This brief snippet of a narrative, Death rides with franksolich, is based partially upon a real-life experience, and the other part on an overactive imagination. One supposes the reader, unless a primitive, can tell which parts are nonfiction, and which parts are fiction.
Because of its Nebraska theme, or perhaps for some other reason, it’s dedicated to the big guy in Bellevue, Omaha Steve, with the hopes that he enjoys it.
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Death rides with franksolich. I was getting tired, burned out, from driving for so long, and all alone, when I spotted a figure shuffling alongside the highway.
I don’t take kindly to driving alone, and especially hundreds of miles, because being deaf, the sense of vacancy, of nothingness, as there’s nothing to divert or amuse one—one can’t after all hear the radio or a compact disc—causes one to get spaced out, and even hallucinatory.
Which isn’t good, despite there’s no other traffic, for zipping through the empty Sandhills of Nebraska at 85-105 mph. I was in a hurry because a friend of mine—our association went way back to elementary school—was dying, and could spring loose of this mortal coil any minute, and I wished to remind him that I loved him.
Not in any sense that gets gay primitives on Skins’s island all agog and gurgling and drooling, but simply in the sense that two males confident in their own masculine identities can remind each other of such a thing without a dirty mind inferring that there’s something there that isn’t there.
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As the solitary figure looked pretty old and tired, he presented no peril to me. I pulled over to the side, opened the front passenger door, beckoning him to get in. I wasn’t up to chitchattery, as there was no need to talk; the guy was walking west, and thus there was only one possible destination, the town in the center of the Sandhills of Nebraska where I’d spent my childhood and adolescence.
Other than that, there was nothing else, unless he’d planned to walk clear to Wyoming.
I indicated I was deaf, in which case “hearing†demands visual attention, which I couldn’t give because I had to watch the highway ahead. He nodded, suggesting it was okay, and so I hit the road again.
Some miles down the road, I began noticing a certain odor about him, as if catching a whiff of some lightly-applied cologne; my fellow traveler reeked of putrefying gangrene. I turned away from the windshield to eyeball him more closely.
“I know you,†I said, startled; “we’ve met before, many times.â€
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to be continued