I stretched the collar with my fingers to see a dirty mess of a laceration that spanned six inches from just above my heart to the edge of my left shoulder. When I moved, a foreign object moved with it, stabbing me from the inside. I touched the skin, sucking in air through my teeth. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but whatever had sliced open my skin was still in there.

With clenched teeth, I spread the skin with my fingers. I could see layers of skin and muscle and then something else, but it wasn’t bone. It was a piece of brown wood, about an inch thick. Using my fingers like tweezers, I dug inside, crying out while fishing the huge splinter from my shoulder. The squishing sound of blood and tissue combined with the discomfort made my head swim, but an inch at a time, I extracted the stake and let it fall to the ground. I fell back, looking up at the weeping sky, waiting for the dizziness and nausea to subside, still trying to wade through my last memories.

My blood ran cold. America.

I scrambled to my feet, holding my left arm against my side. “Mare?” I screamed. “America!” I turned in a circle, looking for the turnpike, listening for tires humming along the asphalt.

Only the songs of birds and a slight breeze blowing along the soybean field could be heard.

Sunbeams cascaded from the sky to my right, helping me get my bearings. It was mid afternoon, meaning I was facing south. I had no idea which direction I’d been thrown.

I looked up, remembering my last words to America. I’d felt myself being pulled, and I hadn’t wanted her to see it. I’d thought it would be the last thing I could protect her from. Then I had been launched into the air. The feeling had been hard to process, maybe something like skydiving but through a meteor shower. I had been pelted with what felt like tiny rocks, and in the next moment, a bicycle had rammed my legs and back. Then I had been slammed on the ground.

I blinked, feeling panic rise in my throat. The turnpike was either in front of me or behind me. I didn’t know how to find myself, much less my girlfriend.

“America!” I yelled again, terrified she’d been sucked out as well.

She could be lying twenty feet from me or still tucked in the crevice at the overpass.

I decided to just walk south, hoping once I reached some sort of road, I’d be able to determine how far I was from the last place I’d seen my girlfriend. The soybeans grazed my wet jeans. My clothes were weighed down by the inch-thick layer of mud, and my shoes were like two blocks of concrete. My hair was caked in wet gravel and grime, and so was my face.

As I approached the edge of the field, I saw a large piece of tin with the words Emporia Sand & Gravel. As I crested a small hill, I saw the remains of the company, the piles of materials scattered from the wind—the same wind that had carried me at least a quarter of a mile from where I had taken shelter.