text: Joanna sped down a streetlight-less stretch of New Jersey highway at 90 MPH, her car furiously rattling and shaking, thinking about how terrified she had always been of highways. For some reason driving on the highway at night felt like being in the middle of the ocean, no place to stop, no markers, just an endless stretch of asphalt, your only protection the tiny bubble of light from your headlights--then suddenly, as if the universe had heard her thoughts, the trees receded on both sides of the road to reveal a massive, near-endless graveyard, split in two by the expressway she barrelled down. Joanna shook her head and looked out at the graveyard, which stretched out all around her and the road like an ocean of grass and stone. She had driven this road hundreds of times--albeit not at this time of night, and not under these circumstances--and she did not remember there being a graveyard here. Especially not of this size. She couldn’t stop her attention from leaving the road and going to the undulating, multiplying rows of headstones, mausoleums, and towering memorial stones, completely dumbfounded. A sudden bright light brought her attention back to the road, and she looked at her speedometer and saw she was going 105, and then the bright light, which belonged to a 2004 Nissan Sentra LE, smashed into the front of her car with enough force to crumple up her hood and throw her into a world of pain and chaos. Some people say that during traumatic events the brain records memories in snapshots. Here are the photos Joanna’s brain took as the metal behemoth she was trapped inside flew through the air: A woman’s face, for a fraction of a second, screaming behind the wheel of her car, seen between the gaps in her fingers in front of her face in a futile gesture of protection. Dollar bills, frozen in the air, flying in every direction like confetti. Her airbag deploying, looking like some sort of phantom racing towards her at light speed, its white nylon body obscuring everything else for a split second. The graveyard, seen perfectly upside down through a shattered window, the spires and bodies of headstones reaching up towards the moonlit sky. The exact moment her nose broke. She was sort of proud that she didn’t close her eyes immediately when the ceiling smashed her face, but then the car flipped and her head flung forwards into the airbag, then back into the ceiling and finally her brain decided to stop taking pictures and pass out instead. “Hey! Hey! Are you awake? Are you okay?” Joanna slowly opened her eyes to see a kind of scrawny, untrustworthy-looking girl with an overly-pierced, angular face and lurid, painfully-bleached hair, her face cut and bruised but looking otherwise okay. Joanna felt blood pouring down her face and she realized her car was upside-down. She had no idea how she was possibly alive. She was sure that any sort of impact over a hundred miles an hour was guaranteed lethal. “Are you okay? I’m sorry--I didn’t see you--you were driving so fast and I guess I was too--the graveyard freaked me out so bad I was like, losin’ it--I’m usually good with like, horror and stuff but I’ve never seen this graveyard before--sorry, I’m rambling--are you okay?” “Yeah. I’m fine.” Joanna dragged herself out from under the crumpled steering wheel-airbag jumble. Somehow the steering column had just missed going straight through her. The girl reached down and grabbed under her arm as Joanna crawled, and together the two of them navigated the constellations of shattered glass on the pavement and dragged Joanna to her feet, wobbling and stumbling. She took a few ragged gulps of the crisp night-time air, leaning heavily on the girl, who held her up quietly. “What’s your name?” “Joanna.” “I’m Talia.” “Nice to meet you.” “...What’s with all these bills everywhere?” Joanna looked at Talia, and in a split second gauged her as not the type to call the cops. She looked at the two flipped cars and the dollar bills littering the road. “I, uh... stole a bunch of money from my ex-boyfriend. His car too.” “Oh--that’s cool. This is my dad’s car...so like, kind of the same thing.” Joanna smiled a little bit and looked at Talia, who stared at her dad’s car, which had compressed by about half. She was actually kind of pretty, Joanna thought. Then Joanna looked out at where the graveyard had been, and realized that it was completely gone, as were the trees, and the only thing that stretched out on either side of them was an infinite, flat, four-lane highway, that reached all the way to the horizon and beyond. Where the graveyard had been there was only darkness, giant curtains of black. And then something spoke, sounding like a chorus of all of the dead together at once, every voice weaving in and out of each other to create a towering, discordant tapestry of sound, what must have been the entire graveyard speaking in harmony. “*Walk with us.”* Talia and Joanna were suddenly surrounded on every side with a teeming parade of the dead, dressed in clothes from every time period, some decomposed, some looking as fresh as them. They walked without a unifying rhythm down the endless stretch of road, weaving around the wreckage of the two stolen cars, some of them picking up dollar bills as they passed and sort of chuckling to themselves, knowing they had no real use for them. There were no streetlights--each of them carried a single flashlight to light their path. Joanna and Talia looked at their feet to see two flashlights, and then Joanna turned to Talia with tears in her eyes. She had thought she was the tougher of the two of them but the question she had to ask caught in her throat and twisted her heart. “Are we dead?” Before Talia had time to answer, the chorus of the dead answered her, this time half-singing, clearly a practiced response to a question that had been asked of them time and time again. Their collective voice rattled the sky, each syllable loaded with the sadness of the forever displaced and the lost. “*This place is for those who have died between* *driving late at night or lost at sea* *Heaven or hell is not for me* *I was nowhere when I died* *So nowhere I’ll be”* The parade fell silent. The only sound was the sound of hundreds of thousands of pairs of shuffling feet, skeleton and human and all the stages in between. Joanna put her head in her hands, and then suddenly picked up her flashlight and whaled it at the ground. It exploded into a mist of glass and plastic. “I’m not walking.” “What?” “I’m not walking. Just because I died nowhere doesn’t mean I have to spend my whole afterlife nowhere.” Talia watched as Joanna ran back to her completely destroyed car and got on her hands and knees. She crawled back in, slicing herself on the glass, and curled up in what was left of the driver’s seat, which was not much at all. Talia followed her and squatted down next to the car. She reached out and tentatively, put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. It’s not so bad. We could have gone to Hell... and honestly heaven always seemed like too much pressure for me. Always having to worship God and sing his praises and be, like, *stoked* to be in heaven...not for me” Joanna tried to hold back tears. “I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to have to walk down an endless highway for the rest of eternity. I *hate* the highway.” “I’ll be your friend. I’ll do it with you.” “I don’t even *know* you.” “Well, you’re gonna get to know me. We’re gonna turn into skeletons together--like, literally. Have you seen some of these people?” Talia shut up for a second and let Joanna cry. She wasn’t sure why she was so calm. For some reason being dead almost felt like a relief. One of the skeletons passing by shouted to them in a voice like glass being broken with a brick. “Hey, you guys gotta move! The road disappears behind us--we’re not just walking for fun! If that darkness hits you you’re gone for good!” Talia lightly rubbed Joanna’s shoulder. “C’mon. We gotta move.” “I’m not moving. I’m just gonna let the darkness take me.” “No you’re not. We’re experiencing the miracle of life after death together.” Joanna breathed quietly with her head in her hands for a minute, crumpled up in the former driver’s seat of the car. Talia’s voice floated to her through the quiet dark. “Where were you going, anyway? When you were alive.” “I don’t know. I...didn’t have much of a plan. I was just trying to get away.” “Me too. And guess what? We’re here. We’re somewhere else.” Joanna wiped her tears and looked up at Talia, who looked even stronger and prettier in the strange light of a thousand dead-held flashlights. “I broke my flashlight. I’m not gonna be able to see.” “I got mine. And if we break that one--all we gotta do is walk in a straight line.” Joanna shook her head a little, then let Talia lift her out of the wreckage of the car. The two of them started their eternal walk together, surrounded on every side by lightly bobbing bubbles of light and the quiet chatter of those who had died on their way to somewhere else, even if that somewhere was nowhere at all.