Worlds Seperated

Worlds Separated

WORLDS

SEPARATED

A  N O V E L  B Y

T Y L E R  W I L S O N

J A C K A L O P E  H I L L

Copyright © 2023 Tyler Wilson

First edition, first printing 2023.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the author,

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art by Swifty.

Edited by Bill Stuart and Margaret Bauer.

Layout by Margaret Bauer.

The author can be contacted at therealtwilson@gmail.com

Published by Jackalope Hill,

The fiction imprint of Antelope Hill Publishing

Antelope Hill Publishing | www.antelopehillpublishing.com

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-956887-64-8

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-956887-65-5

You are closer to it than me.

I cut away parts of myself and put them into these pages.

Now, they are separate from me.

Now, they’re yours.

Wednesday, The 12th

Late Morning

THE HEADSTONES WERE SPARSE. TO THE UNDISCERNING EYE, THEY were no more than a collection of small, flat-lying rectangles that seemed to be placed in no uniform manner. The names upon them were almost unreadable because of the brightness of the stone and the complementary shining of the sun. The months varied from stone to stone, but the years on the stones often repeated and remained unchanged within each small monument. Each one was a surprise to their living company who traversed them on this day that seemed to exist without time.

His ears were berated with the roaring sound of wind like driving down the interstate with the windows rolled down while he himself was still and outside of any automobile. If not for the migration of air, he would be utterly motionless as he stopped and listened to the howl of the ghosts of the past or present or future. The ghosts of what he did not know. The ghosts of what he pretended to not know.

He looked at the sky. It was a blue that made a person uneasy. So much sky and so much blue without a single cloud to break it up. All-encompassing blue, save for a single bird stuck in place with wings stretched wide and body bobbing up and down. No progress granted. The lone man stared at the feathered beast through squinted eyes and wondered why. Why does it continue even when there will not be any ground covered? He thought that surely if the bird landed according to his passing whim, it would be blown away. As futile as fighting the wind may be, it kept one from being dragged away or covered by time. Better to be eroded than to remain intact and without will.

He often found himself philosophizing. There was a time when someone had been prompted by her observations to question why he thought and answered and spoke the way he did. The answer was not like his other answers, and it seemed to him that there was no other way to act. Why don’t more people contemplate? Lofty thinking often, ironically, resulted in driving himself into the earth. Currently, however, the soil was much too hard for him to sink, despite the many little sinkholes south of a desperate amount of the ground-bound plaques. He was an unassuming soul among the ruins of life.

Being on the run was a curious thing. There is a constant, earned paranoia that persists in every single action one takes. In fact, this is also true for most situations that lead to these circumstances. However, in this moment, there was serenity as his mind cleared and thought of its current location. Finally, a man sought after; in a word: wanted. Here in this place, unmoving in vulnerability, he was safer than the wealthiest, most connected rat in the puppet world. There would only be one person in the whole of the world that would connect him with this place, and she was a woman more beautiful than she knew, who was far away from his life at this stage. Had it been months? Or years?

She had told him on a drive through this wide country about a grisly, unsolved crime that had occurred long ago. He thought he remembered her saying the ’50s. A man had walked in off the highway into a family farm home and killed the entire family except one. The surviving teenage daughter ran miles and miles to the safety of the nearest neighbor. No reason was known, and the man was a stranger, at least as far as this highway-traveling stranger knew. The story had made him depressed. He had never gotten over it.

The furiosity of the Texas Panhandle sun was not to be ignored. His skin was beginning to burn and ache for the respite of shade. The air was drying him out and leaving a thin layer of dust over his body and clothes. He couldn’t get over it. He smiled a little as he turned to walk out of the sacred grounds onto a ground that he considered just as sacred. Maybe he still felt freedom. He did not think he ever really knew the feeling, but maybe this was close to it.

Approaching the neglected vehicle that carried him loyally to this lonesome cemetery, Scott Austin took the keys from his jacket pocket and felt like an album cover to a heartfelt, heartland rock record. Typically American, or was it typically young? He had not had the opportunity to speak to a young person from a foreign land who truly embodied their respective national values. Accuse of him chauvinism, but he settled on American. Not all music was consumerist, he decided. Much of it was very much so and reveled in lowness, but some of it had genuine thought and ideals put into it. Less grand than the majesty of chapels and statues, but a shining example of human spirit breaking through what was merely economic to what was good.

As his thoughts on this matter completed, he turned the key in the ignition and cranked it against the firm resistance. The engine roared to life. When the shifter dropped into reverse, the radio finally tuned and began to play. A story of carelessness and remorse told by the well-worn voice of a widely-loved musician filled the cab of the plastic shell of the late model coupe, accompanied by the perfect amount of static to remind the listener that radio exists for the especially lonely.

While a voice filled with exhaustion serenaded the lone man, his eyes watched the horizon and the dirt path as it disappeared beneath his tires, cruising toward the highway. Speeding away from the summit between his mind, his soul, and the always speaking and rarely heard (and rarely heeded) voice of God, he entered the world again as he turned back onto the highway after a car moved past him at a speed unheard of only a century ago. The flash of the automobile paid him no mind, but he would need to be mindful of people once again. He had never overestimated his role in the world before this; now it was conducive to his survival to overestimate it in the extreme.

Behind enemy lines in his birthland, it was a time of heavy surveillance and pervasive misinformation, but the powers that be would certainly use their abilities to stack the odds against him in a way that would make the average, spoon-fed citizen kick his own dog out of contempt if it were known to associate with one Scott Austin. He felt badly for all the boys who had been given the name they now shared with him; children were cruel and there would now be a generation of Scotties and assorted middle names because of him. Of course, there was a possibility that he was only placing greater importance on himself than there really was. There wasn’t any way to tell if they knew his name or what information they really had at all. Still, he worried about all these things as the tachometer climbed and dropped with his steady acceleration, trying to control his breaths and heartbeat with the consistency of the engine. Genuine humility was a death sentence for a man on the run. It translated to ignorance and obliviousness.

The wind shear rattled the vehicle and its occupant. Cruising two miles per hour below the legal limit, Scott tried to remember what the next town would be. His calf flexed with the precise movements of his foot, keeping his speed hovering between the two speeds he had selected. After the incessant advertisements of salesmen big and small, another song began to play. A drumroll leading into a swaying, lyrical experience for a name that reveled in its simplistic beauty. A song that he had not listened to at this stage in his life. A song that, when it spoke of loneliness, made his throat close; when it uttered the word free, his jaw tingled at the hinge. Then the rural voice told him that he had been learning how to let go of a thing he had never held. With one hand on the wheel and one on his thigh, his knuckles whitened. He figured it must be the town of Turkey coming up and he could grab a bite there.

There was nothing more to do except go ahead and keep on going.

Tuesday, The 11th

Evening

THE RESTAURANT WAS PROBABLY FILLED WITH EVERY MOBILE member of the community, having quiet family meals. He did not stare or noticeably twist himself to gawk at all the decent folk around. Instead, he sat just quietly and tried to fit in as best he could as a single diner. He turned another page in the book he had picked up from a thrift store the preceding Sunday. The paper was yellow and rough like you find in all old paperbacks. The smell that lifted from each new page was that musty yet fresh smell that bookstores have. These young, unfettered words were seeing light for the first time in a generation comforted him.

He had grabbed this book among others to pass the time and sat down at the table with it to hide his face and make him seem easily passed-by. The prose had captured him. The story of the young, Welsh man enraptured him. The beauty of the land and language and people resonated with his own persuasions. His emotions raged inside of him like a storm he had learned about but never seen. His eyes would have given glimpses of the passion and his breathing would have become heavy, but he replaced his bookmark and laid it gently on the table to gather himself to order.

A chubby waitress slightly younger than Scott approached his table with a large smile and a wide-eyed, exaggerated look that let him know that she was trying to catch up with the world just like he was, or used to be. Her brown hair fell in wavy curls over her shoulder and enshrined the large smile that pushed up her heavily freckled cheeks.

Saw-ree! I’m just about frazzled this evenin’ tryin’ tuh keep up with all these big orders!

Scott looked around the tame establishment once again, smiling because of her stress that she created for herself.

No troubles. . . . I waited . . . and you came just like you said you would. . . . I needed a little practice in patience. He always spoke with a subdued smirk and pauses long enough to make a person notice them but short enough that he could keep a train of words still connected, a side effect of his planning before action, thought before word.

I hope I didn’ wear on it too much! Whatcha thinkin’ is ya fancy? She had either perfected the speech forced upon people to pry money away from customers, or she was genuinely a bright person. Scott’s cynicism said the former, but the small-town location and atmosphere pointed to the latter, and for that he was jealous.

I’ll just make it easy for you. . . . I’ll have a water and . . . just a cheeseburger.

Plain an’ simple, I can manage that! Fries good with that burger?

Fries are perfect.

She spun and headed off toward the kitchen, checking on other tables as she went. He looked after her as she moved so spryly and swaying her hips. More than likely, she dearly loved the knee-length skirt she wore and saved it for busy worknights such as this. Waiting tables made her the focus of the spotlight, and she felt pretty and elegant swishing through the tables. Maybe it was vain, but that feminine spirit was honorable in a respective, equitable sense to the chivalry that men strive for. He replaced the book in front of himself so that it could comfort his nose with its scent of a feeble old librarian as frail as a page standing at the gates of Alexandria in defiance. Had the burning of libraries and their denizens set the world back by ages? Or had they stayed the flood of fire? If they had been filled with stories such as this one, which was injected with life and made his own feelings validated, certainly the former. If they contained other words of malice and unnaturalness, then the latter.

Lifting his eyes from the page that had commanded his attention, he considered the nature of things. How could everything be thought of so thoroughly and without misunderstanding? He swore that things were one thing or another, but they could also be so many things in-between. Could he be simplified to nothing more than an overthinker who became lost and confused in his self-constructed complications? Is consideration supposed to curse its adherents? Was his nonsense that of the onset of insanity? The pinnacle of it? Not thinking the way he did seemed madness to him. He started his reading again. At a new chapter, the bookmark was replaced and the book laid on a remote part of the table that was most likely to be free from any residue. Not long after, the careless, stressed-out waitress came flitting back and laid the basket in front of an unmoving—save for his eyes—Scott with a grandiose effort that was more than simple placement but less than a low bow.

Hope ya enjoy, made ’specially for ya! If ya need anythin’ else, just call for Jordyn! The sparkle in her words let Scott know that was her name.

Like the river?

No, more like the burger joint waitress, she spoke