A Day's Strange Language

He stopped the truck in the darkness at the edge of each small town. Twelve hours of driving with stops across the state’s gas stations and their ethereal green luminescence. In the towns he saw the hidden lives of families caught in the downturn of once prosperous economies and the bare white light that shone from the bulbs of poor homes. Here and there a bed sheet was hung across a front window, with the scattered shadows of a home’s inhabitants cast behind the faded patterns. Great grain silos loomed above the streets and stood rusted in the dusk. Pronghorns drifted across the highways from one plain to the other, cut through with a black vein of asphalt. He spoke to his mother through the atmosphere, her guidance to him fulfilled in the hours of cruise control and fast food bags mounting in the footwell. A patrol car’s lights illuminated the outline of a distant street with its red and blues like some downed aircraft taxiing between old stores. There was once life here in abundance. Now each second was another memory fading into the strange language of the setting sun and the days left behind.