Your Road

You’re walking down a long, dark road on a cold night. There are no street lights, no cars, and no other signs of life. You don’t know how you got here, wherever here is. You remember sitting in the passenger seat of your best friend’s car, laughing with them as they had attempted to answer their phone whilst driving one-handed.

Then nothing.

You woke up by the side of the empty road, got to your feet, and started walking. You were fairly sure you knew which way the nearest town should be in, so you started walking in that direction.

Now it’s an hour later, and you still can’t see any signs of civilisation.

You’re cold, and you’ve got your arms wrapped around yourself to keep your body warm. You’re starting to get worried because your survival skills are laughable, and you don’t want to have to spend the night by the side of the road. You don’t even know what animals live out here – there aren’t a lot of plants, just a flat expanse of dry land.

You also don’t have anything to eat or drink on you. You’re not feeling thirsty yet, but you know that if you keep walking eventually you’ll need some nourishment. You can only hope that you’ll come across a car or a house at the side of the road with a kindly owner who takes pity on you.

It becomes darker around you. When you look up at the sky, you notice that there are very few stars in the sky. This confuses you, because you’re used to looking out of your bedroom window at a sky full of glittering stars, and you can’t be that far from home. You used to stare at the stars as a child and try to recognise the different constellations.

Eventually, you come to the end of the road. There’s nothing here. The road just stops. You think about leaving the road for a moment and continuing on into the wilderness, but that’s only because you don’t want to have to walk back the way that you’ve just come. You come to your senses, sigh, and rub your eyes. This isn’t right at all.

You turn around and begin walking in the other direction, but what you see makes you stop. There’s the wreck of a car in front of you, upside down in the middle of the road, and it looks just like your best friend’s car. Glass is all over the road, and twisted bits of metal are sticking out of the car at odd angles. A pool of blood is seeping out from underneath the passenger side of the car.

You understand now. You know without walking all the way to the other end of the road that it will end suddenly, just as it does at this end. You expect that you won’t be able to walk off the stretch of road even if you wanted to. You’re stuck here until someone or something far greater than yourself either decides that you’ve paid for your wrongs or helps you to finish your business.

Until then, you are stuck wandering along the road where you died, a ghost whispered about by the few people you manage to make contact with.