10:7

As the accumulation of emptiness threatens to smother all lingering spirit or hope, ahead a washed out green sign slowly thrusts upwards out of the unbroken horizon: Tompkins 15 km, No Services. This first, illusive sign of life often brings the traveller back to himself, more strikingly so in the dry stifling heat of a prairie Indian summer. Miles of sticky traveling and whistling wind have lulled you into believing that this desolation had no beginning and would have no end; this first sign marring hypnotic surface of the void, introduces that first delicate crack, that within a few scant miles, will open up like a portal out of this empty, lonely land.

It is here, at this first sign of hope and this first reminder of what you left behind that the epiphany can often be found. That moment of clarity and confluence of unrealized realities that clears away the concealing grime and lets a sort of truth shine through.

It was here that Barney remembered the box. He knew he had fled. He knew his retreat had necessitated abandoning his goals and uncharacteristically leaving behind a piece of his reality, his precious truth, with that crone. And now he remembered that he had left even more behind; he had left behind his words, his history, the records of all that was his now lay in a dank corner in an architectural monstrosity in a nothing town in reach of each and every one of the pathetic and insignificant occupants. It was here, as the desiccated landscape first began to give way to thoughts of renewed life, that Barney recognized the enormity of his defeat at the withered hands of that shrivelled old bitch.