Sunbound

☀ Misery, Population: 1

C H A P T E R  1: Misery, Population: 1

☀     ☀     ☀

    "Good evening, folks. I'm tellin' ya', this is shapin' up to be one of the worst blizzards in Michigan history. It's the storm of the century headed straight down from Canada. Expect white-out conditions, bad roads, closures—"

    Skylar Glass reached out a vibrantly contused hand to turn off the radio of his 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle.

    He sat in the silence for a moment, listening. He did not what he was supposed to be listening to, or if he was supposed to hear anything at all, so he elected not to listen. He tuned out the world and focused on the white specks collecting on the windshield. They were hard to see in the inky blackness of the night, but the snowflakes gradually grew in size, coming down in thick, white tufts that would bury the Chevelle in less than an hour, he predicted.

    He stared through the windshield, passed the speckled February air and the white-laden field. There was a billboard a few miles ahead. The advertisement had been ripped off a long time ago. Now it just looked like a colossal, broken screen stretching up towards the sky. It decimated the moon, the unbarred window to an empty planet.

    Skylar ran one of his large, calloused hands over his stubble-lined jaw. He was nineteen, the age most people would consider to be on the verge of adulthood, but they did not know Skylar — if they did, they would know that he had been burdened with adulthood almost from the moment of his conception.

    He pulled down the visor, sparing a glance at his face in the mirror, and he wondered if he always looked that way. If he always had rigid, often-wounded cheekbones; the thin scar on the absolute slope of his nose; and lips no less striking for their delicacy, despite the bottom of the two almost always split open and held together by self-procured stitches. Often times, he did not recognize himself.

    He also wondered, as he took in the reflection of his face as a conglomerate, if he always looked that tired. Not the type of tired from waking up too early or getting a few hours less of sleep. He was the type of tired that cursed poets and writers. But even then, he was still handsome. He had a face that somehow managed to walk the line between introspective and impetuous. But his eyes were the real killer. His irises, like copper sunbursts, could dance lively with the gleam of audacious laughter, then become dual caverns of a hellish inferno at the drop of a dime.

    Skylar was a rugged, brooding rod of a man that smiled as often as planetary alignment occurred, but when he did, it was an experience. Skylar Glass, in himself, was something that had to be experienced. He was like capturing all of the changing phases of the moon. He was being in the middle of a meteor shower. He was the sunset; that drop of golden sun beneath the horizon of prepossessing scarlets, canaries and tangerines. And it was sad, really, that he would never think of himself that way no matter how many poets, and artists, and desire-stricken women told him so during a stop on one of his many long drives. He flicked the visor up.

    The silence began to eat him alive, nipping at his fair skin until he could no longer stand it. So, he turned the radio on.

    The slow voice of an anonymous, faceless disc jockey cut through the silence. "I know it's twenty-ten, but I'm gonna take it back to the sixties for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen..."

    A slow, hypnotic melody of various instruments flooded the Chevelle. There was not the faintest pause of realization in Skylar that recognized the song as This Guy's in Love with You by Herb Alpert.

    He was taken back to all the years his mother — who had been nothing for the past three years, save for a foundered skeleton in the bottom of a coffin somewhere in California — played that scratchy record. She would take off through the living room of their leaky, crooked trailer like a ballerina unhinged from her jewelry box. She spun and pranced around the living room in her underwear, her brunette tresses like a storm around her beautiful face. Skylar would never forget those nights when the light bill was passed due and the trailer was illuminated by dim candlelight; he would watch as the shadows transitioned across her solid, ivory skin as if she was the horizon line and the sun lived and died by her wayside.

    Skylar surged with a current of emotions he could not decipher nor differentiate. He wanted to cry, or laugh at the irony of it all, or run until he collapsed... Or maybe even fall asleep to the smooth voice lolling out of the speakers. With shaky hands, Skylar turned the volume up until it could not get any louder, and hauled his tall, muscle-dusted body out of the Chevelle. His legs felt like stilts as he walked to what he believed to be the middle of the snow-blanketed field of green and wheat and the occasional oak.

    He sat down on the spot, his legs folded in front of him and his frozen hands resting in his lap. He was speckled with snow in seconds, becoming nothing but a silhouette in the niveous night. A silhouette whose thinness was made up by the thickness of his coat; whose scarred knees peered out through frayed tears in the denim; and whose old sneakers soaked up the snow like rags.

    Beneath the breeze, he heard the echo of the song swimming out of the Chevelle. He listened carefully for anything else. He half expected to hear a siren somewhere, an idle conversation, or the sound of an oncoming vehicle's tires crushing stones into oblivion down the road. But he heard nothing. He did not know how to feel about that.

    The snow began to fall faster in pointed, diagonal cursors. Skylar just sat there, in the brunt of the blizzard, running his tongue along his lips every once in a while. It was not long before his bottom lip cracked and blood settled over the crevice. He tasted pennies.

    He looked on, passed the naked billboard, at the infinite stretch of highway on the other side of the field. Skylar thought, There should be an eighteen-wheeler, and then, as if the universe were playing some ungodly prank on him, the highway lit up with the high-beams of a tractor-trailer barrelling through the millions of white flakes dancing in the headlights.

    His non-consequential thoughts wandered back to his mother and every time she sold her "love" to transient trunk drivers, her head bobbing beneath their steering wheels, in exchange for being taken over state lines. When the horn of the truck blared over Herb's voice, Skylar wholeheartedly believed it was his mother tugging the chord. The belief was fleeting, though. She was dead, and freezing himself to near-death in the field he spent many-a-days of his childhood in waiting for her to come back was not going to change the state of her existence, or lack thereof.

    He looked back at that blank billboard and he wished there was something on it. Hell, an advertisement for Viagra would suffice — not that he ever needed. Just something, anything, to take his mind out of the place it was in now.

    He pulled his stiff bones up from the ground, feeling like a glacier; a six-foot-one mound of ice in the middle of the field.

    He padded back to the Chevelle — half-frozen, heavy and soaked. Reaching out a raw, red hand, he changed the radio station. Some upbeat pop song pumped out of the speakers. He grimaced, turning the volume down to a dull whisper.

    A moment later, the Chevelle roared to life. Its high-beams sliced through the field, and its taillights glowed like brilliant rubies in the current of white bleaching the world.

    Skylar did not know where he was going or when he would get there, but he did know one thing: He needed to get the fuck out of Michigan.