Roads Under Impossible Stars

The heater blew hot dust at Keely’s knees while frost silvered the lower corners of the windshield. Hollis kept one hand at twelve o’clock on the wheel and the other hovering near the temperature controls, as if the hatchback might misbehave out of embarrassment if she watched it closely enough.

“Pick something without handclaps,” she said.

Keely scrolled through the old road-trip playlist. “That removes most of the decade.”

“Good decade for clapping. Bad decade for water pumps.”

The temperature needle had climbed past the white slash Hollis had drawn on the gauge with correction fluid. The heater was helping pull warmth off the engine, which was why they were roasting inside a car that let the desert night in through every door seal. Behind them, two water jugs knocked together beside a folded blanket, a jack that Hollis trusted, and a spare tire she did not.

Keely chose a song with no handclaps. Hollis listened for six seconds, then turned it down until the drums became a pulse under the engine rattle.

The road ran pale through low scrub. Their headlights caught the reflective stakes one at a time and gave each back to the dark. Keely had printed a map because Hollis’s phone was out of storage and hers had been searching for service for an hour. The paper was already softened at the folds and striped with three routes in Keely’s different-colored pen.

“The overlook road should be after the cattle guard,” Keely said.

“Was after it.”

“It’s still on the county map.”

“So is the campground with the toilet on its side.”

“That was one time.”

“It was on its side the whole time.”

The joke reached the place where their old laughter should have met and stopped there. Hollis leaned toward the windshield. Keely folded the map along a line that had begun to tear.

At sixteen they had spent whole drives fighting over music and still arrived laughing. In the last three months, neither had used best friend where the other could hear it.

This was their last trip. Keely had used those words when she proposed it, then rushed to explain that she meant last before the move, not last forever. Hollis had said she understood. Since then Keely had built a calendar in her head: calls on Tuesdays, a visit every six weeks, the winter concert they had attended since they were sixteen. There were ways to keep a friendship if both people followed through. She had made a list.

The cattle guard jarred the hatchback hard enough to make the stale cheese crackers jump in the cup holder.

“There,” Keely said. A dirt entrance slipped past on the right.

Hollis checked the mirror. “Can’t turn here.”

“There’s room.”

“There’s a ditch. We’ll take the next wide patch and come back.”

“If we turn around now, we can be at the overlook by eleven forty-five. Stay twenty minutes, get the picture, then head back before the gauge—”

“I can see the gauge.”

Keely opened the crackers. “I know. I’m just saying the timing works.”

“You do keep saying that.”

The next wide patch was farther than either of them remembered. By the time Hollis swung the car across the empty road, the heater smelled faintly sweet. She shut off the fan.

“We should go back,” she said.

Keely heard herself answer too fast. “We came all this way.”

“And the car came all this way. That’s the part I’m trying not to push.”

Above the windshield, the sky had become crowded.

Keely first mistook it for the clean abundance of a place without streetlights. Then she saw that there were too many layers. Bright points hung behind dimmer ones and in front of them, as if distance had folded flat. One cluster repeated itself upside down near the horizon. Thin rivers of stars bent in opposite directions without crossing. Hollis coasted onto the gravel shoulder and stopped.

They got out. The cold found Keely’s damp shirt at once. The hatchback ticked and settled behind them.

“That’s not weather,” Keely said.

Hollis looked up, then at the road, then back up. “No.”

A white spark burned across the horizon, then climbed. It should have fallen. Instead it cut uphill through the impossible layers, dragging a green tail that split into three and joined again.

Keely wished backward. Not in words at first. She wanted the cattle guard before they missed the turn, the afternoon before this trip became a test, the month before Hollis found out from somebody else that Keely had applied for the job. She wanted the years when silence inside a car had meant there was nothing they needed to say.

Then the wish narrowed in panic: just go back.

The meteor opened soundlessly, white from end to end.

Keely lurched against her seat belt.

The heater blasted her knees. The song with no handclaps was playing louder. A whole cracker rested on her tongue, dry and square, though she had swallowed it beside the shoulder. Her phone lay on the map and read 11:38.

It had read 11:42 when they got out.

Hollis drove with one hand at twelve o’clock. “Every six weeks,” she said.

Keely choked on the cracker.

Hollis glanced over. “What?”

“Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know.” Hollis rubbed her thumb over the cracked wheel seam. “It was there. Just the words.”

Ahead, the dirt entrance appeared after the cattle guard. It had been a single track. Now it forked immediately, one branch climbing toward a ridge that had not been there four minutes ago.

Hollis braked. “Was that a fork?”

Keely looked behind them. Beneath the car, the road was as it had been: two narrow lanes, patched tar, white edge stripe. About one car length back, the stripe hooked into a broad curve they had never driven.

The dashboard clock had been dead since Hollis bought the car. Its display now held one green digit: 4.

Keely reached toward it.

“Don’t,” Hollis said.

“I wasn’t.”

The recessed button beside the display was meant to set minutes. Keely could just fit a fingernail into it. She pulled her hand back.

Hollis took the right branch because its washboarding was shallower. Keely marked their bearing on the map and watched the temperature needle. For the first minute, the track ran toward the old overlook. During the second it curved north, though the compass on Keely’s phone insisted the original road lay south of them. At the third, their headlights found a field of black stones. There had been pale sand there before.

“Turn around,” Keely said.

“When I have room.”

The gauge climbed over Hollis’s white mark. The track narrowed between stones large enough to split the oil pan. Keely looked at the green 4.

“Wait,” Hollis said. “I’m stopping.”

Keely pressed the recessed button.

The world pulled sideways through her inner ear.

She was back at the fork with both feet braced against the floor. The heater was on. The temperature needle sat below the white slash. Her phone said 11:38 again, although four minutes of fear remained sharp in her mind. The nausea did too, a slow rotation behind her eyes.

The clock showed 3.

Hollis swallowed. “Don’t take it.”

“Take what?”

“That’s all I’ve got.” Hollis tapped two fingers against her lips. “I heard myself say it, but I didn’t hear a voice. No picture. Nothing around it.”

The right branch was gone. The left ran straight for thirty yards, then divided around an abandoned service building standing where the black stones had been. Its two pump islands had no pumps. Moonlight shone through the office windows.

“We moved back four minutes,” Keely said. “Exactly. The car too. Look at the gauge.”

Hollis did. “You pressed that.”

“I needed to know if it was the same as before. The first time just happened.”

“And now?”

“Three. I think it means three left.”

Hollis shifted into neutral but kept her foot on the brake. “You think.”

“We know it undid the heat. Fuel too, probably. We can use that. We take a road, check it for four minutes, come back if it’s wrong.”

“The road changed.”

“Which is why we test it.”

Hollis looked at her. Not angry, Keely thought. Not yet. This could still be handled if Keely gave her the information in the right order.

“The building gives us shelter if the radiator goes,” Keely said. “Maybe a landline, tools, old water tank—”

“No one has put a landline in that place since before this car was born.”

But Hollis eased forward. The asphalt ended one hatchback-length beyond the tires, clean as if cut with a blade. Gravel began there and led toward the building.

They made it to the first pump island. Beyond it, the driveway dipped. Hollis stopped and opened her door to look down.

“Stay here,” she said.

“I can hold the light.”

“Then hold it at the ground.”

Keely followed. The beam showed tire tracks running into the dip and ending at a crust of sand. Hollis scraped it with her boot. The crust fell through. A drainage channel yawned underneath, wider than the tires.

“Back up,” Hollis said.

The gravel broke under her next step. She caught the door frame. Her shoulder struck it, and the open door slammed into the concrete island with a metal crack. Inside, one of the water jugs toppled. Its cap sheared against the jack, pouring water across the cargo floor.

Keely grabbed Hollis’s sleeve. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Let go. I need to see if the hinge—”

“I can undo it.”

Hollis went still. “Undo what?”

“The door. The water. Your shoulder. All of it. And then we don’t come this way.”

“Keely, wait. Let me finish.”

Keely pressed the button.

The seat caught her. Vertigo rose harder, cold and immediate, and for a second the windshield seemed to roll while the car stayed still.

The clock showed 2.

The water jug stood capped behind them. Hollis’s shoulder was unmarked. The driver’s door shut cleanly, without the pale crease left by the concrete.

“Let me finish,” Hollis said.

Keely closed her eyes.

“There’s another one, isn’t there?” Hollis asked.

“One phrase.”

“No picture. I don’t know what I was finishing.” She flexed the shoulder that had never struck anything. “What did you do?”

“The ground gave way. The door got bent. We lost one jug. You hit your shoulder.”

“So you pushed it.”

“It fixed everything.”

The service building was no longer ahead of them. It stood far off to the left, turned sideways, with no road reaching it. The new track curved right. The compass showed west; on the printed map, west was open desert for thirty miles.

Hollis examined the ground through the windshield. The same rectangle of old asphalt held the car. Beyond the hood, at almost exactly its length, the surface became reddish gravel.

“You don’t choose the road,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Keely’s stomach rolled again. She took a cracker for the salt and found the packet sealed. Even the tear had been taken back. She opened it along the same crooked seam.

They drove the rightward track at walking speed. Hollis called the surface as it came: packed gravel, loose gravel, shallow rut, stone shelf. Keely watched the clock and tried to repair the rest.

“About the six weeks,” she said. “I wasn’t making a rule. I meant I could come back more often if that felt—”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Not this time. Before.”

Hollis took her foot off the accelerator. “Before when?”

“Before the first reset. You said visits weren’t the same as telling you I applied. I was trying to explain that I didn’t tell you because nothing was certain, and you would have spent three months thinking I was already gone.”

“Did I say that?”

“You said I don’t get to make your waiting easier by leaving you out of it.”

The words had survived in Keely complete and exact. She had already tried one answer to them. She could do better now: start with agreement, remove the part about Hollis not answering messages, keep her own voice level.

“You were right,” she said. “But I wasn’t trying to leave you out. I was trying not to hand you a problem before I knew if it existed.”

“You know what I’m going to say?”

“No. I know what you said.”

“That isn’t better.”

The track climbed. Keely could see the useful next version of the exchange as branching roads: if Hollis said she was tired of being managed, Keely could explain the difference between planning and control; if she went quiet, Keely could give her room without letting silence harden. Four minutes was enough to get past the bad opening.

Ahead, a pale strip that looked like pavement descended over a low rise.

“That might join the highway,” Keely said.

Hollis stopped before the crest. “It doesn’t.”

“We can’t see from here.”

“I can see the outside edge slumping. And there’s no uphill cut for a road coming back out.”

“We could walk it.”

“Engine’s hot. I’m not leaving it idling.”

“Then shut it off. I’ll check.”

Hollis set the brake but did not move. “Did we have this argument already?”

“Not this one.”

“Did I tell you not to take a road?”

“You don’t remember that.”

“I have the words.”

Keely heard the accusation that might follow and began answering it before Hollis spoke. “I’m not making you repeat yourself. The ground changes. The only advantage we have is that I remember, so I have to compare what happened and—”

“You keep answering things I haven’t said.”

“Because I’m the only one with all of it.”

“You’re changing your answers.”

“I’m using what I know.”

“On me.” Hollis took her hand off the gearshift. “Don’t push it. Not for this.”

Keely’s finger was already in the recess. She told herself the road was unsafe, the gauge was high, the four-minute window nearly gone. Hollis had set the brake. Nothing was falling. Nothing was broken.

She pressed anyway.

For one long instant there were two directions of down. Keely clamped a hand over her mouth and tasted metal.

The clock showed 1.

Hollis stared through the windshield. “Not for this.”

Keely breathed through her nose.

“That’s the piece,” Hollis said. “Three words.”

The old asphalt beneath them remained. One car length ahead, it ended in a broad fan of stable gravel. Beyond that, a broken ribbon of pavement descended into a dry wash and stopped at a wall of pale dirt. The service building had vanished. Behind them, the track they had just climbed did not exist.

Hollis turned off the engine.

“No more driving until you tell me the rules,” she said.

Keely put both hands in her lap. The night continued its slow rotation around her, then steadied.

She told Hollis what she knew and only what she knew. The first return had come with the meteor and her wish. The others happened when she pressed the clock button. Each was four minutes. The number counted down. The car returned to its earlier position with its fuel, heat, contents, and damage restored. So did they, except Keely kept the erased time and the spinning in her head. Hollis kept one piece of speech.

“Words only,” Hollis said.

“You said no pictures.”

“I’m checking.”

“Words only, as far as I can tell.”

“And the road?”

“The patch under us stays. Past about a car length, it changes. Every time it’s moved farther off the route on the map. The compass tells us where this road points now, but not where the next one will be.”

Hollis considered the gravel fan, the wash, the hood. “One push left.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t push it without asking.”

Keely started to say that an emergency might not leave time. Hollis was looking at the dashboard, not at her.

“Okay,” Keely said.

They inventoried the car. Hollis did the work; Keely wrote it down. A little under half a tank. One full water jug and one three-quarters full. Four foil blankets, a flashlight at sixty percent, six cheese crackers, three fruit candies melted into a single striped brick, one spare hoodie, a weak jack, a doubtful tire. No signal. The radiator reservoir was low enough that Hollis would not restart until the engine cooled.

“Highway should be south,” Keely said.

“Map south.”

“The compass still says south.”

“The compass doesn’t say there’s a road there.”

They walked no farther than the gravel fan. Hollis crouched and pressed both palms to it, then swept the flashlight over the slope. Angular stones, no crust, no dark line of a drop beneath. Safe enough to move the car fully off the broken pavement if they did it now.

“You’re dizzy,” she said.

“I can steer ten feet.”

“I can steer my car. You watch the passenger side and don’t wave unless I’m near the edge.”

Hollis restarted. Keely got out and held the flashlight low. The hatchback crept onto the gravel, its tires crunching one careful quarter-turn at a time. Keely wanted to guide every inch. She made herself watch the passenger wheel and say only, “Clear,” when Hollis asked.

Once the car sat level, Hollis killed the engine again. Heat soaked upward. A wet hiss came from beneath the hood, followed by a white thread of steam. Coolant began to spit from the overflow line and darken the gravel.

The green 1 lit Keely’s hand as she reached for the clock.

Four minutes back would fill the reservoir, cool the engine, put them on the intact patch. It would also take away the inventory and Hollis’s condition. The road beyond the tires would change again. Keely could return with the right explanation ready. She could ask before touching the button and know which words had failed.

Hollis stood outside by the hood, waiting for Keely to pull the release. She did not say don’t.

Keely withdrew her finger.

“It’s venting,” she said.

“I hear it. Pop the hood, not the cap.”

Keely pulled the lever. Hollis raised the hood and set the prop, keeping her face away from the steam. They lined the cold front seats with two foil blankets, kept the other two for themselves, put on both layers they had, and moved the water out of the cargo area. Hollis tore the striped candy brick in half with the jack handle. It broke unevenly; she took the smaller piece.

“At first light,” Hollis said, “we check the hose. If it holds, we add water after it’s cold and try the gravel back to the highest point. Slowly. If the track is gone, we stay with the car and use the mirror to signal.”

“We should climb the ridge first and look for the highway.”

“After daylight. Together. Ten minutes out, ten back.”

Keely wrote that below the inventory.

The sky remained impossible, dense with overlapping distances. Without the engine, the silence made room for the small sounds of their camp: foil snapping, candy against teeth, coolant ticking onto stone.

Hollis sat sideways in the driver’s seat. “Every six weeks.”

Keely looked up.

“That one,” Hollis said. “What was around it?”

“I said I could visit every six weeks after I moved. You said visits weren’t the same as telling you I’d applied.”

“Anything else?”

Keely could have given her the whole erased exchange, including Hollis’s long silence and the exact place her voice had thinned. “You said I made the schedule before I asked whether you wanted one.”

Hollis pulled the foil blanket closer around her shoulders. “Sounds like me.”

“It does.”

They did not decide on Tuesdays or visits. Hollis took first watch because, she said, Keely looked as if the parked car were still moving. Keely objected once, then climbed into the passenger seat and set her phone alarm for two hours.

“Wake me if the steam gets worse,” she said.

“It’ll stop when it’s cold.”

“Then wake me if you get too cold.”

Hollis adjusted the flashlight so its beam rested across the gravel and the first broken edge of road. “Two hours. I’ll wake you.”

Keely put the unopened half of the crackers between them. The dashboard clock held at 1. Outside the windshield, the broken pavement ended at the wash. Hollis listened to the radiator, and Keely waited for the alarm.