Number #2

It was one of those roads like from the movies, long, flat empty fields on either side, lone tree in the distance.  The road ambled and they...rode on.

The boy rode with his father in an old purple station wagon staring out the passenger window, unbelted in his seat, and a cold wind freezing part of his forehead through the door's window which had been lowered slightly by his father via the driver's side automatic window 'command center' as they had backed out of the driveway earlier that morning.  The sky turned iridescent, cycling kaleidoscopically through colors and shapes all with angles, and so not like clouds at all but more like shafts and pinwheels of light poking through the boy's squinted eyes.

The back seat of the car was filled with suitcases each with brown metal buckles and locks, and small rusted keys hanging loosely from each case's handle by an old rotting string.  The father was himself transforming weirdly every few seconds in the driver's seat, appearing in one moment as a mid-40's man in his white Navy uniform, a Captain with white shoes and epaulets and a visor of what he called "scrambled eggs," and then the next moment he sat there driving, an old man falling asleep in his chair, one leg draped, pens accumulating in his shirt pocket.  He kept changing did his father, moving back and forth through his life--one second in his confirmation suit circa '47, the next in his lawn-cutting shorts and t-shirt--but the boy?  The boy, he just stayed a boy, watching his father be adjusted back and forth through the years.

On the side of the road, animalia collected, carcasses accumulated, broken bodies their numbers increasing as the journey-miles accrued.  The boy pointed and the father pulled to the road side.  He opened his door and moving to the car's rear he opened the hatch.  He began to unload the cases and soon the boy, silently assenting, assisted.  His father lined the cases side by side along the roadside and the son soon followed suit.  When they all lay in a row the father stood nodding, his hands on his hips.  The boy without asking began to work the locks with the rusty keys but none seemed to open.  He then tried the key from one case on another and now the keys began to break and crumble in his hand.

His father stood and watched, waiting.  When the boy had exhausted himself and sat, spent, the father pulled from his pocket a golden key, unblemished by rust and the passage of time.  The color of the key blinded the boy and yet the father seemed, in the reflected light, to grow in stature.  And the cases each glowed and collected in a constellation of light consuming all around them.   The boy's last sight of his father was of a man perfected, levitating mightily weilding a sword of black ice.

When he woke up he lay in the cold on the side of the road, completely alone.