Hollis Meade is heading west. That’s what the house fly green display above his rearview mirror tells him.  He believes it.  He has no reason not to.  The scenery is trees and dirt and machine-bitten mountains for miles and miles. Nothing is changing, but he had been on the road for at least three hours. That’s what the numbers on his watch tell him.  He isn’t sure if any of it mattered. The distance, the time, Hollis Meade as a person, he isn’t sure about any of it.  

 

Speed up to sixty-five, he thinks about the hotel where he spent the last few days.  That’s where he left himself.  The bed sheets that collect the dead skin also collected him.  It was like he peeled layers of his life off during a toxic chemical spill nightmare wetting the folds of his brain and he bolted without patching it all back together.  This wasn’t amnesia.  Hollis was sure he could remember everything if he went back to the hotel and Icarus-crashed on the shattered springs of the hotel bed again.  His memories would stick to his sickly frame and he would know once again what he was driving away from.  More and more, though, Hollis likes the idea of not knowing.  He could have lost his job at the hospital's public relations department for stealing the patient’s breakfast.  There’s a chance he bludgeoned his wife with a hammer, part of a stainless steel tool set, the only present his father ever gave him.  That could have been real.  Could be, his father bought him plenty of presents, including a Johnny Bench autographed bat, and loved him like a grainy black and white Papa lodged between commercials for detergent.  Hollis doesn’t know anymore.  Maybe he robbed a Goodwill store because he saw a wrinkled fedora that he didn’t want to put down three bucks to wedge on his head.  Darker, he could have stabbed his gay lover, the look of farmer’s wife sadness in his eyes as the pocket knife blade slid in and out right above the belly button that used to be a symbolize the machinations of life.  All of these things were possible.  

 

A drink of something warm and spoiled from a Happy Mart cup, Hollis swallows and scrapes an orphaned oval pill from his shirt pocket.  It falls apart like colored chalk on the tip of his teeth-gnawed finger.  His raw and wounded tongue pulls the bitter mess to his mouth and he takes another drink.  A click and pull of his throat and he swallows clothing fiber and prescription dust. Ashes to ashes.  He coughs twice and checks the scenery again. Hollis feels worn down, eroded. He might need to stop somewhere in a few hours and get some more sleep. He might need to sleep and become less and less until he is whole and new once again.