I had been driving for twelve hours straight.
Long-haul trucking isn't glamorous, but it keeps you numb. That's what I wanted—no distractions, no voices, just asphalt and time. The highway unspooling into the night like a thread through some unknowable fabric.
Around 2:30 a.m., I passed Mile Marker 237 on Route I-74. No lights. No cars. Just the hum of tires and the low rattle of a half-empty trailer.
That's when I saw it.
A sign.
"EXIT 237 – SERVICE ROAD. LAST STOP BEFORE THE SKY."
It wasn't on the GPS.
I'd driven this route for years. There had never been an exit there.
But it called to me.
Like it was always meant for me.
The off-ramp was narrow, cracked with age, overgrown with weeds that looked more like veins than plants. The pavement shimmered slightly—not from heat, but from something beneath it.
I drove anyway.
It curved hard, leading into a deep cut in the hills—farther than any exit should go. The highway lights disappeared. My high beams flickered like they were afraid to shine too far.
Ahead: a single gas station.
No brand. No cars.
Just a canopy of flickering lights and an old analog pump that shouldn't have been working in 2025.
The sign above the door read:
"WE REMEMBER YOU."
I stepped inside.
There was a man at the counter. Thin. Skin like worn leather. Eyes cloudy like a dead lake.
He didn't look at me.
Just said:
> "Pump's on. Take what you need. Don't stay long."
His voice sounded layered—like a whisper buried beneath itself.
I tried to ask where I was, but he just pointed to a wall covered in faded photographs. Hundreds of them. All Polaroids.
Some black and white. Others color. All of different people, standing in front of the station, smiling.
In every photo, the sky behind them was wrong.
Sometimes cracked. Sometimes spiraling. Sometimes full of teeth.
And in all of them… a faint figure stood in the distance.
Looking at the camera.
While fueling up, I heard it.
A low, droning hum—not mechanical, not natural. Like something massive exhaling underground.
I looked up.
The stars were moving.
Not twinkling.
Moving.
Not fast—but deliberately, sliding across the sky like figures on a clock face too large to see all at once.
And between them: black gaps that were… blinking.
Eyes.
Watching me.
I dropped the nozzle.
That's when the road behind me was gone.
The off-ramp had folded in on itself like it had never been there.
And the hum was getting louder.
I ran behind the station, toward what looked like a hill.
But it wasn't a hill.
It was a scar.
A gash in the land where the earth didn't end in dirt but peeled open, revealing a darkness that moved like oil and hunger.
The hum became a chant.
Not from outside.
From inside my head.
> "He came from the road.
He sees the horizon.
He has been seen in return."
The ground around the scar writhed.
Shapes began to rise from it.
Long. Pale. Faceless.
They moved without motion—just became closer every time I blinked.
I turned to run—
And found the Attendant standing behind me.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
"Where is here?" I asked, breathless.
He looked up at the moving stars.
> "This is where the world ends politely."
> "Where the sky folds over itself like a napkin after dinner."
He handed me a photo from his pocket.
A Polaroid.
Me.
Standing outside the station. Smiling.
The sky behind me was wide open—split like a wound, bleeding stars.
"I never posed for this," I whispered.
"You haven't yet," he replied.
The things from the scar were closer now.
I could hear them.
Not talking—remembering.
Whispering my own thoughts back to me, out of order.
The truck. My daughter's voicemail. My mother's funeral. A red balloon. A dog I'd hit at seventeen. The crunch. The whimper. The silence.
"You have to give something," the Attendant said.
"To leave?"
"No one leaves. But they forget they stayed."
He handed me a knife.
"I don't want this," I said.
"You brought it," he replied.
And I remembered.
The blade. The glove box. The night I didn't stop the car.
Not the dog.
The woman.
The woman I hit and kept driving.
The knife was warm in my hand.
I walked to the scar. The figures parted.
And I understood.
They weren't here to kill me.
They were here to witness.
To record.
The gas station was the mouth.
The road? A tongue.
And the off-ramp? A single breath, taken before the final sentence.
I knelt beside the scar and cut.
Not myself. Not my flesh.
Something beneath me.
The asphalt peeled back.
A photo slid out.
Me. Smiling.
But this time, I wasn't in front of the station.
I was inside the sky.
I woke up behind the wheel.
Dawn was rising. I was parked in a rest stop, two miles past Mile Marker 237.
No sign of the off-ramp. No record of a stop.
My hands were clean.
My tank was full.
And there was a photo tucked in my visor.
Me. Standing in front of the station. Smiling.
And just behind me…
The Attendant.
And behind him…
Something far too large to fit in the sky.
It's been three weeks.
I keep driving.
I see red balloons where there are none.
I hear the hum when the engine idles.
And sometimes, when I pass an old Polaroid booth at a truck stop…
I see a photo that hasn't been taken yet.
Me.
Kneeling beside a wound in the earth, smiling.
And the caption reads:
"The Driver Who Remembered Too Much."
I don't sleep anymore.
I just drive.
And wait for the road to remember me back.