10:8

It was $4.95 for the bottle of water. One stinking bottle of water that should have been free for the asking but this hole of gas station was asking for five fucking bucks.

This was a sign of the times. Everyone was getting greedy and the bastards in their ivory towers were putting the squeeze on. He’d run into a place last spring in Calgary that was trying to get away with charging $3 for a lousy cup of coffee. Just because it was ‘fresh-brewed’, whatever the fuck that meant. And now he was stuck shelling out cash for fucking water. Nothing from a tap because the bastard owners were too fucking lazy to clean the fucking bathrooms. Fucking pig sties. Actually I wouldn’t let a fucking pig in there, probably die of fucking gonorrhoea five seconds after it walked in the fucking door.

And one more smirk out of that ignoramus prick at the counter and I would have introduced him to my fucking tire iron. Fuck him and his “that’s the price on the bottle dude…”

Jesus, why the hell did I stop. 80 fucking degrees in a fucking desert and no one but morons and inbred asswipes around. I should just get the…

That fucking bitch. That stupid, conniving, ball shrinking whore. This is all her fucking fault. I don’t care what she thinks she has on me, I’m going to drive this fucking car right down her goddamn throat until she shits out what she fucking owes me… I’m going drive this piece of shit through her motherfucking living room and then burn down her pissant little fucking country hovel around her…

It’s my fucking property. She has no right to keep me from it and I’m gonna fucking just…

Fuck.

Fucking…

Fuck.

Barney slammed the empty bottle on to the oil-soaked concrete pad and watched it skitter under the car. He opened the car door and slid down into the Cougar’s sticky vinyl seat still wet from a day’s worth of sweat streaming down his back. A moment of staring blankly at the dust covered gauges and he twisted the ignition violently, slammed the Hurst shifter into gear and jammed the gas pedal down.

I gotta hit Estevan before the border closes. Fucking bitch.

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.

10:6

Just east of Medicine Hat the land flattens out. For a few hundred miles across the southern Alberta landscape, there had been nothing but slowly rolling prairie devoid of anything but chugging pumpjacks, abandoned farmsteads and giant metal microwave towers that thrust up above the horizon and marked off the lengths of constantly retreating horizon like giant milestones. But after climbing out of that last deep valley that marks the last of the mountains’ fluvial bounty as the watercourses all turn north towards far off Hudson’s Bay and then leaving the wishful metropolis of a small prairie city behind, the land starts to feel like it’s had every last feature scoured away. The hills disappear, the signs of human habitation fade and the vista soon becomes nothing but miles and miles of flat, grass covered sea.

In this absolute emptiness even the grass remains short and sparse and, son after crossing over the Saskatchewan border, even it begins to give way to dried out nothingness. The unsuspecting traveler often opens his eyes and finds himself transported to far off Sahara, watching the whistling winds shape dunes of drifting sand, trying to build up or dig dig down, trying and failing to add some sort of texture or dimension to this arid and bleak landscape.

The pervasive howling wind constantly buffets vehicles side to side, constantly reminding the itinerant traveller that it reigns supreme in this wild and empty place. Gone are the doubled lanes, and all hint of fellow sojourners; it is as if the land itself has deliberately separated all the wayfarers, leaving them to transit the uninterrupted space with only their own fears and doubts to accompany them.

The ash grey ribbon of road flows straight and unswervingly between the sentinel towers — the sole indications that that man has passed this away before and has somehow marked the passage — with no towns nor crossroads to break up it’s progress. By now even the ubiquitous fences have disappeared as if the inhabitants had long ago given up hope of ever containing or even cataloguing this vast expanse of nihility.

It is a prospect that seems designed by the gods themselves to empty the mind and drain the soul.

10:3

God I hate that bitch.

The steady purr of the 351 started to roar as the speedometer climbed past 80 miles an hour. The southern Alberta highways were straight and empty and Barney took his rage out on the road, chewing up the asphalt and watching the miles disappear like the crisp, biting light of the sunset behind him.

He had the car, but little else and it was all that bitch’s fault. And she… what she had was worth more than the cash he was now mourning. She had a piece of the puzzle, a piece he could never recover short of murdering the interfering shrew and he had sworn that was the one thing he would never again turn his hand to. But the temptation…

He wrestled the iron monster into a sharp corner posted with ridiculous limits; a squeeze of the brake, a pause and then he floored it coming out of the apex, crossing momentarily into the other lane. That’s how you do it, not by slowing down, but by muscling through. That’s how you survived, how you prospered. Fucking sheep are always slowing down, obeying the law and getting in my way. Let them speed, let them roar down the road at whatever pathetic pace their tiny ego’s allow them; he would still crush them in the corners and leave them broken in the dust.

Barney notched the radio up again and grinned fiercely; broken in the dust he mused. He did not, however, look back to see if there was any truth to that assertion on this particular day.

9:29

I killed him. He is gone, crossed out, removed from the narrative, erased, dele’d, torn from the book, naught but a forgotten footnote in this, my new edition.

For 11 years I suffered and succeeded in spite of that son of a bitch and now he lives only at the base of my life’s shredder, in a disjointed and flimsy heap of disordered entropy. Screw you. You are nothing now.

Fuck him. Piss on his words. Salt his memory and make sure it never grows, never fucking again rises to spread his poison and putrid bile. Fuck his fucking memory, his fucking life, his fucking soul. And fuck this fucking book. Or what remains of it.

The look in his eyes as I tore each page from it’s binding, randomly crushing this fine linen page and burning it over that cleansing flame, tossing that one aside to ends its usefulness in the pool that was his blood. That, that is a memory that I shall allow to endure: cruelty repaid. The bastard. Cruelly REPAID.

But now, the book. The pages. I think I shall remove them from play, eliminate the distraction, but perhaps, reserve them for some future part. This story is far from done and the world still has a epic saga’s worth to answer for. And, for now, I have the gold, the geld, the numismatical means to do what I want. Later we shall see what we see.

Enough. I must record this days work, erase the past, rewrite the future and begin again. And this time we shall follow my script and no other.