Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
Chapter Sixteen: Phantom Ships
Fifth day. Or maybe sixth. Time works different here. The limestone walls have become my monastery, the Rio Grande my only clock. Haven't eaten since El Paso. Maybe longer. The emptiness clean, necessary. Like the desert fathers. Like Jesus fasting forty days until the stones spoke.
First light finds me already awake. Or maybe I never sleep anymore. Just float between states like the hawk that lives in the high crevices. My body weightless, translucent. Could blow away on the morning thermals if not for the gravity of grief.
The canyon breathes with me. In. Out. These walls that were once ocean floor, that hold the fossils of creatures that swam where I sit. Time folded and refolded until past and future meet in this eternal now.
Pull out my Record. The pages feel like skin. The pencil heavy as bone. A golden poppy grows from limestone crack—impossible, insistent. Scorpion weed clusters n…
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