Jaybird and the Haulin' Turtle | The Long Drive
3Jaybird never asked how long he’d been driving. Time had a funny way of folding in on itself, so the days and nights bled together beneath the violet sheen of his hatchback’s paint. He kept a slab of meat on the passenger-side floor, wrapped in crinkling plastic that rattled with every pothole. That meat—cold, mysterious, and somehow pulsing with a life of its own—was the only thing that tethered him to the world he’d lost.
The highway stretched out like a cracked spine, each vertebra a ruined exit or collapsed overpass. Jaybird’s tires hummed a steady hymn to endeurance, but every now and then a new obstacle would rise from the asphalt. He’d slam on the brakes at the sight of a jagged boulder the size of a small car, the kind that seemed to appear out of nowhere. He learned the hard way that clipping one could tear through more than rubber; it could rip open the seams of reality.
He ate sparingly, stealing nibbles of jerky or scavenged protein bars when the meat on the floor seemed to mock his hunger. Sometimes he’d stare at it through the windshield, as though the world beyond the glass were a hallucination he’d conjured to justify his endless mileage. The meat felt like a promise—one he neither understood nor trusted—but without it, the hatchback wouldn’t idle, the engine wouldn’t purr, and Jaybird might finally let himself stop.
It was on a morning that smelled of rust and wild thyme when he saw them first: shapes hopping at the horizon, growing larger with every mile. He pulled off onto a cracked exit ramp and killed the engine, his breath shallow. The rabbits came into focus.
Giant, hollow-eyed creatures with fur that glimmered like tarnished silver.
When they thudded onto the asphalt, the world shivered. Jaybird waited for a moment, willing the hatchback to stay still, wondering if the meat would lonely whisper its secrets in his ear.
He didn’t stay to find out. Slamming the door, he grabbed his weathered backpack and circled to the passenger side long enough to press a hand against the plastic-wrapped slab. The chill of it sent a pulse up his arm. Then he leapt back behind the wheel, slamming it into drive. The hatchback shot forward, weaving through the bunnies as they lunged—teeth chattering a warning he didn’t wait to decipher.
In the rearview mirror, a monstrous silhouette rose on the cracked pavement, too tall for any rabbit. Jaybird’s heart hammered against his ribs. He hit the accelerator and felt the engine surge as though it had been waiting for this moment. The road ahead vanished into dust and ash, but he kept the meat close, guiding him through a landscape that refused to end.