After Grid

 fade in two leaves wrestle and hover close to the ground wildly  fighting their way out of the shadow and dirt into the side of a rain drenched highway and up into the wind. They fall violently back down in a gust of passing cars then dance and scrape a path along the cement through speeding cars, over yellow dotted line, over the reflection of flashing blue lights mirrored in the puddles, through a  pair of black shoes a set of legs wearing black pants, under a fire truck and into a crowd of more legs and shoes, coming to rest and pressing themselves against a bloody torso just as the the hand wearing a rubber glove had raised the sheet. Muffled voices seem to fill the bucket that lay roughly about 100 feet away and the shadow that safely held that bucket and its contents intermittently lit up with the reflected light coming from the steady stream of rubbernecking traffic did nothing but overemphasize the gruesome details of what must have happened to the poor soul that...

  Tobias never had a sense of belonging. When he was a child the other kids always made fun of him for being different and he carried that into the framework of his reality in this world. He could never shake the fact that he wasn't the right person for his own skin.  On October 3rd, 2021 at 3:45 one beautiful fall afternoon, however, very little of what was the person named Tobias BlackElk remained as he lay a broken and mangled heap in the road. The delivery truck that had hit him remained almost pristine, parked out of the way of traffic with its hazards on. Tobias had been mercifully covered with a drop cloth that the driver found in the back of his cargo hold and only the dusting of some brush and leaves competed with the muffled sounds of a distant police radio and delivery driver recounting the accident. What was left of Tobias's consciousness drifted away towards the west. His thoughts carried him past the heap covered in dusty drop cloth, and beyond the huddled men, d...