The Tenth Mile Marker
2 min read · Original fiction — a story, not a true account
Dale had driven the Route 40 corridor for eleven winters and knew every mile marker on it the way other men know their children's birthdays, so when he passed marker ten for the third time in what should have been a straight forty-minute stretch, he knew something in the night had gone wrong.
The blizzard had come in faster than the forecast promised, the kind that swallows headlights whole and turns the road into a rumor. He'd throttled down to twenty, then fifteen, watching the reflective marker posts tick by like a slow heartbeat: eight, nine, ten.
Then eight, nine, ten again.
Each time he passed marker ten, he also passed the same stalled sedan half in the ditch, hazards blinking weakly, a shape hunched at the wheel that never moved and never got smaller in his mirrors no matter how long he drove past it.
On the fourth pass he stopped, because a man can only convince himself of coincidence so many times, and he walked to the sedan through snow that came up past his boots. The driver inside was an old woman, unmoving, her hands still correctly at ten and two, her eyes open and fixed on the middle distance the way people's eyes fix when they have been waiting a very long time for a particular kind of help.
She was not cold to the touch, which frightened him more than if she had been. "You have to stop counting the markers," she said, without turning her head, in a voice that sounded like it was arriving from much further away than the front seat. "Counting is what's kept you here with me."
He walked back to his rig without another word, put the truck in gear, and drove without looking at a single marker post for what felt like an hour and was, according to his logbook, six minutes. When he next let himself look, he was passing marker twenty-two, the storm was thinning to ordinary snow, and there was no sedan behind him in the mirror, in the ditch, or anywhere else on the whole white empty road.
He still drives that corridor. He has learned to let the mile markers blur past uncounted, and on the worst nights of the year he takes the long way around, adding forty minutes to his route rather than risk finding out whether ten is still waiting for company.
"He had been driving in a circle the whole night. The car in the ditch was there to make sure he noticed."
