This is not Middle Earth. This is not Ancient Greece or the emerald cliffs of Ireland. This is not Heaven or Halloweentown or even Ghostbusters’ New York. This is truck stops and chain malls.
There are no dragons, only smoke stacks, belching the sky into bronze-y steel and killing us with clouds and cancer. There are monsters, yes, but like religion, they reflect us, are shaped by us, crush and squeeze themselves into the lifeless, concrete corners we force them into.
Like religion, they survive, and like our gods, they are as vengeful as the ones who created them. Like religion, they vanish when we are not looking, for they have no object permanence or simply care not to. Like religion, they are hungry. Viscerally, violently hungry, the kind of hunger to run a stoplight and crush a child below your chunky black tires for.
But none are as hungry as the one called Rubberneck.
Think of a highway, of neon lane markers, of lampposts, of cork walls. They are the clones of interstate travel – identical, expected, rarely deviant in any noticeable way. Much like our days, they repeat and cycle without us every really noticing. They are strong and stable, bland and unflinchingly trustworthy, and because of this, they are as monotonous as they are boring.
If you’ve ever found yourself in a car on a long road trip, it’s more than likely you’ve turned your attention to your phone or a book, or chosen to lose yourself in the colorful tunes of a song or the limitless world of sleep, unless of course, you are that sorry sucker stuck behind the wheel. But even the most distracted passenger will turn gaze out the window if caught in their peripheral is any shape unnatural to this landscape. Amorphous like plumes of fire vomiting from a overturned vehicle, jagged like the bones a deer, colors and figures dancing for your attention like ballerinas on a sleek, simple stage.
We turn our attention for the same reason we seek aliens on the barren surface of the moon. Emptiness desires fullness, hunger desires food, and we desire entertainment in our world without fantasy.
In this empty space between road markers and lane dividers is where you can find the one called Rubberneck.
It swathes itself in pungent purples and mauves. Just seeing it against the bleached beltway grayscape is like stepping into Oz, seeing color and knowing magic for the very first time. It stands out not only in color, but in shape – taller than a human but thicker than a lamppost.
It’s collar bulges like a football, so top-heavy that one might mistake it for a miniature water tower if not for the oily, pitted skin stretching itself into a knotted spiral below what must, by process of elimination, be considered a head.
And then, of course, there are the eyes.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, twinkling arythmically like the scales of a coiled snake. Crowding for space on that twisted neck, they bulge, bloodshot and dry, barely enough room to blink with eyelids caught under other crusty eyelids vying for the tensile flexibility to moisten themselves. The eyes of drivers who looked for one second too long at those burning, purple robes, made eye contact with that terrible, twisting neck and were trapped by empathy, by horror, and most of all, by curiosity, as they caught the break pedal just a moment too late and surged with all the deadly force of a missile into the lanes just adjacent.
Lanes full of cars, full of families, full of bored, drowsy faces, boredom broken one final time by shattered glass and bursting airbags.
People blame the fire. It’s expected, and it makes sense. It is our only tool against the dissonance required for such a creature as Rubberneck to be real. It is our only tool to explain why the corpses of these distracted drivers come away with bloody pits where a pair of eyes should be. It is the only thing that could have melted them away, the heat of an engine as it explodes on the metal skewer of another bumper.
Those who have seen Rubberneck know where they have gone.
But most of these people are eyeless themselves.
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(wip, I might come back to this later).