The sun went down, and soon the land disappeared. We sailed past piles of sawdust lit by sodium lamps, and cement factories and junk shops, the rag edge of the road’s shoulder flickering alongside us like firelight. The smell of wet trees blasted in the window— cold, strong, mountain trees. The yellow stripes shot toward us like laser beams.

I leaned against the window and watched the night floating by. A mailbox appeared and whizzed past in a blur. A gas station grew and receded against a backdrop of pitch-black. Kurt’s face was half-lit from the dashboard, his eyes locked on the onrushing road. I pressed my cheek against the cool window. I couldn’t tell if we were racing forward or plunging straight down into the void.

The Wind

THE WIND

IT WAS AN OLD STORY, and Joseph had heard it many times before. In fact, ever since his grandfather’s arrival a month earlier, he’d been hearing it almost every day, and it was always pretty much the same. The details might change a little, and some of the order, but the big picture remained intact. The beginning of the world, according to his grandfather, began with the wind.

“The wind was the first thing,” the old man said. His voice was a throaty, desiccated rasp, and his eyes gleamed from the bottoms of deep craters in his head. He looked so brittle lying in bed that Joseph worried his soul would fall out of his skin before his eyes dropping upward and splashing into the blue water of the sky. Joseph’s grandfather’s lips rounded and closed. His eyes seemed to read words on the ceiling.

“The wind was all there was,” he whispered. “The wind would move inside the darkness, and touch itself, and try and hide. Before the world began, before . . . oh shit . . .”

He coughed, a resounding, catarrhal avalanche in his chest. His eyes bunched, and tears formed at the corners of his lids, and he pressed his yellowing hair into his pillow. Maybe this was it, Joseph thought. He didn’t want to see his grandfather die. But he told himself that it would be okay, too. The cycle of being was a perfect circle, his mother said. Death was not a tragedy. Everything that entered the world naturally departed, only to come back again in some new form. He could see where the notion offered some kind of comfort.