Afternoon and Reno came and went like casual slot machine quarters. Gas stations, diners, convenience stores, they had all started to run together. Was the bony 20-ish waitress with the fading Ronald McDonald Red hair and multiple face piercings in a diner or a truck stop? Off which highway? As the clear edges of recollection melted and pooled together, she began to breathe more deeply, and her shoulders began to relax and drop. Her right knee, slightly stiff from driving for days, had risen to the challenge and no longer ached. Her shoulders felt warm and tan. She could start back soon.

The approaching sunset promised orange and gold on a purpling backdrop. She turned west so she could watch it while she drove. The highway narrowed into two lanes, then a small, barely paved road into the scrub, and finally gave into dirt track in a surprisingly gradual fashion, ending at the edge of an arroyo. She stopped the car and got out, still looking west, the eastern sky stretching a purple blanket of stars toward the western horizon. She got a faded red sweatshirt out of the trunk of the ‘vert and sat on its warm hood, heels on the front bumper. With the falling temperature, she knew the hood would soon be covered with a fine coat of droplets. The air was dry and still, as if the wind held its breath in anticipation of the last sliver of fireball sun’s descent.

The sweatshirt had been Dale’s, and it was long on her in every possible direction. Dale had faded and softened in her mind as the sweatshirt had on her body. Now he was just big and sweet and pretty, standing in the doorway in mismatched socks and rumpled boxers with his dark wavy hair all sticking up at crazy angles, and that lopsided grin. He had understood about the pictures, and even drove to Philadelphia with her one time. In the end, though, she hadn’t needed him desperately enough. She wouldn’t have been crushed, or dead, or worse, without him, and it seemed he couldn’t quite live with that. She loved him enough, but she was somehow too… regenerative, perhaps, as if she could slip off into the desert and regrow a lost limb. She spread her arms out in the faded red sweatshirt like a road-dusted starfish and stretched. After watching the stars for a while, she got in the vert, pulled the top up, and slept.

Yikes, I have been really remiss of late. Sorry about that. I’ve been spending most of my blogging time and energy on the new team blog. You may be asking yourself, what does a foxy chaoticist mama do on a Saturday evening? Apparently, the answer is: blog.

So here’s what’s on my mind right now. Driving home from the shop this evening, I saw something in the road that appeared to be moving. 95% of the time, things in the road here are not roadkill, but merely odd discarded items. Denver is very clean, so trash never hangs around long or anything. As I drew closer, I realized that what was dancing about in the road was a paperback book of some sort, a big bulky novel or something: smallish, thick, pulpy pages.

This of course made me wonder about the circumstances under which it came to be there. Did a dissatisfied reader (presumably in a passenger seat, although you never can tell with some of the inattentive crappy driving that goes on around here) cry out, “This is pure drivel! Drivel, I tell you!” and fling it out of the window of a moving vehicle? “Enough heaving bosoms for me–I require a PLOT!”, like that? Did someone lay their paperback on top of the roof of their car, only to forget about it and have it fly off on Santa Fe Drive? Did it merely fall out of a pedestrian’s bag? Pah-hah-ha! What am I thinking? Nobody walks in Denver. Did the paperback in question take flight in a windy back seat? Did it fall off one of the many literary “trucks” from which Lisa and I used to occasionally “find” reading material? Did it somehow make an escape from a nearby building and strategically buffet itself to that location, only to be stranded in the middle of the busy road it was attempting to cross? Did it fall through a dimensional portal, plunk, into this universe, and that was just where it landed? I think it would be fun to explore each of these scenarios, or to use it as a future writing exercise/project: an ordinary object in an unlikely place.

I bet Lisa’s got a good idea about it…