Sky‑Road Soliloquy
Stay out on the road too long and a darkness begins to cling to the soul. It’s a murky twilight where shadows take on weight and hope a stranger. It was somewhere on the far side of the Arkansas line when that darkness slid across Josie’s windshield and settled beside me in the passenger seat. The horizon was a smudge of pewter, sky and earth welded together by November haze. The radio hissed with more static than song.
I had been on the road for hours, alone but not solitary, because loneliness is its own kind of company. Mile markers ticked by like reluctant confessions: Brenda should be here. The steering wheel vibrated with the noisey rattle of Josie’s sixty-seven horses, but the seat beside me stayed heartbreakingly empty, the indentation of her absence deeper than upholstery could show.
The Long Thin Thread
The road teaches lessons a man never asks for. It tells him what he loves by stripping him of it. It tells him who he is by leaving him to talk to himself when the sky goes purple and the only witness is a shape-shifting moon. Somewhere west of Siloam Springs the asphalt narrowed, shoulders fell away, and the world became a two‑lane thought-stretching exercise through pasture and pine. I eased back on the throttle, let the old van choose her own pace, and listened to the engine hum a low hymn of endurance.
Every couple dozen miles a town appeared—name on a green sign, maybe a grain elevator or a bait shop, then gone like a skipped heartbeat. I imagined Brenda walking those streets beside me, her laugh ricocheting off brick façades, her hand tipping invisible hats to the stray dogs that trot across every rural intersection. Without her the towns were cardboard cutouts: store fronts with no dialogue, parks with no children, sunsets with no audience.
I spoke to her aloud, nonsense sentences that fogged the windshield and vanished. You’d like this bend in the river. You’d scold me for drinking gas‑station coffee this weak. The cab absorbed my voice and gave nothing back, a confession booth without a priest.
Calling Home
Cell service was fickle out here; bars rose and fell like chestnuts in a carnival shell game. When a signal finally held, I pulled over beneath a cottonwood and dialed. Her voice answered—warm, clear, achingly close. We traded small facts first: weather, mileage, and yes, the dog never stops barking, what Josie had rattled on the highway. But the space between sentences filled with unspoken need. I could hear it in the hitch when she inhaled.
“I miss you,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“I miss me too,” I tried to joke, but the words clung to the roof of my mouth. What came out instead was a ragged exhale. “Soon. I’m turning the corner on the tour.”
Soon felt elastic—capable of stretching into weeks or more. She knew it; I knew it. Still, we pressed soon between us like a down-filled quilt, something warm to hold against the bruise of separation.
We said our goodnights. The call ended, and the cab emptied of everything but the scent of road dust and the metallic echo of her absence.
Sky, Unbroken
Night flattened the landscape, ironed out ridges and fences until only sky remained—an ocean of ink pricked by indifferent stars. I coasted onto the shoulder, killed the lights, and climbed to sit on Josie’s warm bumper. Above me the Milky Way spilled like a bucket of powdered sugar. I thought of Brenda beneath a different firmament—same stars, different longitude. I imagined a thread of light running from my chest to hers, taut as a violin string, humming with distance.
Out here silence is never absolute. Crickets sawed unseen fiddles; a coyote announced his hunger; Josie ticked as her engine cooled. These sounds folded into a lullaby older than any recorded song, and still I could not sleep. Loneliness is a restless bedfellow, forever rearranging the sheets.
I unrolled the bundle of twenty‑dollar bills—another thousand earmarked for tomorrow’s gift—and felt the weight of intention in my palm. Each crisp note carried a wish, a promise Brenda believed in as fiercely as I did. Keep going, the money said, find the next story, light another candle.
Dawn Reckoning
Just before sunrise a ribbon of fog crept off the pasture, slid across the blacktop, and licked at Josie’s tires. I fired the engine, headlights cutting ghostly tunnels through the white. As gears engaged, thoughts of Brenda rode shotgun: those gorgeous brown eyes, the stern way she folds laundry, the crooked grin she can’t suppress when puppies tumble over each other. I cataloged these details like a miser counting coins.
The sky blushed rose, then gold. With daylight came traffic—two pickups, a battered school bus, a funeral procession of migrating geese overhead. The world woke without ceremony, and I drove through it half‑ghost, half‑pilgrim, heading east, always east, the sun a burning breadcrumb leading home.
The Arithmetic of Distance
Loneliness isn’t static; it compounds. Ten miles without her equals an ache. A hundred becomes a low‑grade fever. By the thousandth mile it calcifies, an interior stone pressing against lung and heart. Yet the mathematics of return offer hope: each mile traveled now is one I won’t have to travel later. The distance shrinks, bead by bead, on an invisible abacus.
Somewhere in the Ozarks, on a ridge overlooking a patchwork of pastureland, I pulled over and scribbled Brenda a letter I’d never mail:
Dear Bren,
Today the sky was so wide it hurt. I wanted to stretch it like a quilt until it covered the miles between us. I bought peaches from a roadside stand—sweet enough to make a man believe in July, even in November—and wished you were there to taste the juice on my chin. The vendor’s dog followed me back to the van, tail helicoptering. He knew I was lonely. Dogs always know.
I’m carrying home stories like river stones in my pockets. Some are smooth already; others need tumbling. You’ll help me polish them, I hope, when the miles are memories.
Keep the porch light burning.
Always and forever,
Brock
I tucked the page into the glove box, beside spare fuses and the spare ignition switch.
Turning Toward Home
The road eventually arcs south then east, tracing rivers that refuse straight lines. Every curve feels like a conversation with Brenda—unfinished, to be resumed at the next bend. Towns blur: Mountain View, Batesville, Bald Knob. I stop only for fuel and to hand out hope wrapped in twenties, each gift a silent tribute to the woman who showed me how giving away pieces of yourself often leaves you more whole.
By dusk Josie and I pull up outside West Helena. I park near the river and sit on the front bumper. Across the water lies more highway, but also the promise of Brenda’s arms. The loneliness recedes a fraction, like a tide obeying distant moon‑logic.
I close my eyes and hear her laugh ride the evening breeze, as real as church bells. When I open them, the first star pricks the sky. I make a wish a grown man has no shame making: let the miles be merciful; let the road rise to meet me; let home be waiting, lights glowing, coffee hot, and Brenda’s hand finding mine before words are necessary.
The engine turns over. Headlights carve two bright rails toward the horizon. Somewhere up ahead a sign will announce the border of our state, and beyond that sign Brenda will be shaping a pillow, listening for Josie's distinctive engine rumble. I give Josie a little gas, and we chase the darkness eastward, carrying sky and thoughts and the unbreakable thread that leads me home.