How to Find Peace at the End of the World by Saro Yen Read Free Book Online Page B

the Beast and I tuck the other into the waistband of my pants, making sure the safety is on before I do. Feeling better I head back inside to finish up.

11:30 AM. I’m all packed up and ready to hit the road. I’ve vowed to myself that I won’t let some misplaced sense of attachment keep me to any particular place or thing. Well, that is, of course, except for Amy. To get to Dallas and to get back to my fiancée, that’s my only goal now.

I had found the Beast actually had interior accommodations for plugs, well, except for the ground plug, so I went back into Wally world and got a pair of wire clippers. Then I swung back around and picked up a little college dorm room microwave and snipped the ground off. Then I hooked the microwave up to the interior outlet and turned the engine over. I’d said a little prayer before, of course. The Beast started, no problem. The microwave did not spark into flames. I patted it where it rested: for all the frozen items I’d had stocked in my minis: Hotpockets and Bagel Bites galore. I have resolved, of course, not to use it until I am stopped and the other appliances are unplugged, of course, lest I become a walking irradiator.

So, I’m back on the road again. I take the overpass bridge to the other side of the freeway and merge. Less than half a mile down the road I come upon my first major obstacle. An overturned eighteen wheeler, of course. The trailer has smashed into the side of the HOV lane and lays in two pieces like a broken egg, ripped cardboard boxes and smashed washers or dryers lay across the highway. I would actually have had a little room had the cars following the tractor trailer also crashed into it and come to a rest. Naturally, they were funneled down into the side of the highway farthest from the concrete barriers and created a little wall against the concrete barriers on the other side of the freeway. I back track and decide to begin taking the feeder roads to avoid situations like that, and to be able to make use of both the straight-thrus and the exits and bridges and underpasses in case there is a snag on either side. I get on and make good time, screaming down the feeders at eighty miles an hour. I probably get in a good six miles, taking alternately the feeder roads and the bridge intersections. Then the construction starts.

Morning rush hour. 7:35, yesterday. Construction on the 45, 610 intersection has funneled traffic into three lanes. The other lanes are stripped of their concrete covering, just a mush of mud and a tangle of sharp rebar. The feeders are non-existent and the ramps onto 610 are equally clogged, as is 610. The cars are jammed up against each other, as if a thousand brakes were released all at once and all the cars idled into each other, which is more and more likely what happened, as much as it bothers me to admit. There were gaps here and there where people put things into park. Who puts their car into park on a busy freeway?
    I consider my options for a moment. I could go the six miles back down the highway the way I came from and take the Beltway all the way around until I meet 45 again on the north side of the city. But then, the beltway isn’t going to be much better. Actually, it’s probably going to be like a deathtrap. Well not a death trap, but I have this fuzzy feeling that I’ll be even more likely to encounter clogs on the toll road, especially with both sides strictly bracketed by thick walls of concrete. It doesn’t have the wide open grass median, which I had been counting on, that is, until reaching this intersection where neither feeder nor open grass are available.
    I note that the stopped cars look almost like a shaggy multicolored carpet thrown over the freeway, a carpet that while having very long and tough hairs and giant gaps, may very well be navigated by a bug, a Beast, with legs as long and spindly as mine. I back the Beast up, fully intending to make a Big Foot run, like the ones I remember from the