The Breathing Roads, the Thirsty Roads

Have you ever used Google Earth to watch earth from above? Have you ever noticed the motorways, the avenues, the paths that cross the vast areas of the planet? They look like blood vessels in the erath's body; if you were using a drone to watch the traffic in real time, you would see the perpetual motion of the wheeled blood cells as they travel from one urban vital organ to the other. In some arteries the flow is dense, continuous, fast; in others it is indolent, scattered. And in others it is non-existent. Dead. The blood vessels have been emptied of their life-giving liquid and remain immobile and dusty, forgotten by gods and men.

The roads are alive. The roads breathe. They hark the screech of the wheels on the asphalt, on the soil and the gravel; they receive the pressure of trucks and rigs and are injured; pieces of their tissue are pulverized and scattered; they are drowned in water, buried in snow and sand, ripped apart by roots, pierced and dug by other breathing creatures; they decompose, subjugated to the overwhelming power of entropy.

And, like all living creatures, the roads are hungry. The roads are thirsty. They embrace the carrions of small animals that are dismembered by the wheeled vehicles and are forgotten, abandoned on their rough, frozen surface; they suck the dead, rotting flesh and gnaw their fragile bones. Asphalt and dirt absorb the spilled blood, grab as many pieces as they can, digest them in the tar and assimilate them, turn them into inorganic matter that will replenish their pieces that have been lost from the abuse they have suffered. And of course, when food is not offered to them, they seek it it themselves.

***

I've been a truck driver for twenty-two years. I've crossed all the States, as well as most of Central Europe - and I've seen some shit that would make one's hair stand on end. I preferred driving mostly at night; not only due to the traffic ban during day that was in effect in many countries, but mainly because I like night. More quietness, less traffic. And more danger, of course - night travelers are always in a hurry to cross the arteries, as if they are sensing a danger that is not obvious but hidden somewhere in the dark.

I've seen drivers losing control in front of me and fall into protective bars, trees, other vehicles; I've witnessed accidents in which the police and the ambulances hadn't even arrived and I've helped the trapped passengers who were screaming; I've slipped into pieces of flesh that were spread on the pavement and I've kept in my arms a girl who was dying with tears in her eyes; and I have noticed, out of the corner of my eye, the asphalt waving briefly like it was shuddering, like the excitement for the victims that were scattered on its surface have awakened it from its hibernation. Our mind is not made to comprehend everything, unless it belongs in the reality we have convinced ourselves that exists – and like everyone else, the first time I saw the road dashing to grab his meal, I tried to convince myself that the shock of the events had caused me hallucinations.

It was a mess: a truck had gone into the opposite direction and had crashed on three cars before it eventually end up in a ditch on the edge of the road. As it turned out, the driver of the truck had been asleep at the wheel. I saw him instantaneously, as the police officers were escorting him in the police car, dazed but alive: he was a tiny man, between 55 and 60, with bald head and glasses. He wasn't hurt, except a small slash in the forehead, which had turned his face into a mask of blood. His eyes were wide open by the shock, as his gaze was trying to embrace the totality of the carnage he had caused.

The road (a small, country road with two lanes and no median strip) was full of debris and shattered bodies. It happened to drive at that spot at about 2 a.m., when the police cars and the ambulances had already arrived - I stopped behind four other cars that were waiting for the road to be cleared, I turned off the engine and got off the truck to stretch my legs. I knew that it was futile to try and help, especially now that the emergency services were present, and that my involvement would do more harm than good; so I lit up a cigarette and stayed at the side of the road, watching the horror scenes unfolding in front of me. The driver in the car in front of me turned his head and looked at me. His face was pale and dim eyes. I nodded and he turned his head again in front, to the medics who were carrying a man cut in half to the ambulance.

The area was bathed in blue and red by the police cars' beacons, revealing flashes of dark lakes of blood and islands of flesh on the pavement. A woman was thrown out the widnshield of her silver Honda and was dragged up to the ditch on the edge of the road, leaving red, shiny streamers behind her. A young man was in a black Volvo that had been turned into an shapeless mass of scrap, with his hand hanging out of the window and his head turned to his back in an unnatural angle. The third car was stuck under the truck trailer and the only thing that seemed intact was its trunk. The medics had picked up most of the bodies, while six police officers were staring at the slaughterhouse, speaking low.

As I later heard, six people were killed in the crash and three more were seriously injured - the presence of so many cars at such a time on a deserted street was pretty weird, until it was announced that all three vehicles were returning home from a wedding. Much later, when I saw with my own eyes the bizarre nature of the road arteries, I realized that all the victims had been seduced. I don't know how all this led to the bloodbath I had watched, I don't know if, in some way, the lifeless matter that form their tar bodies managed to drug the driver of the truck or made him lose control; what I know though, having noticed various incidents, is that the roads are devious, motionless but dangerous, like carnivorous plants that trap their prey and then they consume it.

As I stood there, I got a glimpse of something moving to my right. I quickly turned at it, expecting to be a fox or a stray dog ​​that had smelled the blood and had come close, and for a few seconds I froze as my mind tried to manage what I was seeing.

On the edge of the road, where the asphalt met the soil, the ground was cracked. In the repeated flashes of the beacons, I noticed that the crack was growing slowly. A chopped hand was on the edge of the rift and it was wobbling by the slow shifting of the ground. I thought I heard a faint, hollow buzz as stones and soil were falling into the opening, followed by a screeching sound like grinding pebbles. I watched stunned the cracked asphalt and the bloody hand that was now dancing on the verge of the opening; after a while, with a subtle sound, the amputated member slid into the crack and I lost sight of it.

My first thought, of course, was that a small earthquake had occurred - or that the road, which was not in good condition anyway, had exceeded its limits and the severity of the collision had created a sequence of underground collapses that, in turn, had led to the crack.

Bullshit. Whatever my mind was trying to think (I didn't even know if there was any logic in my second scenario) it was deleted from what I saw after.

The rift closed, with the hand still in it. I felt as if I was watching a tape being played backwards – the edges of the crack began to unite until the asphalt returned to its previous, intact form.

I lit another cigarette and, still trying to justify what I had seen, I approached with a seemingly casual pace to that point. There was no sign of the crack, except a small nick left which crossed the white marking vertically. A few inches away there was a puddle of blood. I squatted and inspected the road - tiny drops led from the puddle to the insignificant crack and a tiny piece of pink tissue was poking out of the scratch on the road. The skin was pulled into the opening and disappeared, as if something had sucked it. I shivered and left a horrified scream; the police officers turned to look at me. I backed away, feeling their gaze fixed on me, and I saw the puddle reduced as the road was absorbing the blood.

I returned to my truck and didn't get out of there for the next two hours, until the whole mess was cleaned and the road was ready to be used again. I tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, I was seeing the same scene repeated again and again: the tiny piece of skin disappearing into the opening of the road.

***

That was the first time I came into contact with the hungry road. Little by little, the memories of that night turned into obsession, and after that, on every trip, I was looking for signs that what I'd seen was not hallucinations or projections of a tired mind; that everything I've witnessed had really happened.

I did it to some extend – I saw dead animals (rabbits, cats and, in one case, a deer) to be devoured by the tar, the stone and the dirt right before my eyes; I saw rivers and lakes of blood being dried up without a trace; I saw roads suddenly splitting in half in front of me, and, as I was avoiding them at the last second, merging again behind me; I saw puddles and deep ditches on the pavement to be rebuilt overnight.

I was able to continue doing this work for seven more years. It was obvious, as times went by, that the streets had become aware of my interest in them and they didn't like it. The nights that I was sleeping in my truck I was tossing, picturing the streets as a titanic living organism, a hive mind that was learning from its mistakes and was better organizing its traps, that was watching the traffic and picking up its prey as well as its hunters. My knowledge of this eldritch entity was a risk for its existence - and therefore it wouldn't let me reveal what I knew.

Whenever a deer was crossing the road, whenever the streets were transforming creating obstacles, every time I was successfully avoiding someone who had gone into my lane and was heading over me - I knew that all these were sent from the consciousness that resided in every inch of our continents. Highways, boulevards, streets, dirt roads, trails, all were planning to eliminate me.

In 2014 I handed over my diploma and retired. In the last months before my retirement, I couldn't sleep: I kept dreaming that the ground in the parking lots that I had stopped for rest was tearing apart under my truck, and it was confinig me in its insides like a fly trapped in a dionaea.

I moved to a small town in Nevada called Carlin, and I bought a bicycle, although I now prefer to move anywhere on foot. I avoid roads and to my fellow citizens I am known as  "the strange old man who crosses the sidewalks clung on their fences."

I don't care; the roads are everywhere around us, they encircle our homes and jobs, we drive in their labyrinthine networks, we use them daily without paying any attention to their existence in the same way as we do not see the trees or the streetlights, we think that they were always there and will always be. They can help us reaching our destination or lead us to a dead end, they can serve us or we can become their food. The roads watch us in their endless silence, calculating, creating traps. The roads are everywhere.

And, lately, the roads are more hungry.