The Road

public - Will show date when possible

Samuel kept his eyes on the road - mostly - but it was hard not to sneak glances at the young woman making herself small in the passenger seat of his cigarette-burnt hatchback. Hard to believe she was pregnant, but then, looks could be deceiving with this one.

He rolled his window down, and the wind licked into the cab with its dry and hungry tongues. He braced his knee against the wheel for stability, and used a freed hand to shield the virgin cig while lighting it with a careful, steady dexterity that only comes from the well of practice. Once the glow of the burning tobacco seemed established, he put a hand back on the wheel, and leaned toward the window as he puffed.

The woman said nothing, just stared at him, taking in the ritual.

His cough was dense with the social discomfort of the moment. "Sorry," he apologized preemptively. "They keep me calm. Don't mean to be a nuisance to the little ones."

"No trouble. My pa used to smoke. Don't think it ever did much bad to me, in the end. Ma's the one who had different blood about her." Delia had a light voice, like a souffle on the razor's edge of falling in on itself. It was almost lost in the wind rushing into the car, but there was a crystalline and plaintive quality that carried over the noise.

Samuel nodded, sucking more air through the filter. Better by the second. He observed, "you don't talk much about 'em, you know. Either of 'em."

Delia shrunk a bit further, curling her arms tight around herself. "You know what all's to know about them both, I think. Certainly ain't much worth sayin'."

Her driver spoke softly and carefully. "I don't mean to be a voyeur. You don't have to say anything you don't want to. It's just hard to put myself in your shoes, sometimes. You grew up different."

Her eyes softened, dropped some of their defensive quality. "I did." She looked down at his arms, strong, comforting in their hairiness, one hand on the wheel and the other ashing out the window. "Well, you grew up different than me. How am I supposed to know what's normal without a childhood like yours? I don't know what's worth tellin'."

Samuel thought for a second. "I suppose not. How about we make a game of it, like this - I say something about when I was a kid, then you take a turn, and we just keep takin' turns. It'll help keep me awake, anyhow."

Delia smirked. "You sure you don't want to fix the player?"

The older-looking man glanced at the backseat through the rearview mirror - "Mount Vinyl," as he'd called it on multiple occasions. He chuckled. "If only! Thing about a record player is it needs a steady place to rest, or it can't play music properly."

Delia looked out her window, crouching down to get a better look at the sunset, only visible now as a purple sky. "And neither of us much like the radio."

"No."

A reflective green sign whipped past on the side of the road, and Delia wondered what it said - how such things spoke. Maybe this game wasn't such a bad deal. "Alright. Tell me a story, Sam."

Sam thought for a minute. When he opened his mouth, he said: "I never had an easy time at school. We moved around a bit when I was little. The country kids thought I was a city boy, the city kids thought I was a country boy. Nobody much wanted me except my father, and when I did make friends, I had no power to keep them. By the time we finally put down roots, I didn't trust it. I think... there's a part of you you're supposed to grow inside, that's able to feel at home, and I never got to."

Delia considered this, and asked, "You grow roots?"

He laughed at this. "Not literally. I just mean, we stopped moving around. Dad got into the record store business, and we had a shop. He made friends easily, everyone loved him, and there was I. Quiet, lurking, but helpful where I could be."

Delia nodded. "But you did go to school."

"Well sure. All kids go to school."

"I didn't," she admitted.

"No shit?"

"No shit." She stared hard at the photo taped to her sun visor. It'd be dark soon, and she wouldn't be able to use it for reference much longer. "Pa said there was no place for me there. Ma agreed. We stayed on the farm and raised cows. They never liked my smell."

Sam laughed good-naturedly. "I imagine they didn't. There's a lot of creatures on God's green earth that wouldn't know what to make of you."

"Well I can't blame them!" Delia's voice carried a note that was - indignance? Guilt? "I was born from a cow you know."

"Hold on. What?" Sam took his eyes off the road for a moment, looking her over, before returning to responsible driving. "You're gonna need to explain that to me."

"Mama laid her eggs on the outside of a cow. She told me when I was old enough. The cow was sick, but it was alive, and that was perfect." Delia tidied her hair. "It gave us food until we were big enough to eat regular food, like cooked meat and oatmeal."

"You ate it alive?"

"Well, until we ate too much, and then it wasn't very alive at all. But that's always how it was meant to be. I was always nice to cows after that though, as... a penance, I guess, for being born like that. Even if they never liked me, it wasn't their fault. I'd be wary of me if I was a cow."

Sam shook his head. "Jeez. How many of you were born in that batch, anyways, all running around on your little legs?"

"Ma said it was something like 200, but with a number like that it gets hard to count."

"Two hundred?!"

"Sure. But not a lot of us grew up, so it hardly mattered. A bunch of us ate each other before we were really old enough to remember anything, and then Pa got mad there were so many of us, and Ma said she'd take care of it, and then there was just me."

"Christ almighty. What'd she do, eat them herself?"

"So she said. Skipped a regular few table meals to do it. I think Pa figured out why eventually, but by then the deed was done, and I ate my way out of the dead cow, and they started teaching me how to be a person."

Sam looked pallid in the fading light. "Fuck, Delia, I was joking."

She tilted her head. "I can't always tell, sorry. I didn't mean to spook you."

He took in more smoke, considering whether he might need a second cigarette after this. "And I didn't mean to spook. I told you when I met you, I can handle it. I just didn't expect something like that, is all."

She watched him carefully for a second, then intentionally relaxed into her seat, an act of trust. "Well. How are people normally born?"

"Not like that."

"It's your turn, Sam."

"I suppose it is. Hmm. Without getting into a full examination of the birds and the bees - which I am not qualified to do, and no I don't mean literal birds and bees - well, the birth part of things is dangerous for the girlfolk. You'd think we're meant to die out, with how dangerous it is. It can take days, and usually, it happens in a hospital. You know those parts you got down there?"

Delia nodded wryly. "Sure. You've seen 'em."

He flushed, but pressed on. "Well, normally the baby that comes out of there is pretty big. Like, head the size of two fists held together, and the head comes out first."

Delia looked mortified. "Out of there? It wouldn't fit!"

"It gets bigger! I don't know how, but it does! The hole gets bigger and the baby still takes an age to come free, and it still hurts the whole time, but it works."

She shook her head. "But that's normal?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"But it's dangerous?"

"Used to be the main way mothers died, and it still takes 'em sometimes."

"You're makin' that up, Samuel. You're kidding again."

He tipped his dusty brown Walker hat, which had perhaps once been in fashion, touching its tip with a ritual reverence that intrigued Delia, even after weeks of travel. "Swear on my life, that's how it's done. Some folks say it's a curse for ancient sins."

"Must have been some sin."

"They say the first woman ate an apple. One she wasn't supposed to."

"Is that all, Sam? Christ. I wonder if my curse didn't come from a woman eating a spider."

He flicked the spent cig out the window, pondering. "Well, you never do know. It wouldn't be the strangest thing I'd ever heard. And how do you know the name 'Christ' but not the old stories, anyways?"

She stared off into the infinite trailing distance of straight road ahead of them, written in reflective paint - no, carved in asphalt, the thin scar of a scalpel through the prairie. "I pick things up, Sam. You say it a lot, I figure 'Christ' is just something you say. Why, is it a creature or something?"

Sam laughed hard. "Or something, I suppose! Guess I better explain religion sometime. If I'm counting right, though, that was my turn."

"I think it was. Awful rude of you to leave me on a cliffhanger, but I'll survive it." She considered her life, trying to think from an outsider perspective. "Ma and I always relied on Pa to do the hard work. Do you think that was because he was a man, or because he was a man?"

Sam scratched his chin. "Not sure what you mean."

"Well neither Ma nor I were ever very strong. And I've heard that's pretty normal for normal people. They say men are stronger than women, and I'm extra careful around men because of it. There's all sorts of ways a man can hurt a woman."

"If he's a bad sort of man."

"Then there are more bad men than you think."

"I still don't know what you mean though? A man or a man?"

"I mean, what if he was stronger because he was a regular human man? You know, I look normal enough from the outside, but..." She tapped her arm, and it made a soft, hollow noise. "My arms and legs are all full of air, you know."

Even in the fading light, even with her safe-but-nightblind eyes, she could see him squint. "That can't be true."

"It is true! And if something lets the air out, that limb goes limp. I fell out of a tree once, I was always climbing because I'd get bored, and it was the scariest feeling, not being able to move my legs. I had to unbind my arms to get home, and I was scared for Pa to see me like that."

"Unbind?"

"Like that one night together. You remember."

Samuel grinned. "I do. It made my stomach lurch, but it was exciting too." She sunk into her seat a little, and he softened immediately. "I just wasn't used to it, is all."

"I suppose. Anyways, it looks like I have two arms, but that's just me holding six of 'em together and letting the skin grow over top of 'em like that. I'm mostly air, except in the middle, where I'm mostly organs. That's why I can change shape."

He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel, considering this. "You sure do know a bit about your innards, Del."

"I had to!" she bursted out, louder than she intended, and then more softly, "Ma taught me. She'd always say, there ain't no doctor and there ain't no vet. So you better know how you were made."

Sam reached his hand out, and took hers. "I think you were made beautiful. Just right." He looked at her then, in her eyes, lit only by the headlights reflecting off the road, growing brighter by the second. "Inside and out."

Delia gripped his hand and screamed, pointing ahead, and Sam barely had a chance to see the white-tailed deer before it rolled up violently onto the hood and hit the windshield with a juicy, lethal crunch.