It's cold when I arrive, and black as a death's head moth. The layers of ice around the road have sharpened since nightfall, and the bleary eyed fog of my vision only enables me to view dusty entrails of falling snow, undulating throughout the dark night, trapped in a whirligig of artic air and mist.

It's like the dream I have, where I am too enticed by visions of snow maidens, and I veer off the road, towards the direction of the cow pastures. Within minutes I am embedded in a Wisconsin shit farm, the last thing I see before I black out is the scarecrow etched in the snow in the shape of my father's face.

I am determined not to repeat the sonorous pursuit of my dreams, and I instead pull off at a nearby truck stop, where a man with no eyes in his sockets tells me he's out of gas for the night.

I pull up a chair inside the barely-lit office. He pours hours-old coffee into a Styrofoam cup that still contains cfc's after all these years. He tells me about the night and how it lulled him into working for free, during the red-eye shift. He tells me of the consistent infiltration of the black ice, and how it overtook control of his bodily functions. He points right at his black pearl of an eye and tries to explain how it got there, but it doesn’t make any sense. None of this adds up.

Why am I here in the middle of the night, when there was so much on television? How could I have ignored the Carolina St. Louis football match on TV and instead chose to talk to this hollowed-out eye possessing, bad coffee drinking cast away. I made a wrong turn somewhere and I don’t like the way he looks at me, with no pupil visible. I attempt to stand, but become engulfed in something I cannot see, touch or smell. It's dawn before they find my body in the shit patch in Wisconsin, staring blindly at the scarecrow face of my father.