Fictitious Witch Love and Real Highway Death
By Philip Gelatt

Saturday August 6th. Somewhere Southeast of Chicago, about 55 miles over the Ohio boarder into Indiana, traffic along I-80 ceases completely. Dead standstill, locked, a line of trucks like a circle of wagons, their tail lights flickering in a slow pattern of frustration, greets us and welcomes us to the cattle call. I'm the poor bastard behind the wheel and I feel immediately this could be a trap. The photographers start making phone calls, playing cellphone bowling, reading books. I stare at the road, start to go mad. I turn the engine off and roll down the windows, as I want to smell Indiana. It smells good. I expect Indiana to smell like overripe fruit and flies' eggs. Instead it smells strangely calming.

I turn the engine off, the sun is going down fast and I start to dance. I give the car a little arm swing, left roll to right, right roll to left, a little jazz hands and I talk about musical theater kids I knew in high school. "Douche Bags." Then I hit the jazz hands hard, gyrating my hips as much as the car seat will allow. I give the song and "Oh yeah."

And then I start letting the stir crazy come out my mouth.

(to be read aloud)

The crowd laughs, but doesn't seem to understand the necessity of my requests.

We start to talk about the Wiccan princess Skye. It's determined her last name should be Roberts. "Skye Roberts" sounds like a pulp hero to me and I start going off about Princess Skye Roberts and how she lives on a far away planet, and carries a pouch of mother earth around her neck to help her weave her spells. I claim she smells terrible, she has a pet pig named Trelawny, I can't decide if she carries a space blaster or if that's not really what Wiccans are all about, she most definitely, however, misses Gaia, she travels through the intergalactum in a modified airship known as the Cardinale, somebody suggests her nemesis is the Space Pastor, but I think that's a little too loaded a term. I'm completely in love with this fictitious woman. She has brown hair and rarely shaves any of it.

Meanwhile, the brake lights shimmer and flicker, the faces in the wheeled cages around me grow angrier and Friday's sunlight slams into the horizon turning Indiana to that color people call "gold" but would more appropriately be called "sunset."

Traffic starts to move again, slowly. We reach the blockage, on our right is the remains of a car that looks like its back side has been torn apart by mechnical dogs, thirsting for oil, metal and revenge. Down off the road, its headlights illuminating a random and empty piece of forest is the semi that did the damage. It looks remorseful almost, staring at the corner of the highway. I wonder if there will be a white cross to mark this place. I only glance at this quickly, as 70 miles per hour beckons to me.

Strange to think how many people were affected by his death. His life suddenly became the personal business of at least a thousand people, and it changed the everyday life of America. I wonder how many of the people stuck on I-80 between 9 and 10:30 pm will remember what they saw. Will this moment of violence just passed stay with them? Or fade as just another road annoyance, just another kinda crazy thing they saw on their drive home? It made me annoyed and then something else, something like sadness though it certainly wasn't that. I wonder if I'll remember the site of that car, or if it'll just go down as a strange sidenote. I wonder what kind of parallels I'll draw between this sacrifice the road has fed me and my final destination. I'm already fashioning sentences.

18 miles down is the next rest stop. A Burger King, a Starbucks and a Pizza Hut. Groovy.