“What was our exit number?” He’s gripping the steering wheel loosely, if at all. His hands skim the sweaty wheel cover like rockets around a planet, friction just barely holding. The car drifts like it didn’t care.

“Sixteen.” She has her skirt pulled up just over her knees so she can pick at a scab. Her knee starts bleeding a little, but it doesn’t run. She pushes her thumb down on it, covering it up completely. She takes it off and looks to see if any blood has come off, then holds her thumb up at arm’s length. She squints as her thumb eclipses the moon.

They’re somewhere in the mountains, sliding up and down like clouds. The radio scratches from somewhere deep inside the dash. Music might be playing. Or a commercial. Or talk radio. Something. It’s hard to tell, but neither of them make a move to switch it off.

It’s dusk as they’re driving, and getting darker. He flicks on the headlights, and the trees back off the road are barely lit up, and only for a moment they come into view, then disappear. She watches out the side window. They look like spider’s legs, she thinks.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You said something about spiders.”

“I thought I’d thought it,” she mumbles and turn back to the window.

He sighs and turned back to driving. He wonders where the other cars are.

The car moves like a ship. He flicks on the brights and settles back in the seat. He’s not watching the road so much as he’s watching the side of the road. Occasionally he sees two pinpoints of light and a blur of motion and the deer moves away from the road. More often than that, he’ll see a body lying on the shoulder. Sometimes fresh, sometimes a week or more. He counts under his breath how long it takes to get past them from the time he first spots them. One buffalo, two buffalo, three buffalo-

“Sixteen?”

“Hmm?”

“Our exit. Right? Sixteen?”

“Yeah. Quit asking me.”

“I just don’t want to miss it, is all.”

“Fine. Quit asking.” She turnes back to gazing out the passenger window vacantly.

He leanes forward to spin the radio tuner. It settles on an evangelical program. The man inside the dash somewhere is saying something about will. Either man’s will or God’s will. He couldn’t quite hear. It just felt better to have a voice in the car with him.

Beyond the shoulder and beyond the trees there are houses. He can tell because sometimes the lights are on, cutting pale orange rectangles out of the dark. Every once in a while there is a house on a hill above the treeline, close enough to the highway that they stand out against the sky. They have larger windows with all the lights on but no curtains. He turns his head to follow them as they pass, trying to see inside. When he sees people inside, they never move. They’re always standing still, like mannequins, or a single frame of a movie, stuck getting ready to perform one action for the rest of eternity.

He turns back to the road, then to her. The man inside the dash is praying. He can tell because there are long pauses between sentences.

He wants to say something. Wants to take what he’d been thinking about and just say it, get it out there. Wants to ask her the question he’s been wanting to ask her. He’s thinking about how there’s a split second in your life where you really do have a choice in what’s going to happen, a single moment in which what you do say actually does matter, and it does change things. How just the act of saying it changes everything. It changes everything about the future. Everything about the world.

A sign drifts by. Exit sixteen, next right. He clicks on the turnsignal. “Now what?”