Alice Zinklienfelt, 48, was a cosmotogist. Since she lived so close to the Village Lockesmith Beauty Salon, she would walk to work if the weather was nice. While walking she would pass the Trailways Bus Terminal which was part of the Amtrack Station for the little town of Ephrata, PA. Alice had stopped enjoying life ever since her husband, Corey, died of lung cancer, four months prior. The job was no longer satisfying. Suiicide had been an option but she knew her three daughter.would be terribly ashamed. So she followed a dream to go to The Pacfic Northwest. She bought her one-way train ticket and she refused to think about what she was lieaving behind.. Ther;are were adventures ahead and nothing but regrets in the past. A. smile played across her lips-- a smile that had been missing for a long time. As the train moved out of the station and maneuvered on to the main line, she waited to hear the clickty-clack of the train wheels on the track. Now she completly relaxed. Free. Free, I'm free at last.

He’d driven by the bus terminal many times on his commutes to various parts of New England. It seemed to always kindle his interest in the destinations of the passengers who transited the station. He thought to himself that the folks inside were much more interesting than he. They had purpose. They had plans. They were just for a moment, letting a small slice of life ferry them around as they sat serenely amongst the swirl-themed, fabric-lined interior of a steady diesel behemoth.

He had been a rider before of course, allowing himself to be intoxicated by the sleep-inducing loll of the bus. He would pretend to have important business or an exciting event planned when he reached Boston. The truth was that he was just a cog in the machinery of a small technology business and his work bored him quite literally to tears.

Today was different though. He pulled the Maxima into a parking spot at the depot. He wasn’t quite feeling anything. No apprehension about walking away from a job, a family, a house, his “future”. At 40, his “future” had arrived and it was not at all what he had wanted, at least it did not make him happy. He had feigned his way to this point, but his desire to be somewhere else, to be someone else, was finally too much. This was the crack in the china. This was his abyss. He either had to get past it or fall in, and he didn’t have a constitution that accepted despair.

He let the driver’s side window down an inch, climbed out of the car, locked it, and tossed the keys in through the window. He turned and walked into the bus station and never looked back.

If only. If only the muscular jump of the Spitfire from the cinder lay-by of the Point of Interest, out onto the long straight hot New Mexico highway. If only for a day, the canvas over the two-seater pulled back, to feel on the skin the chill of the open cockpit and in the lungs a nasal rush of piñon, of seeing rise up an unnerving dip or sudden turn, yet rocketing along unphased, fully alive in this vast desert surround.

But only. But only the quiet, repetitive ping of the vitals monitor, now and then erupting with an annoying buzz when my heartbeat slows. If only there were a chance of an open cockpit or a rush of piñon, of an unnerving dip or sudden turn -- but for the abject impossibility of it all, of this deadness from head on down, of their certainness that I will receive no reprieve from this absolute stillness.