Remix
your inner dialog.

Just type US Route 20 into your favorite search engine and hit the images tab, and you’ll see a determined – and occasionally crooked – line, running coast to coast, connecting twelve states along its path, including New York state, where I spent ten formative years living in a house that sat about 25 feet from Route 20’s eastbound shoulder. 

Art kept a slow, relaxed pace. He wasn’t one to move very quickly to begin with, but it wasn’t the sand that was slowing him down. It seemed to me that Art had something he wanted to talk about, and so I waited patiently for him to start talking, knowing that once he got going, I was going to be in for a long ride. Anyway, I was still wondering what he knew about Jade. And how he knew about her. And what or who else he might know.

To my right, the cloud-filled crater pulses with occasional flashes of muted, blue light. All around me, an inexplicable landscape littered with grand spheres and domes, a gameboard of giant proportions. Above me, a blackness so deep and impenetrable that the millions upon millions of stars within it can only play at illuminating the infinite. And before me, just ahead of me, too distant to be seen clearly, but close enough that I can discern their forms, two figures moving in my direction.