DRAUMRS - Dreamweavers Among Us

21 - Do Your Best

Julia and Carol were walking down a long highway, stretching to vanishing points of infinity in either direction. The perspective wasn't broken by a laneway, a house or even a signpost indicating that humans lived or traveled here; but the road itself was made of immaculate black asphalt, which was neatly lined with a bright yellow paint lane divider and crisp white painted edges. The highway was shouldered in manicured gravel and ran dead flat away from them in both directions.

Beyond slight drainage ditches, scrub grass fields led to small widely spaced trees, which eventually filled in to a full height dense forest on both sides of them. The forest was highly differentiated on close examination, with apparent variety of both species and growth. But, looking ahead or behind, it became a uniform green corridor broken only by the black line of the highway running up the middle.

The women were trudging down the road in a direction. Which direction they couldn't know as there was no discernible sun or any other indicator of east from west or north from south. They walked right on the asphalt, because there was no traffic. As far as Julia could remember they had been walking for hours down the middle of the right lane, backs to traffic—so not as they were taught in some long ago, mostly forgotten Elmer: The Safety Elephant filmstrip. What did it matter? With several miles of highway visible behind them, nothing was going to be overtaking them any time soon.

"Where the fuck are we going?" Julia asked in exasperation.

It was rhetorical; she knew that Carol wasn't leading. Julia was sure that if she stopped walking, Carol would just stop too. There was no answer either from Carol or from any kind of narrator. Her legs were aching; blisters were starting to raise their voices where her old sandals rubbed her feet on both the instep and sole. She wished that she had worn better shoes to walk to nowhere.

As if in some small response to her question, she became aware of the pack she was lugging. She stopped and pulled it off her shoulders. The red canvas pack was heavy enough to contain something useful, but there was no apparent opening. She dropped it on the pavement with a thud.

Predictably, Carol had also stopped a couple steps beyond her, but said nothing. She also had a red pack that had no flaps, zippers or other means of entry. Carol removed and dropped her pack as well. She looked at Julia in resignation, but with none of Julia's frustration.

Julia now compared their clothes. Each was dressed in rag-tag acid-washed jeans and patterned tees, with belts that were too wide and colors that were about two decades out-of-date. Julia wondered what had possessed her to dress out of the very back of her closet, with clothes that rarely saw daylight. It was all too confusing.

She sighed and said, "Let's at least take a break. I'm just about wiped out here and until I have some idea where we are going, I'm not walking anymore. What if we're going in the wrong direction?" It was rhetorical again. Carol just shrugged.

They sat on the packs at first, but pretty quickly just stretched out right on the pavement. Julia used her pack as a head rest and tried closing her eyes to see if any sense of purpose or direction would come to her. She must have dozed off as Carol nudged her and pointed to a silvery dot far off in the direction they came from. It was hard to see against the shiny surface of the road, but the dot was slowly growing in size.

"It's a car or truck," Carol declared. It was still too far away to identify, but this seemed like a pretty good guess. Carol was already up and dragging her pack to the shoulder.

Julia couldn't see any urgency, but eventually arranged her aching limbs under her and also stepped off the pavement, dragging her pack with her.

She looked up to the left and was surprised to see a bright red oversized pick-up rolling to a stop. It definitely hadn't been anywhere near a second ago.