there's always good news, even for you.

even for me.

The wheel was greasy in Spider's hands. Dice sat beside him, whistling through his teeth. Spider was conscious of the smudges on the windshield, the crack in the vinyl dash. A commercial for a debt consolidator came on the radio and his right hand flicked from the wheel to the radio button and back, replacing the urgent drone with a mindless country warble.

"Why don't you get an iPod?" Dice scratched his cheek, watching the straps on the tractor trailer ahead of them flap in the wind.

Spider considered. He checked the rear view mirror and signaled to pass, easing left and accelerating. There was a fresh pack of cigarettes in the pocket of the door, right next to his left knee. "Dunno. Pretty demanding keeping track of all that bullshit."

"Shit man, just load it up and put it on random. Anything is better than this crap." Dice's finger was circling his nostril, sneaking up on it.

Spider pulled even with the truck. Covenant Transport. They thundered along the bending concrete interstate, shimmering in the California heat, an eight lane river.

A blue REST AREA sign swung up from around the bend. "I gotta get some gas, Dice." He had forty-seven dollars in his pocket, and a couple quarters. Not counting his emergency twenty, but he never counted that.

He drifted left up the ramp, letting the hill slow the car, and aimed it under the canopy next to the pumps. They got out of the car together. Dice walked to the mens room, tried the door, then turned and went in the door to get the key. Spider went to the booth, gave the attendant a twenty, and pumped his gas. The truck parking area was nearly full, gray boxes ranked diagonally across the parking lot. A yellow and red sign promised more than it could deliver with glossy blue letters. A flatbed truck with giant fiberglass teddy bears painted purple, yellow and pink idled next to the curb, a tattooed forearm as big as a ham hanging from the window. Another rig had a ferris wheel folded like a dead spider, the elliptical cars stacked like oranges behind it. A carnival caravan.

Spider leaned against the quarter panel. The pump clicked next to him. A green Toyota with a hole in the muffler pulled up next to him, away from the pumps. The back seat had two car seats in it, each one with a grimy kid in it. The girl was younger, maybe two, Spider figured, and she was asleep, red creases in her fat little legs, a pink t-shirt with a picture of a cat in white glitter, a long drip of melted chocolate made a cigar for the cat. Her hair was wet with sweat. The boy was blonde, probably four, leaning forward in his seat and looking at Spider, his skinny arms sticking out of a green GI Joe shirt. The woman who was driving was leaning across the empty passenger's seat, cranking down the window. "Please mister."

The gas pump beside him clicked, $20.00 showing. "Please mister," she said again, "I'm sorry to bother you."

Spider looked over his shoulder. Between the advertisements taped to the window he could see Dice talking to the girl behind the register. She stood straight, he arms folded in front of her. Dice was laughing and fiddling with the peanuts, flashing his watch.

"I've never done this before, mister. My boyfriend kicked us out and I'm almost out of gas. I need to get to my mother's house in Pomona. I've been driving around here for almost an hour, mister." From behind her in the back seat, the boys blue eyes looked out at him through black and wet lashes. She was still leaning across the console and looking up at him. One of her teeth was chipped. Her fingernails showed pink crescents between the polish and the cuticle. "What are their names?" Spider asked her. She stared at him, blinked, just looking at him. "Your kids, what are their names?"

"Jason and Crystal."

"What is he, four?"

"What?"

"How old is he?"

"Oh. He just turned three last month."

"He's a big boy. You're a big boy, Jason." Jason looked at him round-eyed.

Spider reached in his pocket, took out the money that was folded there, peeled two dollars off and put them back in his pocket. He leaned over and handed her the other bills. "Get some gas and get them something to drink," he said. "Thank you. Thank you so much, mister." Spider heard Dice's steps on the concrete behind him. "And some fruit. They need something decent to eat." Her eyes went to the mirror as she pushed the money into her pocket. "I will, I will. Thank you so much." She twisted the shift on the steering column and pulled ahead into a parking space at the air pumps. Spider flipped the handle down and replace the nozzle in the pump, ignoring Dice's stare. He climbed back into the drivers seat and started the engine. Dice got in and slammed the door.

"What the hell was that?"

Spider shifted into reverse and angled the car to the ramp that led back to the highway. He pressed the button on the radio again. When the car got up to highway speed Dice said it again, "What the hell was that about?"

Spider told him.

"Jesus, you are an idiot. That was a total scam man, you know that? You just got scammed by a tweaker, do you know that?"

"It was my money, Dice."

"Not any more it isn't."

They drove in silence for a few miles. Spider had a coughing jag. He wished he'd had that cigarette.

"Jesus. A freak. A fucking tweak."

"What difference does that make, Dice?"

"Spider, I'm not so sure I should do this with you. I thought you were more reliable than this. More predictable. That's important."

"I'll do my part."

He kept driving. Up ahead in the lane to the left, a car-carrier jounced on the road, piled with shrink-wrapped luxury cars swaying in time with the dangling chains. Spider checked his mirror and signaled to pass as they went under a bridge. He pressed the accelerator and moved up next to the truck.

Spider reached down into the pocket in the door, fingering the box. The cough came up from his asshole, straight up his spine, twisting and crushing everything in his chest, pushing the air in his lungs out out out. He gripped the wheel. He could feel the blood squeezing out of his head, there was nothing to cough, nothing to spit, but the cough would not stop. His throat was turning inside out. He could feel the wheel between his hands, there were some shooting blue dots in front of the windshield and then nothing.

Whenever Spider had tried to imagine what it was like to be blind he had always thought of it in terms of blackness, in terms of the absence of color, the absence of form or movement, the way it was when he used to hide in the back of the closet under the stairs in the basement. Blindness meant total darkness to him. Darkness like black velvet wrapped a hundred times around your head in a cave two hundred feet below the surface of the earth, like being in a crack in the back of that cave and buried in tar.

This wasn't that kind of darkness. This was just his eyes turned off. He could hear the engine of the truck next to them, he could hear every bearing grinding. He could feel the ridges in the pedal under his foot. The wheel in his hands was shimmying ever so slightly, he was used to that, but conscious of it in an entirely new way. The car was drifting. Turn on the eyes, goddamn it. He was sucking air and hacking, something thick was in his throat, in a place it didn't belong. His ears hurt. He could feel the seat under him, behind him, pushing him forward, he knew he was drifting in his lane but he didn't know how much and he tried to correct for it, but not too much. Spider listened to the engine next to him to try to assess whether he was correcting for the drift. He had read that right handed people overcompensated to the left when blindfolded. Then as quickly as it had come, the cough finished itself. Spider blinked and saw that he was still next to the truck, in the far left of his lane. He blinked his eyes to clear the water from them. How long was that? A couple seconds. Dice was looking at him with a strange expression. "Are you ok, man?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, Dice. No problem." He coughed again and his throat burned. Spider was breathing very carefully.

They were Lexus' on the truck. He watched for the exit.

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Subject: Search of competitors

Good time of day.

You are disturbed by the charitable company Redd Cross of Slovenia.

We have the business offer for you.

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Thank you for attention Redd Cross of Slovenia!

Dear Sir/Ma,

Please permit me to write you irrespective of the fact we have not met before. I got your contact through network online hence I decided to write you. I would be very interested in offering you a part-time paying job in which you could earn up to $4,000 a month in extra income.

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JOB DESCRIPTION:
Work as my payment assistant in charge of collecting and processing the payments from the associates.You are to receive payment from associate, cash the payment, deduct 10% of every payment received as your commission and forward the balance according to my instructions.

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NAME, ADDRESS (NOT P.O BOX),CITY,COUNTRY, PHONE NUMBER,AGE,SEX,OCCUPATION AND EMAIL.

All replies should be sent to: DR Henry Martins Chung.
dr.henry_m@gcn.cx

Regards,

Sparky isn't going to live to see the summer this year. Everyone knows it, including him, but nobody is admitting it. He is wearing a rosary now, a wooden one. About a half hour after I got there one-armed Rosco came in with Sparky's mom. She's 96 years old, down to one leg. Between them they have six limbs. They brought a cuban guy who had beaten colon cancer and is now fighting lymph cancer with some success.

Rosco brought christmas presents for Sparky, but he barely had the strength to rip the wrapping paper. He has lost 23 pounds in the last three weeks. He was breaking down in the middle of the cuban guy's discourse on how you have to eat while you're getting radiation, when his phone rang. It's strange, the sovereignity we give to a phone call, the way we let it destroy the moment, any moment. Sparky's voice is thin and far away now. The cancer is eating him up inside.

I wish I would be able to remember Sparky had all his color working for him, when he had a dance in his step and flashing eyes; but now I'll have to balance that with the memory of his 96 year old mother massaging his legs, holding his hands, rubbing his head; telling him she wants him to come home, wants to hear him again in the hall, coming and going, like before.

Rosco brought him a robe, some socks, some sweatpants. He said, "you know, stuff you can use while you're here, until you come home." Rosco did time for Sparky a while back, he's that kind of friend. Rosco has had over 400 speeding tickets.

The cuban guy had a different type of cancer than Sparky, and he has licked it for now -- that's why Rosco brought him, to prove that you can win that fight. He was full of helpful advice. When Sparky took the phone call, the cuban guy kept talking, telling me how to do it. Sparky closed his phone and showed him the bags he wears on his legs full of amber liquid. When the guy asked Sparky if he could do crunches, he showed him the tubes in his chest and in his belly. The doctors have a protocol, they play their games. Sparky kisses his beads when his eyes get wet.

The football games came on the big TV and I said I had to go, and that I would see him next weekend.

I heard the Ravens lost.

(...thank you JAXA)

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"Brijit aggregates the world's best long-form content and abstracts it in 100 words or less."

Expectations are the cape of the matador.

Clarity is the horn of the bull.