Madison tried to get small against the hard vinyl of the door, wishing she hadn’t accepted this particular ride—folks stopped with enough regularity that she could’ve perhaps been picky. The cold, cold world had her in an accepting way. It was the height of winter, and the sun didn’t stay in the sky long those days. Hitchhiking in the sunny cold was hard enough, risking it after nightfall was a tremendously bad idea.
But this ride! The driver was in skimpy red shorts that slipped way up his thigh. His immense legs looked like weisswurst sausage that had spilled from its casing: pale and lumpy and speckled with discolorations. Above his right knee was a spiderweb splash of icy blue, varicose veins. They made Madison think of her mother in her night gown, hem held up to her hip to reveal her thigh, while flashing around an old snapshot with her other hand while saying, “You’re poison. Look how I used to look, and just look at me now.”
Her mother had changed physically after giving birth. There was no denying that, but as far as Madison could tell, a child never asked to be born.
“You’re poison.” Her mother’s words, so hurtful, so regularly uttered. Back then, her mother hadn’t been nearly as big as this man next to her in the tiny cab of the Ford F-100, but that was a long time ago. Who knew what had happened to her mother since?
That truck cab smelled like cough drops and leakproof rubber. The heat ran at a trickle from the windshield defroster vent. Twice already the driver had pulled over to catch his breath, hand clutching between his disproportionate, though still large, breasts.
“Don’t get old,” he’d said.
“Don’t get fat,” he’d said.
Madison figured if, on a weekly basis, she had to walk even a quarter as much as she had since 6:02 AM that morning when the cops arrived to expel her from her apartment, she’d never, ever get fat. Old though, only way to keep from doing that was to die.
The man pulled over to the side of the two-lane highway for a third time. It had suddenly become dark outside. Madison had been on the road twelve hours already. He put a hand to his chest and wheezed.
“I’d…be…let…ting…you…out…next…corner…any…way,” he said.
Madison understood. She pulled the handle and swung the door. “You’ll be okay?” There was a sodium-vapor light on a steely grey pole that shined yellowly down into the truck, making the man’s tears stand out as they built around his glassy eyes.
“Letting…the heat…out,” he said.
Madison ejected herself from the truck and started walking up the shoulder. The dusty snow in her wake was marred by proof of her footfalls and dark spots of splashed slush from the hours the temperature had climbed above freezing in the afternoon. She guessed if she touched those spots, they’d be hard as stones now. If she stepped into them, her feet might take a swift and painful flight out from beneath her.
The man eventually pulled on by her, heading for the stoplight. She watched, thinking of that meaty hand between those meaty breasts. “Like Mom’s heart,” she said and then bundled tighter into herself.
As a girl, she hadn’t known parents shouldn’t say those awful things to their kids. She didn’t understand that people made choices and actions resulted in children, and that it was not children willing themselves on parents. She did not realize what her mother had blamed her for was not her fault.
Not like now. Now she understood the world, or rather, understood that if her parents were punished by her existence that they’d asked for it. And now, it was as if she was going to give them a little extra.
The world had been against her entire generation. TV and movies had flashed a shiny, shiny coin and damned if she and so many others weren’t compelled, undeniably so, to chase after it. Like most, she got to California and found the work didn’t pay much and when it did pay, it disappeared. Capitalism was about having money to start. People often talked about the diamonds in the rough, those who made it huge, despite the odds. Madison had seen them as motivation, hadn’t realized all the sacrifices and self-loathing one had to endure to rise to the highest peaks.
And then she skipped a waitressing shift to audition for a film starring Raquel Welch. The diner fired her and two weeks later, they put her out of a crummy old apartment that would likely sit vacant for weeks. She’d heard there were enough vacant homes and apartments to house the world’s homeless population ten times over. It sounded so likely that it almost had to be true. She’d pleaded about her lost job and asked the landlord for grace, speaking to the superintendent as proxy. She didn’t know who the landlord was, but by the expression the superintendent wore, she should’ve known to save her breath. The very, very official eviction sticker had gone up on her door a week prior and she tried every avenue she could think of to find somewhere else to go.
In the end, there were only two options: homeless or home.
Home was a four-letter word if ever there was one.
Five hundred miles, and if she’d have gotten the right rides, she could’ve done it in no time, while the sun was still out even. The first ride took her nine miles. Thirty-nine minutes later, the second ride took her twelve more. The moment she swung open the shotgun door on a beat-up Thunderbird, the driver had called out “What do I get if I give you a ride?” She made some noise and turned to close the door, but he’d been leaning and grabbed her by the wrist and said, “I was only kidding. What, you girls today can’t take a joke?” She was cold and sad and almost defeated, so she got in. The man offered to buy her a drink at Danny’s, a club-like restaurant in the next town. “They have a great lunch menu,” he’d said. She thanked him and got out at the next set of lights, forever heading northeast, as if running from the sun like a frozen cowboy in a spaghetti western.
She wore a blue parka and blue wool slacks. She didn’t own boots, not the kind that prevented snowmelt from turning feet into popsicles—she’d sold the stylish boots, and her clothes, and her little Zenith TV and her glass jewelry, and the watch a great aunt had bought her for Christmas one year. She sold everything she could, short of selling herself: whore or housewife, she wanted neither.
In the end, herself was a particular commodity she was going to sacrifice in order to put a roof over her head. Her body and her mind.
Give in to the horrid woman who’d made her, who’d called her poison because of the physical changes after giving birth, because of having to raise a normal girl when she no longer felt normal herself.
The next driver was a woman, Madison’s first of the day. She’d taken her a good ways, past Las Vegas and well past the Utah border, had bought her a coffee and a donut. Had offered her cigarettes. Had told stories of her own past standing on the road with her thumb out. “I hope nobody’s trying anything on ya,” she’d said, and in a way that suggested maybe she understood that worry a little too well. “It’s getting dark early, you can crash at my place, if you like. Might not be so smart to be out at night.”
The offer was tempting, but it felt like putting the soiled and scummy bandage back on a weepy wound after she’d gone to the trouble of ripping it off. She’d made up her mind: home was where she had to be and there was no stopping until she got there. The next ride came quickly and took her three miles out of town and left her by a side road. The driver had said he thought she might’ve been his daughter and, “Sorry for leaving you out like this,” when the traffic was flying by the mucky shoulder and most who would stop were simply going too fast to do so.
More than an hour passed, dozens of vehicles, and eventually, there came the man in the F-100. All that flesh didn’t seem so distasteful until she warmed up right next to it. Now, she was twelve miles from home and only six miles from the town of Duncan.
Duncan. She’d gone there as a kid. They’d had a theater and the incredible Sears store on the north end of town. Her grandmother had taken her sometimes, when she was very small, but mostly she pilfered money and walked, once she was old enough to do so. Most days as a teenager, someone would pick her up, back then she hadn’t even needed to stick a thumb out. People got to know her as a wild child, though harmless. It was as if they all pitied her for who she belonged to. Pitied her ilk.
Things weren’t nearly so easy as an adult.
A vehicle rumbled up like the very distant roar of a lion and she turned to face it. She painted a hopeful, approachable expression on her face and stuck out her arm, popped her thumb from her fist. It was a sedan, and it was slowing.
“Hey, there,” a middle-aged man said, leaning across the vast, fuzzy bench of the center seat. The car was a Buick, one from the late ‘sixties she guessed. “Headed to Duncan?”
Madison fell into the car. “No. Thurman.”
“Tonight?” the man said, reaching for the panel to turn up the dash heater.
Madison hadn’t noticed, but she’d been shivering. She was damp, tired, and so close to getting this ordeal over with she almost welcomed her mother’s forthcoming words. The worst part of it was for later anyway; how long the pain would stretch was impossible to say just yet.
“Yes,” she said.
“No, not tonight. It’s too dark. There’s a donation hostel in Duncan, you know. Nice place. It’s attached to the nunnery, everybody gets their own room. I hear the nuns are excellent, perhaps you’ll want to talk to them anyway, get set on a true path?” The man nodded and smiled as he spoke. Really trying to sell it. “I’ll take you there.”
“No. It’s okay. I just want to get…” she trailed. Home. She hadn’t said it aloud yet, not to anyone.
“Hey, that’s fine, but if you don’t mind my saying, you look hungry and tired. My wife’s at home, she made a lasagna this afternoon. How about a rest and some lasagna?” The man patted his slightly rounded belly to give the story credibility. “How about it?”
“No, it’s okay. Please, take me as far as you’re going and—”
The man cut Madison off. “You know, this time of night, you’ll get better traffic if you shoot west and loop around. Probably get to Thurman right quick. Seems like a detour, but likely it’s worth it.”
“It’s okay. I’ll just keep going, someone will pick me up,” Madison said.
The man clucked his tongue. “What if I show you the detour? We can stop at Rosie’s and I will call my wife, tell her I’m late, and I’ll take you right around to Thurman?”
“I said I’ll be fine, okay?” Madison said.
The man chewed the inside of his cheek, but then nodded. They drove the following four minutes in silence. The man pulled over at the second stoplight in Duncan, only a few hundred feet away from the Sears. The other, busier east to west stoplight crossed here as well. Madison got out of the car and had to wait on a sidewalk for the light to switch and the word WALK to appear in yellowy lights.
That last man had been an odd one, though not in the usual odd man way. Why did he want to keep her from Thurman? No, not from Thurman, from taking this road to Thurman?
It took another ten minutes to get to the northern edge of town—they’d been expanding since she was last home, a mile of new, identical homes lined the highway where it had been only farmland before. She stood beneath a streetlight and shivered. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Time mounted and she peered into the darkness. If she left the light, she might have to walk the whole way home.
“Only six miles,” she said.
Six miles on the side of the road in the winter was about two hours of frozen time. Six miles in a car, no matter the time of year, was a much more inviting suggestion. She decided she’d stand there until she got too cold. If nobody came, then she’d start walking.
Not two more minutes passed before a police cruiser came. The cop lowered his window the way any driver would, but she didn’t touch the door handle. In the passenger’s seat was a sack lunch. In the middle seat was the officer’s sidearm.
“Hop in the back. I’ll take you around to Thurman,” the cop said.
“Around? It’s just up there.”
“Yeah, but…uh…road’s closed up there. Bad accident,” the cop said. She saw immediately that he was a terrible liar, and she couldn’t even see his expression clearly. He oozed dishonesty and untrustworthiness.
Madison turned to look down the highway and then to the sign that read:
THURMAN 8
HESSEL 24
Maybe if she were going right into Thurman she would’ve let all this oddity slide and taken a ride.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Get in the car and I’ll take you around to Thurman,” the cop said, tone suggesting he typically didn’t have to argue.
“No.”
“Listen, missy, there’s a big honking accident. Now do as you’re told.”
“Why are you trying to keep me from taking this road? Really, why?”
“Told you—”
Madison snapped. “You’re lying! Why?”
“Get in the back of the car and I’ll take you straight to—Hey!” the cop shouted as Madison began to walk.
To her surprise, he didn’t follow. Instead, he U-turned and headed back into Duncan.
To keep warm, she pulled her hood tight to her face and buried her arms up to her elbows in the opposing sleeves of her parka. Only her eyes and forehead confronted the elements bare. No lights cut the dark stretch, no vehicles rumbled nearby, not in front, not behind. The forest on either side of her thickened. The snow on the road was deeper, it hadn’t been plowed recently. Distantly, but not far enough, she heard the cry of an animal. Something big and awful. She shivered and kept her feet moving.
Voices seemed to echo through the woods then. Tree branches snapped on both sides as if footfalls were crunching closer, pushing nearer. She increased her pace. The voices began forming familiar sounds, but she couldn’t make them out. Snow whumped behind her. Someone was on the shoulder, following her.
She began to run. The cold, cold air stung her lungs. Ahead, she could just barely make out the gate posts of her family property. The forest obscured any light that might be coming through from the house or barn. Something brushed her shoulder, picking at the material of her parka. She jerked away. The voices were close now, trailing behind her. The footfalls were matching her speed, bettering her speed.
She broke into a sprint. The frozen air was harsh against her teeth as she drew great, raggedy breaths. The shuffle and movement around her built up a flurry of snow. The voices became clear, teasing.
“Madison.”
“Madison.”
“Madison.”
“Poison.”
“Madison.”
She pulled her arms free of her sleeves and reached for the gate, somehow knowing there’d be a chain and a padlock and those things behind her would catch her. Torment her.
“Madison!”
“Madison!”
Hands snatched at her jacket, at her thighs.
“Get away!” she screamed, pushing through the—thank god—unlocked gate.
Ahead, a dim red light shined, but from the barn rather than from the house.
“Madison!”
“Madison!”
“Poison!”
“Poison!”
Steamy breaths puffed around her, alongside the sparkling ruffled snow. Grabbing hands. Hissing voices. Madison started toward the front porch but veered away when she saw the degradation, the ruination of her childhood home. They’d once been a wealthy family. They’d once bred racehorses in the barn. But that was before Madison’s time.
“Madison!”
“Poison!”
Those little touches were everywhere, growing bolder and rougher, getting her in-strides and sending shivers into the few warm places she had left.
“Leave…me…alone!” she screamed as she ran to the barn’s man-door. She had to stop to shift a large hook and eye lock, but nothing came upon her from behind. Nothing touched her.
“Madison.”
“Madison.”
“Madison.”
“Poison.”
“Madison.”
The voices had become a sea of whispers on the otherwise silent night. Madison opened the door and stepped into the comparative warmth. The red light came from a massive heater hanging down from the rafters behind the high stall partitions. Madison wanted to be under that heater, to recalibrate and figure out what was happening. Find her mother.
The whispering ceased and Madison rounded the final partition. In the center of a vast open space was a ten-foot pig lying on her side. She looked at Madison.
“Hi, Mom,” Madison said.
Up from behind her came the others, a reversal of her mother, a reversal of that giant pig with a human face. These were her siblings, she supposed. They were all shorter than four feet, had perfectly round heads, and pig faces. Dozens of them. They ran to their mama’s array of teats that hung, stretched out and overwrought, from her flabby abdomen.
“Madison. Poison girl. Come back to see what you’ve done to me?”
Madison’s heart tumbled and spun. She stretched her arms wide and stepped to her mother. Blood was blood, no matter how much it made you hurt inside. She kissed her mother on the mouth and then let her lips play to the woman’s ear. “I never poisoned you, you did that to yourself. Snort snort.”
XX
*COLD ROAD HOME first appeared in Underworld Theater: 1972
Bio: In August 1984, Eddie Generous was born into a family born to shit the bed. He has a print-journalism diploma from a community college, which is important if he ever accepts one of the job offers to rewrite articles vomited out by AI technology. He was the first of his household to go to college—and first child to avoid institutionalization, thus far.
Currently, Eddie lives on the west coast of Canada with his wife and their three cats. He is the author of close to 40 standalone books, has edited 6 anthologies, and put together 19 issues of Unnerving Magazine. More than 100 of his short stories have seen print in anthologies or magazines. He created and operates Unnerving Books, a small press responsible for publishing 85 titles and counting. He enjoys getting stoned and dancing around his living room.
For more about Eddie Generous, visit jiffypopandhorror.com