Sparrow Hill Road

Wisconsin doesn't look kindly on the weeks that slip in between the death of cold and the birth of warmth; Persephone may have left her husband, but she isn't home yet, and this is one state that'll be damned before it lets anyone forget it.

I have never wanted to punch a highway in the face as badly as I do right now.

Every inch of ground on this planet is a palimpsest, scraped clean and overwritten a million times, leaving behind just as many ghosts.

Do you always talk in driving metaphors?" "I'm a hitchhiking ghost. It was this, or talk in Disney metaphors.

They’re all the ghostroads, and they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re all physical evidence of the scars mankind leaves on the world.

One in three hitchhikers on the North American road died long before anyone offered them a ride, and for the most part, we’re pretty friendly.

Styles change, music gets hard to listen to, and hemlines bounce up and down like kids on a trampoline, but hypocrisy is the one thing that never goes out of style.

There are times when I wish we weren’t all so good at forgetting that everything is connected to everything else. Because those are the times when people get hurt.

Snow White never learns not to eat the apple, and her spiritual sister in fruit-based stupidity, Persephone, does the same with her new husband’s pomegranate tree.

No one works the night shift in a diner for long without learning that the world is bigger, and bleaker, than they ever dreamed.

Sometimes, the dead aren’t the only casualties,

I drop to my knees, more tired than I should be. Exhaustion after death just isn’t fair.

EVERYONE IS BORN BASICALLY THE SAME WAY: bloody and screaming. We come out of our mothers, shriek with our first breath, and find ourselves lost in a world that we don’t understand. But we’re hungry for understanding, hungry for life, and so we learn. We grow. We wrap the world around our shoulders like a blanket or a coat, and we wear it proudly every day of our lives, for however long those lives may last. We are temporary creatures, and we know it—that’s why we fear the dark, after all, that’s why we build walls and light candles to keep it out.

Being dead is one of those things that really teaches you how to be glad to be alive.

The only thing you can do when the ending looms is roll down the windows, let the wind blow back your hair, and drive your hell-bent, hell-bound ass to where it needs to go. Everything ends. So suck it up and face it with a little dignity already.

There are a lot more than just two Americas. Every inch of ground on this planet is a palimpsest, scraped clean and overwritten a million times, leaving behind just as many ghosts.

Kyle-Kyle-Kyle,” she’s saying, almost like it’s a chant, a benediction meant to be spoken in the church formed by their bodies.

The ghostroads love him like they’ve never loved me—like they’ve never loved any hitcher. All that, and his car, too. Phantom riders get all the luck.