…where we leave our guarded understanding to break free from that containment to find the universe that lives within all of us.

Val drove the truck hard, the corner coming too fast, how she wanted it. Dee was with her,not Dee but an Ethi of her, the idea of her when they had first met. She was screaming and laughing as she tried to change the channel on the radio. And then it was a song that Val remembered from when she was a kid. She had listened to that song on a tiny radio and the truck’s radio turned exactly to that too. But then Dee changed the channel again, and the tiny radio was gone.

“Leave it,” Val implored.

There was a stream of trucks ahead of them, heavy traffic, and she passed them all on the shoulder, over the gravel and rocks, wildly through the potholes, the axles getting slammed, and then the road was open again, a distant city on a hill.The music got louder as Dee leaned further back into the dark, and a car veered in front of her, crashed into the blackness, and another one veered to miss that and crashed with a thud. She looked around and stared at the accident to see if it had really happened.