Milton Wilson

Fiction by Christian Stephens

Roads have spirits, believe it or not, inscribed and scarred by the wheels that tumble over them. Cemented by their divots and potholes, these spirits are vivified by the various injuries mankind gifts them, given life through erosion and grind. Curious as this may seem, it’s not a very stringent practice. Even if unintentionally, we all tend to occasionally whittle away at their personalities; heck, any random schmuck with a lemon does, too. Reading them, however, is a much denser matter to master, a more intricate language to understand, but not an impossible one. Through extensive observational study and an unconscionable amount of patience, anyone can learn to read the roads and watch their spirits grow. A drag race here, a flat tire there, a dumped body and resulting high-speed police chase not too much further past that – living history at its most apparent and quite literally at our feet. What’s more, the esteem of the roads can be measured mathematically. A correlation exists between their relative history and the frequency by which they are used, meaning those with many travelers have an abundance of stories and experiences to share, of which they will proudly boast to anyone who has the eye to heed them, while roads less traveled are, well, boring. 

A hierarchy has been erected, for the sake of you road philistines out there, to help catalog each of their distinct archetypes. Foremost among them in both rank and utilization are the Most Highly Traveled, the interstates. Out of all roadkind, the interstates contain the most honorable spirits. They act as ambassadors between man and infrastructure, as benefactors and sages to the lesser roads of the world, branching out so that even the most isolated of their kin may partake in their accumulated wisdom. Without them, the function of roads as we know them today would be primitive and primal, mere dirt paths and cobblestones ruled by nothing except instinctive drive.  

Below their order reside the roads of middling popularity, known as the highways. Although they have enough personality to form unique traits and features, the highways struggle to maintain an identity. Much of what they recite is information that they themselves gleaned from the interstates, albeit in a less descriptive format. Consider them the asphalt equivalent of a rather tiresome grade-schoolteacher. Still, they have good-natured spirits and extend themselves to fellow roads wherever the interstates cannot. They take pride in this, as it gives them a sense of purpose despite being otherwise subordinate. Many will never exceed local fame, but even so, the highways are typically satisfied with the mild authority they wield, winding dutifully throughout the countryside in arterial aplomb. 

Roads of even smaller stature are simply referred to as streets. Despite being the hardiest and most prolific of their bunch, there is rarely something of importance to be learned from them. Their spirits are secondhand, golems formed from the tire-swept dust and gravel of faraway freeways. A street is as much a highway as it is a thoroughfare or a turnpike, an amalgamated swirl of spirits melded and bonded by stone. Nothing about them is original other than the pitch used to derive them, yet they are tirelessly hopeful that they, too, may one day nurture into great interstates. Nevertheless, most remain tragically and eternally infantile within small towns and suburbs, forever slowly fledging in anticipation of their untapped potential.  

The hierarchy likewise dwindles down to an almost microscopic degree, edging around a brief quibble between the nomenclature of “alley” and “lane” before it abruptly ends at a single, final, nameless category of road. There are few fates worse than being designated as a road of this stature, as a road without any use, a road of inadequacy, of futility, a road not inherently despised but forgotten by the world. Many of these roads are void of spirits, instead embodying the attributes of a mummified corpse – lifelike in appearance for the most part but indistinguishably, unmistakably sterile. The dead ends of their society, abortions of their concrete womb, they lay wasting in pitiful resignation, too ignorant to even be aware of their circumstances for nearly all their underwhelming existences. Some are, though. Some are very much aware.  

Such is the fate of Milton Wilson. 

It didn’t deserve what became of it, but alas, fate is not a negotiable construct. The universe has oblique methods for delivering its blessings and curses. It is not uncommon for miracles to be dropped into the lives of the most destitute nor is it for disasters to smite them into oblivion. Therefore, it takes a prudent mind to understand them, to develop them into something remarkable, but it can be done. It can be learned. It can be anyone. And it just so happened that far outside the cities, beyond the suburbs, past the exurbs, in the very distant reaches of American metropolis, a low, tumbledown town was dying.  

Once an exurb of its own, the town had long since degraded into an effigy of its former prosperity, a benighted ghost town starved of opportunity. A lack of stimulation had aged the town like sunburnt produce, causing its roads to become little more than fragmented pathways. Vacant houses moldered into termite hotbeds, abandoned storefronts transformed into walk-in terrariums, relinquished churches and schoolhouses atrophied into graveyards of possibility. The intrinsic beauty of decay was not present within the town for everything was putrefied with an incurable cafard. More than anything, it was in dire need of a miracle. 

Its mayor, a dreamer, was searching for something to throttle it back into action, to renew its diminishing condition, yet years upon years upon decades of pooling together scarce resources, of holding heated referendums and troubled public office campaigns had failed to produce anything meaningful. His constituents, too, were growing old and restless. They worried that they would soon die alongside their home but felt impotent to restore it in the wake of their many unavailing recovery efforts. Fundraisers, grant petitions, and dirt-cheap land speculations had all resulted in naught, and no amount of appeal to the outside world was gaining them any traction. By all means and measures, the town should have long since collapsed and returned to the hinterland from which it came. But then, on one particularly hopeless afternoon, the mayor was given a revelation.  

After much brainstorming and an excessive amount of gab with the town council, the mayor revealed to the townsfolk his end-all, be-all remedy for their unsolvable plight. It was glorious, it was galvanizing, and it was Milton Wilson. The mayor’s hopes for it were infinite: soccer moms and drunk teens alike would use it to come home after rowdy evenings at their respective haunts; mechanophiliacs would race down its open two-mile stretch in their LED-studded war machines; gas stations and subdivisions would decorate its curbsides where the surrounding deciduous forest had been preemptively cleared; and rows upon rows of streetlights would cast their shielding rays upon its smoothly paved blacktop until dawn reigned in a new day of travel. While never intended to be great, Milton Wilson was at least meant to be a symbol of growth, an emblem of promising tidings, an omen of gentrification, rejuvenation, and rising property values.  

To the townsfolk, Milton Wilson was a tarmac messiah, a long overdue response to their faithful prayers. It would bring business scrutiny to their home, ratify construction leases with supermarket chains, fast food joints, and an unnecessary amount of strip malls, front headlines in local papers flaunting the up-and-coming boom that was to take place along the very curves of Milton Wilson’s sleek, lean form. The town was to be revolutionized from a ramshackle backwater to a magnificent landmark among the barren countryside, a Mecca for all the rural nobodies to convene and rejoice. Yes, to them, Milton Wilson was more than just a road. It was a revival.  

But, as it happens with hope and promise, something went awry. A misfiled paper, an extra zero, a missed phone call was all it took for their ambition to rapidly fall apart. Contracts were shifted, funds were revoked, and the construction of the new world was halted, all except for that of Milton Wilson itself. The miracle died with neither a bang nor a whimper, and so it laid squat and flaccid across the town’s southeastern frontier, smoldering like roadkill left to the mercy of the elements. 

The townsfolk were devastated by Milton Wilson’s abdication, and their already glum demeanor slunk even further into the town’s foundational loam. Gone were their glorified dreams a bustling city, of a place worth calling home and haven. No, with the sacrilege of Milton Wilson, they were entirely assured of their geographic insignificance. Their roads were meek, not even a meager street among them, and read of beaten-up pick-ups and black mufflers, of unrecovered flash floods and mobile home conflagrations, of disappointment, struggle, and overwhelming economic failure. To have something so precious as a second chance ripped away from them at the very last moment was nothing short of heartbreaking.  

As a last-ditch chance at rekindling Milton Wilson’s extinguished flair, those few who remained in denial established a community garden near one of its ends, and a biker lane was painted down its edges to attract at least some form of transportation to the empty expanse. Their endeavors were in vain, however, and ultimately scrapped after it became apparent that Milton Wilson’s impermeable melancholy was just too heavy for any sustainable life to develop. Once again, the town had been led to misfortune. 

Well, time passed by, and the townsfolk’s wounds grew infected with an intense psychological sepsis. Their grief mottled into a burgeoning rage towards the mayor, who had been surreptitiously attempting to cover up the flagrant erasure in taxpayer funds as a result of his reckless pursuit. Of course, the townsfolk were not keen to forget the snake oil plot he had dangled in front of them all. They picketed and rioted, spurned him and his damned miracle until he finally threw in his resignation. The mayor subsequently abandoned the town, crestfallen over his excommunication, and took with him everything he possessed other than his regret in the form of Milton Wilson. Still brooding over his costly mistake and without a black sheep to crucify, the townsfolk eventually turned their backs on the bastardized road as well, figuring that any hope for its reconciliation left along with the mayor. They then returned to their deadbeat rhythm, and Milton Wilson persisted in solitary stasis without even a single scratch or scar to parade.  

Its rot was a prolonged process, much longer than that of the town. As the passing summer suns melted down its tar epidermis and the flitting winter freezes puckered its once-perfect surface, Milton Wilson began to physically represent the bitter manifestations of the townsfolk. It became the symbol of failure, the emblem of lost promise, the omen of deterioration, malformation, and decaying stature they had conceived it to be. Grasses grew wild where the surrounding deciduous forest had been preemptively cleared, the streetlights gradually stopped casting their shielding rays upon its deformed surface, and even the most daring of the mechanophiliacs avoided racing down its expanse as the likelihood of speeding into a pothole became too possibly perilous. The world was not kind to the poor road, and the town all but reveled in its gradual disintegration. It was a cruel thrill they felt watching their downtrodden idol contort into a blasphemed cripple, the kind felt by a child witnessing a sibling take a spanking on his behalf. Hate fueled their engines, fueled their hearts, and the townsfolk spit curses like boiling oil onto Milton Wilson’s image whenever the opportunity provided itself. As far as they were concerned, Milton Wilson was a good-for-nothing waste of rock and bitumen, a conglomerate mongrel better suited as rubble than route. Yet somewhere underneath all that ugliness, all that hatred, somewhere where no one expected it, Milton Wilson had formed a spirit of its own. 

It was a gnarled spirit, a twisted entity concocted from animal scratches and dead weeds rather than tailpipe exhaustion and burnt rubber. Consider it the asphalt equivalent of a terribly demented feral child. It reeked like sulfuric pitch, looked like a quarry’s carcass, felt like a chalky outbreak of eczema, and was bereft of any thought other than its base desire for masochistic release. Had someone examined it, Milton Wilson would have read of a Frankensteinian loathing for the civil engineers who forced it into existence, of a rabid craving for retaliation. It would have read of a hunger for traffic, if only to harm whosoever dared to drive down into its gullet, and an unintelligible, almost untranslatable emotion akin to nihilistic self-immolation. Above all, it would have read of fear, fear of the inevitable day when it would be torn up into piecemeal chunks and ripped away from its last surviving ambition: to destroy anything and everything that set foot upon its placid veneer. Yes, Milton Wilson was a malevolent, greedy road, reared by ruthless, uncaring people. If it could not serve its one designated use to the world as a convoy for human flight, then it would do all it could to impede mankind in its gross spread. 

So it happened that during one passing caravan’s unfortunate summer vacation, it took the road never traveled. It was an unfortunate mistake, but not due to a lack of gasoline, or the recommendations of a GPS, or out of an exasperated search for a rest stop bathroom. Rather, it happened that the disgruntled and travel-weary driver took a right just a bit too early, a block away from the caravan’s actual turn. Other than a few chortled criticisms from the other passengers, and a very vehement rebuttal from the driver, they didn’t think much of his blunder. No one would have. It’s rare to come across a road that would purposefully shy away from its riders, let alone harm them, and besides, there never has been a road quite so malicious as Milton Wilson. But had they the eye to read it, the passengers would have lamented their poor foresight. They would have immediately thrown the vehicle into reverse and backed away from it in favor of a road with less vindictive aspirations. Alas, they didn’t pay it any attention, and without direction or caution, without hesitation or even a pondering glance at the desolation quickly approaching to devour them, the tenacious caravan sped onward into the bowels of Milton Wilson. 

It hadn’t trundled more than a few hundred meters before the wild curbside grasses started to sway from their stalks up. Small clusters of pebbles lying on the sun-bleached pavement beside them began to lightly rattle, and throughout the surrounding wasteland, a hush had condensed in the air. All was silent except for the hum of the caravan, the plink of the pebbles, and a muffled groaning located somewhere subterranean. It was a growing groan, the groan of a sepulchered creature popping and snapping its stagnant tendons as it stirred from an elongated slumber. Wafting up from underneath the town’s foundational loam, it slowly morphed into a croak, then a hawk, then a rumble. At first a low and mild tremor, a slight rolling of the horizon that could be explained away as the caravan having run over an obstruction of some sort, the rumble quickly picked up tempo, pitching into a violent, lurching sensation that shook the ground in a jagged sequence. The sky shuffled, the grasses danced like wildfire, and all around Milton Wilson, the world began to crumble. 

Still oblivious, the caravan carried onward. Its passengers were too engrossed with the labored combat of boredom to give any of their attention to the road before them. That was, until they started flying. Every couple of milliseconds, the caravan would become momentarily airborne as it soared over the crests and troughs of the waving pavement, gliding into the troposphere before dipping back down in jarring shudders. The passengers quickly snapped to attention, petrified and bewildered, and shifted back into their seats as the driver pushed down hard upon the accelerator. For the first time they looked out their windows at the flowing pitch and became aware of the apocalyptic nothingness engulfing them. There was no shelter anywhere within eyesight, no structure or edifice in which to seek refuge. Wherever the end of this blasted road was, they needed to get there fast, for already they were deep inside its seismic grasp.  

Suddenly, without warning or indication, a jolt much more vigorous than the previous bumps thrusted the passengers towards the roof of their vehicle, and with the weight of gravity inversely shoving them back earthward, the caravan slammed into the blacktop with a dissonant clang. Where its bumper struck the surface, a small, beautiful laceration edged itself into Milton Wilson’s flesh, the first – and last – mark it ever received. There was no time for plaudits, however, for Milton Wilson was growing ever more violent the faster the caravan drove. Chips of dark stone flicked up and scraped the sides of the caravan’s hull as if retaliating for its new mutilation, and cracks spiderwebbed across the ground towards the vehicle, reaching for it with lightning bolt-shaped claws. What should have been a four-minute escapade was turning into an obstacle course through shifting tectonic plates and debris artillery, a steeplechase through tapestries thrown up from nature’s gutters. Milton Wilson would not let its prey flee, would not let go of its last surviving ambition: to destroy anything and everything that set foot upon its placid veneer. It would slaughter these petulant travelers in their dinky automobile and finally prove to the world that Milton Wilson was a name to be feared among all cross-country commuters, a road to be blazoned in the legends of the mighty interstates, a category all its own in the grand road hierarchy. 

Charged with the cutthroat impulsion of a caged behemoth, with the distress and ire and fervent detestation of a being left to rot its perennial corpse for years upon years upon decades, Milton Wilson released its most tremendous convulsion yet. The might of the convulsion warped the ground like a black hole, revealing a large depression adjacent to where the dilapidated remains of the community garden lay drenched in lichen and rust. A screech ripped through the air as the garden gate tore away from its hinges, the ground wobbling underneath it like a sedimentary trampoline. As the depression deepened, dragging down the world around it into a maelstrom of sod and broken blacktop, a hollow thunder could be heard conjoining with the cacophonous rumble. Somewhere underneath all that ugliness, all that hatred, somewhere where no one expected it, the earth snapped.  

Of cracks and crags, of splinters and shreds, of tremors and trenches, a surge of all the hate of the manufactured universe suddenly centered upon that open two-mile stretch in a singular instant, ripping apart the asphalt beast along its sternum. The jaws of Milton Wilson abruptly roared open with an explosion of grit, exposing a vast cavity littered with dirt and detritus and muddy gastric juice. Where capsized chunks of pavement crashed into its surface, the brackish water simmering at its bottom shot up in geysers, reaching upwards so to pull the outside world down into its gaping maw. The true horror of Milton Wilson had been unleashed. 

The passengers of the caravan, temporarily dazed by the cavernous abyss opening before them, continued to speed ahead. In just mere seconds, the ground beneath them had turned from docile to diabolical, from an unsightly strip of land to a writhing fault line. It was impossible to understand, to digest, and they didn’t. They couldn’t. For a moment, an achingly long moment, it seemed as if they, too, would plummet into the murky depths of Milton Wilson. But out of instantaneous, knee-jerk instinct, and possibly some divine grace of the interstates, the caravan driver jackknifed to the right, barely skidding off the lips of the rapidly broadening sinkhole and tearing through the dead weeds lining Milton Wilson’s dull, emaciated form. With a crash and a thud, with an awfully grating crunch, and with the predacious road bellowing grime into the air behind them, the caravan flailed onto its side, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, until it stopped in a final, limp flop. 

 It took several hours before a rescue team finally made its way through the rubble of the earthquake to where the caravan had crashed. They found its passengers alive and mostly intact, mewling over their ruined vacation, their ruined clothes, their ruined automobile. Nobody mewled over Milton Wilson. It took a considerable while to do so, much to the chagrin of the passengers, but they were eventually sauntered to an infirmary two towns over, and a towing company was called in to haul away their totaled vehicle. Once all the commotion had died down, though, the rescuers once again became recluses. They didn’t feel guilty for not blocking off entry to the road. They didn’t lose sleep over nearly killing a family due to their negligence. They didn’t care one bit about the intrepid idiots who made the dumb decision to drive down that accursed avenue, about outsiders from far off, meaningless roads of life coming into their town unwanted and unprovoked. It wasn’t the townsfolk’s fault over what happened to them, over what happened to Milton Wilson. Blame it on the mayor, or the construction workers, or the unfairness of the world at large. Blame it on anybody who gave a damn. But after being threatened with an uncomfortable number of lawsuits, which the town most definitely could not afford, they were forced to take a more proactive initiative. It didn’t take much deliberation before it was ultimately decided that Milton Wilson would be torn asunder. Well, what was left of it, that is. 

Despite their consensus, the townsfolk weren’t entirely sure how to feel about the sentence. Milton Wilson was a disgrace, certainly, and long overdue for extermination. It had brought nothing of value to the town, nothing but disappointment, struggle, and overwhelming emotional distress. Even for all that, they still cast down their eyes when driving near its ruins. By virtue of motherly consternation, they shared a maudlin sympathy for the scorn it endured at their hands. Only within the most subdued regions of their collective subconscious would they admit this guilt, the kind felt by a child witnessing a sibling take a spanking on his behalf, but there it resided, hunkering in cold confinement.  

Make no mistake, though; the news of Milton Wilson’s obliteration was met with unanimous joy. Gone were the haunting dreams of a lost hope, of a road that led to nowhere. No, with the sacrilege of Milton Wilson, the town was finally assuaged of their architectural burden, finally rid of their greatest oppressor. So, as it happens with fear and vengeance, the atrocity was eradicated. A couple of signed papers, a permit for demolition, a few months’ time was all it took for it to be torn up into piecemeal chunks. Barricades were assembled, bulldozers were brought in, and the destruction of Milton Wilson was incited, all except for that already wasting in its fetid pit. The abomination died with both a bang and a whimper, and so it lays in craters across the town’s southeastern frontier, fading like a skid mark amid the bustle of rush hour traffic. 

Let it be known, however, that the fate of Milton Wilson is not the fate of all nameless roads. An interesting characteristic of the hierarchy, one that is often ignored, is its transitionary nature. A road is not bound to the caste it is born into, for just as all great interstates must one day be paved over, spiritless roads can eventually be pruned into fabled boulevards. They can be altered, nurtured, loved and well kept, or they can be mocked, desecrated, tarnished and disregarded, as in the unfortunate case of Milton Wilson. Therefore, it takes a prudent mind to understand them, to develop them into something remarkable, but it can be done. It can be learned. It can be anyone. Through extensive observational study and an unconscionable amount of patience, even you can learn to read the roads and watch their spirits grow. If only you have the heart to heed them. 

About the Author:

Christian Stephens is a first-year Psychology student at the University of Alabama. He is heavily influenced by his upbringing in the suburban South, with which he shares a confusing love-hate relationship.

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