Prof_JL

I can say I've lived a pretty privilaged life up until now, out of the way of hard places and people that don't want you there. But unforseen circumstances had uprooted me from my previous position in life to a westward nomad travelling to no end, maybe someday an end but I don't have one in mind now. Perhaps I'll reach a beautiful valley and live in a tranquil log cabin, perhaps I'll wander this desert for 40 years before returning to my promised land, wherever that is. Perhaps I'll run out of money in some dirty little tent town and beg for money outside some scummy saloon. Perhaps I'll run out of food and starve in the wilderness.

I never knew how large the continent was before I began to travel it. The great grasslands streatched out to far beyond what the eye could see or the mind comprehend. Sitting in the back of a wagon with a twisted foot I had got from falling during the evacuation, the landscape began to blur, started to look like a matte painting in a theatre backdrop. The air was dry as a cracker and abnormally still but I had little time to reflect on anything as I reached a small town that I didn't know the name of just as the first clouds of the day began to roll in. It was well after six.

"We're gonna have to stay here for the night." The driver said anxiously. "Does this place even have a hotel?" I asked." The driver pointed and i turned my head nintey degrees to the left and saw a marvel of frontier engineering, a two story façade held together aesthetically with only a light coating of milk paint and a sign on the front that said "Fort Glenstone hotel and also saloon". I thought to myself "Well, this is where I'm beggin away the rest of my life". We went inside to find a dimly lit room of tables and a bar, two table on one side of the room sat normal looking men for the area, rugged and muddy, hunched around their drinks whispering quietly.

On the other side of the room were eight other men, who sat in the saloon in the same way blood sits on snow. They were well dressed and trimmed, buisness like, upright in both stature and ones assumption of their character. They were silent, drinking whisky or some other kind of spirit without noise, the liquid poured down their throats without making a sound.

It took me a while to realise that they were looking back at me, their eyes watery and unfocused, as if they were staring intensely at something behind you or inside you. I looked to my side to the wagon driver but he had already checked in and had climbed the stairs to the second floor, from the landing I saw him shaking his head at me and then disappearing into the hallway. I looked around at the saloon and saw a divide, there were plenty of tables in the room but only two at polar ends were occupied. I walked towards the bar slowley, hunching my shoulders in an attemt to throw off the piercing stares of those eight strange men behind me.

I stopped at the bar, the barkeep was writing something in a small book of his. He didn't look up from his book for several seconds before doing so. His dress was somewhere in the middle of the room, well to do but relatable. He looked at me, or something behind me, perhaps the men. As I breathed in he spoke "Room seven", "…Thanks" I said.

I went up the stairs and into the hall, it had the same gaudy wine colured as my old home, the one I grew up in. It irked me in a way. I had gone on this exodus for a perticular reason to remove myself from the old world, to find a new place to be myself, I was irked aswell for being irked at the wallpaper. I didn't want delve into a spiral of rememberance to a past I had tried so hard to distance myself from. I entered room seven to find the wagon driver asleep in one of the beds, I took the other and fell asleep in a few minutes. My dreams were like the prarie outside, mostely empty.

The morning came softely and I ate some dry crackers, when I went to look for the wagon driver he was nowhere to be found. I went down to the bar and fished a coin out of my pocket without looking at it. The barkeep looked down at it and took out a bottle of beer. I downed it in a few seconds