Traveller

This story was published as a short short at Fiction at Work on June 16th 2010.

Traveller

An unknown foreigner (for I am foreign wherever I go), a twenty-two year old man (if I am that yet), died (for I am that already) at ten o’clock on the night of November the twenty-second while reading Cortazar against a lamppost which a car, derailed by the fog, smashed into at one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, passing first through his body like butter before hitting the stale, rock-hard bread of his illuminated support. How well this would all fit in with Oliveira’s wonderful conception of the absurd, and mine as well, that I could sit here looking for a blank page in a near full notebook to write about my own death. For I am dead; my epitaph is written. So I wonder why I hitch all through this countryside, and others, looking for beauty, recognising it in everything from the worm returning from its concrete exile to the sewer grate I have used as a urinal, and all those green fields, hills, and trees, each resonating with a praiseworthy internal aesthetic I cannot find in myself. Is that why I keep traveling? Because I only find ugliness within, and I hope and I pray that the more I ravenously devour of this external wondrousness the better it might hold back my dismay? For I am dead, it is true, and rotting away; this shell is my mausoleum, tombstone, and grave. I will go to sleep beneath that bus shelter across the street and wake up tomorrow knowing I died today and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to start again.