The dark hills were like the bodies of deep sea monsters washed ashore, huge masses of ground, only visible by the absence of stars in the patch of sky they covered. Yet between them, as he was driving, Simon could see Venus, the brightest object in the night sky, blip in and out of his view, the outlines and forms of the hills guiding the morse code message it read him.
“The loneliest road in the world!” they called it, of course it was in America, “Only here, in this desert, would the landscape be so cold.” Simon thought. “And of course only I would be on it.” He rolled down the window of his Ford Transit and let his arm part the wind fluttering past. He felt his skin chll, as the heat was peeled off him by the air, feeling the currents guide his fingers, which guided his hand, which guided his arm and so on and so forth. The cracked yellow headlights patterned the road in front of him and warped distance in a dreamlike way.
“Loneliness is deadly you know,” He spoke to the hills, shouting out his window so they could hear him over the distance. “Dad said it was feebleness, an attitude problem, but it wasn’t dammit, it was just loneliness. But no one noticed, noone tempered themselves enough that they’d notice their ‘advice’ just made it worse. Oh well,” he said softly, “it’s all done now.”
He remembered his Mother, with an iron in her right, and left hand on her hip, conjuring up steam like a witch. Her hair was in a bun, which meant that she had been working for no less than three hours by the time he had gotten home. On an archaic box tv, that was for most of the time shut away in a cabinet, the Sound of Music was playing and his mother was singing along.
Simon brought the van to a gentle stop in the middle of nowhere, not a difficult place to find when you reach it. Stretching his arms and fists to reach the sky, he stepped out of the van, arching his back. Pressing his whole weight through the soles of his shoes into the dusty, rooty ground below, he made a conscious effort to feel the grains of sand shift beneath him. Here, where the lights of the world were so far away they didn’t even warm the horizon, the stars were a mercy to behold with all the soot of the city swept away. He walked around the van to grab a tin lunch box from the passenger seat, then took a shovel from the back. He turned on his heel and headed out to the desert. Counting… twenty, thirty, one hundred and forty paces finally. And as he covered the box that contained the revolver with sand, he whistled a tune from the movie his mother watched while working. “I guess it’s justice, but I guess you feel different Dad. Don’t you?” He asked the hills.
