He had decided to head out the night before at about one in the morning, and didn’t really get any high-quality sleep, just nervous postcoital naps as the girl dug her head onto his shoulder, and he felt tense and nervous and content. Her name was Harper and she had a tendency to roll around in her sleep. He felt happy, but tense. Like the happiness was a thread that could be snapped in a split second, so that he had to enjoy it while he could.

At five thirty he got nervous about his parents waking up and seeing the truck missing and calling him and chastising him so he told Harper this and she pouted but then she heard the automated coffee pot click on and, thinking it was one of her parents, spurred him into leaving. He slunk out the front door as the sun oozed into the living room, and he climbed into his truck, tired but smiling meekly.

So he was very tired, very pleased with himself, and in this mindset of temporarily successful peskiness he slid his car underneath the country bridge on a gravel road and waited for the torrents of rain to let up so that he could at least see the road in front of him.

And alternative rock music was playing lightly on the radio.

And he put it into park.

And he thought about the curvature of Harper’s legs and fell asleep.

And the engine ran idly and the gasoline was broken down and the car emitted carbon dioxide and other, unimportant chemicals, and in the unventilated solace of the space beneath the bridge it built up enough that it was poisonous to the human body, and his sleeping nose wafted in the poison and put it into his bloodstream, and he died wordlessly in a quietly purring pick-up truck underneath a bridge in rural Missouri.

•••

Amelia rarely drove. The mid-size sedan seemed to churn on gravel roads, and she didn’t know if that was bad or not, so she would suck her teeth the whole time she clutched the steering wheel.

“Whoever thought that gravel made a good road? I swear,” she said.

She often talked to herself when she was anxious and alone. Amelia thought about Barrett. She imagined him in the car, responding to her question, saying something like “gravel seems fine to me.” Amelia scoffed, again, to herself.

Amelia usually visited Barrett after coming back into town from Columbia or Washington, usually for some shopping trip, or to visit old friends. This meant she would be coming in south on highway 333 and could just swing right off the highway into his driveway. She tried coming in from the east this time, going over the bridge in McMaren, and winding through some back roads in the hills. She didn’t know the way.