The faded blue pickup truck had been sitting on the shoulder of the highway for over a week. It sat on a stretch of road sided only by forest for miles in either direction. And while the truck certainly wasn't showroom fresh, neither was it a rust bucket that someone would want to simply walk away from.
All of which had me wondering about the owner of the truck. Had be been accosted after his truck had broken down? Had he stopped to respond to the call of nature and been skewered by the antlers of a deer? Had we wandered into the woods and gotten lost?
On one of my several trips past the truck I took the time to look into the forest. The trees grew so closely together that the shadow of one merged with the shadows of a dozen others in the slanting afternoon sun. Though I was admittedly driving by at a pretty good clip, it seemed a person wouldn't have to go more than twenty paces deep before one section of forest looked just like any other.
Was the pickup truck's owner in those trees even now hollering for help with no one able to hear? Or had something loosed itself from those many shadows and taken the owner off to a nightmare world he had never dreamed existed.
At that last thought the forest took on a decidedly unfriendly feel. I pushed the accelerator closer to the floorboard.
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