He had to get to New Jersey, that was for sure. He was about halfway now, somewhere in the middle of Minnesota, he speculated. He remembered a road sign, how impersonally it had welcomed him. Flat metal with flat letters. The cab of the truck bounced on the cracks in the hot road. On his wrist was a green Casio digital watch. He looked at it and it blinked the time at him: 10:32. He blanched. He recovered himself once he realized that he had accidentally pressed the tiny button that switched it to and from a twenty-four hour clock. He pushed the tiny button again. The time blinked: 22:32. He liked to use a twenty-four hour clock.

The road arced him to the left. Four-hundred miles of straight-away had dampened the memory of how it felt to be pushed to one side of a seat by a curve. Next to him in the driver’s seat sat a man who was caught unaware by the turn and made choppy cuts out of the bend. The bend ended and the truck settled back like a sloppy spring. In the middle of the road there was an elk. Only three words had been spoken between him and the man who sat in the driver’s seat. The words were: “Where ya headed?” He hadn’t replied. He had to get to New Jersey. His name was Noran, but he didn’t tell the driver. Reflexively, he never told strangers his name. They always said, “Norman,” or, “Noman.” “ran,” he would say back. They then usually said nothing or looked elsewhere. Another glance at his watch: 10:35. He blanched again, and again recalled the tiny button. For a moment he pondered the failure of such tiny buttons on Casio watches, they sure did a poor job of keeping out of the way.

The elk was still in the road when the truck met it. It wasn’t a glancing blow, nor did the elk really make an effort to save itself. A smarter elk would have at least saved its head and lost the torso. There the elk stood, planted in the road with a glassy look in its eyes like it had lost contact with the world outside. The truck driver only slammed the brake once he had crunched the elk good and well. Its elk body bent over the hood and cracked the windscreen. The driver cursed and then quickly went silent. Noran seemed unaffected by the force and remained upright in the cabin. The meeting of elk and truck seemed to hand around in time, like a cloud on a lake. Noran watched the patterns that grew from one point on the windscreen. Wonderful designs. A dung beetle with it’s legs folded around a fresh roll. He saw the wind really try to uproot a Douglas Fir in a storm. Cloud patterns appeared in the windshield: simple spotted cumuli, those speckled altocumulus spread all over, the crescendo of a bright red sky from a dusty, setting sun. He also saw two figures sat in the cabin of a truck, one drooped with its head on its chest, shaking it carelessly like it was trying to get free of its neck. The other, stretched a grin over its face. When it was alive, the elk had five eyes. When it was dead, the elk still had all five. It hadn’t lost one of them, even when a truck had squeezed it good.

Noran opened the door to the truck. The warmer air came in to meet the cold air in the cabin. He took a long look at the bright blue sand, little blue cones of eddies sometimes took the looser top grains up. The heat hummed along all of his legs. He stepped out onto the sand and winced. Shoes would have been useful here, but he didn’t let his grin drop. It wasn’t a good time to be outside, all three suns were at high-noon. Seeing that made him think of his watch, and he chanced another glance: 10:45. He blanched, but left the tiny button alone. Behind him the man in the truck had let out a groan, his head still hanging loose. Noran looked at his watch and realized he was hungry. The man, Noran guessed, was forty-five. There was some slogan on the dusty gray hat clamped to his thinning head. Noran had not bothered to read it. Other than a thick gold ring embedded with turquoise stars, the man wasn’t worth the effort of looking at. In the backdrop of a desert, he would be overlooked. Dragging him by the ankle, his hat cap kicking up blue swirls of sand, Noran put him in the backdrop of the desert. The man groaned, propped against a pink cactus. Noran turned to the elk. He was hungry. He had to get to New Jersey, that was for sure.