/fa/ - Fashion

We’re deep into the Carolina countryside, dead of night. I never knew such darkness outside of tunnels and tombs, I never imagined the scattering of eyes, beaming back my halogens like a threat before dipping back into the forest, that serrated tree line blotting out the stars as we hit the first pocket of low-lying fog.
The mist floats right up from the road bed, brief clusters of dead clouds whipping over the hood, tangling with our headlights. I feel her eyes scan over me from the passenger seat - she does this when she’s scared. Judging my composure, maybe. Metering her own response to this empty road, these passing fog banks, those strange eyes flitting past us from the tall grass that grows in the shade of a lifeless gas station on the outskirts of a dying town.
She points to a sign (bright yellow diamond nearly hidden in empty branches), demands a translation.
“It means this road won’t be paved much longer. Probably gravel.”
My ears are popping now, we’re headed up a steep one-lane dinosaur into the heart of an old green mountain and I remind her we stopped seeing mailboxes about ten minutes ago. The canopy is a mess, dead trees woven together with broken rock and deepest night. She asks me again if the doors are locked.

You don’t expect to hit something at a time like this. All those endless acres of woodland, a single road cutting through them, I saw it from ten thousand feet as the airbus dropped through the cloud cover over Charlotte. It’s infinite, you can’t see the ends of it.
A panicked doe crashes through underbrush to my right, a blur of pale dun fur and empty black eyes tearing into the roadway at a 45 degree angle, too soon, too close. These are the thoughts that passed through me right then, every concern raised instantly, my own mind addressing them one by one in the space of a second that seems like a minute.