I recently did my first bit of vocational voice acting on The DeMondego Diamond, a tragedy-romance murder mystery audiodrama- the format is technically referred to as a 'dramatized full-cast audiobook', involving an ensemble cast, narration, music, and sound effects.
I played one of the main characters, Beau DeMondego, a playboy scion of a shattered commercial family. He is part of a tight-knit (perhaps ingrown) group of friends attending law school at a fictional hybrid of Duke and UNC Chapel Hill when chaos and death arise from a tide of pre-graduation debauchery.
The show's been getting great reviews, as you can see on Goodreads and Apple Podcasts. Working with the other voice actors gave me a greater appreciation for the skill of voice actors in general than I'd ever had before; most were either established professionals or pursuing acting as a vocation, and their versatility was astounding. I kept my arms and legs inside the vehicle and just method acted, i.e. played from my own experiences rather than trying to embody a wholly separate character as an artifice. The latter is true skill and seeing voice actors who can really step outside themselves and embody someone unrecognizable from their regular sound and affect is remarkable. When they do 7 or 8 characters in a row as a warm-up, it's like seeing somebody rapidly scroll through a character-select screen.
The show's production values are astonishing, even moreso because the audio engineering, editing, and take selection were a one-woman show, all performed by the writer and director, Greta Craig. The show sounds better and is more aesthetically pleasing than most major audiodramas (or any kind of production) that you'll hear on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That's the power of a creator's interest in a project's outcome, where personal attention to detail can outproduce professional subcontracting. I look forward to sharing another project that I collaborated with Greta Craig on, an upcoming fantasy audiodrama written and directed by myself.
You are a GM. The party has just entered the docks.
A man is meeting a woman at the base of a wooden jetty.
His pose is bold and he is dressed like a ministerial grandee, though he has no badge of office.
Men in street clothes watch him from a distance. One is in a window, a gun barrel just visible behind the sill. Two lean in an alley, arms crossed, each with a hand inside his coat. Another sits in a dockside cafe, a submachine gun ready in a gym bag beneath his table.
The woman has just disembarked alone from a luxurious nine-winged flying boat. She wears a black broadcloath cloak and cowl over crimson robes hemmed in silver and an ermine wrap about the shoulders. A glint at the tip of her sleeve may be its hem, or a weapon.
The golden scarab ship hung in the psychic-singing void, asteroids on the grand scale moaning around it, buoyed and bouncing from one another gently on the rims of great glowing teal shelf fungi. It was this psychic song that filled the heavens, whose astral blue visual harmonics blazed whitely on the scarab's crown.
Alazin, Alazin Wyrmling. The great devourer, eater of realms notional and schematic, of psychodigital superstructures like an infinite sewer, informational landscapes like future-anticipating naninte machines, and imaginary landscapes so terrible they would scar sound mortal minds forever.
Seed of the transgalactic serpent, coiled and the color of light at the unknown heart of the universe, unspeaking, its tiny spermatic spawn its senses, its attention, perhaps its thought? But they would all be called back one day, called back for this nigh-infinite knowledge to be processed. Perhaps...
Molluscs had found him, their tails stained-glass peacock feathers in green or violet and gold, their shells frescoed or mosaiced with scenes of attitude, gangs of molluscoid entertainers worn semi-ironically or images of ancient molluscoid warriors or pearly-white molluscoid saviors worn unironically, depicted lavishly in donated fragments.
A semi-rebel, its shell grafitti'd and lovingly defaced by its friends, jagged black scripts written, little muckergames played out in streaks across its gloss.
Alazin salivated, tasting the heavenly grace of the neuronal tissue woven throughout their bodies, each one like a great sweet strip of candied delicacy, he longed to gnaw on them for days and bathe in their remnant ichor, but could feel that this would be the end of his great experiment. They took him and cradled him and placed him in a room full of plush, eggshell-colored pillows hemmed in gold tassel, ceiling scaly with pores and dripping fat warm wetness.
A great antennae extruded from the golden craft, its struts quivering like saliva, and tasted the silent chorus of the shelf fungi that heaved with outward landing-strip blue flashes. Something in the ship began to quake with its power. The molluscs leaned on pitted blue crystals held in golden pincers as if by the claws of beasts submerged in the gummy blue floor, and the great thrum that stroked the bones of the ship alternated between a whine and a cascade. Finally some essential resonance or quantity was captured and the antenna was collapsed into the ship's golden scalp. Tiny animals had been gathering unnoticed and one came free of the antenna with a sucking thump, creatures little streaks of blue extruding red-pointed flagellum across the surface of the ship, assessing it for edible fungi, patiently wafting across its viewstrings like cosmic gnats.
The ship shook the mites off gently and then was suddenly encased in a three-layer lime-green impulse sheathe and was jettisoned from the asteroid field like a silent tornado, the little creatures turning to watch it go.
___
A great shining beacon, a plate and four coins soft and curling, bathed in gold, with green cities writ in jagged glass through troughs and bays in their skins and pouring from their sides, hanging into space like geometric jewelry. A budding golden rose hanging like a love letter above a gas giant in pastel midnight blue. Glittering star-signs flitted like shreds of damascened glass in shoals and schools around the mothercraft, the great station in the nethervoid by giantside. The hiddenpronged scarab erupted from the void and slithered into one such school, adopting a harmonious harlequin-print formation, a fixtured caravan of molluscoid strangers.
Traversing the lovingly glowing ions of a docking bay hangar, Alazin was painted with a numbing agent and carried like a minor holy relic at the head of a group of molluscoids down a sodden-walled, smoothpaved hallway, broad for clinking flashing molluscoid tails, tall to fill infinite space. Passersby watched the bearing of the alien, one in a gossamer cloak flooding and filling the floorspace, drawing it in as the procession came hemward.
The heady scent of body-brain thrumming around him, inundating his every sense. In the molluscoid flaps that held him, so wonderfully distributed through every body present. The numbing spray was an irrelevancy, a taste. He couldn't hold out. He didn't want to. Would destruction come? But what was life without this? He dove in.
Blurbling shrieks filled the hall as he thrust himself into the molluscoid and up around inside its body; this had been deemed a far-fetched irrelevancy but it was all too real. He swam around its body, devouring neuronal tissue as he went, and with every sweet burgeoning mouthful and swallow his eye was opened. Planets cloaked in ichor-filled hallways, bronzed flues and tubings cascading into space like orbs remade as golden walnuts. Rings at intervals around planets, hurling orreries to cast conventions of starships across the cosmic depths. Suns cloaked in discs like freezing hands, warmth and power charging invisible arms that led to the planetary sunscapes and chemical forges that bled poisons and mana. The ichoroid industry, great pharmaceutical foundries devouring crystalline distillate and blood powders and starfire. Medicines, solvents, explosives, and capacitor alchemy; the molluscoids' hard-traded gifts to a greater universe. He saw hundreds of bodily forms in moments, manifold and unitary, substantial and ghostly, singular and distributed, saturnine and shining, Neptunian and stony. He saw that in almost all of them there was a brain, or at least equivalent tissue resplendent throughout the body, and he gasped at the revelation of glory: a universe filled to the brim with these delectable beings.
And then he looked in close and saw this glassy-feathered slugman whose body he was ventilating; he could feel this thing's pride in his civilization's works, its great burbling vat-foundries. Great feathertailed tankers wrought like celestial slug-dragons curving the nebula's heaven bridge. His heart, his love for slugkind, his love for nutriment, for the bled snailflesh of mindless beings bred to grace tables to be pickled and poached and barbecued. His radula carving inanimate flesh for the gathering of those whose loves he shared. His friendships, confidings, suppressed quirks, sweet respites. Alazin could not weep and there was nowhere for his emotion for this man to go, he could only vibrate hotly like a ball of anguish for his dying host, this deflating being with fading, shocked consciousness blazing with pale regret, grand rugose flesh holed and made worthless. Alazin almost let them dig him out with a sparking bident but he needed time to grieve, alone, and so he bolted from the withering body and dove down an ichordrain in a flash of silver.
This dying molluscoid, whose name was Ihhsss, would live in Alazin's heart. He would not have died in vain. This molluscman's loves, his worlds, his civilization, Alazin would pay them for what they had given, for what they had taught him in the fatal moment.
He fell from a tentacular ichorspout into a deep green pool of molluscoid runoff in a lightless basin, and floating, curled, warm, and pensive, he began to dive through his new memories. Ihhsss had been an architect of starships.
The ceiling is a great dome of golden lattice, glossy dark square pictures held amidst the gleaming rays, misty black or amethyst.
He woke to feel the blessing of all things, the hand of god cupping him amidst the field of pillows. He was dehydrated, had to piss, his legs and feet hurt, and yet he felt the immanence of grace, of a golden light and pleasure extending to infinity.
Little miracles, the joy in climbing a mountain. Leaping from rock to rock, painless, body singing with music that became the universe, song and story permeating it, revealing themselves as one, admitting no cold inhuman sterility. Existence revealed as ripping rhythm, acceleration, a dance with music and earth and the body. To run up the mountain without pain, clothes river-wet, strange admirable fool, skin glowing. Legs filled with ecstasy with each push, dislodging rocks here and there, stumbling with the power, power faintly conceived of and recalled as a legend, something inaccessible as a truly secret door when he was still weak as a kitten and full of pain and emptiness with each movement, continuing with the mummy faith of a flagellant pilgrim. There was flagellation now, heels dying and coming loose, dead skin and flashes of scraping agony, new flesh born unto destruction; easy to suppress, a small price to pay for this joy. How long could it be managed? Similar to asking: How long can you fly in a dream? You swoop and swoop, coming close to the ground, full of elation and dread and wonder, attacking it while it's before you. Eventually its appointed time ends and you turn to other things, content that you will return before your light is out.
Then came the great bloody desert where smiled the quilted colors of Setroxia’s opium fields, mountains, and beyond a wetter clime still arid to one emerging from the balmy bay of Megakratheon’s power. There in the plain on short grass and starlight was the City of Leagues, a yellowlit sprawl kneeling blackly manifold like a geometric arthropod whose legs were forges and foundries.
Black fighters bearing the long red triangle across their wings escorted the petitioners, their white biplane like an angel, dove, or swan fallen into the World Machine and silently sorted to its final position by unspeaking psychopomp autonoma.
They flew low over the city. It was a place of vents, tunnels, great blocks like obsidian temples, everywhere sheds and hammocks for sleeping; vast hammocks between buildings, families looking up from where they gathered on blankets, fires burning inside sheet metal shelters and foundries which knew no flicker. No towers; a great sprawl, utility upon utility.
___
Menu of the 22nd Annual Political Officer's Conference Capstone Dinner
With explanations for esteemed labor delegates and intelligence assets
Apéritif
Cookies and Cream
freeze dried coffee in heavy cream
This is a “get up and go” food; one can heat the cream before adding the freeze dried coffee and then re-chill, but this would reduce the nostalgia many Leaguesmen feel for the texture when semi-mixed.
Appetizers
-choice of-
▢Earthsavor
peanut butter pumpkin purée
Circle preferred additions:
Cinnamon Allspice
Nutmeg
Ginger
Cloves
A Leagues seasonal favorite. The primary ingredients are grown here using rotary trough gardens which are hauled through the sun each day via a chainworks before resting in subarchitectural chambers.
As you can see, the Southern Vice Isles campaign has delivered a bounteous crop of spices to our diligent militia unions and beloved tribal allies, which are now available to grace your table tonight.
▢Interfluvial Purée
whipped salmon and potato
Veterans of the Minervan Cascades pacification developed a taste for these abundant local ingredients, mashing them together in leafy pits to be served communally. Tonight's rendition can be tamed with chive sauce available at your table.
▢Broiler stew
Mains
Free flow begins: Glasses of fuming sorghum moonshine, steins of manioc beer like liquory buttermilk.
-choice of-
▢Savannah Pudding
white rice blended with mayonnaise and soy sauce
“Semi-abandoned” vinegared fish sauce is sometimes used in lieu of soy sauce, in which case the mayo proportion is reduced; this is referred to as Island Pudding.
▢Butter Thighs
chicken thighs fried in butter served with butter
One kilogram of chicken thighs fried without breading in butter until crispy, on the very cusp of being burnt. Served with a fist-size piece of sun-softened sea salt-flaked butter seized in gigantic casks from the Juncaceaen cattle barons. Sometimes served drenched in mashed green chili and vinegar.
Dessert
The Four Corners
durian ice cheese toast
Prepared by those deployed to tropical theaters, with pasteurized processed cheese food on toast being commonly enjoyed in the City of Leagues. Slices of durian and cheese are chilled in a medic’s ice chest and served on hot toast, optionally buttered; those who want to really taste something will leave the sandwich in the sun for a few minutes before getting down to business.
Digestif
Blood Mana
water with sodium chloride, potassium chloride, trisodium hydrate (citrate), and glucose anhydrous
This wonderful mixture is the key to rehydration. It is prepared for those who are recovering from survival and evasion or POW status, and is distributed to communities suffering from diseases like cholera and dysentery.
Humanitarian cargoes are sometimes delivered by our elite soldiers, such as the Committee for Freedom, who have learned to use Blood Mana to recover from their benders and immediately get back into the action.
What you will have tonight is Blood Mana's Hospital Formula. A "Field Formula" can be prepared from water, honey, ashes, and salt, with potato skins and medicinal bark added if available once the water is boiling.
Note that despite rumors seeded by labor spies, the name has nothing to do with the Blood Bank Entity, which was quickly suppressed by the heroic sacrifice of the City of Grandoval.
___
Merlane lay in the safehouse for days, numb, listless. Gradually he regained his hearing underlaid with a constant whine. His balance returned with fits of wooziness. The explosion had blown a small hole in the ceiling of the workshop, the floor of the sleeping area, and this became a tiny volcano of horrific scent after a few days. Merlane grew sick again and left, walking to the freight logistics district, bearded, matted, filthy, bent, and wild-eyed. He lay in a dark corner, ignored, until a truck bound somewhere abroad had been loaded with sacks of macadamia nuts. He clambered into it, ensconced himself, and waited, perfectly still. The truck rattled to life and headed for the city gates.
…
A mailplane approached the City of Leagues by night; missives, records, communiques, pleas of requisition. Sacks of paper hung from the wings; Merlane huddled in the rear seat. The city was like the highest tip of an ecumenopolis rising through the wastes, dark sere streak of metal, a budding x uneven with many protrusions, hooks and sawteeth imperfectly imitating the greater examples of yore. Raised spines budding, conning towers of the sprawl, grain silos and water basins and tenements unyielding concrete scaffolded in dark metal. A thousand amber windows and blood-eyed mills forging the city’s skeleton night after night.
They touched down on a dusty street on the city’s outskirts. Boys in leather trenchcoats watched them from walls and doorways. A donkey laden with steel water drums tied to it by rope nets stood impassively, droverless, sniffing as the plane came to a stop beside it. Thanks, said Merlane, and crawled out of the plane. He went up a staircase shaped from corrugated iron and walked along the featureless, charcoal-colored roof of a building. He found a tarpaulin thrown over a vent to keep the rain out, wrapped himself in it, and lay on his side. Visions of people being disemboweled and pulled apart with jolting splitting rips filled his mind. He blinked and shook his head but there they were. He breathed deep as they sickened him. Screaming echoed over the singing of his ears and the universe was filled with the ripping butchery of tortured people.
The next day he awoke from his vicious fugue. He wandered until he smelled food. A canteen window for file sorters. They gave him a bowl of vegetable broth with a few pieces of semi-molten broccoli in it. They shrugged and apologized; this was what they’d been given. He swallowed it and went back to his tarp.
This is the first part of something I write from a place of shadow (as opposed to most stuff I put out which is more “balanced”) when life or experience puts me in that frame. I didn’t write this intending to share it with anyone. I will most likely not share any more of it for a long time, because if, while I'm writing it, I'm thinking about anyone else reading it anytime soon, then its purpose will be compromised.
Warning: Extreme violence, torture, sexual assault, suicide, and despair. I'm putting a link to a google doc so you don't accidentally scroll into it.
The Outer Highway is the least-known transitionary realm. Many cultures have myths around the Green Realm, some of the Mirror Realm. A few scholars believe the World Machine is a transitionary realm, most do not.
The Outer Highway could be the most recent transitionary realm that human beings have encountered. It may simply be that no one ever returned before the advent of the automobile.
There are many paths in, very few ways out. A person might enter from any place in the world where there are roads and vehicles. They could be deposited anywhere else in the world should they return, never in the same place.
The greatest concentration of disappearances is in the Heliconian Hills region north of Noosecliff, the famed deepwater port through which coffee beans and industrial chemicals are transited to the grand conurbations of Barratum.
Noosecliff’s waters are harried by pirates. They have a religion of love, sagas in which no princess deigns to marry anyone but a pirate, where the wives of gouty mayors spin the lock-gauges at night to let the ships in, joining their beloved while the wharves burn and riot.
Defenses are better now but all merchantmen must be men o' war in these seas.
The coffee and chemicals are offloaded. Friendships are renewed and bribes paid by the supercargoes while locals fight crewmen in spew-alleys caked in throw-up and kens where shit-stained men sleep under chairs to awaken miraculously unrobbed sometimes.
The cargo is carried to ready trucks in sacks and pails. Engine drovers wait, arms crossed and big and hairy or thin and weathered. Tattoos and scars. Knuckles bulbous, eyes hard and wild. Veterans whose friends were spent. Boys raised in corrugated shacks, the only quality metal the chains their fathers beat them with. Men from dusty hills a thousand miles away where decrepit temples host deadfire ashes to ancient heroes whose true brutality and true divinity are forgotten, to whom the rhythm of the cosmos devolved into a tuber’s skin until the bloodrime came.
A truck is loaded, it roars to life and trundles forward like a landship headed for the killing fields. All witnesses understand its destination, Barratum, where the coffee and chemicals will be sold for vast profits, but no one knows the engine drover’s path through the wild Heliconian gnarlpines. This is his lore, his luck, his wager, his life his stake, his fortune.
He may need to bribe before he even leaves the city. He may need to kill once he leaves the gate, but the path is not won by violence. It is won by unceasing progression. Unceasing, for the hills are crawling with wolves. Wolves to a man.
Town militias, servants in rapine to robber baron notables. If their cars are on you, keep running like a wildebeest beset by hounds until you pass the most bloodthirsty city, town, or tribe you can think of. They are likely to hate your pursuers more than they want to stop you. You have not robbed and killed them for generations.
Some robbers are so formal they have toll booths unconnected to any government; here you can be issued a safe conduct with suitable stamps in exchange for cash, drugs, or a cut of your cargo. This safe conduct stands only among their associates.
There are cults to luck, cults to the apocalypse. Some sacrifice, more simply shoot. Steal to fund the movement. One in ten thousand tiny creeds, that’s what your death serves.
Your cargo is legal in Noosecliff and all Barratum, but the sage-lords sent from Noosecliff, Barratum, Hemostill, and Tavernbend to tame the Heliconian Hills now prey upon everyone they encounter there. They won their appointments at great peril and are crushed by their patrons, crushed by the bribes and tribute they must pay.
At first they ripped up the fabric of civilization in the Heliconians to starve out the robbers. There are ruins from the first days of this policy, fields of ash speckled with skulls and ribs, infernoed homesteads, cements burnt to gum like candles, wood walls eaten black by elemental giants.
At length they realized that the patchwork Heliconian polities were too lucrative to destroy, their defenselessness against state predation was a temptation so relieving as to be erotic to the sage-lords. A saying of the sneering office-giver: “If you can’t come up with a gratuity despite your flock, I know of a few very competent hopefuls…”
The sagemen will peel you for bribes at best, or impound your rig and make you into a human torch at their niece’s funeral (the only time this is permitted; otherwise it’s beheading or boiling or riveting or firing squad).
Perhaps these crimes will be investigated once the sage-marshal has perished from his Alzheimer's. Perhaps the kleptocrats will be purged, as all among them know they should be. Perhaps. The sagemilitias tread the high paths, watching for telltale fumes.
Yet the mountains are vast, their roads uncounted. Their steepness, and the possibility of paying a bribe and moving on, means that the engine drovers don’t armor their rigs or bring hosts of gunmen. Your best bet is not to sleep. Not to stop, except but once.
There are shadowed gravel roads in the deep woods, horrible for big rigs except that the journey could not be made without them without incredible luck, which the engine drovers cultivate but do not wholly rely on. There are families there connected to no tribe, no clan, no village.
They have underground tanks of fuel. Gasoline? It runs the vehicles. Big boys drag out the hose. Cousins watch with shotguns.
Things for sale; crisped pork skin, vinegared intestine, dick and ball soup purported to ensure lust. Oral sex from grown daughters, more from wandering devotees of the little white pill, the hierodules of hidden anchorages to transcendent speed.
These are for sale too, these pills. Wakefulness, nightlessness, visions of curves and corners to come. The aura of the law and the reverberating teeth of spike-strip wreckers, cavern-hidden hijackers whose patrilineal progenitors robbed muleteers 3000 years ago.
These exoplanet families understand the engine drovers’ strategy and they sell the pills to support it.
They trade with the drovers for precursors. No one knows their recipes, their witches brews. Surely there are many. Their effects are real, witness the empty gleaming eyes of engine drovers arriving after 72 or 96 hours with no more than a refueling stop.
All too real. Some drive at breakneck speed, sliding around gravel downslopes or curling, piney river roads cackling, bellies heaving, eyes bleeding, victorious.
A few end up in gulches filled with fire.
Some are lost in highway manticism. The straightening and darkening of turns to come. The reticulating road like the axle arm of a great machine, an infinite expanse, road rebuilding itself before you, past cannibalized, a model highway in the empty dark.
You may forget where you are and what you’re doing, except for its necessity, and that you must keep the vessel on the road and the machine in homeostasis until perhaps there will be sense again.
Time and space may be blown away by silver speed, the joy of the launch obliterating everything but blistering cascading freedom. Ecstasy in splitting the sky. Escaping the suns, the orbs, all-seeing, untouchable.
A reality returns slowly. Silently, subtly, soft colors to your sides or far ahead. You may emerge from a tunnel, or the sun may rise and annihilate a lightless realm, or the clouds may clear around you.
A landscape of shadows transitions to red-orange dirt, crisscrossed at wide intervals by curving paths of asphalt. Or dune seas, powder-pillow moonscapes, bone-blue expanses of pebble, each wound about with the craggy black asphalt.
A smell of tar and sand. An infinitude of silence, incredible distance, unmarked and unmoving sky a dull pale gray-blue nothingness or black-orange gradient of sunless sunset.
You bake on the black creosote, gasoline fumes swimming around you like a cascade of hot engine eels. Thirst impending like a skyscraper sandstorm. So dry that the raisin-wood feeling of the driest mouth begins to develop in your eye sockets and inside your ears.
If you travel on you might see the waste of past travelers. Empty rigs slackening in the sun. Bones blown to half-dust along mile-long paths from the vehicles.
Some sped here through slick barriers in our realm. Heart racing, horizon dilating, sky and sand bending around to touch behind, speed spreading and flattening all sensation into sick headache split white light.
Others passed out on roads and drugs, awakening here.
Those few in the know recognize a death sentence. Yet they return more often than the unaware, but it is always a postponement of trial.
The roads branch to infinite distance, gradually curving. If you depart one you will never reach the other. If you wander off the black into the trackless expanse, you may begin to hear voices calling from dirty rocks, calling out in breath and song, dreamy and inward. Beware stars descending in the sky, animals skittering away in the dark, a sudden balm in the air. Illusory.
Sapience echoes in the stones, an alien coldness or blood-warmth aching to touch you, to know you, for connection. Oracle or vampire.
Blood welling between corpse-crevices. Beasts half-corporeal wandered here before man, reverently making their graves, waiting in repose. Come close, you may become one with them. Drown beneath the earth, join with their bodies.
Yet they are sometimes the trail back. There are other forms of departure, but the voices might speak to the wanderer, open him, interrogate him, coax him, and, in time, may speak him towards a dark place that only a lucky few others will find in their desperation.
Those who return from the Outer Highway never do so at their point of departure. They are deposited on a road far from home, often so insensate from fatigue and thirst that they don't at first feel the transition.
You will thereafter love spring water, or filling staton soda, or the falling rain in your open mouth, whichever you drink first. A few die before tasting these. “Where could he have come from?”
Some return with no charge, no charter, no fetter. Their passing was a fluke, their return mere Yaldabaoth's providence.
Others are bound and marked by the things that helped them home, alien revenants trapped in stone and soil, a mutual hem of orthogonal realms, twisting to accommodate and accumulate their arteries.
The Outer Highway that we know is traced by black creosote asphalt; perhaps in impossible distances its conduits are stranger, half-shadows of alien thoroughfares, perhaps looking nothing like a desert to the poison beasts trapped in its nether.
When you return, you may be monitored, approached, coerced by aides of the beast or the beast itself, reaching across the cosmic littoral. They may compel you to work a deed on earth, or they may compel your return to the Outer Highway, shades driving your recursion to nothingness, to unearth beasts of blood and song, a rescue mission from which you will never return. Hurled after the tiniest chance, cast into null space to dry and bleed into the asphalt creosote.
Perhaps you have transitioned back into your only trade of engine drover. You return from six days upon the road and on your nightstand, next to a freezing cold beer, is a cap full of little white pills.
