calluses

Lyrics

[narrator] The quiet didn't settle all at once. It leaked into the cab through the gaps where the windshield used to be, heavy and smelling of raw earth, boiling radiator fluid, and crushed pine needles. The steam rising from the cracked engine block hissed a faint, dying breath against the dark. Inside the ruined sedan, he didn't move. He lays slouched against the deflated canvas of the airbag, his forehead pressed to the fabric, counting his own breaths. They were shallow, trembling, but they were his. The water hadn't taken him. The road hadn't kept him. When his eyes finally fluttered open, the passenger seat was empty. The lake outside the glass had vanished. There was only the gray, static light of a pre-dawn sky bleeding through a heavy canopy of unfamiliar trees. He unbuckled his seatbelt with a stiff, uncooperative hand. The latch clicked—a sharp, plastic snap that felt entirely too loud in the stillness—and he rolled sideways out of the broken door frame, falling onto the damp gravel of a roadside ditch. He stayed there for a long time, his cheek pressed against the wet stones, waiting for the world to stop spinning. His bones ached with the memory of the impact. When he finally forced himself onto his hands and knees, he looked back at the wreckage. The car was crumpled like a piece of discarded scrap paper, the front bumper wrapped entirely around a concrete mile marker. It was an absolute monument to his own carelessness. He had fallen asleep at the wheel of his own life, and this was the bill. He stood up, shaking, and looked around. The asphalt of Route one oh nine was gone. In its place was a narrow, cracked asphalt road that ran straight into the mouth of a quiet, monochrome town sleeping under a blanket of low, heavy fog. There were no streetlights here. No neon signs. Just the silhouettes of weathered wood frames and rusted tin roofs. With nowhere else to go, he began to walk, dragging his left leg slightly. The gravel crunched rhythmically beneath his boots, the only sound echoing through the empty streets. The town felt suspended in time, a place built out of gray cedar and salt air. He didn't see a single soul. No faces in the windows. No cars in the driveways. Just the hollow, echoing silence of a place that had learned to exist without anyone in it. The first month was not about healing. It was about calluses.