This rusty car creaking along the highway.

So the other night a motorcyclist draws up from behind. His single, steady light does so gradually while I'm driving in the car towards home after wandering lonely inside the drowning noise of rubber on highway, and of wind sneaking through shuttling crevices. The blank noise of a car late at night has been written about, and has been sung about. All kinds of lines that welcome the way it smothers the incessant haunting of one's inability for understanding, or worse actually, the unnegotiable despair of having understanding. These combined with something lit in hand and something liquid under the seat, it's a convention.

The trouble, the truth, is that when you drive long enough, the dull pulse of fear that lay in those thoughts becomes amplified. You flail about in wonder at how a thing--something shared and held, something communed--can be made to vaporize, and how it does in a joyful white flash so that what you still have within you is as if a careful delusion. After a while all that a person sees is the cycling of their mind around images on fire, about an impossible confusion. But then a motorcyclist drew up, and once it was close it turned off its headlight. Now all that could be seen of it was a floating nickel in my tail lights, too near my car as it sailed along behind me. When that happens the first fear, the one that loudens in every crawling day, is suddenly flattened by the anxiety of whether you should speed up or slow down, and how quickly you should make either of those transitions. But then a few minutes later, because somehow this is how it is, they weave into each other. And mortality and fear become the same thing, these two vehicles in the dark.

Each other's magnitude and bond.

Out to meet you.

This one, this is one of those days. One where the yellow of wheat fields being cut folds into the air with the smell of forests. A cicada somewhere nearby wiggles its weightless ribs together. And even though you feel the weighty heat of the sun brightening your hair, you catch the spare, strange drop of rain on your arm. Within it all, your walking feet landing upon the open world, you feel you just don't know at all. And you can't tell whether it's coming from all that out there, or from all this in here. And then you feel another drop fall onto your swinging arm.

The stairs of his concepts.

They were the only two left on the bus. Everyone else had piled out as soon as the bus had pulled over at the small convenience store that leaned against the edge of the highway. A leftover smell of hot, uncomfortable passengers clouded the cabin where they no longer sat. He finished eating his melting chocolate bar and shuffled the narrow aisle to wash his hands at the back of the bus. She was sitting there, a large girl with headphones in her ears, stretched across that very last and longest row of seats. The door to the washroom was sticky and jammed at first, and he hit her with it when he finally pulled it open. He apologized to her. "It's okay," she said, but he was not sure that the girl had even heard what he said.

Inside the small, dim bus washroom, he washed his hands and looked at his face. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought about what other people must think about in the mirror. And if this is the same face that people saw when they looked at him. If they saw calm, or sadness, or interest, or wonder. Or if they saw something blank, or uninviting, or maybe abrasive. He wondered if, when people are looking in the mirror, they feel their heaving flow of moments. One telling him repeatedly how nice his teeth are. One teasing him about the holes in his socks and then offering him chocolates from a crammed pantry. If other people, when standing before themselves, might also feel their hearts constantly slowing out of a past that is so quickly shed--one that was magnified by the shared breaths of those who held it, but now deflates under only his own, and seems to have done so just moments after a departure. Just moments, maybe. Parts of one world made small, made forgotten by others'. Just moments, maybe, because those, their own, are replaced by others'. He wondered if people feel the weight of their future. If, with the unwavering and quiet observance of themselves that holds within it a curved, piercing expression, they feel their minds absolutely bursting from their skulls. If they feel anguish. A kind of agony that can not be chased. He looked at his teeth and his eyes, at the few summer freckles. He pushed hard for the sticky door to open, and it hit the girl again. He apologized, and they smiled at each other, and he went back to his seat. A few minutes later, the rest of the passengers migrated back up the bus steps in their wrinkled, stuffy clothes. As the bus pulled onto the highway, it filled with the smell of processed, powdered cheese and shrink-wrapped sandwiches.

The most insane dashboard I ever saw.

Watching Pascal watching me watching It's Complicated

Many a trip continues.

I am very pleased to encourage you to listen to the upcoming episode of the CFRU 93.3 program Pioneer Radio. The theme of the episode is Movement, and the generous hosts gave me the opportunity to read "Moving Still," a recent short story of mine, for the program. Pioneer Radio airs Mondays at 5 o'clock PM EST, and episodes are available for download at their website.

Stream CFRU radio here: http://www.cfru.ca.

Faster than sound.

With just thirty-one seconds on the count, Atlantis, the last space shuttle on its last trip, was delayed. Somewhere in all the millions of parts something was not as perfect as its design. Some piece, shaped by thousands of minds out of decades of discontent. Murmurs passed through radios into the air. They saw that it was not the shuttle itself, but the cap at the top of the pad that was not yet fully withdrawn for launch. This hood that balanced as a vent over the giant external fuel tank, the central part of a shuttle. The delay was not for Atlantis itself but for the structure that was built to send it along. On an unseen man's mark, the count continued down. And then the ship burst off into the big blue, millions of pounds at a mile a second.