The instant I crossed the city limits of Roswell, I was nearly obliterated at just outside the parking lot of the local Walmart. Which was not how I'd envisioned my grand arrival.

  I’d spent the entire drive south imagining something cinematic—pulling over at the famous Welcome to Roswell sign, stepping out into the desert air, squinting into the sun like some bastardized, road-weary Mulder on the brink of a new case. But instead I'd been so unnerved by the thought of nefarious black SUVs and staying under the radar of any ominous no-name government agencies that the thing had blown by the window in a technicolor blur before I could even find the brakes.

  Cursing my lack of journalistic instincts, I took the first right turn I could make without burning rubber and found myself on the driveway into the local Walmart.

  Then, as I glided through a four-way intersection and into the parking lot, a rumbling, bumbling, tetanus-trap of a pickup truck blasted through a stop sign and almost T-boned me. The truck gave a terrible rattling lurch as its rear tires squealed against asphalt in a cloud of smoke. It skidded to an abrupt stop mere feet from my exposed flank and settled

  But that wasn't actually the worst part. Not even close.

  The worst part—and the part that would haunt me for the rest of my stay—was that the dusty bastard had the ever-loving gall to honk at me. Like I was the asshole. Like it was my fault he'd almost turned the inside of my poor yellow Challenger into a meat salad with extra Dallas chunks.

  The truck continued to honk and all I could do was stare back at whoever—or whatever—was hidden from me, lurking somewhere in the shadow depths of that dusty cab. I squinted into the cab, expecting some beastly, slack-jawed trucker with eyes like a pair of burned-out cigarette holes, but all I could make out was a scrawny, gnarled claw of an arm moving up and down, pounding into that old horn until it squealed.

  HONK. HONK. HOOOOOOOOOONK.

  I sat there, transfixed. Staring into the abyss. Feeling his hatred through the windshield.

  It took him gunning the poor truck's old engine to startle me out of my freeze enough to scoot shamefully out of his way. The old truck bleched ahead, shaking off a shower of flakes, and one of those pale claws reached out the window to flip me off as he crossed through my rearview.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  I watched him drive past, still bewildered and deeply wounded by all the aggressive honking. I desperately wanted to flag him down, to explain myself somehow. I was sure I could make him, her, or it understand that it didn't have to be this way—we didn't have to put all those bad vibes out into this tenuous social climate.

  He would understand—he would have to understand. We don't have to hate each other! All the aggressive instincts don't have to win!

  Things don't have to be this way, God dammit!

  I could win him over with something polite and gentle, like: "Pardon me, sir, but did you happen to notice that it was actually you that missed the stop sign? Yes, sir, I understand you are in a hurry—and I don't blame you!—but surely you can see how, given the circumstances, it wasn't really fair of you to honk at me like that when you were clearly the party in violation of all applicable social mores?"

  Yes, that would do it. Then maybe we could have a laugh and I could offer to buy him a drink later and he could introduce me to all his rural New Mexican friends and we could swap stories about little green men and strange lights in the sky.

  That was the kind of simple human interaction I needed.

  Something normal.

  But then again—this is America. 2025.

  This isn’t an era of friendly roadside misunderstandings. This is an era of raw, unprocessed American rage—of tooth-gnashing, honk-first, flip-off-later tribal warfare, where every human interaction is just a precursor to some inevitable Mad Max street brawl over a spot in the Costco gas line.

  Do people still use words? Do the dusty social mores of past enlightenments still hold any value? God, what even is normal?

  I don't know what's normal. I'm an outsider, a wayfarer, a transient with a typewriter who routinely holds philosophical dialogues with a bored blind dog. Who the hell am I to decide what's normal?

  It's a dog-eat-dog world, after all. Why should Americans be any less hungry?

  So I didn't flag him down. I didn't say a world.

  The truck lurched ahead, its exhausted frame shuddering like a dying ox, and then it was gone. The last I saw of that old wheezing truck was the dirty TRUMP-MAGA sticker hanging off its warped rear bumper as it turned a a far corner and sputtered away into the city traffic.

  I sat there for a long moment, shell-shocked and vibrating with unresolved tension.

  Then I sighed, checked my phone. Thirty-seven new notifications. They build up fast when you can't check in with your screen for three hours.

  "Trump vs. Zelenskyy." "High Prices Expected." "Crisis in Gaza."

  I stared at the screen. The urge to doomscroll prickled at my brainstem. But no. Not today.

  "No politics," I muttered and hit the 'Close All' button. No sense in chasing those particular demons. There was enough bad energy still lingering in my car already without getting the God damned government involved.

  Having banished the news, I checked the time and discovered I had a solid hour to kill before check-in time. Plenty of time to get a quick lay of the land.

  I took a deep breath, wrung the existential dread out of my hands, and pulled back onto Highway 285, rolling deeper into the murky neon depths of Roswell.

  This town had a feeling already.

  And it wasn’t good.