Find Thy Haven at Mile Marker 94

Stark yellow eyes peer through a soft opalescent haze, across vacant lots of rainwashed asphalt and feral grass. Skies darken and a horrible windchill sweeps through thinning air. Fat rodents pilfer nuts and fries out of a toppled garbage bin. Each, with time, quit for the treeline. An owl watches, canted slightly past the edge of the roofing tiles to look at a pair of trapped, squabbling mice; he leans in, his talons gripping the roof’s edge with practiced stillness, a great feat with a severed toe. Two young mice, stuck in a fry box, scream when they look up into the yellow eyes. The owl lifts his wings but halts upon sight of something in his periphery. The wind bleeds out and the air grows lean. The young mice slip into silence. The owl’s wings fold and he looks left to investigate, then tears away toward the trees.

On the roofing’s edge, missing the very same toe, sits a nameless thing.

Evening shadow slides through the woods like drapery and the bright scent of laurel has died. The bird chatter has gone. Long ryegrass blades sparkle with a frost that pushes forth to the foundation of a low brick building, and the dim breezeway light, one of few timid bastions opposing the ominous void, briefly quakes ... and then suffocates as a lone sedan pulls in.

The new car already has a passenger-side scrape in the silver paint. In the backseat are piles of women’s clothes, some still with security tags attached, and a backpack sits behind the passenger seat with the words Fairfield High Track Team embroidered on the front, matching the words on the back of Levi’s jacket.

“Mom, I’m driving.” Levi says, hand held out.
Heather laughs, and then coughs. “Yeah? With what license?”
“I got one in August.”
“No,” she slowly shakes her head. “I’d remember that.”
Levi briefly closes his eyes, but a second of reflection is time enough to threaten him with tears that were already overdue.
“Just give me the keys. Please.”
“You said you have to take a piss. Go ahead.”
“Where are the keys?.”
Heather lights a cigarette and stares at him. “Just fuck off, will you?”
“Sure, once you give me--”
Her eyes are now inches from his and he withers from her ashen breath. “Fuck. Off.”
His face boils with contempt rather than sadness, but that’ll come later. The blue smoke leaking from her nose drifts into her eyes, so she leans back and looks out her window with an expression that Levi still can’t read after seventeen years.

He gets out of the car, leaving the door open. His bare face braces against the cold as he walks away and Heather yells “Fuck you!” at his back. The door slams shut. On instinct, he reaches into his front jeans pocket for a phone that isn’t there, wondering if his friend Josh got ahold of his dad. Every moment, he hopes to hear police sirens behind them, but it’s been three days and he’s starting to think that nobody is coming.

Levi pulls his dad’s flannel up over his nose to sniff the cedar shampoo scent lingering on the the collar. Broken glass crunches under his feet as he approaches the building. For a only moment, he pauses to observe the sounds around him ... but there are none; the grinding of his boots in the shimmering glass is all there is. Alone in those outstretched highbeams, it’s like he’s moving through the only thread of light in the universe.

Wary, he treks on.

When he diverts to the side of the squat brick building, there, lying near the grass, is a frozen lump that’s only dimly visible by way of the diffused headlights. It’s large enough to possibly be a racoon. After a moment of considering the women’s side, he recalls that racoons aren’t usually winter animals. He takes five fraught steps forward, confirming that it’s a dead bird; probably an owl given the golden eyes. Across the pavement are splotches of uncoagulated blood. Tufts of feathers shift in the breeze. He backs up toward the cinderblock sight barrier, scanning his surroundings before rounding it and hurrying through the doorless entrance.

Automatic lights click on and Levi is at the head of a long room that’s nothing but fractured concrete and rusted steel. He approaches the second stall, which looks like it should smell horrific but smells like nothing. Not chemicals, not sewage. Nothing. He does a once-over of all five stalls, but they all look and smell the same. He chooses the handicap one at the end, thanks christ he doesn’t need to sit down, and does his business. While doing so, he looks ahead and sees the only piece of graffiti in the whole place, though he wonders it even qualifies as such. Etched into the wall in very fine print (by needle-point perhaps) are the words find thy haven at mile marker 94. He stands there longer than he needs to, reading the words over and over. He’s unsure if he’s even near mile marker 94, and he supposes that he should pay attention to things like that in the future, just in case. Once he flushes and all is noiseless again, for a narrow moment, the Nissan’s horn blares ... and he assumes Heather is fishing for the rum she threw on the floor.

Levi reaches for the lever but halts, his hand stopped by an authority that knows something he does not. Thin fingers crawl under the skin of his nape, skittering down his vertebrae and up into his hairline.

Mom?

The question kicks him, begging to hear her high voice call back to him ... but he says nothing. Soft air flows through the entrance just as it did when he walked in, though its relationship with the room has changed. It now moves around something that wasn’t there before.

The fresh scent of cedar shampoo rides on the back of an otherwise odorless draft, and his hesitancy lifts just enough to unlock the door. The rusted hinges groan, stunting the door’s movement as if to say don’t do this. Levi pushes on the cold metal, but stays in the stall.

Across the room at the threshold where fluorescent light meets the edge of night, just beyond the doorway of this tight elongated space, is Levi’s father.
“Dad?”
His father’s snaggletooth glints at him: a beacon in the midst of a shadow-blurred face.
“Hi Lee.”
The unique rasp of an old injury was at the back of the voice, and Levi’s urge to sprint into the man’s arms is barely contained by doubt that allows him only a few steps forward. He tries to find the eyes, but there are only two vague smudges of white.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Later, we need to go now.”
His snaggletooth remains bright in the middle of an oily black smile.
“Where’s your car?”
“We’re there in five minutes if we cut through the trees, using the trailway.”
His father turns and the outline of him fades away.

Levi only now notices that the Nissan’s headlights no longer illuminate the sight barrier outside the entrance, but the relief of apathy washes out any concern.

He walks out into the nothingness, toward the trailway. Then he’s gone.