dig

Instant
by Hetre Z

They had told him to walk, so he walked. First the left foot, then the right, like hand-over-hand up the rope in gym class.

His shirt was off, and the heat stretched his skin tight over his shoulders. It rose up from the ground in coils and made the tire-tracks gummy. His sneakers wept bits of rubber onto the road.

After the first hour, he started to fall asleep from moving. The air slid in around him and he walked underwater, breathing in-out rhythm like sleep, and not bothering to brush the dirt from his arms.

Justin didn't stick his thumb out, he held his head up. The sun hit him wherever it could.

Left foot, then right foot, he kept repeating it to himself. Back at home he'd visited a monastery, just once, and the monks had told him to live constantly in the moment. Justin tried it on the road, every second being his first and his last. Left foot; new second, new beginning, right foot.

The sun went down, and he stepped off the road and lay down on his jacket. The next morning he walked again.

That was three days spent just walking, trance and movement. Justin learned to make deals with himself, counting a thousand steps, or ten thousand, before he could rest. Don't watch passing cars, and you can have some food. Don't look at the sun, and you won't go blind.

Three days walking, and his jaw started to clack in his skull. Three days walking, and the road looked like a snake with its mouth open and waiting. Three days, and then a car stopped.

*

The man in the car called himself JC, stuttering over it. He wiped his hand over his mouth, and looked at the steering wheel, and asked Justin where he was headed.

"Orlando." His tongue was thick wet against the desert air.

"Oh, hey, me too. That's so wild." JC smiled big, uninhibited, and Justin swept the dust off his chest with his shirt. He got in the car when JC waved.

Nothing outside the car looked any different, but the odometer clicked away. Five miles by the gauge, and then JC frowned and sat up straighter.

"Oh, but. How did you expect to get to Orlando from here, just by walking?"

Justin's legs tingled from bending and staying bent. "Well, you stopped." JC opened his mouth to answer, then closed it and looked back at the road.

It was harder to live in the moment in a car, but he tried. He counted under his breath, and made different promises than before. Fifty-five miles and you can ask for some water. Ten more minutes and you can put the sun visor down.

*

After the first day walking, Justin had gotten an ache in his hip, like he'd ruined something special there. He'd felt like an old man, favoring his leg and sometimes waddling along with one shoe off to help the pain, but he kept going.

In the car his hip started to spike blue and red, making him bite his lip and lock a fist around the armrest. JC didn't seem to notice, but at the next gas station he stopped and bought some Advil.

"Orlando's a long way away," he said when Justin looked at him. Justin didn't answer.

JC said he figured they were in Idaho, the way it was flat and the corn was growing and everything. He said Florida should be in a couple of days, but he didn't know for sure, and maybe they should stop at the next motel they saw and get rooms, and what would Justin like for dinner, or had he already eaten something, and –

"Yes," Justin said.

His voice sounded like rocks, like the ones his feet had bled from, walking. Justin wished he didn't sound like that, remembering the dark of blood on the road, how it had slipped out through the hole in his shoe. But JC stopped talking, so Justin didn't wish very hard.

*

When the air turned purple and gray, JC looked for a town to stop in. There was an exit three miles down, Motel 6 and Days Inn, and JC asked Justin which one he'd prefer. Justin had a bandanna in his back pocket; he pulled it out and laid it over his face without answering.

JC got adjoining rooms at the Days Inn. He left Justin sitting on the bed and feeling the cool of the wall through his shirt. Justin buzzed everywhere, muscles slowly loosening as he pressed himself into the headboard.

Three days of just walking, and the movement had pounded exhaustion into him. Sitting in the car had started to leech it back out again. He sat in the hotel room and felt his arms come alive, his legs and hands.

At midnight, Justin got up and waded through the dark, stopping at JC's door. He could hear breathing when he opened it, someone else's new moment constantly, and he listened.

Breathe in; new second, new existence, breathe out. Asleep.

Everything in him bristled and stung. Justin sat on the floor, his forehead pushed into the wall, and breathed to match. Take a breath in, new second, and then out. Awake.

Justin opened his eyes at dawn, the air swimming gray against his face, and crawled back to his bed. He curled himself around a pillow and pushed his back into the headboard, and waited for JC's breathing to change. Justin thought, I'm waking up.