Stealing Time

By Michael Sean Erickson

Have you ever driven down a long and windy road; eyes half shut after dark; window cranked open just to keep you awake; and noticed afterward that the many hours of night travel seemed to go by as if no more than a few minutes? Don't you realize that you're stealing those hours, turning them into minutes, and pretending that those awful things you did in the cheap motels along the side of the road were just figments of your imagination? Oh, you don't realize that. Well, you will; perhaps not today, perhaps not this year; but someday, when you round the bend you'll realize as much as our hero that there is a price to be paid for stealing time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Sean Erickson
• Release date: Jul 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988599758

Michael Sean Erickson

Michael Sean Erickson wears many hats. Some of them are as trampled and lost as the Lost Sombrero. Others are being stored still in a tidy space at the rear of his closet. Among his finer adornments, he is or has been a political consultant, an essayist, an Anglican Catholic Priest, a stage actor, a husband, and a father of a Shih Tzu. He is from San Jose, California, but lives currently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with his beautiful wife, Sharon, and their Shih Tzu, Shansi.

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Stealing Time

Michael Sean Erickson

Hot Chili Press

Copyright © 2013 Micheal Sean Erickson

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ISBN: 978-0-9885997-5-8

First Edition (ebook, version 1.0): 2013

Published by Hot Chili Press at Smashwords

E-book and cover design: Patricia Garcia Arreola

RANDALL is alone in his 1969 Oldsmobile Delta 88.

Apart from an occasional big rig rolling out from the blackness in front of him and swooshing hot wind and soot over the left side of his face; a blur along the port sides of their trailers spelling out Piggly Wiggly or Coca Cola just inside of the yellow fan of his left headlight; his is the only car on a two-lane highway winding and sloping into an unincorporated hell swamp populated more by road kill than by God fearing, Bible thumping, American taxpayers.

It is dark; pitch black; a half hour or so beyond the last bell; and the star groupings in the endless sky are quivering like inebriated gnats over an exposed tomb; scavenging off of the yellow headlights; and leaving behind nothing at all but a brooding fear that the next bend in the highway may reveal the last brick wall in the long and sordid life of a night road traveler.

Because that is where the life of a night road traveler invariably ends up when all is said and done; somewhere around the dark bend in the old highway; the car hood collapsed into an accordion; the cabin smashed inward on all sides into a box of suffocated screams; and the burnt oil coated over the sour stench of decomposing flesh in a manner that seems to lessen the nauseating sting of a violent death, so that the fragrance left behind is listless and cold, like the soft breaths of a melancholic ghost wandering down the side of his endless highway.

Randall leans his heavy head through the opened driver’s side window on occasion. He senses vaguely that the hot air slapping against his left cheek, and fluttering his left eye in the manner of a reel snaking through the innards of an overheating projector, will shake, rattle, and roll the whiskey out of his system before he makes it back to his old pillow an hour or so beyond the next sunrise.

He leans back against his torn leather seat; the foam pushed out in many directions, when he presses the full weight of his back against the surface; and he stretches into a lumbering yawn; more drunk than tired; heavy eyelids fallen into puffy cheeks and pulsed awake again by an occasional pothole on the road, only to settle back into that half asleep stare when the obstruction turns out to be nothing worthy of his immediate attention. He is just uncomfortable enough not to doze off completely and not to sway his Olds off of the highway.

There is a red idiot light blinking on his dashboard; something to do with something not working just right, but not so broken down that he cannot return to his chunky monkey wife of thirty some odd years, his nondescript tract home on a corner lot of nondescript suburbia, and his little cubicle at a life insurance brokerage where he cold calls people and urges them to get a piece of his rock; and since the white dome light has been broken pretty much since he drove his claptrap off of the used car lot, there is nothing but that blinking red idiot light to keep the cabin from being totally consumed in blackness.

It is a bloodshot eye that tells him that everything is going to be all right on this long and windy road, so long as it is still blinking back at him. It is a real friend; the kind that never winces when Randall stuffs his flask under his driver seat; the good sport that will be with him still when he swerves too fast around that last bend and couples his own fate with the rest of the old highway ghosts.

That is not likely to happen tonight. The Olds is chugging down the road, like a senile grandma in soiled diapers; awkward spurts forward, followed by an inebriated sag to the side; and, every once in a while, a sick crouch on the rear tires that farts out a purple blue stench or an occasional dust bunny. It is never going to pick up enough speed to round that last bend. It is just going to slug its exhaust pipe round every bend in front of it until it passes out on the driveway.

And Randall will have no idea how much time he and his Olds have stolen this night; how many long hours have breezed by as no more than odd moments of reflection here or there, or as catnaps taken when the road really seemed to be straight enough, or as sips of flask whiskey while slinking low on the seat, as if hiding out from an illusory highway patrolman watching him from the big sky.

He will have an idea that something has happened, when some other sad and lonely night he and his Olds round that last bend; not sure what, but pissed off that his ghost hand is not substantial enough to grab a hold of that flask and to retrieve it from the car wreckage that is just everywhere; but, until then, he and his Olds will just steal away the night hours and turn them into the elusive, half assed, and disquieting memories that are the mental meat and potatoes of hangovers; memories passed off as unreal; moments as fragments from dreams.

Randall switches on his radio. He turns the dial from static to static; just a few unrelated musical notes in the mix of radio frequency screams; and then, in an epiphany that is so sudden it nearly splits his forehead, he remembers the FM cannot reach him this far out from civilization, like a lighthouse beacon that is scattered by the sea fog and then is swallowed up completely by the nautical miles in between it and the crow’s nest. He will not be reeled back by Madonna loving him like a virgin or by Tina Turner not needing another hero.

And so he flips over to the AM dial. He encounters just more of the same static; except now a few pastors hailing Gawwd and Jeeesus in the mix of radio frequency screams; and is about to give up, when he finally stumbles upon that one show that can be heard so well no matter the miles from home as to be the comfortable voice of an old buddy sitting in the passenger seat and assisting his fellow night owl in stealing away the long