Asphalt

You take the coffee from the machine, fingertips on the verge of melting from the heat emanating around the outside of the cup. No lids, no cardboard sleeves; you are holding the coffee in your bare hands making extra sure not to spill it like last time. From the entry point of the brownish-black liquid you feel a line of flame, stretching all the way down into your stomach. The coffee is good, you think to yourself, the only good thing left. You walk back to your car. You feel like you could drive all night. 

With nothing but that cup and a Snickers to keep you going, weary eyes straining from how long you’ve been awake, you start your Corolla and get on the road again. Road is a bit of a nebulous word for you; it’s all road, really. You can’t see the farms off to either side of you, and not because of the darkness, but because they’re not there anymore. Every scrap of flat land got turned into a big parking lot at some point in your life. The thing is, you don’t even remember when that happened. 

The lights on the road show you a glimpse of the vast expanse of asphalt which has become the new landscape of the midwest, peaks and valleys of blacktop which smother any life which once laid beneath, save for the rare weed that has grown up through the cracks–though your tax dollars work hard to make sure that whatever fissures appear get fixed within days. You almost feel bad for the government workers, coming out to a random spot nowhere near anywhere to snuff out the last remnants of plant life, sweating until all the moisture drains from their body and pools at their shoes–which have an extremely high likelihood of melting–creating this soup of rubber and saltwater that stains the ground until a different cleanup crew comes to wipe it up. But, on the other hand, they’re the ones who paved over everything in the first place. 

You snap back to the road. You’ve lost sight of the yellow lines, the only thing telling you which part is the street and which is the parking lot, and have swerved off to some place. It’s completely dark on all sides, the only light being from the stars, and from something in the far, far distance: a blurry halo of luminescence somewhere just out of view beyond the horizon. Hopefully you make it there before the sun comes up and melts your tires into the ground. If you have to push your car again with the sun beating down on you, you think you might just lay down and let yourself melt.

A light comes on from inside your car. It’s your empty light, the hand on the dial is dipping into the red. Panic fills you for the split second it takes you to remember what car you’re driving. You hit the dash a couple of times with your palm, and the hand swings back and forth before displaying that you have a half tank left. 

The light turns off. All is well.