4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
Fog and Frequency
Corey's text kills the last delivery and the storm kills the road. Parked in a lay-by with the windows fogging shut and the world reduced to rain, Jim finds the half-joint Adrian gave him still dry against his chest. The weed changes the sound of the storm. The wet clothes change the feel of his skin. And the morning — the driveway, the woman, the taste he can't unfeel — changes everything else.
Corey's text kills the last delivery and the storm kills the road. Jim's parked in a lay-by between Glenfern and Collinsvale with nothing but rain, a thermos going cold, and the half-joint Adrian Pafistis handed him that morning. The windows fog. The world contracts. And the particular solitude of being the only person inside a kilometre of weather nobody wants to be in does what solitude always does — strips the performance and leaves what's underneath.
The weed loosens what the morning wound tight. The cold, the wet clothes, the skin prickling beneath clinging cotton — everything the storm did to Jim's body becomes kindling for something the driveway started. Gladys comes back. Not as thought. As taste. As touch. As the ghost of a breath he shouldn't have been close enough to feel. And alone in the cab with the rain hammering down and nowhere to be and no one to see, Jim stops pretending and lets his body finish what the morning began.
Private, raw, and completely unapologetic. The chapter that lives where most stories look away.
