It was midnight, and Miss Wolf and Miss Tusk had been on the road for twelve hours straight (though Miss Wolf would say it’d been eighteen). Riding along in their car, its once obsidian exterior now worn by enough mud and rain to grow a new ecosystem, they made their way north through Michigan. Work was up there, and both of them looked forward to escaping the oppressive heat.
“I mean, what is it about hotels that makes them so popular with the dead? This is the fifth one we’ve gotten hired for this year. I’m not complaining, but it’s really weird,” Miss Wolf continued, pulling her map out from the back of their car. It was like a mobile antique store, crammed with all sorts of cast-off and carefully-constructed items. This particular artifact was a gift from her less-distant cousins, spiders spinning silken routes across the parchment to possible destinations. Though they didn’t talk much, Miss Wolf still appreciated the gift. In fact, it was her favorite thing in their burial mound of a backseat.
“Well, if I were to die, I can definitely think of worse places to be than a massive island hotel. Did you know it only took ninety-three days to build the whole thing?” Miss Tusk pondered, keeping her hands firmly on the wheel and her eyes on the road. Of their collective dragon’s hoard, Miss Tusk personally enjoyed an elephant-engraved journal, its pages filled more with dust than writings. She had been told anything written within would never be forgotten, but Miss Tusk took it as a challenge to see how her memory fared without it.
“I do now.” They would have laughed if not for exhaustion, so instead they both let out an audible exhale. It dissipated quickly, and the silence returned. Soon, like clockwork, the sound of hateful claws trying to rend their hallowed, wooden confinements emerged from the trunk. Whispered promises of cruelty fell on the unphased ears of Miss Wolf and Miss Tusk. They had driven this far without being afraid of the things inside the casket, and they weren’t going to start now. Still, it was quite annoying.
“Have you noticed that there has been essentially nothing for at least the past two hours?” Miss Wolf ran her fingers over the window as she stared out at the dark. The sky was far too cloudy to see any stars. Miss Wolf didn’t particularly like stars; she preferred ceilings with stars painted on them, but if given the choice between stars and clouds, she’d take stars.
“It’s a very remote stretch of highway, and it’s midnight. I wouldn’t expect much now,” Miss Tusk replied, her eyes scanning the endless streak of glowing white paint on the side of the road. She knew Miss Wolf was correct; in the past two hours, forty minutes, and eight seconds (and counting), exactly one Ford F-150 (black with some scratches) had passed them, going the other way, into Ohio. Likely a family, likely going home after a long vacation, based on the suitcases, the exhausted parents in the front, and the sleeping son with headphones on in the back passenger seat. Miss Tusk could hear country music blasting from their radio as the parents attempted to stay awake. She rarely turned her own radio on unless Miss Wolf asked her to. The car itself wasn’t exactly brand new, so it didn’t hurt to check in on the old device once in a while, she supposed. She hoped the family made it to their destination alright; night driving is dangerous after all.
“I mean, yeah, but you’d expect there to be something. Like, how about a couple of trees or corn stalks or an old dilapidated barn that no one remembers being built, somewhere to look into? That sort of thing, you know?” Miss Wolf fogged a small section of her window, drawing her best approximation of a human smile so that there could be something on the road. It is difficult to fog up a window in the middle of June though, and every smile seemed just off enough that all they brought was discomfort. She quickly wiped away her smiling monsters.
“You really don’t like empty spaces, do you?” Miss Tusk gave her smile, which always came with eyes that seemed to organize whatever they took the light from. She had lived the childhood Miss Wolf always said she wanted, she and her family hiking long trails through the trees to the newest resting spot. It was a fairly simple transition from a single forest to a single country. As long as she had a destination and someone to help her get to it, she was content. It was why she was still on good terms with her family. They had, after all, guided her to the career of helping people. There were, of course, always people to help, so she always had a destination. Miss Wolf, of course, always wished to be traveling, so she had someone. And so, Miss Tusk was content.
But she would be happier once she got rid of the coffin. Just a little bit further.
“Listen, I already feel small enough as is, I don’t need to feel like the world could swallow me up at any time and that it has already done so with other things,” Miss Wolf replied.
“It is nice to have gone this long without any distractions, though. Remember Pikeville?” Miss Tusk thought of the sin-eater they had gone to visit, how she had meticulously spent the whole drive calculating the number of sins one could commit in seventy years multiplied by the annual number of feasts a forty-two-year-old sin-eater could have. It was important for the dimensions of the coffin to hold them all and the amount of gasoline to cremate them. Both were sufficient, considering how the scorched sins were safely locked away within their box, unable to do little more than whisper. The sin-eater seemed pleased with the arrangement, and Miss Tusk hoped they would consider a dietary change. Too many sins can cause all sorts of nasty side effects, especially if they aren’t your own. Miss Wolf mostly remembered them dragging the sins into the coffin, like trying to carry armfuls of molasses that wanted to bite you.
Miss Wolf doesn’t particularly enjoy having to bite back.
“Yeah, that checks out. Look, you should really try to go outside your route occasionally. You never know what you can find if you just take a moment to appreciate things on the way. Life doesn’t take kindly to being webbed up in plans and assumptions.” Miss Wolf had never fully understood her cousins, so caught up in their fantasies of building a home that they never bothered to explore the rest of the world. She often saw herself as the sole inheritor of wanderlust from a family of agoraphobes, a reputation that fit well with her partnership with Miss Tusk. It was, after all, Miss Wolf’s idea for the two of them to take their expertise on the road.
“It also doesn’t take kindly to those who dally about, but alright, Miss Wolf, I’ll give your suggestion a fair chance. I’ll take a little detour, and we can have our own little adventure there. But after that, I’m driving until we get to Mackinac City, and I don’t want to spend money on another room with mold retaking its ceiling when we have a perfectly serviceable tent, deal?”
Miss Wolf let out a dramatic sigh. Which of them was supposed to be the recluse again?
“I find your arrangement to be acceptable, Miss Tusk. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Now, we should be seeing something any second now.”
Seconds passed. Miss Wolf expected to see some sort of directions to a gas station or a fast-food restaurant or a closed arcade full of mechanical smiles, something typical like that. She was excited when she saw the piercing glow of a blue sign on the side of the road, but her excitement quickly decayed when she noticed that the sign offered no guidance; it was blank. One after another, every sign they passed lacked any kind of instruction or information. As Miss Wolf began to wonder if the world itself was messing with her, she saw that Miss Tusk kept her eyes firmly on the road and her mouth in a soft smile. Occasionally, she would flick a switch, and the ticking of a turn signal echoed throughout the car for a few moments before being shut off. Miss Wolf saw Miss Tusk turn the steering wheel, but she felt no associated force propelling her from one side of the car to another. It was still the same, featureless stretch of highway.
“Any minute now.”
Minutes passed. The signs were gone. Miss Tusk was still smiling; she knew the route well.
“Okay, so I am not going to say ‘any hour now.’ Have you noticed anything out there?” Miss Wolf shifted about in her seat as the road seemed to get darker and narrower the longer she stared at it. The highway began to feel like a web, tightening around their car until it would break the metal shell encasing them like venom-dripping fangs plunging into chitin.
The car stopped suddenly.
“Well, I’d say we’ve successfully gone off the path,” Miss Tusk said cheerfully. It had been quite a while since she had been to this lack of place, and it was just as absent as she had remembered.
She stepped out of the car, leaving a bewildered Miss Wolf still inside.
“I thought you said you wanted to go off our route,” she enquired, somewhere between completely sincere and playfully sarcastic. Miss Wolf stared out of her window and saw how limited her previous definition of the word “nothing” had been. The road blurred in front of and behind her, trailing off into where a horizon should have been. The bright white lines on either side of their car seemed less like a suggestion about where your vehicle should be and more a firm barrier between that which existed and that which didn’t. Her one consolation was that the stars had returned, both above and below her, but she could make no constellations from them, as if they had purposefully been placed in such a way so that nothing could be interpreted. This piqued her curiosity. It had been a while since the sky was wrong.
“Well, you certainly did,” Miss Wolf replied, more perplexed by her surroundings and her companion’s familiarity with them than anything else.
Miss Tusk opened the trunk, lifting the coffin out and placing it on the edge of the road.
“So…where exactly are we?” Miss Wolf asked, the stars blinking when she stared at them.
“Well, when I was little, and my parents wanted to sleep somewhere a bit more secure, we’d all go off the path a little way. So, I thought it would be fun to visit it again,” Miss Tusk answered, slowly edging her funerary luggage closer to the white line. She had always found this place so peaceful. After all, no need to worry about ghosts or angry park rangers (or, heaven forbid, both at the same time) around here. She remembered how the sky’s gaze was just enough light for her to read whatever she could get from libraries, bargain bins, and book boxes (her favorites were on elephants and boars). She started formulating a reunion with her family as she looked out.
“And, as a bonus, it makes a rather convenient spot to cast away something that should remain unfound,” she added, smiling as she kicked the coffin down into the sky. It burned like a meteor entering orbit as it fell, and soon enough, a new star joined the detour’s atmosphere.
“So, even your detours are premeditated?” sighed Miss Wolf.
“Exactly! Now we can enjoy the rest of our drive without any pesky sins trying to suffocate us in our sleep. It’ll be wonderful,” beamed Miss Tusk. There was a moment of silence as they contemplated what to do next.
“Well, you know what, I still enjoyed this little trip off the path, and a deal’s a deal. So, you wanna take a break from the wheel? I can handle things at least until we get to Midland, so you can sleep,” Miss Wolf offered. Miss Tusk continued to stare out at the sky’s abyss, thinking about how she tried and failed to chart those stars when she was younger. She pulled out her journal and began sketching the sky to the best of her ability.
“Well, technically, because I already had a plan for doing this, it wasn’t a true detour. As such, I believe your end of the bargain would be void, no pun intended,” she replied, focusing on her notebook, “so, we can get out of here in just a moment and find somewhere to get a room if you like.” Miss Wolf simply sat down beside her, smiled, and looked up.
“If that’s the case, then I think this is a nice place to rest for tonight, but when we get up North, we spend some time enjoying the island before all of this business with the hotel. Deal?”
“I find your arrangement to be acceptable, Miss Wolf.”
Miss Wolf walked back to the car, started the engine, and turned on the radio. She hummed along to the melodies of static-filled, slowly-plucked steel guitar strings. Miss Tusk’s ears perked up slightly at the introduction of music to her space, but she just kept looking up and down at the sky, and soon enough, she began to hum along as well. Miss Wolf walked back and sat down right next to her, letting out a contented sigh before giving the silence to the echoes of country music. Soon, they would agree that the engine should probably be turned off and the radio silenced; they had a long journey ahead of them, after all. But for now, Miss Wolf and Miss Tusk had a whole expanse of unbound stars to take in and all the time to do so together. For now, Miss Wolf and Miss Tusk were content.
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 