The Gray of Sunset

It happened when I was on my way home from the flea market across state lines.

I sell things I make out of junk mostly. The term is Trash Sculptures in the community I belong to, but I never liked that term. Some may call them junk but to me, their treasures. I make all kinds of things from stuff I find at the dump. People, vehicles, animals, whatever catches my eye. They sell pretty good, but not in my home state. I usually end up driving to Sadies Flea Market, one of these huge sprawling outdoor markets in Alabama, to sell my wares. The people there love them, and today was the first time in a while I've come back with anything.

I was loading "the sitter" into the back of my truck as the sun went down. I had made him out of rebar and old license plates, and he was definitely unique looking. I'd had some lookers, but he was a little heavy for my usual crowd. The Sitter is an end-of-day purchase, to be sure, and no one was buying him today. I sat him in the back of the truck and grinned as he sort of looked like he was sitting there, just resting in the truck bed after a long day of being on display.

With my passenger secured, I cleaned up my stall and rolled out of the parking lot just as it started getting dark.

The road was busy, but not overly so. It's about an hour to my house through some pretty rural countryside. I never minded. It's a pretty soothing view as you roll along towards the Florida/Alabama line. Most of the route is roadside stands, abandoned buildings, gas stations, and the ever-popular fireworks stand. It's hard to explain, but it always seems so desolate out there. A single pole light shining beside the shell of an abandoned house. An old store that's slowly being retaken by the woods. A rotting cooler that someones just left by the roadside, its mouth wide open and it’s inside scummy. They were little things that reminded me that humanity had once had hope for these out of the way places, and made me wish I had the skill to use a camera properly.

Some artistic type would probably have paid a mint for pictures of some of these things.

As I drove, I saw other people getting ready to leave the shops and businesses along the highway. The setting sun seeming to wash them out in a way that's hard to explain. It's strange, but the sunset grayed them, making them look like actors in an early nineties show. It seemed to bleed all the colors out of them, and it's kind of nostalgic for me.

It always seemed comfortable until today.

As I drove for the state line, the sun turned the trees into a fiery corona, a forest fire that burned on and on until it was snuffed out with the eventual setting of the sun.

It started rather subtly. I had chalked it up to the sun, having gone down when I first noticed it, but as I drove past a familiar barn, I had to double take. The barn was old, older me probably, but it looked like something drawn in a sketchbook. It was hard to put into words, but it just looked flat and unfinished. As I watched, the light on the barn threw only a small circle of illumination, and the yard itself looked grainy and unreal. I watched as a cat walked under that light, and he seemed to be made of graphite lines that had learned to move all on their own.

I rubbed at my eyes as I rolled along, pretty sure I was just tired.

I had been making sculptures and putting together today's pieces all week, and I was probably just starting to feel the strain. A little sleep was all I needed, and once I got home, I could start burning my candle at both ends again tomorrow. The Sitter could sit in my truck till I woke up tomorrow morning, and I'd have added another two or three pieces by next Saturday.

I didn't think much of it as I rolled along until I saw the other houses.

The farther I drove, the harder it was to just ignore the strange change in the landscape. I drove past a trailer park and could see all the gray lead outlines as the windows glowed. The insides looked like they were lit by bug zappers, that harsh fluorescent light making them seem to crackle. The spotlights made the concrete look pores, almost holey, and the dog resting out front looked like if he were to bark, it would come out in word bubbles. It was all very surreal, and I had to look down at my own hands in order to discover whether I, too, looked like a pencil sketch. I was pleased to find my normal level of realness and just kept driving as I tried to get past whatever I had driven into.

It didn't get bad until I came to the stop light.

There's only one stop light before you get to the state line. It's probably there to allow the people leaving the gas station or the liquor store to get back onto the highway so they don't get creamed. The gas station had only a single light over the pumps, but the inside looked welcoming. It reminded me of that painting, the one of the dead celebrities in the dinner, and I was half tempted to turn in when something whooshed up to my left, and I turned to see a fire going to the side of the liquor store.

It wasn't much more than a one-room building that sold beer and wine. I had driven past the pink stucco building a thousand times, but it had an evil look tonight. It didn't glow like the trailers or the gas station, and its face was dark and brooding as the glass reflected the fire to the side of it. It seemed the antithesis of the gas station, and sitting across the street from each other, they almost seemed adversarial. The cars in the parking lot were the old rusty sort, pick-ups, dark-colored Cadillacs, and long cigar-shaped constructs. They seemed to hunch around the lot like gargoyles, but as the fire began to build, I noticed the strange people that were feeding it.

The store has a cage beside it, something the employees fill with cardboard boxes and trash and then burn when it gets too full. I watched as the human shaped creatures threw boxes onto the flames, others simply standing around as they watched the fire in exaltation. The people weren't even approximations of people. They looked like a child's idea of human shapes, the bodies bulbous and the heads looking lumpy. Their arms were muscled, and their legs disproportionately squat. They looked like orcs in a Lord of the Rings book, and just looking at them made me a little uneasy. They were supposed to be human, but I had never seen anything less human in my life. They looked like natives in an old jungle picture, dancing around a flaming idol, and as I watched, I saw one of them notice me. I glanced back at the light, but it was hard to tell what color it was. All three were shades of gray, and as they flipped through, I couldn't tell what I was supposed to do.

Something moved in front of the grainy flame, drawing my attention back to the liquor store.

The four of them froze as they saw I had noticed them, their red eyes glaring as they prepared to run in on my truck.

Red or Green, I didn't care.

I put my foot on the gas and blew through the intersection, rolling up the road as the four lumpy humanoids watched me go.

My tires squealed as we flew up the blacktop. The trees and buildings we passed had begun to pulsate a little, their lead edges crackling like lightning. The whole thing looked like a Tex Avery cartoon, something from a sketchbook nightmares skit from the old show, and the longer I watched the sky, the less I cared about the road. My eyes were glued to that fuzzy space, the graphite lightning sending phosphorescent clarity through the steely gray sky. Something was rising up amongst the clouds, a silver orb of a moon that suddenly and unexpectedly filled me with fear.

Then it rolled in the sky, and I was suddenly looking at the eye of some great beast. It swam in that inky space, this perfect orb, and when it found me, I began to shake. The eye looked straight at me, fixing me with its gaze, not blinking as its regard bore into me, and I found myself unable to look away.

When the harsh lights and the equally harsh horn invaded my space, I continued to be aware of nothing but that blinking moon.

Then suddenly, everything went dark, and I was left floating in the inky blackness until a beeping brought me back to the waking world.

I was in a hospital, arms aching from the IV and head pounding from the wound that had likely landed me here. My sister had been playing on her phone, but she looked up when I started groaning back to consciousness. She stopped me from getting up, and I realized that I only saw her out of one eye. Thankfully, the other was covered in bandages, but at the time, it was pretty jarring.

My sister filled me in and said she was glad I had come out because no one understood what had happened.

According to the man in the moving truck, the one I had scared half to death, I had crossed into his lane as he was driving back to the depot. He had swerved, barely avoiding my truck, and as I left the road, he saw someone slip out of the back and fall onto the concrete. I had proceeded into the nearby woods before a tree had stopped my progress.

It wasn’t until he went to check on my passenger, that he realized it was a dented metal doll and went to check on me

He had helped get me out of the truck and stayed with me till the ambulance came.

Then I spent the next four days in a coma.

I don't know what happened, I can't even really explain it, but somehow I slipped into something very different. The road I'd come to know was not what I drove that night, and I suddenly found myself in a place that I couldn't come to terms with. I tried to tell people that, but they seemed to believe that I might have been drugged or maybe I had picked up something I couldn't handle at the flea market. They never found anything heavier than Xanax in my system, though. My sister had floated the idea that I fell asleep and had a dream before I drove off the rod, but I know what I saw.

I saw those things, and I'm lucky to have escaped them.

So if you're driving the highways of America, be on the lookout for pockets of strangeness.

And good luck if you should slip into one.