The road she is driving on is a long-forgotten interstate now rerouted. The kind where you're spending more time avoiding potholes than paying attention to where you're going. She checks her phone for the 500th time. There is still no cell service. She opens the map app to find it still doesn't have a GPS signal. The frowny face emoji it displays momentarily infuriates her. The old-school plastic-covered map takes up the entire passenger seat. 'Thanks, Mom,' she says internally.
Last time she stopped to pee. She had held the map as she squatted against a telephone pole. The map had shown her somewhere in the middle of the Nebraska sandhills. But the map also showed this was a major highway, but the state of the road says otherwise.
The miles of empty grassland with scattered run-down shacks leave her feeling empty and alone. She had felt a similar feeling on Route 66, but this had none of the charms. She drives past a turnoff, a little more than a pair of dirt paths the right distance apart to drive down. It was one of a handful in the last hour. She hasn't seen any sign of a person in over an hour. She is growing worried as the gas gauge dips lower.
Her car impatiently dings to indicate the tank is empty. 'shit shit shit shit shit,' she thinks. She rolls down the windows on her beat-up yellow 1995 Ford Taurus. Her brown hair was flapping in the wind. She wrestles with it. Swerving as she drives down the road. She gets it up into a bun, takes a moment to get situated again, relaxes, and sits back. "Yep, this is how it ends, not with a bang but an empty tank of gas," she says to no one. Then taps on the outside door panel nervously.
Like a literal sign from a benevolent god, a glowing 2-story-tall sign that says Jim Gas came over the horizon. She breathes a sigh of relief as she pulls into the gas station. The little bell chimes as she drives over the drive-over bell. Brilliant chrome with bright reds and whites is everywhere. She guessed it was from the 40s. Everything looks to be meticulously maintained. She blinks; what she is seeing does not match the image of flickering fluorescent lights and rust covering everything. She has a tingling sensation up her spine. "I have seen this horror movie," she says to herself. A tall man in his mid-twenties wearing striped overalls but without a spot of grease on them walks up to her window. She puts on her smile.
"What can I help you with?" the young man says as she looks his face over. He looks kind and a little like an athlete; he looks at her expectantly, and not a hair on his head is out of place. He looks to be all muscle. But he looks like the gas station is oddly perfect and lacking the hardness and scars of hard work.
"Well, miss?" he asks.
'Shit, I was staring,' she chastises herself. "Gas, please. Fill it all the way," she says.
He nods and starts to fill her car. She watches him from the mirror. He turns and smiles at her., 'He even has all his teeth,' she muses.
"Anything else?" he says. "Cold drink?"
