She attacks me in the subway of a city while I try to find ‘The Rat Museum.’ I push her into the path of an oncoming train.

She overturns my rented canoe and pulls me into a lake which is rumored to have flooded a town. With her rope around my neck, I am dragged underwater until I think I see the ghostly buildings of ‘Old Fredericktown’ swimming in the depths, but her lungs give out before mine do. I use her body to jettison me toward the surface.

She chases me through ‘The Bear-Proof Field’ until we each fall to the traps, just a few yards apart, and while I pry the jaws from my leg she rakes the ground with her fingers, stripping her ankle of flesh in an effort to reach me. I leave her to bleed out in the dirt.

The Woman is still limping the next time I see her. She hobbles in front of the bike as I swerve to take a familiar gray road, going well past the posted speed limit. The front wheel strikes her just as the world loses its color and we fly forward together, the heavy frame of the motorcycle spinning back up and over us. There is a moment of weightlessness followed by a good deal of pain.

The world is still gray when consciousness returns. I’ve landed in a ditch, spared serious injury by the thick mud there, churned up by run-off from the snow-capped mountains. The Woman, when I find her, is not so lucky. She is on the side of the road, undoubtedly dying again.

Her bag is at her side and, in it, I find the same objects- a shattered phone, a broken hairbrush, crushed make-up, and a ratty copy of Shitholes. I also find her wallet, tucked away in an inner pocket. I find her ID and recognize the name immediately.

This woman is the editor of ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’

My revelation is cut short by a sudden, sharp pain. The Editor has twisted her body in such a way that she is able to weakly bite the top of the hand that supports me on the asphalt and she takes a piece of me when I pull away, struggling to my feet.

The gray world has shrunk to a small triangle in an attempt to expel us. Its corners have stuck on the bike, the Editor, and myself, but it will collapse soon and we’ll be pressed out somewhere along the side of the highway. I walk to the motorcycle and grip the handles, hoping it will be enough to ensure we end up in the same place. The world shifts until it’s only a gray line that connects me and the dying woman. She sees me, because I am the only thing left in this transient reality to see.

I circle the entry for ‘The Last Sectioned Diner’ in her book and toss it to her without thinking. It lands on her broken ribcage and she curls into a ball and the sight of her pain makes me forget what I had planned on saying.

The last she sees of me is an apologetic grimace and a half-wave.

-traveler

In all of my travels, I have never been to ‘Yellowstone National Park.’ From what I’ve read and from the pictures I’ve seen online, it is a strange and beautiful place. ‘Yellowstone’ is a landscape that boils beneath its surface- a place of scalding, prismatic pools that will dissolve a man’s body in a day. It is a home to wild animals and raging fires, a place to buy expensive souvenirs and to hide one’s irritation at the lack of cell service. It is a completely natural place, and, though the Wayside runs through it, ‘Yellowstone’ is a destination, not a detour. It has no place in Shitholes.

But I am compelled to go, all the same.

How much of this is the magic of the postcard? I tell myself that I am going to meet the woman, to settle this before things get out of hand. I tell myself that I have been travelling so long for this project that it could be a relief to travel somewhere for myself- somewhere made safe by the rangers, with no hidden agendas or gray histories. I tell myself that ‘Yellowstone’ in the autumn will be an experience worth having, and that I have reached a point where I might blend in with crowds again. My hair has grown out. My old injuries have healed over. My teeth are still gapped but I have learned to smile with my mouth closed. I tell myself all of this, but when I look at the speedometer, I see Alice’s pick pointing down any road that will take us in the opposite direction.

She doesn’t trust the Woman. Or she doesn’t trust me.

Have I become an adult somewhere along the way, no longer willing to run from my problems but prepared to face them head-on? Or is it the card that compels me: a volcanic spring in vintage, WPA-style, with the message overlaid: ‘Wish you were here?”

Surely not into the simmering pool itself.

When I reach the gates and pay my entry fee I wonder how she plans to find me in a park so big. I stop for lunch and ask about the specific pool depicted on the postcard. I follow their directions, several miles down the road, and pull up to see it.

And the moment I see it I realize I have no desire to.

The Woman tries to kill me. She leaps out from behind a tree and shoves me into the railing so that all the air leaves my lungs and I double over the inconsequential barrier, smelling the rotten-egg stench of the boiling water below. The Woman shifts backward to push again and I roll out of her grasp, my ribs bruising on the rusted metal. I try to hit her before I see she’s drawn a knife and she slashes me clean through my jacket, a flash of cool pain across my forearm. I run, which she doesn’t seem to expect, and by the time she’s caught on I’m halfway around the pool. She follows me and I run again. She changes direction and I run the opposite way. She throws her knife across the center and it hits the ground behind me handle-first. The water is steadfastly between us.

“What the fuck?” I yell.

It’s more an exclamation than a question but she answers anyway.

“You did this to me!” she screams, “You made me like this!”

The Woman tries to rush me again but the pool is too big. She is screaming and crying now, loud enough that a passing car might hear and stop and sort this all out. We run several more circles before she stoops again and starts to throw rocks at me from across the way, screaming with each stone, screaming with so much force that I think her vocal cords must be tearing, that she must be moments away from throwing-up, from passing out. The stones fly past me, aimed as they are with blind anger. I see my bike behind her, parked at the road. If she runs again, I might be able to break from the circle and reach it in time to drive away.

“NO!” she shrieks, seeing my eyes flick to the road, “No more running!”

She lifts her body over railing and drives herself toward me, splashing into the scalding water. There is plenty of time to run- no chance that she could swim across quick enough to catch me even in tepid water. She boils alive, her face reddening and hair falling out with each angry stroke toward me. She doesn’t make it halfway before her screaming rattles down to a hoarse cough and then sputters out entirely. She floats silently toward me, the chemical pool already loosening her skin.

I step carefully around the water, back toward the road, keeping my eyes locked on her body. I am sure, until I reach the short trail back, that this is some trick. Her bag floats out from under her as I turn to leave, ejecting a hairbrush, a phone, several pieces of make-up, and a book.

‘Autumn by the Wayside: A Guide to America’s Shitholes.’

I am nearly a hundred miles away before I look at the postcard again, realizing too late that there may yet be some magic in it. My fears are unwarranted. Staring at the stylized pool, I know I would rather be anywhere else.

-traveler

‘It is likely by design that the ‘The Postcard Depot’ was built near the geographic center of the contiguous United States and, that, in violation of some soft traveler’s code, it stocks a library of postcards from across the country, available for a quarter each (or five for a dollar) and in seemingly infinite quantity. Among Wayside destinations, ‘The Postcard Depot’ stands out as both cleaner and more strictly organized than most. It is broken into sections by state and then alphabetically, by county, with clear tabs to indicate the popular landmarks one might be pretending to visit.

Conspicuously separate from the others are those that state, in one form or another, ‘Wish You Were Here.’ These are kept in a glass case, available at $250 a piece (or five for $1000), with no indication as to why they might be worth more. They are stiff and new, with crisp white borders and razor-sharp edges. These postcards take the ink of a pen as though thirsty for it.

Those in the know would have you believe that the cards do exactly what they suggest, which is to say that they compel the receiver to the advertised location. The cards are wishes in one form, fickle occult contracts in another- they must be sent through USPS- hand delivery will not do- and there are no guarantees as to when the receiver will heed the call. The only guarantee is that the card will sit with them, a window that overlooks a place far away, and nag until they finally crawl through it.’

By the time I understand the consequences of reading the card, it’s too late. The woman has realized I could outrun her indefinitely and now she’s cornered me with an over-priced souvenir. I should have guessed the moment a mail-carrier arrived at my tent in a dusty cornfield in the middle of the night. I should have guessed the moment I saw my full name written across the back, pressed into the cardstock so that I can feel the indention of it on the other side.

The woman compels me to Yellowstone and I turn myself toward it, somewhat relieved to have her in front of me now, rather than behind.

-traveler

‘Summit County, Ohio is home to ‘Old Towne,’ described as your run-of-the-mill reenactment village by colorful brochures found in motel lobbies of the surrounding region. Pictures inside reveal homesteading women hard at work, churning butter or tending fires that heat their theoretical soups in hanging iron pots. They suggest that, for a small fee, bearded men in stiff flannels will guide you in and around their simple (but sturdy) homes and allow you to take selfies in their simple (but sturdy) chairs, marveling all the while at the complicated (and fragile) ‘magic color box’ you keep in your pocket.

The parking lot of ‘Old Towne’ tells a different story.

The complex is walled off, as one might expect, but the entry gates are permanently closed. The townsfolk sealed them from inside shortly after the 2013 grand opening, during which the reenactors were said to have screamed at the sight of waiting customers in their modern clothes and shining vehicles. These events, and several shouted exchanges over the following hours, remain the last verbal contacts that have been recorded with the people inside ‘Old Towne.’ Transcripts consist mainly of accusations of witchcraft, prayers to God, and desperate threats coupled with the clanging of simple (but sturdy) farm tools. The walls of ‘Old Towne’ are not so thick that they cannot be spoken through and they are not so tall that crumpled letters cannot be thrown overhead, but the reenactors have decided to ignore further attempts to reach them and seem to carry on the illusion of homesteaders living out a miniature apocalypse in a makeshift fortress.

Several theories have emerged in the wake of the ‘Old Towne’ apocalypse, the foremost being that this is all some sort of complex art installation (which would explain why an anonymous entity funds new billboards, prints new flyers, and pays property taxes on the land). It does not explain why no charges were brought against the reenactors when, in July 2017, a woman snuck over the wall with a hand-written guide for their reintegration into modern society and was photographed, several days later, hanging from simple (but sturdy) gallows by a helicopter flyover.

Theories from the furthest fringes would have you believe that the apocalypse truly has befallen ‘Old Towne’ and that we are the doom that manifested in 2013 at the beckoning of some unknown force. The world has certainly grown stranger since then, and we, with out flashing phones and roaring engines, torment them so.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

The roads I take become more treacherous- narrow and gravelly or too wide altogether and so busy with other vehicles that I am sure I will be crushed between two well-meaning commuters. I go out of my way going out of my way, often losing myself on dead-end service roads when I could be cruising smoothly down the interstate, wondering what music radiates from towers in the distance. I lose myself trying to lose her.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the woman that seems to be following me. I thought, maybe, I would be brave enough to face her. She has it all wrong, of course. She writes about the burning of beloved roadside attractions (the strangers, remember?), and the extinction of a species of fern (I am not convinced it did not survive the destruction of the Boone radio station). She writes about the body of a man in a rest stop (I tried to save him) and the near-death of a self-proclaimed witch hunter (who nearly killed me, if memory serves). She mentions a run-in with a predatory shadow (as though cut from dark cloth, crumpled, torn, and stretched) and I admit that it might be my carelessness that let it loose on the world. I had assumed the Black Tailor’s false shadow had died long before it tore free from my socks.

What I mean is that everything could be excused in one way or another if I were to just stop and wait a while and prepare for her to speak her piece. That’s what I intended to do at the next comfortable town: spend a little extra time writing a particularly polished entry while she catches up. But Alice has been acting strange, her pick in the speedometer swinging erratically, taking me in wide circles sometimes, leading me down an off-ramp and then back onto the highway.

“What a shame,” I whispered to myself, “This will make me difficult to follow.”

And, with the thought of her further behind me than ever, there came a great sense of relief.

And then I knew I was running.

‘On a planet inhabited by creatures that can fly, swim, climb, and jump, humanity has historically risen above its terrestrial kin in one physical domain: running. We are not the fastest runners, by any means, but we are certainly the most dedicated, capable of wearing down prey and losing predators over distances their own bodies refuse to endure.

‘The Retrospective on the Human Runner’ should be a celebration of this accomplishment, and it does begin that way, providing peer-reviewed back-pats to the men and women who arrive at the building, dressed in athleisure that reveals the rigid definition of their calves. ‘The Retrospective’ takes a sudden turn at its midpoint, however, and becomes a venue for the owner to air their concerns about the current state of humanity.

‘We are still running,’ he writes under an exhibit featuring a man sitting at a desk, filing his taxes, ‘What are we running from? We cannot outrun the inevitable.’

‘This is running!’ he claims of a scene in a strip club.

‘This is running!’ he claims of a woman paying for coffee.

‘We were not meant to go this far- not yet!’ he says of the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth, ‘It isn’t ready!’

‘The Retrospective on the Human Runner’ should be a short museum and, like many things that go on too long, it leaves the visitor feeling tired and hurt and hardly more capable than they felt when they began.’

It strikes me, upon leaving the ‘The Retrospective,’ that I cannot picture the woman behind me in a car. I cannot see her on a bike, like mine, or with a vehicle of any sort. I have a clear picture in my head of what she might look like, and when I hold that image in my mind, I see her running as well.

-traveler

‘It’s said that there is a tale for every visitor on the shelves of ‘The Library of Urban Legends,’ though the trick, of course, is understanding which is written for whom. Take, for instance, the story of a woman who shook hands with a thing that lurked in her apartment’s garbage chute, only to be pulled inside when she (objectified, first, and later devalued) became garbage herself. Or the man who tried to stage his own kidnapping, who locked himself in the trunk of his car and died weeks later (drinking his own urine and chewing his belt), not because his neighbors did not hear his screams, but because they heard and chose to ignore him. Or the story of a man who shaved his head so smoothly that the world was reflected there just as it was around him (though warped by the curvature of his skull) and who became haunted by thoughts of passersby and their reflected bodies stretching across his scalp, dancing wickedly like candle flames and offering offense to their progenitors. Or the child who slipped into a manhole (its cover lifted and concealed by a flooding street) and who can be seen splashing about on the underside of puddles in the city, the treads of her shoes heavy with mud.

For whom could these tales hold morals?

It is difficult to say whether ‘The Library’s’ run-down aesthetic is by design or due to budgetary restraints. On the one hand, many of the legends (hand-written and folded into haphazard pamphlets) have been lost to hungry insects (or censored by them, who’s to say?). On the other, ‘The Library’ proudly touts what is has dubbed ‘The Whisper Bank,’ its first venture into the digital age. Three kiosks now allow visitors to experience the urban legends as they were meant to be, whispered by voices that seem to half-believe what they are saying- that seem to await the approval of the listener before laughing, as though the story were a joke, or sinking into despair with the understanding that they may very well be real and that the world may have a dreadful sense of irony about it.

Standing in ‘The Library’s’ towering core, it strikes the author as strange that legends of the past spoke of great deeds, that the stories we tell each other now are necessarily tragic.’

I arrive, finally, at ‘The Library of Urban Legends’ and recognize that I have passed it many times. It is situated in a repurposed grain silo, narrow platforms and thick shelves spiraling up the length of structure, terminating in darkness. The outside is clean and smooth- a clever urban camouflage. A run-down silo would attract people, people like myself, who have an eye for the Wayside’s eccentricities. A maintained silo in the countryside may as well be the opposite of a lighthouse on the coast: a building that deflects attention.

For all the work I have put in to finding this place, I have to force myself to stay. It is cramped, claustrophobic. The kiosks whisper incessantly through headphones that dangle off their pegs and the noise creeps up the cement like an infestation of ants. The stories are as unfriendly as the building, as unfriendly as the man who sits at a desk near the door and watches me, wordlessly, though I assure him I am only here to look for one thing.

I look for something like ‘Autumn by the Wayside,’ a part of me still hoping either that there is some fiction to what I have seen or that the same symptoms of the country’s madness have been captured in these papers. A single overlap would be enough to prove that I am not the sole witness to all of this, that someone else has glimpsed it too, even if only through their peripheries.

And I find it.

Someone has written of the drive-in. Someone else has written of an angry, impotent scarecrow in the center of a corn maze.

Someone has written of me- a man with the appearance of a broken porcelain doll, repaired by children. A man whose arrival portends strange events- sometimes violent ones.

Someone has done more than write- someone is following me, curling her toes in my boot prints and sleeping in beds that I have warmed. She is behind me, somewhere, has been for some time, and she is sure that I am as toxic as the exhaust from my bike.

-traveler

The men sit around the table, their paper women visible behind them on the wall. Sebastian, at the head, appears grim in his lack of movement. Caleb appears guilty in his restlessness. Several decks have been brought to the table but they remain unopened and tenuous- each an unanswered question.

Will there be a game tonight?

Will there be another game at all?

I’m not sure what Eddie told them but I trust that it was more heartfelt than anything I could have said. That’s the crux of it all- in order to get in close with those who hold the cards a sacrifice is in order. Something pure, offered violently.

There are many types of friendships and a path to each. The path to common friendship is long and tedious and something that is done almost subconsciously. It consists of a hundred little interactions drawn out over months or years. It comes upon two people like sleep, or love, or old age.

I don’t know when I’ll have the time for something like that.

So, to secure admission to ‘The Library of Urban Legends,’ I chose to pursue the quick and dirty camaraderie of us-vs-them, the sort of friendship and mutual respect that forms when a newcomer seems to offer up themselves for the good of an existing group.

“It was Eddie’s idea,” I tell them.

“Eddie was tired of losing.”

“He knew it would be suspicious if he tried to pull something himself.”

“He said I could join if I threw the game.”

“He said it would be less suspicious because I wouldn’t know what I was doing.”

“But you’ve all been so kind.”

“And my time here is running short.”

“And I couldn’t leave the group like it is.”

Eddie doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t seem to hear it at first, so sure, is he, that I would be selflessly sucking the venom from their wounds and ingesting the poison myself. Eddie would not turn on Caleb, would not stand up to Sebastian. He was not my first choice, but he was never not an option.

When Eddie does hear me, he does not know what to say. And when he thinks he knows what to say, he says all the wrong things. He tells them everything I told him, that Sebastian was behind the upset shelf and the upset mechanics of the game. He forgets to cite me, though, and by the time he remembers it seems petty. He guarantees that Caleb will not confess to the shelf. He ensures Sebastian will be too angry to think straight.

The room is silent when we are through and the men seem to consider all that has been said. Sebastian (and this is what I feared most) seems unconvinced, and I feel his eyes on me as he clutches a Traitor. He folds it, carefully, over and over.

The cheese, now green around the edges, warms at my chest, wringing out a line of grease that slides down toward my bellybutton. The card has no power over me.

They turn on Eddie all at once, spitting pretzels again, throwing cards. He defends himself, of course, and he tries desperately to trace the lines of my treachery but he buries himself in the holes of the story I told and the others step in to defend me.

I turn to leave, gathering my jacket from the pile on Sebastian’s bed, and I feel him in the room with me. The Traitor in Sebastian’s hand is becoming denser with each bend. It is folded beyond recognition, resisting him now. He pops it in his mouth and starts to chew.

“I’m sorry I blamed you,” he says, “I thought Eddie was a good guy.”

“Me too,” I tell him, “I’m sorry I got involved.”

“Know where you’ll go next?”

“I’ve got family a couple states over,” I tell him.

It’s not a lie.

“You said you were a traveler when you showed up here. Said you were looking for a museum.”

“Never did find it.”

“Well, I think I might know a guy that works there. Could get you in on your way out. We owe you that much for being honest.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Consider it a friendly gesture, then.”

-traveler

“You know I don’t fuck around with that satanic shit,” Eddie says, sitting up through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He grimaces and clutches broken ribs through the brown flannel shirt I’ve lent him. His bandages bulge underneath.

I am homesick, reader- ready to return to my old life on the Wayside. There are dangers there, of course, but there is also space to run from them. Given a room to live in I have begun to claw at the walls like a cornered animal. Given friends I have begun to tear them apart. Sometimes I dream about Veronica and her red door. I dream that I am trapped inside the freezer like so much meat.

I relax my fingers when I feel my nails digging into my palms.

I regard Eddie through the smoke.

“Suit yourself,” I tell him, “But I saw it clear as day- Sebastian pushed the shelf over.”

The cheese itches under my shirt where the top peels away and tugs on the hairs of my chest. I smell it, faintly, in the air that pushes out from my collar. It is rotting.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “Sebastian wrote the game.”

There is a moment’s silence between us before he leans forward and reaches for me. I stop him, afraid of revealing Brendan’s talisman.

“I got the letter today,” I tell him, “Seasonal work has ended.”

“Shit,” he says.

“If Sebastian wants me out…”

“You don’t need to stock shelves to play the game.”

“Won’t be able to afford it for long,” I remind him, “You’ve seen how I play. So I’m thinking, if Sebastian already wants me out…”

“Fuck that.”

“If Sebastian wants me out, if he thinks I’m screwing with the game, why not just admit it and head off?”

“It’s not fucking fair,” he says, “That’s why. It’s a slight to your fucking honor, dude.”

“I don’t care what they think,” I lie, “And you’ll know why I’m leaving. Let me do this for you, man. As a friend.”

Eddie huffs and picks and his nailbeds but I know he misses the game.

“Get the guys together this Friday,” I tell him, “I’ll ‘come clean’ and bow out, no problem.”

He is quiet for a long time and when he finally does speak he points to one of the discarded Traitors on the table and shakes his head and smiles.

“Fucking Sebastian,” he laughs, “That thing doesn’t look anything like you.”

-traveler

There is a staff shortage at the store’s pizzeria and I am shifted there for an afternoon, my seasonal position stretching uncomfortably toward infinity and my arm aching under the weight of the peel. When the others there are tired of me burning the food, they send me to the back where a 18 year old boy is frantically cutting occult symbols into old pizzas. He takes them apart and rearranges them on the floor. He licks his fingers.

“Why are you doing that?”

“You think I’m doing this?” he asks, wiping his nose with his sleeve, “It’s the pizza cutter. The thing’s cursed to cut pizzas this way. Try it.”

He hands me the pizza cutter and I carefully cut a mushroom-sausage into eight equal slices.

“Shit,” he says, “Maybe it is me.”

“They sent me back here to help,” I explain, “Anything specific that needs to be done?”

“Name’s Brendan and you can start by showing me how you did that.”

When the woman from the front pushes her head into the kitchen I’m close up behind Brendan, holding his right arm ahead and trying to guide it in a straight line. After several promising starts he’s managed to carve the crude visage of a goat-eyed being in a four-cheese, the marinara seeping from between its clenched teeth. She closes her eyes very slowly and opens them in a fraction of a second.

“Leave him alone,” she tells me, “Wipe down the counters. Brendan, I need a classic pepperoni. Don’t fuck this one up.”

“Yes ma’am!” he says, and he dusts himself off as the door closes. “Thanks for trying,” he whispers, and he points out a rag near the sink.

I clean while Brendan arranges the pizza, placing and re-placing the pepperoni slices to form a pattern that likely has some esoteric significance. Despite the close quarters, he doesn’t pay me much mind and so an hour passes in relative silence as orders trickle in from the front and Brendan’s work occasionally undoes mine. It isn’t until he goes on break before the dinner rush that I catch up and survey the empty room for hidden filth. I find it in the southeast corner, lurking behind a refrigerator- a matte-black spot with gray fringes that extend a yard in every direction. The core of the thing sucks heat from the humming underbelly of the fridge and glares darkly as I crack my knuckles and soak a new rag in bleach.

“Place is looking good,” Brendan says, his return filling the room with a smell like burning paper, “Mind helping me pick up the mural?”

“The…”

From my crouched position on the floor I turn and, for an instant, an image coalesces in the pizzas arranged there.

“That’s… Caleb,” I say, “From hardware. And Eddie on the floor.”

“Really?” Brendan asks, “From here it looks like a dog or a small horse.”

“How are you supposed to view this?” I ask him, trying to kneel back into a position where the tableau made sense, “Did you… make this for the thing under the fridge?”

“Hell no,” he says, “I made it for you.”

As I stand, a new image forms across the toppings, this one static. It’s me and Brendan, our earlier roles reversed. He stands behind me and holds my arm into the pizza oven. Brendan’s head rests, with sympathy, on my shoulder. My own face is screaming.

“Wait, no. I saw my friend on the floor before this.”

It was Eddie, I’m sure, spilled across the tile in crimson tomato, sandwiched between the floor and a shelf of thick crusts. Caleb’s form in curved bell peppers turned away from the scene on the left, his hand still outstretched from tipping the shelf. Sebastian on the right, having narrowly skirted the threat in red meat and olives.

“Old news,” Brendan says, “They took that guy to the hospital hours ago.”

And before I can stand to grab my things, I feel his hand on my back.

“Hold up. We’ve got to deal with that arm first.”

When the store closes I am lying on my back on a table in the kitchen. My shirt dangles over the dishrack and I am cold.

“You chilly, man?” Brendan asks, “You’ve got some bumpy topography here.”

“I’m fine,” I tell him, “Just do what you need to do.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

Brendan peels cheese from another slice of pizza and cuts a long rectangle from it, draping it carefully over my arm. He licks his finger and runs it over my bare skin, clearing away grease that has spread into the negative space of his design.

“This is good,” he says, “Some of the best I’ve done.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“How do you think I got this job?” He lays out a small, mozzarella pentacle over the inside of my wrist and massages it until the slick underside sticks. “I think we’re ready to bake this in.”

We move into the darkened store, our faces orange in the glow of the oven. Brendan tells me it won’t hurt, but I saw the tableau and I know he’s lying. He watches me reach in between the racks. He pretends to believe me when I tell him I’ll endure it on my own but he is there the moment I try to withdraw, holding my arm to the blazing heat. I smell the hair burn from my arm and watch the cheese rise and bubble and brown.

I find myself screaming:

“How much longer?”

And he screams in reply:

“A man makes his own pizza.”

He does not release my arm until the cheese is blackened and the skin is red. The design sloughs off as soon as I bend my elbow and Brendan howls. He drops to his knees and begins to furiously consume the crisp remains. I slump to the floor beside him and cradle my stinging limb.

When Brendan has finished he turns to me with black powdered lips and says:

“You should probably go to the hospital before that blisters.”

Before I leave the store, he rolls a long rectangle of cheese along my sternum, telling me that as long as it sticks there I will be protected from further assaults. I plan to peel it away in the parking lot but it remains there like a fat leech even as I step from the curb and into a crowded bus.

The doctor at the free clinic does not ask about the gray stain that grows from under my t-shirt as she bandages my arm. She doesn’t ask about the patterns in the burns.

“Does this hurt?” she asks, and I tell her what I realized as I slipped out of the pizzeria and into the brisk moonlight.

“Not at all.”

-traveler

They remove the woman from the room next to mine. Not dead, no. The opposite, actually. She’s never looked more alive than when they drag her out of the room, screaming and clawing at the door. I am already awake when it happens, staring out at the highway through a thin slat in the blinds. I am a few uninterrupted minutes away from leaving the motel and this town. My legs have been shaking for weeks. I dream of running and it feels like flying. My racing heart wakes me in the middle of the night.

An ambulance arrives silently. A police car after that. I gather, from the eventual confrontation, that she is being taken to some home for the terminally ill. Some estranged family member has made that choice for her.

Eddie is out of the bed and in the lot before I even wonder if the noise will wake him. He shouts at the paramedics until the police pull him aside and warn him against further interference. The woman screams after him- him, and eventually me, standing in the doorway- to convince them that she’ll be all right on her own. Neither of us do. How could we?

The woman’s room is left unlocked in the chaos, her door ajar. The sickly smell and yellow light seep out onto the pavement outside my room. I hesitate to cross it and, when I do, it’s only to close the woman’s door. I see the indention of her body on the comforter and the path of her pacing in the carpet and I shut them quickly away. Eddie jogs over.

“Think we should take some of her stuff to her?” he asks.

I demonstrate the locked handle and he puts on a face that he wears the rest of the evening. He’s wearing it at the table near the window, looking out the slat with me, when he says:

“I’m sorry things have been so shit recently.”

I thumb a card in my pocket, a picture of the Traitor, and I scratch my nose.

“Me too.”

Another Friday arrives and we play a few broken rounds of the game before Sebastian steps away to smoke and several others linger, bound by cautious unrest. Caleb is the first and only one to broach the subject.

“We need to change it back.”

Nobody disagrees, which is as much a mutiny as these men will ever conspire toward. They begin to drop the Traitor from their hand, drawing up as though someone had dealt them a missing card. Even Sebastian seems relieved, at first, to find himself lost in the old, familiar archetypes and their old familiar behaviors for an evening.

It isn’t until later, when Diego stands and drops a card from his sleeve that Sebastian sees what has happened. He seems to see them all- all the Traitors, all at once, secreted in pockets and stuffed between the pages of old novels on his shelf, folded under baseball caps and into shoes.

“What’s this?” he asks, picking the card up from the rug, “You cheating, Diego?”

“No, man,” Diego says, squirming in his clothes, “No… Me and the guys thought…”

His move to snitch sets the others off. They throw down their cards and shout about the problems with the game and threaten Diego and try to excuse the subterfuge. They spill beer and chew pretzels so that they can spray the crumbs from their mouths and make angry gesticulations. Sebastian is silent, for a moment, and I swear his eyes are on every card in the room. For that moment, he’s in the place he goes to make these things. Then, he holds up his hand and he says:

“I know who’s doing this.”

And, as sure as I am that he’ll say Caleb he turns to me instead.

“You.”

He bends the Traitor in his hand, folding off-center so that the illustration crumples on its arm.

“You all better be out of here by the time I get back,” he says, and he goes for another cigarette.

Everyone moves to pack up, the game abandoned on the table like a half-finished story. Eddie, seeing that I haven’t moved, sets a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know what that was,” he whispers, “But he’ll get over it.”

I should be embarrassed, I realize, to be called out like that. I should be thinking of every reason it couldn’t be me that’s ruining the game. Instead, I try to keep a straight face as pain racks the left side of my body, radiating from the arm Sebastian would have me lose.

-traveler