On the Road

"On the road," Thea said.

"Yeah." Leroy ducked out the door momentarily to retrieve his backpack, spilling most of its contents on the return trip. He came up with a paperback whose binding had long ago come to terms with entropy. "Like Jack," he said simply.

Thea got up and poured a shot of bourbon into a dirty glass. She thought of many things to say, all of them stupidly parental. What she did say was, "So how is it that The Road leads to this particular door?"

Leroy was trying to collate three fragments of his holy text but as he shuffled them two of the pieces split into loose pages, so he had to give up. "Well," he confessed, "turns out that the road of today isn't exactly what it was for Jack."

"What do you know."