‘It’s suspicious, isn’t it? Anything that’s free? Is that true, universally speaking, or is it a uniquely American understanding of the volatile lust for profit? We understand the dangers of gasoline, but we still use it to propel our cars. We tell ourselves it is controlled and ignore the occasional fire. The cancers. The damage to climate. Fuel is the way propel our cars and profit is the way we propel our lives and we must accept the inherent dangers if we want to get anywhere at all.
Right?
‘The Pest Depository’ advertises itself as a free service and it is convenient and clean and well-staffed, attributes one might expect a non-profit to have one, maybe two of total. It operates with the sure confidence of a cult, its employees well-dressed and enthusiastic but hardly forthcoming. There is an emphasis on the value of life- of all life. Of the lives of pests.
This seems important.
‘The Pest Depository’ does not catch pests. Its services do not extend beyond their several locations in the state of New Jersey, aside from the occasional pop-up at conventions and fairs. They take only lives pests but they take them all with equal reverence: mice, possums, insects, bats. They have the means of ungluing rodents from traps, but only if they are allowed to keep the result. They claim to set broken bones, though they offer no public menagerie of recovering souls.
They do not, in fact, make any claims about what happens to the ‘pests’ once they have been deposited.
Whatever they do, it must pay the rent.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
‘Taken at face value, ‘Just Table Legs’ goes about its business honestly. The business sells no tables but only their legs, with discounts on matching sets of four or six (but reasonable prices for odd numbers between). They offer custom work for the existing table that needs a leg replaced. The shop reeks of warm sawdust. The owner’s hands are smooth and calloused.
Every chair leg is sold with nails pre-installed, sharp and silver and difficult to transport.
People are found with these nails inside them all the time, the legs swung with such ferocious intent that those pictures of crime scenes that have been made public show the wooden limbs still projecting from the flesh and bone of the victim in whom they have become embedded.
The owner does not comment on the tendency for his work to be used in murder- only gestures to the sign at the front.
‘Just Table Legs.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
‘Timberline Froyo’s’ mascot is a winking man in a trench coat and its buffet pickings are largely (but not completely) inedible. Past the whirling drums of frozen yogurt (plain, chocolate, or swirl), the toppings start with ammunition. Ammunition for firearms. There are a few trays of your standard caliber offerings up at the front, but most people come for the weird and legally gray stuff and it shows in quantity.
Hollow point.
Irradiated lead.
Dragon’s breath shells, which I believe are incendiary.
All this and more can be scooped into the bowl with that dollop of frozen yogurt. In fact, ‘Timberline’ offers a small, sunken lid-like piece of plastic for keeping the toppings away from the yogurt. A sign suggests this is to keep things from getting soggy during transit, but it’s framed as a speech bubble emerging from the mouth of the same trenchcoat-wearing figure.
An unnecessary flourish, really. Nobody gets this far without knowing something’s up.
‘Colorado is a liberal state, chock-full of repressed liberal hunter-types that sometimes see the fun with which their conservative peers flaunt insane and unnecessary weaponry in states with lax gun laws and decide they’re willing to flex their own moral boundaries in private. Mostly this has resulted in even more insane and even less necessary weaponry, designed by people who, in the day, use their degrees to engineer jet engines or refine highly efficient fuels.
It’s all still illegal, of course. To make. To sell. And nobody wants to lose their jobs.
Enter ‘Timberline Froyo,’ which is laid out like any frozen yogurt buffet except that their toppings are largely donated by the same freaks that make exploding guns. ‘Timberline’ keeps its sources anonymous and, due to a quirk of Colorado law, they’re able to sell those donations legally, as long as they do so by weight and as long as they’re sold with a visible portion of frozen yogurt.
The largest take-away container on offer at ‘Timberline Froyo’ is a ten-gallon bucket, and people leave with them teeming all the time.’
I go for the smallest bowl portion and really consider my options. The by-weight cost of the frozen yogurt at ‘Timberlines’ is outrageous, something they seem to pride themselves on referencing as bait for the FBI or the ATF agents that must lurk about and make purchases of their own from time to time. They talk about the serene life of the cows. Of organic farms and ethical milking and slow-churning and love.
I move past ammunition (none of it would fit in my gun) and into an area labeled ‘animals, living,’ which indeed features snakes, birds, and insects the colors of which suggest they are exotic, at least, but probably also venomous.
I don’t think I’m ready for a new pet.
Past ‘animals, parts’ and ‘drugs’ (prescription and recreational) and ‘furs’ I start to understand that things are set up alphabetically and that it isn’t the chaotic mess that it seems to be. By the end of it, the only thing that has really caught my eye are a pair of magnets so strong that one normally needs a license and a good reason to own them. The thick, plastic encasings to keep them separated don’t add much to the weight, and they make a fun but expensive souvenir from a place I doubt I’ll have the money to visit again.
A day later I accidentally loose one magnet from the case and it affixes itself to the top of the camper. When I try to use the opposite end of the other to pop it up enough for a fingerhold, the original magnet promptly flips and attaches to its brother, pinching off a piece of skin from my finger about the size of a grain of rice.
I count myself lucky and leave the magnets where they are.
A place like ‘Timberline Froyo’ could be dangerous for a guy like me.
-traveler
I don’t pretend to know how waves work generally speaking. I’ve never really needed to know anything more than when to avoid them and how to survive those waves I was initially trying to avoid. Generally speaking (again), I don’t trust the ocean or anything that lives inside it. I don’t trust the way it moves- I don’t trust myself enough to understand what it will do next. Luckily The Wayside doesn’t have a lot of ocean features. There’s a math problem that explains it: the drivable area of the country versus its physical boundary.
I don’t do math either.
‘The Wave Lake’ in Northern California sets off a lot of the same alarms I hear when I see the ocean. It sets off a few others, too, like the alarm for the movement of a spider. The alarm for a particularly gnarly looking mold. It takes me a while to figure out, but I think it has to do with the waves generating so visibly from the center of the lake, as though some massive heart is beating just underneath the surface.
And, in a way, there is.
‘Difficult to reach, and not for the normal reasons, ‘The Wave Lake’ resides deep within a wealthy gated community called ‘Ridgeburn.’Ridgeburn, at its outset, was created with an understanding that the lake at its center (previously Lasso Lake) should be made open to the public. As the development gained the backing of wealthy soon-to-be-residents, many of whom had law degrees and connections in local committees, the actual process for any non-resident citizen hoping to visit Lasso Lake became… arduous. In fact, an op-ed published some years after found that the process was technically impossible, a fact that was quickly quashed by the same powers-that-be that created the rules in the first place.
The shore of Lasso Lake (still its legal name) was tamed and, hoping to impress the snow birds in their summer habitat, it was fitted with a submerged wave machine. The device systematically ground every living fish in the lake to a pulp over the course of a week and the reek of it, the viscera, was so potent in the sun that Ridgeburn opted not to reintroduce wildlife to the area. Rather than alter the wave machine to make it less damaging, they fitted it with a powerful filter.
Lake Lasso now exists like an open wound, wet and lifeless and pulsing. It is wholly dependent upon the machine that collapsed its ecosystem. Without the filter, it becomes a stagnant puddle, its life only larval mosquitoes and rare bacteria.
But it’s interesting to see.
Travelers are advised to just sneak in by foot and linger only an hour to avoid detection. Swimmers are advised to avoid the center. It’s chewed up a small dog in 2023.’
I don’t swim. I mean, I do, generally speaking, but not at ‘The Wave Lake.’ Some combination of my revulsions keep me from wanting to touch the water- from even throwing rocks into it. Nobody is on the beach when I arrive. Nobody is on any of the beaches. The lake laps at the shore like a robot and I leave, mildly sunburned and climbing over fences.
-traveler
‘The Wayside is often accidentally cruel if one allows that cruelty as a byproduct (rather than the aim) qualifies as an accident. When it kills- and it does kill- it usually does so with the same backward grimace a driver wears, having accidentally struck a rabbit on the highway. There is a glimmer of guilt that doesn’t quite and will never manifest as a real action item. The driver will continue to drive (then and likely for the rest of their lives). They have places to be. The rabbit is a sad, but perhaps inevitable casualty in the sort of accident that must happen all the time.
So, too, does the Wayside kill.
‘The Quarter Stealing Arcade’ is an exception to the rule. Founded, as is often the case, without any clear intention, ‘The Quarter Stealing Arcade’ is a labyrinth of rare and beloved game cabinets and pinball tables. The inside is hyper-lit and noisy, a casino atmosphere with a deep popcorn scent. There are no entrance fees. No membership tiers. Patrons are encouraged to engage with the machines, assuming they respect their age and value.
But none of the machines work.
Or.
They all almost do.
Every game in ‘The Quarter Stealing Arcade’ is broken in such a way that it will steal the quarters of its patrons. Some encourage players by counting inserted coins but refusing to move beyond the introductory screen. Others simply fail to acknowledge all monetary input. It took some time for the public to understand that this is true of every single machine in the shop- that the name was not a reference to the addictive nature of arcade gaming in general- that the hardline ‘no refunds’ policy was not due to the fallrate of aging machinery.
No, the owners prefer the machines the way they are. They have gone on record to state that, while some of the machines have been refurbished to near-operational, others have been purchased new and sabotaged in such a way that they will no longer function. This includes four cabinet games and one pinball machine that can be played nowhere else on earth.
The owners refuse to say why they’ve devoted their life to this endeavor, alluding only to the fact that ‘The Quarter Stealing Arcade’ turns a decent profit. Regulars come for the popcorn and claim the experience is equivalent to prodding one’s split lip with their tongue. Sometimes we are simply drawn to familiar pains.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside