Delano, California

The highway disappears. A thin black tail bends off into mist.

The blue afterglow of nightfall: a woozy nausea descends, thick and vague like a fog. It’s that disoriented, out-of-body type of tired, beyond tired, that comes with staying up for over two days straight. The driver thinks how different this tired is from that of a speed binge. ‘Wired’, they call that antsy paranoia, where the eyes remain bolted open out of an indeterminate fear. If anything, this is a drunk tired; though no amount of alcohol has ever caused the dusk to soak so completely through his head like this.

There is no difference between eyes open and closed. It’s all a continuum of murky gray: sky, brush, asphalt, eyelids, hands, all melt into the same drab clumps of clay.

“I can’t be passin’ out now, ah juss got on th’road.” A drunken slur slows his thoughts.

The driver thinks about how he could use a cigarette, before remembering the one he had lit thirty seconds before and let fall to his lap. It's still there, smoldering.

“Godammit!” The stray cigarette burns a hole in the driver’s pants leg, too close to his crotch, before falling to the floor.

It’s strange how different this internal voice, the one reading out the driver’s thoughts, is from the one he’s accustomed to hearing reverberate through his skull when he’s talking aloud. A throaty growl, versus a deep but otherwise clear twang; the driver doesn’t consider himself to normally have an accent.

“Soun’ like a fuckin’ South’ner.” He allows himself a quick smirk at the thought, but nothing comes.

The driver spent most of his life in Michigan, but Pa was from the South. Well, North Texas, at least. He moved up to Michigan along with Ma shortly before the Dust Bowl kicked up, to work in the factories. They had one child in tow, and would have three others over the next five years. The youngest died at the age of ten. The daughter, the middle of the surviving three, ran off to California at age sixteen, followed by the driver, the eldest, four years later. It was not a family situation so untypical for the time; so it doesn’t warrant much thinking about. The driver allows a road sign to briefly steal his attention. It reads “Bakersfield 38”.