tracing the outer edge of its web, crawling in slow circles. It made a faint chiming sound as it moved. Green felt a nervous laugh bubbling up. He looked away.
His eyes traveled to his reflection in the driver’s side window. A tired man with a five-o’clock shadow. He was a little wild-eyed, but that was fair. He’d slept in his car instead of a bed last night, parked in the yellow glow of a Waffle House by a busy interstate. That was a first. He had spent the last two days driving away from every familiar touchstone in his life.
“I look like I’m unraveling.”
He’d seen other things unravel. He knew the look. His ninety-year-old neighbor, Mr. Reynard, who taught him the hobby of making art from old clock parts. His relationship with Jess. The effortlessgrasp he once held on his own goals and identity. An underpinning of sanity he’d taken for granted.
He thoughtlessly pulled the acorn from his pocket.
There it was, resting on his palm again without his conscious choice to put it there. He studied it. Smooth, polished sides. That rough cap. The way it unnerved him then made him feel ashamed for being intimidated by such an ordinary thing.
He sighed.
The crow might have been a hallucination. Falling in front of the bus, a vivid daydream, a momentary slip of his hold on reality. But neither hallucinations nor temporary madness could put an acorn in your pocket in a place with no oak trees. It was the tangible, enduring anchor for all the strangeness that had pushed aside his old life. He could almost hear it whispering,You can’t pretend me away.
A tapping sound made Green turn back to the station.
Alf was at the window. He gave Green a thumbs-up and a questioning look. There were words in that look.
You okay, bro?
How long had he been standing there? If possible, the night beyond the station lights seemed even darker than it had a moment earlier.
Green waved at Alf, pocketed the acorn, and climbed into the car.
Nothing to see here. Normal guy. Doing normal guy stuff.
He started the engine and drove to the edge of the lot, just to mitigate the threat of Alf coming out to talk to him. He parked and entered the address for Candle-Fly into the GPS.
“Proceed to the highlighted route,” said a reasonable voice from the dashboard.
He hesitated.
Here in the dark woods, his plan to live somewhere wild and remote felt more like self-harm than it had while shopping for camping gear under bright store lights. He brought out the scales of his reasonand loaded his current plan on one balance and the life he left behind on the other. The result was the same as it had been for weeks.
Along with fear, the acorn brought a suspicious clarity.
He had been checking off all his “supposed to” boxes for many years and they had brought him neither purpose nor satisfaction. His life had been on the defensive, not so much taking actions to build something he wanted as constantly fending off imagined threats and criticism. Something changed on the day he arrived home, drunk on survival, and sat the acorn on his kitchen counter.
The bizarre yet incontrovertible fact of its presence created a space outside his plans, his reasonable decisions, a space where he could stand and judge his life’s path in a new way. All his careful choices still landed him beneath that bus, so how reasonable could they be? Hadn’t he been compromising in the name of safety? If safety wasn’t really on the table, then…what?
Death crowded out all the voices that had been prodding him along. In that quiet aftermath, he listened to a new and perfect internal silence, waiting for the small voice that was his actual desire, divorced from practicality and social expectation. When that voice finally came, soft and distant, raspy with disuse, it spoke of childhood memories of the woods and the wild things that called it home.
Green heard that faint voice, amplified by the acorn, and did the unthinkable. He listened to it.
“Proceed to the highlighted route,” the GPS repeated.
This time, he went.
The dark woods rose up around him and the gas station lights were swallowed by a bend in the road.
Don’t think. Just drive.
After five minutes of winding up the wooded slope, he noticed that the image of his car on the GPS console screen was now off the road, hovering in the green space to the right. A blocky blue questionmark blinked above the vehicle icon. Either the satellite connection was weak or the maps were out of date.
“Turn left on Lost Creek Road,” the GPS said.
There was no road.
