Lincoln Rhodes (the_long_road) wrote in forgotten_past, @ 2011-06-14 15:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | highways |
Highway song you sing it on and on
Who: Highways
Where: Middle America
When: 1920s
Rating/Warnings: None
He's growing fast. Too fast and he's a clumsy thing as he tries to get used to gangly limbs and new found heights. The palms of his hands are forever scrapped as are his knees and he feels especially sheepish about that as the woman that just patched up his pants had warned him to be careful. He promised he would and he had tried but his feet were too big like the rest of him and he tripped constantly.
No one would mistake the clumsy, dust covered and absent minded boy-nearly-man for what he really was. They would have laughed out right to learn that the tall migrant was a god. A deity they had made and started praising the moment they had put their feet on the ground and called it a trail.
He was evolving now. Becoming something he wasn't quite sure. He wasn't scared so much as he was excited. Bigger was better wasn't it? And they liked it didn't they? The smoothed paved over trail that was free of rocks and bumps and had they seen it? The aut-OH-mo-BILE that flew by on it?
He chattered on ceaselessly about it. To anyone who would listen but mostly to the people he was lucky enough to find on the road. He walked right up to them bold as brass and started talking as if they'd been friendly all their lives."
"...stretches from New York all the way to San Francisco! From one end of the country to another. You can dip your feet in the Atlantic and ride all the way to the Pacific and dip them in there too." Highways kept his hands in his pockets having been warned of his wild gesticulations by his newest (and perhaps unlucky) walking companion.
There was no answer from the old man. No doubt he was too busy trying to keep one foot in front of the other. He was a frail thing this traveler who didn't so much as walk as hobble. When he did speak he had a voice that sounded like a door on rusty hinges. There was something about his skin too nearly alabaster white and stretched over too taught and too thin over knobby bones.
His silence didn't bother Highways and he took as a cue for him to continue.
"And they're calling it the Lincoln Highway. I like the name so much I took it for myself. Lincoln that is. Has a nice ring to it don't you think?"
Silence. Safe for the wheezing of breath as the man deciding he had enough sat on a large stone a few feet from the road. Lincoln flopped over beside the stone.
"You talk too much." Came the rasp.
Lincoln grinned. "Shucks, mister. I know but I can't seem to help myself."
"Not used to it." A grunt.
"Why not?"
"People talking to you?"
"Yes."
"Why's that?"
"My people only have one thing to say to me."
Puzzled Lincoln stays quiet. Talkative he was but he knew enough to be aware when someone else had something to say.
"Not today." The man laughs and it sounds like nails being dragged across glass. He grins and there's a flash of black gums and a strangely pink tongue. "What else would they say to me?"
There's a curious feeling tickling Lincoln in the back of his skull. One that he recognizes and he feels stupid for not realizing what he'd been walking with this entire time.
"Don't worry, youngling. You're new and I'm old and today, today I answer to myself."
Lincoln doesn't follow when the forgotten death god gets up and continues on his way.