Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
Jessica Lilien
I woke up to Jason shushing me, trying to put his hands on my face. I remembered, immediately, everything, I thought. We’d been in a car accident. I wasn’t sure how bad. It was hard to breathe. My body felt syrupy and stupid, undercurrents of bright adrenaline below wet flannel layers. I wasn’t thinking of the right things to think yet. I tried to push his hands away. I tried to snap, “Get off,” but it came out heavy and mushed. The sound of it worried me, in a faraway way: how long had I been passed out? was I injured? badly? is this brain damage? He was trying to put his hands over my mouth.
It was the wet bread slogginess sound of my own speech that worried me awake. My head hurt. I leaned forward, pushed the deflated cocoon of the airbag away from me - it stank, it was dusty and unpleasant to the touch like an unlubricated condom - and I retched, but didn’t throw up, and I put my face in my hands. My eyeballs ached. I felt for blood on my face, but I didn’t feel any. He was rubbing my back, catching his own breath, telling me, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
“Get off,” I said again, and it came out better this time. I pushed his hands away from me again. I was feeling more like normal, I thought.
“It’s okay. You’re fine.”
I shook my head. “I passed out.”
“Did you?”
“You didn’t notice?”
“You’re fine. It - just happened. It must not have, you know - Jesus - you hear that?”
I hadn’t. “I’m okay,” I told him. We’d been in a car accident, but I was okay. I hadn’t been out more than a second, I guess. He hadn’t even noticed. “Are you okay?”
“I think it’s over there.”
“What’s over there?”
“I thought it was dead, we - I mean it was big, but, god.”
“Where?”
“On my side, I think. Over. Past the - I mean, we hit it really hard, I don’t think it - I didn’t think it would get up, but I think it’s - I saw it go over there, but I can’t tell. Can you hear it?”
“No.” I couldn’t hear much.
We were skewed at a 45-degree angle across the highway, the trunk end of the rented Prius just over the yellow line and into the other lane, our headlights making the trees off the side of the road glare white and black. There was something wrong with them: they were strange, broken and torn, the trunks gone practically curly with damage from something - a storm, beavers or insects, maybe - but not from us; they weren’t what we’d hit. The hood was dented in deep like crunched paper, and smoking. The car was done for. I’d told him to buy the extra insurance; he never wanted to. I couldn’t remember if he’d listened to me about it or not. Everything that wasn’t directly in our headlights was very dark, and still. Jason was looking behind himself, out the back window, then out the back-seat side window, turning like a small dog lost, my window, his again. I looked, too. My neck hurt, but my head wasn’t bad. My eyeballs felt bruised inside, my chest hurt, but I was breathing again. The tinfoil adrenaline feel was resurfacing, digging holes in what was left of my black out. Behind us, I saw again that car pulled over on the shoulder; I remembered passing by it just before we hit something. But I noticed for the first time that their passenger-side door was hanging open. There was a small glinting reflection in that window - maybe it was cracked, or broken. Beyond the car, another hundred feet back, I could see the dark outline of the exit sign against the slightly less-black sky: Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile. I’d smiled at it when we passed it. I remembered that now.
“Is anyone in that car?”
“Shush,” he said again.
“Oh my god, stop.” We’d been fighting. I remembered. I hated it when he shushed me, like he was a grownup or something.
“Goddamnit, Marie, if you don’t shut up I can’t hear where it is.”
There was another car in the street ahead of us, too, barely visible in the dark. It was not parked neatly on the shoulder, but slouched fat in its lane, facing us. One of its headlights was on, barely, very dim. The other was off. I could not quite tell if anyone was in that car, either. How long could it have been there, blocking the lane like that?
I remembered the crash. I remembered hitting something. It had been big.
I did not remember what we had hit.
“What did we hit?” I asked.
Jason shook his head, was still spinning, rotating, all around, like he could even see anything in the dark, anyway.
“Please let’s go,” I said. I was remembering more, remembering the impact, the second before the impact, and I was coming to understand that the adrenaline-scared feeling I still had in my throat and between my legs wasn’t just from the crash. What had we hit?
“It won’t – ” He gestured vaguely to the hood. “It won’t start. It’s – the engine. Look at it.”
“Fix it,” I said. I’d said it without thinking, but then after a second I hoped that he had interpreted it as meanness. He was a post-doc; he studied Old English and Middle English poetry. Sometimes he wrote it. He sighed through his nose, started rubbing my back again.
“If it’s gone, we can walk,” he said. “There’s an exit just ahead.”
“One mile,” I said. I couldn’t see it, though. The exit was too far, or the highway was too dark.
He looked at me. “You sure you’re okay?”
I looked at him, too, and hated him, and made him look away, and he stopped touching me.
“What did we hit?” I asked.
“I thought it was - a moose?” he said.
“A moose? We’re in-”
“Jesus, Marie- ”
“-like Kansas.”
“-I don’t know, okay? A fucking house? We hit a house, okay, and then it yelled at me, and then it ran away, and now it’s running in circles around the goddamn car, okay?”
“It - yelled at you?”
“No, it - I don’t know, it - roared or something.”
“Was it a dog?”
“It wasn’t a dog.”
Maybe something was wrong with me. Maybe I did have brain damage. I shoved open the glove compartment between the two seats. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Then I did: a gun was the real answer, as though they came standard in rented Priuses, but if he asked, I would tell him a flashlight. He didn’t ask. I pawed around, but there was nothing - nothing heavy, nothing good. Our rental paperwork, a pile of sad damaged napkins from the last passengers, some change, a pen, Jason’s iPod.
“Phone,” I said. I was glad I’d thought of it. I felt better. He hadn’t thought of it.
“Service,” he said.
We hadn’t had service out here before, but maybe we did now. My purse had fallen over, sloughed its contents on the floor at my feet in the crash. I pushed through them until I found my phone, and I turned it on, and had no service. I tried anyway: weren’t there special rules for 911? But nothing went through, there was no sound, nothing happened, and I hung up and put it back neatly in the special pocket for it inside my purse, snapped the pocket snap, zipped the purse top, set it carefully right-side-up again, left everything else on the floor mat. My expensive Lancôme lipgloss, my wallet, my sunglasses. The floormat was dirty. We were on vacation. I started to cry a little, but quietly.
“I saw it when we hit it, too,” I said. “I think it came out in front of us on purpose.”
“It ran away,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s gone,” I said. “I think it did it on purpose. Why are those other cars here?”
“Why would it get hit on purpose?”
“It wanted to stop the car,” I said.
“Marie,” he said.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. Our windows were up, but even so, after a long time when we didn’t hear anything, we heard something. It came from the woods behind us, on the other side of the road, his side. We looked, but we didn’t see anything. It wasn’t gone, and it wasn’t dead. I almost remembered what it looked like.
I think it was thinking of it, outside the car, knowing that it was close enough that we could hear it when it moved, I think that’s what made me think of the tire-iron in the trunk, nestled snug underneath two suitcases. Something big and hard and heavy, standard in rented Priuses.
“It’s not ambushing anyone,” he said, looking at the trees, waiting for another sound to come, or no sound. “It’s just an animal. It’s just a big animal.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t crying anymore. I knew I shouldn’t, but I didn’t care; I was going to say it, and I did: “We should have stayed on I-70,” I said.
He was facing away from me, and things had been very silent, anyway, but the silence changed. I was thinking of other things I could say, but didn’t need to. I was pretending I was saying them. This is what we had been fighting about, before it happened.
He lifted one hand slowly to his eyes and then, very loud in the quiet: “You never even drive!” I flinched - he’d startled me afraid for a second - and I heard it again, behind us, but louder - maybe closer? “Why? Why? Why won’t you ever drive? I drove us all the way from Maryland to Washington-Goddamn-State in a U-Haul and you-”
“Oh my god that was four years ago-”
“All you do is this! That’s - the reason you don’t drive is so you can do this! That’s why! That’s why! That’s why!”
Did I see the leaves moving behind him, on the other side of the road, behind his head? It was dark; it was hard to tell. And anyway, he was wrong; I drove all the time. “I drive all the time. Who drove us back to your mother’s house when you got drunk with Amanda Shaffer?”
“Amanda – I cannot – I cannot believe you’re bringing up this Amanda Fucking Shaffer thing – she was my roommate, Marie, I lived with her for four years-”
“I don’t even care what you did with her-”
“I didn’t do anything with her!”
“In college!”
“Oh Jesus.”
“I said I didn’t care-”
“This is not about what I did in college.”
“I had the map. I could see. I told you to stay on I-70. You never listen to me.”
Loud - another crash, an explosion, practically, it sounded that way and it felt that way, too. The back of the car raised up, skidded to the right, stopped, rocked on its wheels. My neck snapped sideways, my eyeballs again, but I still didn’t hit my head. We were both still wearing our seat belts. I thought at first it was another car, we’d been rear-ended, but it hadn’t hit us from the rear, it had hit us from the side, from the woods on the other side of the road, and anyway, there was no car behind us when I looked: there was a shape, but it was moving, pacing softly away on four tall articulated legs. Walking down the middle of our lane away from us. Its whole body moved wrong; my eyes couldn’t make sense of how. The car was straightened out now, facing cleanly forward, East, straight on the highway, as though about to go. Something in my bladder or my belly tightened, raised up inside me. Its legs were too tall for its body, stretched improperly, not thin but too tall, too articulated, joints rolled wildly in sockets and thocked into home in a way that wasn’t like a horse or a cat or any kind of a thing. It wasn’t like any kind of a thing I’d seen before, in the movies or the zoo. It wasn’t real, I knew it wasn’t real, I knew it. It had hit us on purpose, and just now it had done it again. It was angry.
“Try the engine,” I said.
“I hate you,” he told me.
The car in front of us, the one with only one headlight on, dim, though, barely on, was resting lopsided on at least two flat tires. I wondered how long that headlight had been on. I wondered how long it takes for a headlight to fade out and die like that. I wasn’t sure if I could see slumped shadow-shapes in the car, lolling a little with the tilt like half-wilted top-heavy flora, I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could. I thought maybe those wide dark shadows splashed and streaking against the inside of their windshield weren’t shadows. But it was dark. It was hard to tell. I didn’t know that for sure. (And the dead deer we’d passed five minutes before the crash, the black hump on the side of the road that we’d rushed past in the dark, wrenched and folded, it was impossible to try to remember now whether maybe that had actually been a jacket on it like I’d thought for a split second, a puffy blue down jacket, torn and leaking polyester insulation and blood, if maybe that had been not a broken foreleg but a human hand, a glint of gold from a wedding ring on it.) Plus maybe I had brain damage, anyway, I remembered. I’d just been in a car accident, I’d passed out. He tried the engine. It wasn’t going to start again.
We sat very straight in our seats, seat belts on, and looked ahead, like good citizens, like a married couple in a commercial. We always fought on vacations, in planes, in cars, in hotel rooms. I had never before wondered why we still took them together. Not going on vacations together had never actually occurred to me before. His hands were in his lap, resting on his thighs. I still had my palm against the window by my head, where I had braced myself when we’d been hit again. We had met under a goddamn tree, on a college campus, a million years ago, and we were going to die, bloody, in a rented Prius in the middle of Kansas. I felt tired, and a little comfortable. Maybe these were signs of brain damage.
“We need to get out,” he said. “We need to – go. There’s an exit ahead.”
“I can’t run,” I said.
“Then stay,” he said, angry.
I tried to remember the sign. Had it been one of the “FOOD - GAS - LODGING” signs? A promise of people, help, tow trucks and blankets, coffee administered as though it were medicine? Or would there be nothing there? One of those terrible trick exits when you’re on a road trip, where it just keeps going, leads to somewhere else, another road, another highway entrance, another highway, when all you need is a stop, a break, a toilet and a Dairy Queen?
“Then go,” I said.
“Marie,” he said.
I might have told him, then, about the tire-iron. I might have reminded him of it. There might have been time to get it, maybe, if one of us had distracted it, if we’d made a plan together then.
But I didn’t say anything. And then I saw it, out of the corner of my eye: darkness moving in dark. Loping, swaying and locking like it was on water, like it was made of water, rolling. So big you couldn’t see all of it at once. It hurt my eyes to look at it. It was pointing straight ahead, moving alongside the car, its head slung low on its body, but it was watching us as much as we were watching it, I knew. It wanted us to see it. It coughed, or barked. It snorted, shook its head like a dog waking up from a nap and I heard - or felt - delicate drops of something wet flung off its face, landing with gentle taps in globs and streaks on the window by my face, a quarter-inch of glass away from where my fingertips rested. That’s what made it real. Its own spit was what made it real. It moved along the length of the car, its hips, I saw them, then it stopped again. The windows were all up. I flexed my fingers against mine, listened for the sound they made. We watched it. It was still.
“This is your fault,” I whispered. I wasn’t even talking to him; it just came out.
He punched the steering wheel. White dust and rubber stink puffed sadly up, floated slow across still space to touch on my hair, my skin. I’d never known him to punch anything before. He wrote poetry and submitted it to journals under a pseudonym, because he was worried it might adversely impact his academic career. I had loved this secret when he first told me. (Now I knew how stupid.) He punched the steering wheel over and over, six times, eight, a dozen, the horn silly and childish in the air inside the Prius, ridiculous, he was ridiculous. I was not looking at him. I was looking out my window. I think I saw it tense at the noise, its shoulders both raising and growing more dense, more compact, but it was dark, it was hard to see. Its head was heavy, a whole with its body, all of one piece, an outgrowth, an extension, and its head was lowered, its whole body pointed nose-down like an oil rig, like a plow, and it swung its face a little bit more toward us, but still it wasn’t looking at us, like it didn’t care what we were doing, it didn’t need to care. Maybe it wasn’t thinking. Maybe it wasn’t a monster. Maybe it was just a big animal. But: I was going to be bitten, I realized. I wondered at it: something was going to bite me until I died. I was going feel something biting me with its mouth until I died, and it was going to happen very soon. Jason stopped punching the steering wheel. I think it was growling, or it started to growl.
Jason was breathing.
“Where are we?” he asked.
We are almost at Four Mile River Road, I thought. We are one mile away. We are on vacation. We are almost there, or we should have been by now. But the truth was, I didn’t know where we were. We were not on I-70 anymore, though I had told him, hours ago, that we should not leave it, and as I watched the dark shape moving outside the car, just past the palm of my hand on the glass by my head, I decided to remind him so, out loud.
It was the wet bread slogginess sound of my own speech that worried me awake. My head hurt. I leaned forward, pushed the deflated cocoon of the airbag away from me - it stank, it was dusty and unpleasant to the touch like an unlubricated condom - and I retched, but didn’t throw up, and I put my face in my hands. My eyeballs ached. I felt for blood on my face, but I didn’t feel any. He was rubbing my back, catching his own breath, telling me, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
“Get off,” I said again, and it came out better this time. I pushed his hands away from me again. I was feeling more like normal, I thought.
“It’s okay. You’re fine.”
I shook my head. “I passed out.”
“Did you?”
“You didn’t notice?”
“You’re fine. It - just happened. It must not have, you know - Jesus - you hear that?”
I hadn’t. “I’m okay,” I told him. We’d been in a car accident, but I was okay. I hadn’t been out more than a second, I guess. He hadn’t even noticed. “Are you okay?”
“I think it’s over there.”
“What’s over there?”
“I thought it was dead, we - I mean it was big, but, god.”
“Where?”
“On my side, I think. Over. Past the - I mean, we hit it really hard, I don’t think it - I didn’t think it would get up, but I think it’s - I saw it go over there, but I can’t tell. Can you hear it?”
“No.” I couldn’t hear much.
We were skewed at a 45-degree angle across the highway, the trunk end of the rented Prius just over the yellow line and into the other lane, our headlights making the trees off the side of the road glare white and black. There was something wrong with them: they were strange, broken and torn, the trunks gone practically curly with damage from something - a storm, beavers or insects, maybe - but not from us; they weren’t what we’d hit. The hood was dented in deep like crunched paper, and smoking. The car was done for. I’d told him to buy the extra insurance; he never wanted to. I couldn’t remember if he’d listened to me about it or not. Everything that wasn’t directly in our headlights was very dark, and still. Jason was looking behind himself, out the back window, then out the back-seat side window, turning like a small dog lost, my window, his again. I looked, too. My neck hurt, but my head wasn’t bad. My eyeballs felt bruised inside, my chest hurt, but I was breathing again. The tinfoil adrenaline feel was resurfacing, digging holes in what was left of my black out. Behind us, I saw again that car pulled over on the shoulder; I remembered passing by it just before we hit something. But I noticed for the first time that their passenger-side door was hanging open. There was a small glinting reflection in that window - maybe it was cracked, or broken. Beyond the car, another hundred feet back, I could see the dark outline of the exit sign against the slightly less-black sky: Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile. I’d smiled at it when we passed it. I remembered that now.
“Is anyone in that car?”
“Shush,” he said again.
“Oh my god, stop.” We’d been fighting. I remembered. I hated it when he shushed me, like he was a grownup or something.
“Goddamnit, Marie, if you don’t shut up I can’t hear where it is.”
There was another car in the street ahead of us, too, barely visible in the dark. It was not parked neatly on the shoulder, but slouched fat in its lane, facing us. One of its headlights was on, barely, very dim. The other was off. I could not quite tell if anyone was in that car, either. How long could it have been there, blocking the lane like that?
I remembered the crash. I remembered hitting something. It had been big.
I did not remember what we had hit.
“What did we hit?” I asked.
Jason shook his head, was still spinning, rotating, all around, like he could even see anything in the dark, anyway.
“Please let’s go,” I said. I was remembering more, remembering the impact, the second before the impact, and I was coming to understand that the adrenaline-scared feeling I still had in my throat and between my legs wasn’t just from the crash. What had we hit?
“It won’t – ” He gestured vaguely to the hood. “It won’t start. It’s – the engine. Look at it.”
“Fix it,” I said. I’d said it without thinking, but then after a second I hoped that he had interpreted it as meanness. He was a post-doc; he studied Old English and Middle English poetry. Sometimes he wrote it. He sighed through his nose, started rubbing my back again.
“If it’s gone, we can walk,” he said. “There’s an exit just ahead.”
“One mile,” I said. I couldn’t see it, though. The exit was too far, or the highway was too dark.
He looked at me. “You sure you’re okay?”
I looked at him, too, and hated him, and made him look away, and he stopped touching me.
“What did we hit?” I asked.
“I thought it was - a moose?” he said.
“A moose? We’re in-”
“Jesus, Marie- ”
“-like Kansas.”
“-I don’t know, okay? A fucking house? We hit a house, okay, and then it yelled at me, and then it ran away, and now it’s running in circles around the goddamn car, okay?”
“It - yelled at you?”
“No, it - I don’t know, it - roared or something.”
“Was it a dog?”
“It wasn’t a dog.”
Maybe something was wrong with me. Maybe I did have brain damage. I shoved open the glove compartment between the two seats. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Then I did: a gun was the real answer, as though they came standard in rented Priuses, but if he asked, I would tell him a flashlight. He didn’t ask. I pawed around, but there was nothing - nothing heavy, nothing good. Our rental paperwork, a pile of sad damaged napkins from the last passengers, some change, a pen, Jason’s iPod.
“Phone,” I said. I was glad I’d thought of it. I felt better. He hadn’t thought of it.
“Service,” he said.
We hadn’t had service out here before, but maybe we did now. My purse had fallen over, sloughed its contents on the floor at my feet in the crash. I pushed through them until I found my phone, and I turned it on, and had no service. I tried anyway: weren’t there special rules for 911? But nothing went through, there was no sound, nothing happened, and I hung up and put it back neatly in the special pocket for it inside my purse, snapped the pocket snap, zipped the purse top, set it carefully right-side-up again, left everything else on the floor mat. My expensive Lancôme lipgloss, my wallet, my sunglasses. The floormat was dirty. We were on vacation. I started to cry a little, but quietly.
“I saw it when we hit it, too,” I said. “I think it came out in front of us on purpose.”
“It ran away,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s gone,” I said. “I think it did it on purpose. Why are those other cars here?”
“Why would it get hit on purpose?”
“It wanted to stop the car,” I said.
“Marie,” he said.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. Our windows were up, but even so, after a long time when we didn’t hear anything, we heard something. It came from the woods behind us, on the other side of the road, his side. We looked, but we didn’t see anything. It wasn’t gone, and it wasn’t dead. I almost remembered what it looked like.
I think it was thinking of it, outside the car, knowing that it was close enough that we could hear it when it moved, I think that’s what made me think of the tire-iron in the trunk, nestled snug underneath two suitcases. Something big and hard and heavy, standard in rented Priuses.
“It’s not ambushing anyone,” he said, looking at the trees, waiting for another sound to come, or no sound. “It’s just an animal. It’s just a big animal.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t crying anymore. I knew I shouldn’t, but I didn’t care; I was going to say it, and I did: “We should have stayed on I-70,” I said.
He was facing away from me, and things had been very silent, anyway, but the silence changed. I was thinking of other things I could say, but didn’t need to. I was pretending I was saying them. This is what we had been fighting about, before it happened.
He lifted one hand slowly to his eyes and then, very loud in the quiet: “You never even drive!” I flinched - he’d startled me afraid for a second - and I heard it again, behind us, but louder - maybe closer? “Why? Why? Why won’t you ever drive? I drove us all the way from Maryland to Washington-Goddamn-State in a U-Haul and you-”
“Oh my god that was four years ago-”
“All you do is this! That’s - the reason you don’t drive is so you can do this! That’s why! That’s why! That’s why!”
Did I see the leaves moving behind him, on the other side of the road, behind his head? It was dark; it was hard to tell. And anyway, he was wrong; I drove all the time. “I drive all the time. Who drove us back to your mother’s house when you got drunk with Amanda Shaffer?”
“Amanda – I cannot – I cannot believe you’re bringing up this Amanda Fucking Shaffer thing – she was my roommate, Marie, I lived with her for four years-”
“I don’t even care what you did with her-”
“I didn’t do anything with her!”
“In college!”
“Oh Jesus.”
“I said I didn’t care-”
“This is not about what I did in college.”
“I had the map. I could see. I told you to stay on I-70. You never listen to me.”
Loud - another crash, an explosion, practically, it sounded that way and it felt that way, too. The back of the car raised up, skidded to the right, stopped, rocked on its wheels. My neck snapped sideways, my eyeballs again, but I still didn’t hit my head. We were both still wearing our seat belts. I thought at first it was another car, we’d been rear-ended, but it hadn’t hit us from the rear, it had hit us from the side, from the woods on the other side of the road, and anyway, there was no car behind us when I looked: there was a shape, but it was moving, pacing softly away on four tall articulated legs. Walking down the middle of our lane away from us. Its whole body moved wrong; my eyes couldn’t make sense of how. The car was straightened out now, facing cleanly forward, East, straight on the highway, as though about to go. Something in my bladder or my belly tightened, raised up inside me. Its legs were too tall for its body, stretched improperly, not thin but too tall, too articulated, joints rolled wildly in sockets and thocked into home in a way that wasn’t like a horse or a cat or any kind of a thing. It wasn’t like any kind of a thing I’d seen before, in the movies or the zoo. It wasn’t real, I knew it wasn’t real, I knew it. It had hit us on purpose, and just now it had done it again. It was angry.
“Try the engine,” I said.
“I hate you,” he told me.
The car in front of us, the one with only one headlight on, dim, though, barely on, was resting lopsided on at least two flat tires. I wondered how long that headlight had been on. I wondered how long it takes for a headlight to fade out and die like that. I wasn’t sure if I could see slumped shadow-shapes in the car, lolling a little with the tilt like half-wilted top-heavy flora, I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could. I thought maybe those wide dark shadows splashed and streaking against the inside of their windshield weren’t shadows. But it was dark. It was hard to tell. I didn’t know that for sure. (And the dead deer we’d passed five minutes before the crash, the black hump on the side of the road that we’d rushed past in the dark, wrenched and folded, it was impossible to try to remember now whether maybe that had actually been a jacket on it like I’d thought for a split second, a puffy blue down jacket, torn and leaking polyester insulation and blood, if maybe that had been not a broken foreleg but a human hand, a glint of gold from a wedding ring on it.) Plus maybe I had brain damage, anyway, I remembered. I’d just been in a car accident, I’d passed out. He tried the engine. It wasn’t going to start again.
We sat very straight in our seats, seat belts on, and looked ahead, like good citizens, like a married couple in a commercial. We always fought on vacations, in planes, in cars, in hotel rooms. I had never before wondered why we still took them together. Not going on vacations together had never actually occurred to me before. His hands were in his lap, resting on his thighs. I still had my palm against the window by my head, where I had braced myself when we’d been hit again. We had met under a goddamn tree, on a college campus, a million years ago, and we were going to die, bloody, in a rented Prius in the middle of Kansas. I felt tired, and a little comfortable. Maybe these were signs of brain damage.
“We need to get out,” he said. “We need to – go. There’s an exit ahead.”
“I can’t run,” I said.
“Then stay,” he said, angry.
I tried to remember the sign. Had it been one of the “FOOD - GAS - LODGING” signs? A promise of people, help, tow trucks and blankets, coffee administered as though it were medicine? Or would there be nothing there? One of those terrible trick exits when you’re on a road trip, where it just keeps going, leads to somewhere else, another road, another highway entrance, another highway, when all you need is a stop, a break, a toilet and a Dairy Queen?
“Then go,” I said.
“Marie,” he said.
I might have told him, then, about the tire-iron. I might have reminded him of it. There might have been time to get it, maybe, if one of us had distracted it, if we’d made a plan together then.
But I didn’t say anything. And then I saw it, out of the corner of my eye: darkness moving in dark. Loping, swaying and locking like it was on water, like it was made of water, rolling. So big you couldn’t see all of it at once. It hurt my eyes to look at it. It was pointing straight ahead, moving alongside the car, its head slung low on its body, but it was watching us as much as we were watching it, I knew. It wanted us to see it. It coughed, or barked. It snorted, shook its head like a dog waking up from a nap and I heard - or felt - delicate drops of something wet flung off its face, landing with gentle taps in globs and streaks on the window by my face, a quarter-inch of glass away from where my fingertips rested. That’s what made it real. Its own spit was what made it real. It moved along the length of the car, its hips, I saw them, then it stopped again. The windows were all up. I flexed my fingers against mine, listened for the sound they made. We watched it. It was still.
“This is your fault,” I whispered. I wasn’t even talking to him; it just came out.
He punched the steering wheel. White dust and rubber stink puffed sadly up, floated slow across still space to touch on my hair, my skin. I’d never known him to punch anything before. He wrote poetry and submitted it to journals under a pseudonym, because he was worried it might adversely impact his academic career. I had loved this secret when he first told me. (Now I knew how stupid.) He punched the steering wheel over and over, six times, eight, a dozen, the horn silly and childish in the air inside the Prius, ridiculous, he was ridiculous. I was not looking at him. I was looking out my window. I think I saw it tense at the noise, its shoulders both raising and growing more dense, more compact, but it was dark, it was hard to see. Its head was heavy, a whole with its body, all of one piece, an outgrowth, an extension, and its head was lowered, its whole body pointed nose-down like an oil rig, like a plow, and it swung its face a little bit more toward us, but still it wasn’t looking at us, like it didn’t care what we were doing, it didn’t need to care. Maybe it wasn’t thinking. Maybe it wasn’t a monster. Maybe it was just a big animal. But: I was going to be bitten, I realized. I wondered at it: something was going to bite me until I died. I was going feel something biting me with its mouth until I died, and it was going to happen very soon. Jason stopped punching the steering wheel. I think it was growling, or it started to growl.
Jason was breathing.
“Where are we?” he asked.
We are almost at Four Mile River Road, I thought. We are one mile away. We are on vacation. We are almost there, or we should have been by now. But the truth was, I didn’t know where we were. We were not on I-70 anymore, though I had told him, hours ago, that we should not leave it, and as I watched the dark shape moving outside the car, just past the palm of my hand on the glass by my head, I decided to remind him so, out loud.
Working notes
With “Four Mile River Road,” I wanted to write a monster story in which the monster wasn’t the big problem. Monsters in stories aren’t ever all that scary, anyway; people aren’t afraid of monsters. If you want to write a scary monster, you have to make it something more familiar: a person, or an animal. We think we know what those things should be like. It’s scary when we’re wrong.
There really is a Four Mile River Road, and a highway sign that announces its existence in one more mile, but I saw that sign from a Megabus window somewhere between Providence, Rhode Island and New York City, not in Kansas. There definitely is a monster that lives there, though. I wouldn’t make that part up.
There really is a Four Mile River Road, and a highway sign that announces its existence in one more mile, but I saw that sign from a Megabus window somewhere between Providence, Rhode Island and New York City, not in Kansas. There definitely is a monster that lives there, though. I wouldn’t make that part up.
About the author
Jessica Lilien has work published or forthcoming in LUMINA; Clackamas Literary Review; Morpheus Tales Magazine; Night Terrors III; and the mixed-media anthology Monstrous, edited by Mariah McCourt. She was longlisted for the 2012 James White Award and her short story “After Saco River” was one of the winners of the LUMINA XII 2013 Fiction Contest, judged by George Saunders. He called it “very strange,” among other things that sound more complimentary when taken out of context. She lives in Brooklyn.