Harry hitches a ride.

He walked for a long time down the road, with the asphalt sucking at his boots heels. He saw a garter snake stretched out flat on the burning tarmac and a highflying hawk. He played the game he always played when he woke from one of his fugue states. Where am? How did I get here? His only clue was a small red dot in the hollow of his left elbow, which he recognized as a needle scar. He had recently been injected with something, or had had something sucked out of him. His game was interrupted by a faint sound behind him. He stopped. After several hours of unceasing bee-drone, Harry’s ears were hungry for action. They focused on the distant hum, and Harry’s heart leapt gladly for it was a man-made noise: in fact, it was a car approaching; a 1994 bottle-green Mazda Miata convertible in need of a tune up-up to be exact. Harry knew these things before he could see the car; such was the acuity of his powers of observation and deduction. Before he had time to marvel at his skill, the car was there, barreling through the heat waves like a Titan rocket gone AWOL.



Harry raised his arm to flag the car down but it was already slowing before he got halfway there. It stopped beside him in a swirl of dust and the smell of hot oil. Harry looked up at the driver and the driver looked at him, and for a moment time stopped. It’s her, Harry thought confusedly, for alarm bells were ringing in his head, or maybe they were church bells or sleigh bells, and for a moment Harry thought he smelled lemons or laundry fresh from drying on the line on a windy spring day instead of hot oil. She took off her sunglasses and smiled at him, and Harry saw her eyes were the same bottle green as her car.

“Need a ride cowboy?’ she asked, and Harry heard the church again.

“Ummm, yeah,” he said over the echo of the bells. “Where are you going?” he said gesturing vaguely down the road. She punched the accelerator hard enough to snap Harry’s head back. “Do you always drive like this?” he asked, rubbing his neck.

“Not really”, she smiled. “Sometimes I drive fast.” They sat silent for a few minutes as the Miata howled up and down the small hills and dips in the road. Harry covertly studied her perfect profile, her golden hair, the muscles in her tanned and slender thigh as she worked the brake and the accelerator.

“What’s your name?” she asked at last.



“Harry, Harry Hero.” She smiled at him again, and again Harry half remembering that smile, that face.

“You look like a hero.” She said nothing more. After a minute or an hour, Harry said, “What’s your name?” and somehow knew the answer the answer before she said “Sophie.” He thought about his situation, and had just about decided to confess his loss of memory, when she said briskly, “Ah, here we are”.

To be continued...