‘There is no ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ pop-up shop. No booth. No storefront. Not even a man selling t-shirts out of the back of a pick-up truck. 

Not officially anyway. 

Unofficially speaking, there does seem to be something or someone out there because you’re hardly the first to ask. The answer, however disappointing, is ‘no.’ We don’t strive to make money off the Wayside and we’ve been successful in that endeavor and that endeavor alone.’

Of course I stop. Why wouldn’t I? Nearly a decade, now, I’ve followed the winding path this guide puts forth and I have nothing to show for it but wrinkles and scars and a budding nervousness that I worry may bloom into general anxiety or acute paranoia. I see the Stranger, still, though I hardly mention him anymore. It’s difficult for me to know whether he’s really there in those moments, always a face in a crowd or a swiveled head in a passing car or a snapshot reflection. I wonder if he thinks I’m following him. That’s a worry, too. 

When I see a booth in a dead mall at the very edge of northern Texas that claims to sell official Wayside merchandise, that is “Merchandise licensed by the hit guide, ‘Autumn by the Wayside,’ I stop. Of course I do. I loiter near the window and note that, by the collection of dust, this impermanent installation seems to have been here for quite some time.

The window boasts the usual suspects: an arrangement of hats and t-shirts with the Guide’s faded logo. There are koozies and coasters and a few engraved bottle openers. My eyes are drawn to a display just inside, boasting rare, out-of-circulation items. Artifacts from ‘The Immolated Kat Cirkus’ pre-immolation, for instance. Jars of cat hair that appear to be only moderately singed. And needles from ‘The Thirsty Cactus’ taken before it was downed by lightning.

And beside that a sign that says: We have the key to the room you’ll be locked in (prices vary). 

And beside that the Stranger, looking bored. 

I blink and he remains. Not a reflection or a memory, but the Stranger himself, looking older the way I look older. He doesn’t see me- looks over as soon as I think it.

I’m gone around the corner before he finishes the turn. The Stranger, his obsidian rabbit-thing in a bed on the counter. Both healthy in a way that neither Hector nor I have managed. And rooted? I risk another look and see he’s gone back to boredom. But it isn’t boredom. He’s reading. And maybe content.

Contentment seems so far off that I didn’t recognize it at first. 

The Stranger turns toward me again and I run. I don’t want to be seen, still searching. And I don’t want him looking for me if he isn’t already. 

-traveler

‘There was a culturally significant silence- an intake of breath- when ‘The Statue of a Human Man’ and ‘The Statue of a Human Woman’ appeared in the streets of Boston, bringing to end a year’s anticipation of the event. Early previews consisted entirely of interviews with the artist, well-known sculptor Steven Lock, who talked at length about the difficulties of distilling the universality of what it means to be human into two images. Guesses as to the final shape of these installations ran the gamut but most agreed they would be abstract, by default, and likely ironic. Two identical lumps of copper, maybe, or deeply intricate renderings of male and female reproductive systems. One popular theory suggested Lock would install mirrors, allowing viewers to recognize themselves as the platonic form of humanity under whichever title they choose. 

That, at least, would have been cheap. 

Contrary to expectations, the statues look like male and female representations out of a vintage science textbook, though critics have noted their proportions skirt the edge of pornography. Their sexual details have largely been rounded out and rounded up, the man’s groin and the woman’s bust highly exaggerated but lacking the detail that might warrant legitimate public complaint.

Though people have complained. 

When people complained that the statues were simplistic and, in their simplicity, were alienating, the city shrugged its shoulders and asked if the public could do a better job. When several members of the public demonstrated that they could, the city shrugged it shoulders and said there was no budget. When members of the public offered to do it pro-bono, the city pretended to not know what the word meant. 

Further complaints took the form of vandalism. 

‘The Statue of a Human Man’ and ‘The Statue of a Human Woman’ no longer look like anything humanity has produced through nature. They do not look human at all.

But the people are happy.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Among a gathering of low hills in southern Kansas, a traveler may begin to see signs for ‘The Mister-EE Spot,’ billed largely in the familiar shape of Wayside destinations that proclaim some inherent mystical property (pun intended). Notable about the signs is the sheer number of them and the state of their decay, which is not at all consistent but instead exists along a whole spectrum of general sunbleaching and woodrot. The signs age and fall apart without repair and new signs are posted in their place (or nearby). Photographic evidence suggests that new signs will sometimes give direction to ‘The Mister-EE Spot’ that are in direct opposition to those previously posted.

None of the signs tell the truth. 

‘The Mister-EE Spot’ does not exist on any online map. Not reliably. There have attempts to pinpoint it and so ‘The Mister-EE Spot’ does sometimes appear as a destination and sometimes even as multiple destinations in the same vicinity. These best-guesses are normally removed within a few weeks when a quorum of frustrated users have contacted the map service, having failed to locate ‘The Mister-EE Spot’ or anything that looks like it might have once been anything like it. ‘The Mister-EE Spot’ has been marked ‘permanently closed’ several times but the signs keep coming. 

Testomonials from those who claim to have found ‘The Mister-EE Spot’ offer some insight into what the place may be. Most describe it as a series of mundane but puzzling illusions, not unlike those cheezy attractions at the standard and more accessible mystery stop-off. A man appears shorter than his wife. Water runs up hill. A dog speaks. But there is no denouement at ‘The Mister-EE Spot.’ Visitors are given time to examine the exhibitions for tricks and have found none. It is a place of magic, they say- of mystery.

And they never find their way back.’

This is the closest I’ve gotten to ‘The Mister-EE Spot,’ I think. Four hours of missing time in Kansas. I emerge starving and half an inch shorter, wearing broken-in shoes I have never seen. A video clip on my phone appears to have been taken in the pocket of my jacket. I hear myself laughing, the way I do when I’m surprised. Somebody else nearby cheers and the video ends. My location at the time of the video was not logged. My phone is fully charged. 

Not sure how to count this one. 

-traveler

Sometimes I wonder if the bar for entry into the guide isn’t a little low. Take, for instance, ‘The Killing Cord’ of central Utah: a low hanging powerline with faulty jacketing in two hand-distant locations. According to my considerable research, there was nothing particularly interesting about it before its infamy as a place to and means by which to commit suicide. And the fact is, there’s no evidence of any actual suicide taking place there. Like so many satanic-panics and children-eating digital games, the hand-wringing around ‘The Killing Cord’ is likely over a rumor. 

A rumor that has been bolstered by a well-meaning local government. 

‘You’ll know it’s ‘The Killing Cord’ when you begin to see the warnings. The hotline numbers, yes. Those come first. Then the very concerned PSAs about the danger of electricity to the human body- detailed descriptions about the pain and charring that one might experience upon contacting a live wire. Then: gruesome images, and though the result of electrocution are naturally gruesome, these bear the telltale signs of AI generation: a real ‘what-if’ exaggeration on something already serious by default. And finally, the pièce de résistance: a wire-made human silhouette that, upon the press of a button, will fall forward on ‘The Killing Cord,’ gyrating and sparking and generally causing a scene. 

People love it. People love making the fake man do his macabre dance on the wire. It must happen 20 times a day, and crowds gather to cheer and record and generally find little social-media-clips of the ensuing firework show. The installation has been nationally panned. Petitions circulate to have the wire-man retired and replaced with something a bit more serious. The government intervention is widely considered to be a failure.

But.

But nobody has touched ‘The Killing Cord’ since the wire man has been in place. The solemnity of the venue has been stripped, not unlike the sheath of the cord, and there’s always someone around to pull a struggling body from the edge.’

I imagine an expert and a roll of quality electric tape could do what the wire man has accomplished at ‘The Killing Cord’ with a lot less trouble. The wire man’s performace is loud and violent and the air around him is acrid for half an hour after, but I’m won over, in the end, by the way the sparks fall on an unseasonable frost. There’s something to be said for replacing an ugly thing with something prettier.

-traveler

‘As is the habit in academia, it took researchers a great deal of time and money to come to understand what any novice in the field would recognize about Able Forest in Arkansas: it is a statuary for rats. The pieces in ‘The Rat Statuary’ look like rats. They look so much like rats that, prior to the area’s viral popularity, most people were under the impression that it was a place where rats came to die, their bodies stiffening on the ground and drying into mummies for lack of regular precipitation. But, no. The statues are made of twigs and barks and leaves and, yes, sometimes the fur and skin of the dead but never enough to make them bodies, per se. Just effigies. 

So, the academic question was never whether or not the statues looked like rats. And it took very little time and a few hunting cameras to confirm that the rats were, indeed, responsible for these creations, so the question was never who was responsible. No, the question that plagued researchers was why?’

Why indeed?

The floor of Able Forest is a mine field of these little rat statues, each one nearly exactly the same in size and pose, differentiated only in execution, really, and in weather-wear. The rats are posed on all fours, each with its head turned up and to the right as though they were made skittish by some sound above them. The effect is uncanny when a predatory bird flies over or when I position myself just right to be the cause of their concern. From that vantage point I can see the little beetle shells or river rocks the artists have installed in the eyes of their creations, mimicking the glossy wetness of a rat’s glance.

I’m not alone in ‘The Rat Statuary’ today. It’s a popular place, relative to other Wayside destinations, but there isn’t much appeal beyond the first few statues and the families have to drag their eldest children through the latter half of the displays, reiterating that not all journeys have social media potential and arguing that a ‘bad vibe’ isn’t reason enough to sit out an opportunity to learn. 

For once, I’m with the teens. 

‘The Rat Statuary’ has the bad vibe of art made obsessively or as a ward against some intimate evil. Why should these rats feel the need to reproduce this fearful posture again and again? Is it a tribute? A warning? I’ve seen the videos of the rats building and they do not strike me as happy. They do not look like they are at ease. 

Some art grants its audience the sadness of its creator and it draws from an infinite supply. It frightens me to think that art could be a vessel- a means by which sickness can be transmitted. These rats seem sick and these statues are the symptom of what ails them. 

I decline the dead-eyed plushies at the gift shop, their heads all swerved to the right. I worry about my own art and what it has done to the people who have witnessed it. 

– traveler