The man beside me, he spoke in staccato sentences – as if his lips had forgotten the shape of words.

He said he’d been walking a long time, with a hungry thumb stuck out into the road, grasping for the wind beside passing cars. With tired eyes he watched them move on and blur into the faraway horizon.

He’d spent many days out there beneath the meat-eating sun, hoping to find himself in the shade. By night, he slept beneath blankets of stars and dead leaves.

A ghosted-out drifter upon the loneliest roads, appearing only in the transient headlights, and then gone.

I asked him where he was headed; he said it wasn’t what pulled him, but what pushed him instead. There was no beckoning light. He said the shadows, they snapped at his heels, and there was something in the deep lines upon that weather-blown face, like country roads – and I believed him, and kept my foot down upon the pedal.

He said a lot of things, in that strange, broken way. He said a lot of things for the longest time, and then for a longer time still, said nothing at all.

I’m not sure which was worse.