Dylan Nice: Other Kinds

“Keep your guts down in my truck, little brother,” he said.

On our way off the hill, the headlights caught the eyes of deer in the clearing. We slowed and watched them decide which way they wanted to run.

“You hit them with a truck as big as this one,” Jason said, “and they damn near explode.”

I nodded, silent. He knew he had no purpose anymore except to show me his life so I’d remember it was once my own.

I slept that night unsettled and dry — the radiator beside my bed was too hot and situated under a window swollen shut. What my life had once been came back suddenly: a smell like dirt, wet ash, the way it felt to be alone and hungry. I planned escapes to other lives. I imagined bright, wide cities lying in wait at the bottom of the mountains.

The next morning I left while Jason slept — my heart beat hard against blood thickened by the trip. I drove the hours back down the ridges. The road widened at dusk. At a rest stop at the edge of the state, dozens of bearded and robed men came out of a bus and bowed on the eastern macadam in prayer. Truckers with scabbed faces bought cases of bright green soda. My car moved fast in all that space, past the stumps of corn that blinked by in perfect rhythms. I hit the flat land again. The car sat me low to the ground with the controls right up against the balls of my feet. It seemed I was part of some big purpose till the size of what was out there exhausted me. Eventually there were no states, there was only the sky that never got any closer and me moving through places I could not stay.

This book wouldn’t exist without the help of the following people:

Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Burch, Amy Butcher, Rachel Yoder, Cutter Wood, and John D’Agata.

I would also like to thank the editors who first published these stories: Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Evelyn Hampton, Adam Graffunder, Sandra Allen, Jennifer and Adam Pieroni, Anne DeWitt, Rozalia Jovanovic, Lincoln Michel, James Yeh, and Greg Gerke.

Dylan Nice’s stories and essays have appeared in NOON, Indiana Review, MAKE, Hobart, Brevity, and Quick Fiction , among others. He lives in Iowa and is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.