I was driving back from my home town, cruising southbound down a country route that I often use. Suddenly I came upon a brown fog, a dusty sort of cloud that swirled from the nothing ahead of me.
The fog grew to a menacing size and density as I approached, now visibly cluttered with debris.
A dusty white sedan appeared from the mess, traveling in the direction opposite mine. It was boxy, some early nineties junker. I decided to ask the other motorist whether it was safe to press on, so I slowed to a stop.
The sedan's neglected breaks let out a squeak.
I rolled down the window to talk to the stranger, only to find that my legs had fallen asleep. With tremendous effort, I shrugged my head and shoulders out of the open window. I tried to form a sentence, still not grasping what the hell was going on.
"How do you...what is the..........shit...help"
The other motorist, a woman in her forties, cocked her head to the side and squinched her face into a confused expression. She looked just like Janis Joplin and she was wearing my sunglasses. She stared at me like I was nuts.
"What?...." she began.
She continued to move her frowning mouth, but her voice quickly gave way to a fuzz inside my ears. The numbing parasite crawled through my body, consuming my last bit of energy.
My head fell to the side of the car, smacking it with a thud. The door slowly swung out as I leaned on it, as if someone opened it from the outside but had been forced to let go of the handle as the car accelerated forward. My limp body stretched across the widening space between the door and its socket.
The push of my upper body against the door opposed my foot to the gas pedal, and to my horror the pavement below began to move backwards more rapidly. The sedan and the confused woman were gone, and I stared in bug-eyed terror at my stationary view of the ground.
Patchy rural pavement panned by quickly, then grass, then just the brown ugly fog. I looked on helplessly, struggling against the laziness that was consuming me.
I fought for consciousness and finally came-to in my bed where I had been reading, now thoroughly freaked out. I had been holding my breath for awhile, probably what woke me up.
