“What are you waiting for?” Lance said to himself as he tried attacking the story’s plot at different angles, but to no avail. The story was like a shape behind a gossamer curtain—there in form but without detail. Having a story stunted in his mind felt unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Perhaps the writer’s block had only loosened its grip and was still there, waiting to whisk away the idea at the slightest hint of creation.
The city gradually gave way to a more rural landscape, and soon signs that informed him he would have to make a choice in the near future as to the route he would take to get to Stony Bay began to appear. To the right was the scenic way—a winding road that appeared to hug the edge of the great lake according to the SUV’s GPS. To the left, a narrow highway shot directly through the rocky, wooded countryside.
Lance hesitated for only a moment before turning on his right blinker and angling the vehicle off the interstate, onto a two-lane blacktop so near to the edge of the cliff that Lance veered the SUV closer to the middle of the highway.
“The road less traveled for sure,” he said to the empty car. Collective Soul now blasted through the speakers and Lance began to sing along with the chorus. Sunlight glared off a billion points in the water and made the lake look as if it were a shifting pool of jewels. Sets of long-forgotten train tracks began to appear on either side of the road. They stretched off in the distance, sometimes close to the road, and at others disappearing completely from his view. The twin steel rails crosshatched by many dark timbers supporting them were like constant reminders of a memory beginning to fade. Every so often a line of boxcars would appear, their sides tattooed by graffiti that was just slightly less faded than the paint it graced, the artists long having grown up and surely moved on to less juvenile practices.
On a particularly sharp curve, a large white cross made from laminate or wood had been pressed into the soil a few yards off the road. As Lance drove past, he could see brightly colored yellow ribbons hanging from the cross, spinning and dancing in the breeze. Another, much smaller, cross came into view, next to its parent. Pink strings of color waved from its arms, and as the road straightened out, Lance pressed on the brake and guided the vehicle to a stop on the gravel shoulder.
“It was a car crash,” he said breathlessly. “He was driving. His wife and daughter were with him.” Lance looked over to the passenger seat and could almost see a dark-haired woman smiling prettily back at him. Her eyes were a deep green, sea-foam green he would’ve called them. When he turned his gaze to the back seat, the kicking legs of a small girl in a pink sundress caught his attention. She was perhaps six, with black hair to match her mother’s. She was looking wistfully out of the window at the sunlight streaming in. There was a curve at each corner of her mouth, as if she knew something wonderful but couldn’t quite put it into words yet. She was beautiful. Lance looked forward at the highway ahead of him, then saw something in his rearview mirror. When he leaned closer, there was straight blond hair where his should have been.
A semi blasted by Lance’s window, close enough to rock the Land Rover on its springs, accompanied by a rude honk of its horn. Lance jerked back in his seat, his muscles straining and his stomach tightening into a hard ball. The imaginings in his car evaporated as though they had been made of steam and light. When he pushed his face closer to the mirror in the center of the windshield, his own face was there to meet him.
He sat back and breathed deeply, trying to calm his heart rate and drain off the rush of adrenaline that pounded in his temples. When his hands no longer visibly shook, he put the gearshift into drive, checked his mirrors twice, and pulled onto the deserted road.