‘A certain small-scale hell exists in the form of a park bench along the Wayside. Provided, undoubtedly, with good intentions- cut with clean lines from American wood and polished to a sheen- the bench has lived out its better days in a single season of use and now decomposes, angrily, in the sun. The winter has sucked the finish from the bench and its planks have bristled, becoming ragged and splintery and light as volcanic rock.

‘The Park Bench Hell’ is nature’s mild protest at the ruthlessness of American infrastructure, at the thick asphalt scabs that itch under the summer’s heat, at being condemned to road verges and medians. It is the inflammation around a wound, the body’s cure-all reflex to perceived infection, making the once-welcoming environment not barren, exactly, but certainly inconvenient to the would-be malignance.

Hold no doubts, reader, the nature on the side of the road does not want you to enjoy it. Every blade of course, brown grass hidden among the greenery is a reminder to keep your shoes on. The ants that emerge under your dirty jeans arrive to keep you from sitting. The carefully placed bird shit, the strange stinging insects, the staleness of your sandwich just seconds after it meets the outside air- this is nature declaring it is capable of ruining a human the same way it ruins park benches, through a thousand miniature violences and infinite time.’

“Fuck.”

The Editor pulls her arm back quickly, yanks her shirtsleeve down over her elbow. She’s opened a bag of potato chips and stripped the plastic from a gas-station ham and cheese. She hasn’t touched either, choosing, instead, to become deeply angry at my assertion that pre-popped popcorn is stale out of the bag, no matter the brand.

“What is it?” I ask, holding out a hand to steady her arm.

She pulls out of my reach and examines her skin.

“Splinter,” she says, “I hate these things.”

“I think my knife has a pair of tweezers,” I say, but the Editor shoots herself and slumps forward into her abandoned lunch.

Blood pours between the slats of the table and across my jeans as I struggle to extricate myself from the bench. I throw up in the grass.

-traveler

‘What is it they’re farming out there? Too short to be corn, too tall to be any number of ground vegetables. You’ve been driving for a while now. Your passenger wakes up long enough to confirm it isn’t wheat, isn’t any number of American cereals. They’re asleep again, unable to answer questions about the strange farm equipment that appears. You know so little about modern farming. You can’t imagine where they pull enough water to satisfy this field, for instance. You don’t know how much water a field of any type needs. Is an acre more or less than a square mile?

Why are there never people in these fields? Why are there so few birds? Why is the equipment unmanned? When was the last time you met a farmer? How do you know they weren’t lying to you?’

The motorcycle coasts on empty for several nauseous miles before the sun finally sets and we find an exit from I-38. We emerge several states from where we started and loiter, for a while, in the parking lot of a gas station. A woman walks her dog in a patch of grass as her child chooses candy inside.

“I’m not sure we learned anything from all that,” the Editor admits, flipping through a copy of Shitholes, “I don’t think that was useful in the least.”

I chew up the last of Alice’s picks and spit the splinters into the gravel. It’s been a while since she said anything to me. I hope she’s resting now.

“You all right?” the Editor asks.

I nod, and we set off toward the next continental breakfast.

-traveler

The Editor and I come upon an RV campground before dusk and grow domestic for a while. We wait out a storm in a round mobile home that would sooner crumble than move from the spot, crouched, as it is, like the dry husk of a cicada. We are both so tired and so unused to the stagnant sunset that neither of us recognize time passing. We set up the living room with second-hand carpets and a scuffed coffee table. We share a bed, keeping a respectful distance between our bodies even in sleep. We take turns washing dishes and, sometimes, we order out for food and grumble at the time it takes to have a simple pizza delivered to the door.

We argue. We fight. Our words spill out in front of the neighbors, in front of the neighbors’ kids. The thin walls of the trailer can hardly hold them. We fill our fridge with vegetables we rarely eat. I grow a little fatter. The Editor grows pale.

The Editor takes to leaving the pistol on the coffee table and I find it casually pointing my direction each time I enter the room. She tells me it hasn’t been loaded for months (“Months?” I ask, “How long have we been here?”) but I don’t know where else she would keep the bullets. I’m sure they are there, in the gun, nestled in the barrel’s perfect slots. I thumb the head of a loose screw and wonder if its curvature isn’t the same as the sleeping lead.

When I move the gun to a shelf I don’t realize I shift it out of the Editor’s easy reach. She’s cradling it in her hands when I see it again, the step-stool chair still drawn across the room to the wall. I stand in the doorway with a pizza box balanced on my palm.

“Finally on time,” I was going to say, having retrieved it myself on a motorcycle that may not have seen use in the last year.

We fight again, the worst we’ve had, and we both determine to leave the other but, because we only have the one means of escape, we go together. And the further we are from the RV Park, the less we remember of our time there.

‘We are led to believe that there can exist a hybrid existence between the permanence of ‘home’ and the opportunity of ‘travel.’ But home is a place, reader, and though it might change it cannot be everchanging. We are animals that require a bolt hole, running from something we know is always just behind us or hiding from the same omniscient predator in caves of our own design. Nature will drive us to safety, and it will always run an ‘RV Park’ aground, scraping the wheels from mobile homes and seizing the engines meant to tow them with poverty and clotted oil.’

-traveler

We re-trace I-38 until the pavement lifts off of the ground and completes a dramatic vertical loop, the crest of which is at least 200’ in the air. I suggest we avoid it entirely by navigating the dry grass just off-road but, as I edge the bike’s leading wheel off the gravel, a washed-out state-trooper car further along the way flashes its lights and that’s that. I don’t want police involvement, no matter the absurdity of the situation, and the Editor is suspiciously quick to agree. We turn around and head east, again, the both of us holding our breath as we pass the cemetery, the both of us remembering a day-old hangover as we pass the bar.

The sun never quite sets, here. The horizon never approaches. We drive for a long time along a stretch of road with a lazy cartoon backdrop- the same trees, birds, clouds- until a speck in the distance becomes the busy parking lot of an event space. A banner overhead reads, simply:

‘GUNS’

‘The mutant offspring of the ‘Free Market’ and ‘Constitutional Rights,’ there is always a gun show happening somewhere in America, always a crowd of people to attend it.

It’s a funny thing: relatively few fatalities have been reported at gun shows. On the other hand, like a rash that foreshadows a deadly fever, firearm-based fatalities inevitably rise in their wake as though these events exist at the eye of some subtle storm that stretches across time. They are a haven for scheming, for pre-meditation. A place for subtle nods and quick handshakes. They were not always this way but they are most certainly that way now and, not unlike the weapons that exchange hands at gun show, their once-purpose is greatly overshadowed by the consequence of their misuse. So, maybe not funny.

The shows vary greatly by region, but a few universal aspects stand out among them. They bring about an atmosphere of smug camaraderie among attendants and a subtle paranoia regarding the rest of the world, as though the act of non-attendance is suspicious in and of itself. There will always be trucks in the lot outside, vacant and idling. There will always be men standing nearby, though not so near as to assume ownership of the trucks. There will be accessories to firearms for sale- racks, packs, and ammunition. There will be meat for sale alongside the guns that killed the animals. There will be a smell like smoke in the air. There will be a tangible craving for cigarettes.

The author would suggest avoiding gun shows to the extent that its possible, though, having seen one ahead, they will likely be the safest place in miles.’

“I just want to use the restroom.”

The Editor insists that we attend, that we pay the $5 entry fee, and she promptly forgets about the bathroom. She insists on displaying the pistol openly once we’re inside, opening her jacket dramatically wide. Nobody seems to mind.

She zips her jacket closed as we arrive in the vendor area.

The guns for sale are outrageous. Many seem warped, as though by a cancer that knows only that firearms are made to kill. They sprout auxiliary barrels. They glisten with knives. Stocks bulge to form clubs and shells cling to cobalt as though held there by magnets. In another section all of the guns are designed to point backward, toward the shooter. The more winding the path of the bullet, the more intricate the barrel re-direction, the more expensive the gun.

“How convenient,” the Editor jokes, prodding a spiraled revolver.

“Guaranteed to do the deed,” grumbles a man behind the counter, hardly more than a pile of dry cloth.

“Wouldn’t it explode?” she asks.

“Two paths to the same place,” he coughs.

The Editor brushes her fingers across the cold metal and startles when I press her forward. There are guns for sale that claim to take ammunition of any caliber, with great input valves that shuffle bullets like a coin counters. There are, in some corners, machines that claim to be guns, machines that take shells and have triggers but have no clear means of output.

“Dare you?” a sign hanging above them asks and, with varied emphasis below, “Dare you?”

Neither of us dare. We leave the gun show, weaving through a labyrinth of idling trucks to the bike and the familiar weight of its trailer. Having determined that there is no point traveling backward on I-38, we press on.

-traveler

Further back on I-38 we stop so the Editor can investigate what I assumed to be a military graveyard, its headstones white as teeth in orderly rows. She returns sober and aghast at something she refuses to articulate because it has no entry in Shitholes and therefore has no bearing on my journey.

In the false privacy of her helmet I sometimes hear the Editor calculating their number. It seems she’s never satisfied with the result.

-traveler

Somewhere in the southeast, the Editor and I fall for a ‘Faulty Road Sign’ and end up on I-38 (which shouldn’t exist). The author of Shitholes includes this little byway as an addendum in the book where one might only find it if one were looking. One would think that, in most cases (including ours), a reader would only attempt to look for it if their GPS had already failed them and if their internet search had already suggested that there were no I-38, and if the only mention of the road online were several pages into a pirated PDF copy of the Shitholes appendices at which point one might turn, frowning, to their own copy of the book and find the entry there, clear as day.

Put simply, a reader will most likely learn about this trap after it has sprung.

‘It can be assumed that there are a few misprints in each lot of road signs that the Federal Highway Administration has produced and, just as a mis-made cell might spiral into cancer, these signs make their way into the system, forming great, redundant interstates that weigh on the taxpayer like a tumor. These ‘Faulty Road Signs’ are distinguishable from their official counterparts only by the absence of a small holographic sticker on the back and, more practically, by simple context clues.

‘Why,’ you might ask yourself, ‘does I-67 consist only of a series of on and off ramps?’ ‘Why does I-21 post minimum speeds as 40 mph when it remains largely unpaved?’ ‘How many times does I-33 split into carpool lanes, their tolls increasingly expensive and their passenger requirements increasingly bizarre?’ ‘For how long does I-38 proceed with a mild right curve toward a sunset that never quite dips below the horizon (shining, always, in the eyes of the driver)?’

You will not likely find the answers to these questions, but you might rest easy with the knowledge that, in asking them, you have narrowed your location to just one of the dozens of feral American roadways that stripe the aging country like varicose veins.’

We burn a pile of books on the side of the road, all copies of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ from paths the Editor insists we have left to be overgrown. We are not cold and the books were a nominal burden- the Editor burns them with the grim pleasure with which she sometimes considers the gun hidden in her jacket. I’m not sure she remembers revealing it to me at the ‘Parade,’ and neither of us have brought it up since.

It was a gun that made me leave the Stranger.

The Editor prides herself on the narrative layout of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ and, in the few instances that we have been drunk together, the conversation will turn inevitably to this achievement. It happens again at a bar off I-38 where every menu item is misspelled and the locals move like spiders in short, unpredictable bursts.

“It’s about the reading experience,” she says, her voice the loudest thing in miles, “A normal travel guide is written like an encyclopedia but this is a narrative. This,” she says, jabbing a finger in the appendices, “is the friend that pushes you into the lake when you hesitate on the rock. This is the intervention from on high when you’re too spineless to take the last step into the unknown.”

Light from the sunset pierces the window. Its reflection off the laminated menus makes it difficult to see her expressions clearly. Her eyes well up when she speaks like this, though I haven’t seen her cry since our first encounter at Yellowstone. I shift and the light reflects there, instead. Her eyes are so full that the slightest movement might set them overflowing: an arm around her shoulder, a pat on the back, a hug. I don’t offer any of these things and her gaze remains thick. Flooded.

We’ve been moving backward on the interstate for an hour, carefully straddling the shoulder, though we’ve seen no other cars. We pulled off for a break here, seeing that the lot exited from the left as though its common enough for travelers to be re-tracing their drive. The Editor became drunk immediately, almost as soon as she walked through the door. I took my time- two paths to the same place. We can’t leave until we sober up and, while we wait for that to happen, we drink.

“I don’t care what you think,” she continues, reading disagreement in my relative silence, “I’m proud of this thing. I’m proud of what I made here. This is a work of art- a book like nothing else that’s come out of our company. I couldn’t be more proud.”

Her insistence on the word speaks, to me, of a deep-seated denial- of a story she tells herself to sleep well at night or to return from the dead. I do think she’s proud, but I think that might be the only positive thing she experiences, which makes it difficult to feel complimented when her face breaks into a wide, weepy smile and she says:

“You should be proud, too.”

-traveler

‘South Dakota boasts a peculiar slogan, ‘Great Faces, Great Places,’ and they would have you believe this was in sole reference to Mt. Rushmore. Beyond this, they would have you believe that Mt. Rushmore accounts for all of the stone faces available along the Wayside and that it is the creation of a species that, admittedly, so enjoys seeing itself that a great portion of its artistic endeavors attempt what a mirror or camera or a well-programmed 3D printer could create in an instant. Can you imagine, reader, if we were not alone in this motivation? Can you imagine the statue of a buck fashioned by its own hooves, the pointed horns a still-green pine branch that shivers in the wind and the eyes, black stone?

The truth is that there are faces everywhere and there are more faces every day- the warped faces in the wood grain of your childhood wardrobe, the crude gaping mouths of cliffsides and ancient trees all early stages of the same phenomenon. These faces did not always exist but, having recognized the faces in the Black Hills, the nation can no longer contain them.

The first time the faces were brought to the attention of America’s colonizers occurred when a pioneering woman named Leana Brookings fell into a sinkhole that she hoped would lead her to gold. In excavating several similar pits nearby her family revealed the face of a great uncle, screaming (or yawning) at the cloudless sky (the initial pit being just one of his deep-set eyes). So struck, were they, with the dread of deep space and dark water (seeing something so familiar made monstrous) that they set to leveling the land. The second recorded incident was of ‘The Overhang Smile,’ a beloved natural fissure observed by the denizens of a canyon settlement. The fissure is said to have dissolved in a sudden rockslide, killing a man and simultaneously revealing his own smiling face below the rough caricature that had previously been the center of sentimental stories (most of which seemed to suggest the white man had always been in the Black Hills).

The faces occur on a small scale as well, looking down from cavern ceilings, their gaping mouths serving as handholds to unwitting spelunkers (whose lights make shadows and faces of everything in the dark). Some emerge, smooth and cool, from river-washed stones. Others break fully-formed, a blight in the crystal hearts of local geodes. No matter the size, the faces play on the human psyche like an itch- sometimes fearful like the crawling of an invisible insect and sometimes annoying like the peel of a dried scab. In either case, the faces seem to call a viewer to scratch and, in either case, the scratching only seems to worsen the condition.

Aside from Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse (which emerges inevitably despite a concerted private effort to demolish it), undamaged specimens can be viewed in a shallow cavern outside the ‘Gas n’ Begone.’ Zelda Flanders, owner, does not publicly advertise the faces but will sell you instructions to the trailhead and rent you a flashlight with the same demeanor a conservative drug-store cashier might employ in selling condoms to a nervous teen. She will offer no rules to guide your tour, secretly hoping that someone will do away with the silent audience that darkens her property like mold in a closet.’

– excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

The Editor chews slowly, her eyes drooping and unfocused. Syrup glistens at the corners of her mouth and her voice is thick.

“I’m fine,” she says, “Just tired. And this place… is gross.”

A young woman walks behind us and she slides a pancake onto the Editor’s plate. The air is thick with melted butter. I’ve hunched my shoulders to protect my own eating area and I take small, regular bites. When I’m not eating, I hold one of the few of Alice’s remaining picks between my lips. This appears to be one of the few acceptable non-eating activities.

Unfortunately, the pick seems to invite conversation, so I eat instead, feeling the edges of my inner-self expanding uncomfortably.

The Editor gags in her chair and I try not to let her disgust spread to me.

‘There’s no magic greater to middle America than a pancake feed. Ostensibly for charity, these events probe the deep stomach of the corn-fed lower class to fund causes few participants will remember past the drive home. In truth, a pancake feed represents the classic capitalist trade-off: money for cleansing.

The cleansing ritual of the ‘Pancake Feed’ involves the three-part dedication of time, sacrifice, and debauchery (making it distinct from those that require only one of the aspects, say, the sterile donation of money by mail, the hammering of a few nails in the skeleton of a charity house, or the straightforward gluttony of an all-you-can-eat buffet). It is an archetype (in miniature) of the American dream in which the lower-class is encouraged to show up, to invest money, and to reap the promised benefits (in the form of the nation’s principle cereal grain, no less), failing to realize that it is the lower-class working behind the scenes as well: a sloshing-about of money in an already shallow pool.

All this to say that the ‘Eternal Pancake Feed’ is an American abomination. 2019 marks its 32^nd year of continual pancake production, locked in place by a single participant, Edith Baker, who has consumed pancakes at a steady pace since the fateful July 4^th on which it began. Baker has grown to an enormous size and has not responded to attempts at communication since the late nineties when she apparently said “Pass the butter, if you would.” A conservative estimate suggests Baker has eaten 24 tons of pancake in the last three decades, all for the entry price of two U.S. dollars. The feed continues as long as she eats, fueled by a certain sense of obligation to uphold the ‘all-you-can-eat’ promise and, no doubt, by grim curiosity.

Despite opening the ‘Eternal Pancake Feed’ to further customers, the event ceased being charitable, or lucrative, a long time ago. It has bankrupted the food bank that it once partnered with and remains a minor drain on the state’s budget: a single citizen’s mindless greed funded by taxpayers through the exploitation of a minor loophole.’

“She’s like those little Venus figures.”

The Editor’s sudden interjection catches me off guard. Alice’s pick slips from between my teeth and lands upright in the soft flesh of the pancake on my plate.

“What?”

“Like the… the fat women they dig up. The old goddesses.”

I look down the table at Edith Baker, who sits at the head. I wonder if she sat there originally, knowing what was to come, or if they’ve since moved the table to indicate her legacy. I retrieve Alice’s pick and suck the crumbs from it.

“The Venus statues never had faces,” I say, “No mouths to eat with.”

“No mouths to talk with.”

“You think ancient humans had pancake feeds?”

“Just a comment,” she says.

It’s good to hear her talking, I realize. It’s the first unprompted thing she’s said since I found her again.

-traveler

The Editor does not reappear for quite some time and I lug her books aimlessly into the south, where autumn is warm and dry. She has left her journal behind, the book she uses to keep track of the differences between Shitholes editions. The first hundred pages are beautiful, looping scrawls- as clear as the night sky. The writing degrades, though, her form as well as her words. By the end she’s writing in a shorthand so frantic it might as well be code. She has predicted I would read this all, someday, and she rails against me when she remembers to. The Editor insists that I tell her once I have and is so sure that I won’t.

She’s right, of course.

I wonder what she thinks of me, sitting as she does on the bike.

There is a picture of us on a rollercoaster- a place ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ said was haunted by spirits from all over the country.

‘What?’ it asked, ‘You don’t think ghosts can have fun? Free from mortal concerns, the previously-fearful departed have no reason not to try these things. Though, spirit photographers have captured increasingly long lines…’

The Editor has no interest in the places we visit, only the order in which we visit them. Had she asked why I bought the picture (priced steeply at $29.99 for the smallest option) I would show her that my family’s dog sits just behind me, its semi-transparent tongue dripping ectoplasm into the wind. The dog, I would explain, was alive when I left. But she was old, so…

So it’s not a surprise.

I have not pressed the issue, though, because behind the dog and behind the Editor, as far back as the camera has captured, the ride seats are busy with her own spirits, each stern-faced in turn. I look at the picture, and I wonder if the new Editor is the one I should tell. She doesn’t seem to think these little deaths matter in any iteration, and truthfully, each Editor is identical to the last. I would not have guessed there was a tally and, faced with it, I’m not sure what it means.

-traveler

‘We are assured, as children, that the vast majority of our fears are unwarranted and that the world is a mundane place so when, as adults, ‘The Parade of Strangers’ arrives in town, we hardly bat an eye.

Is it the celebration of some secret society? Is it a memorial for a forgotten war? Could it be a charity event or a publicity stunt? For whom do they raise the money? What are they trying to sell us? Perhaps they are a friendly, if underrepresented, religion, celebrating some esoteric holiday that the government refuses to recognize. Perhaps they are a roving militia, re-distributing their apocalyptic supplies.

They are none of these things, or, they are a lurching chimera of them all. ‘The Parade of Strangers’ descends upon a town much like a spat of rain: with no motive except to move through it, on the way to destination yet defined. Like a spat of rain, we endure it.’

As always, there are websites that track these things- a website that tracks and attempts to predict the movement of ‘The Parade.’ It is estimated to be three and a half miles long when we check, moving south down I-75 at about 40 mph. We approach its tail and break from the interstate as soon as we begin to see candy on the ground. It sits in sticky piles on the median.

Believe it or not, it’s the Strangers that began the great American tradition of throwing candy from a parade. It is an act that is quintessentially strange, invoking the early-American disregard for litter and an unwarranted trust for white American men. We’ve learned better, since then, and now we warn children that Strangers are exactly the sort of person you shouldn’t be taking candy from. Candy can only mean an ulterior motive, kids, unless you’re paying out of pocket. A candy debt to the Strangers is not something you want on your file in ‘The Secret Bank.’ Low entry, high interest.

No easy bankruptcy.

It would be time-consuming and difficult to try to pass ‘The Parade of Strangers’ from behind but the next best way forward still means bisecting it at some point. We settle on a suburb of Louisville, hoping to cut through early, but the motorcycle isn’t taking well to hauling the little trailer of books (the Editor, herself, weighing next to nothing behind me and refusing to wrap her arms around my waist), so we arrive late and find we’re just in time to see the dead-center passing through downtown. It’s visible from miles around, a flock of birds hovering overhead like a sugar-starved thunderhead.

Seeing it, again, I may as well be back in ‘The City of Strangers.’ They have taken most of it with them, the King’s skyscraper looming over the little suburban townhall like a schoolyard bully. Candy rains down from broken buildings as they are pulled along the street. It shatters on the ground and leave dents on the cars parked along the road. The whole thing is noisy- the rattling of broken candy and the roaring of diesel engines as they struggle to pull the buildings through Main Street. Someone is playing music but its volume relative to everything else makes the gesture seem sarcastic and threatening.

Nobody has come to see this parade, but nobody attempts to stop it. It’s another day in the world and another person’s business as to what this is all about.

“There’s an opening up ahead,” the Editor shouts behind me, “You’ll have to be quick.”

The Strangers eye us as they pass, smirking at the bike’s exhaust and the idea that we might find a way to cross. I breathe heavily under the helmet, fogging the inside. It wouldn’t have been hard for them to learn my license plate, the make and model of my set-up, but it wouldn’t be like them at all to consider the details. As unlikely as it may be, I think any one of these men could know me by my face, or by the way I walk, or by the way my shadow lies a little too thick on the ground. I look ahead to where the Editor has spotted the way through and I ready us for the charge.

Much as we both assumed (though these suspicions often remain unspoken between the Editor and I), the Strangers try to close the gap the moment they realize we’ll be trying to slide through it. Whether they recognize me in the moment, or whether this is just their way, the truck engines spin screeching rubber into the pavement with the effort of the Strangers to jolt forward. Candy rains down maliciously, then, cracking the headlamp and sticking in the treads of the tires. We skid through the rainbow hail and I topple the bike on a hidden curb. I rise quickly and see the Editor struggle.

Her left arm is broken.

The Strangers seem to lose interest now that we’ve crossed but I am careful to leave my helmet on. The Editor pulls painfully at her own and eventually allows me to remove it for her. She frowns at the dangling wrist and glances between the trailer and my covered face.

“Can I trust you with these for now?” she asks, “I don’t really want to travel on this arm.”

Before I can answer, before I can begin to guess the time it takes for a broken bone to heal, the Editor pulls a small pistol from her bag and levels it with her head, spraying a nearby van with blood and brain-matter.

I swallow my gum.

The Editor exists in all timelines- she’ll be back when I make a decision that sends us down a new path. I admire her fearlessness for that time in-between, but shudder to think of it myself.

-traveler