Jeremy watched the birds circling overhead. Seeing the black dots dance in their circuit above him, dark wings flickering against the bright white-blue of the sky, it was sort of like a negative image of sparkles in his eyes, and the thought of that made him chuckle. His tongue prodded dryly at the back of his teeth. He was lightheaded. His heat-shrunken brain reminded him that dehydration caused things like that. He chuckled again.

This was bad.

His feet were hot, so he tucked them underneath himself as best he could, into what scant shade his car provided against the abusive sunlight. Looking out, he watched the heat waves ripple against the unending white of the salt flats.

“You really should have packed some water,” said a voice.

Jeremy turned his head limply in the direction of the sound. There was a man leaning against his trunk. He wore loose-fitting linens that billowed gently in the warm desert breeze, bangles about his wrists, and nothing on his feet. The man smiled softly at him.

“Jared Leto?” asked Jeremy. The man barked a full laugh, but shook his head. “Thank God.” Then, after a moment, he asked “Am I dying?”

“A little bit,” said the man, nodding. “For real though, no water? Nothing?”

It was Jeremy’s turn to shake his head, then, reaching up through the open driver-side window, withdrew a mostly full bottle of bourbon.

“Wow. Not much good that’s going to do you.” The man in white took a seat next to him. “How’d you get way out here?”

“Mid-life crisis,” Jeremy answered simply.

“Some people buy a motorcycle to cope with those, maybe dye their hair. Not you?”

“Nope. Divorced, then bought a car I can’t afford and took it somewhere I could drive it really fast without getting arrested.”

“Race track didn’t make sense for that?”

“I guess not. Always wanted to drive on the salt flats, loved the idea of the desert. Or, at least, I thought I did.” Jeremy eyed the bottle in his hands a moment before setting it down. “The desert sucks.”

“It’s not great,” the man agreed. A few minutes passed with them both watching the few, thin clouds in their struggle against dry air. “If you don’t mind me asking, what’re you running from?”

Jeremy fought the reflex to deny the question and say that he wasn’t running from anything, and instead actually thought about it. Because, of course, there was an easy answer. He was running away from an utterly crumbling life: failing marriage, dead dreams, the shame of those things now hanging over his social circles like a immense wet blanket. And while there was still truth to an answer like that, the longer he took to steep in thought over it, it didn’t feel like the complete truth.

“I don’t think,” he began at length, “that I am running from something.” The man in white watched him patiently, feeling that the rest of the answer was incoming. “No. I think…I think I’m running after something instead. It’s like a dream, maybe, but one that I’ve never had- or maybe, more like one I’ve had a thousand times. That, and I listen to too many hard rock highway songs.”

“The ‘us against the world’, ‘drive fast and die young love song’ type?”

Jeremy flashed a finger gun. “Bingo.” Despite himself, tears slowly began to well up in his eyes. “So, when I bought this stupid car, tore off the lot, and drove it out here as fast as it could go with the top down, it wasn’t supposed to be by myself. That’s never how the daydream went. It was supposed to be my wife and I, middle fingers up in the air, rock music, all the rest of it. Not, well, this.”

“Well,” sighed the man in white, “what are you going to do, now that you are here?”

“I could just…die. Lots of people have done it.” He looked at his warped reflection on the bourbon bottle. A hot breeze blew dust over Jeremy’s feet and speckled the brown glass, aging it in an instant. For a moment, he considered what it would look like to someone who found him out here, weeks, maybe years after he died. Skeletal, coated in dust, forgotten. What stories would that person come up with as to how he got here, or would they find it obvious? Since Not Jared Leto was clearly just a figment of his dried up imagination, it would be the bones of a single lonely and doomed idiot who drove out to the desert, broke down, and died.

“You could,” nodded Not Jared, “but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“It would be easier. A lot easier.”

“Than what?”

“Going back.”

“‘Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave.'”

“Ghandi? Old Testament?”

Not Jared laughed. “No,” he said. “Albus Dumbledore.”

END

I wrote that up at work the other day on nothing more than a whim. I was listening to some rock music from my teens years, felt a scene coming on, and voila. It definitely feels a little unfinished, but I had nowhere else I cared to take it, but I imagine Jeremy made it home, apologized for something, and lived happily ever after.

Anyway, news! Had a couple of publications this summer, firstly over at Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight Magazine is my story “Just like Old Times”, and more recently is my Sci-Fi story “Software” with Third Flatiron’s Offshoots: Humanity Twigged anthology. Check ’em out, let me know what you think, and live well.