Eschaton
On that particular road was a curve preceded by a long stretch of narrow pavement. Two single lanes passing each other by at forty-five miles per hour. At one side tree-topped hills and at the other a reclining meadow. The overhang of the trees shaded the lane to his left, but that early morning it was freshly watered from the drizzle of the night and the day before it. The gleam of what little light there was mottling the blacktop. Rain. Not a hard downpour but a constant and incessant mist that seemed a malaise personified; the kind that makes you prefer the adrenaline of an electrical storm, that seeps into your pores with a musty stench drawing earthworms out onto the sidewalk. Gray skies and gray fog like the clouds pulled down from the overcast, thick enough to need your headlights on at 8:00 AM. It was an ordinary morning, as identical in its features as so many that had yet weathered the road more innumerable to imagine in the fifty-odd years since the asphalt was poured and se...