The Stormbound Passenger
Lightning stitches the night into ragged shards, and the highway unfurls like a slick black ribbon. The rain hammers the windshield with a merciless cadence, turning the world outside into a gray wash of memory. I drive with the wipers singing a tired chorus, listening to the storm’s voice bargain with the road as if the weather itself could bend to human will.
From the shoulder, a figure steps out of the rain—drenched, mud-slick boots, a coat that clings to him like a second skin. He taps the door with a gloved knuckle, the faintest smile curling his lips. I pull over, and the chill that rushes into the car seems to carry a different weather inside me. He slides into the seat as if he has always belonged to the inside of a moving machine rather than the storm outside.
“Just passing through,” he says, though the words feel curated, as if he’s reciting a line learned from a book about storms. His voice is precise, almost ceremonial, and the air around him carries the scent of rain and old coins. He keeps his eyes forward, but I catch him studying the dashboard as though it’s a map to a place where he has been many times before.
- The odometer ticks backward by a mile, then resumes its march as if nothing happened.
- The radio sighs with static, delivering a lullaby in a language I almost recognize.
- The clock on the dash wobbles from 11:57 to 11:56, and stalls, refusing to move another minute.
As we drive deeper into the storm, he speaks in clipped phrases about weather fronts and forgotten towns that vanish when you blink. He notices every detail I miss—the way the hedges lean closer to the road, the way the streetlights blink out one by one as if they’re winking at the night’s secret. He tells me the storm keeps good company with those who listen closely, and that a traveler isn’t merely someone who moves through space but someone who carries a fragment of the weather’s memory.
“The storm remembers every name it ever carried, and every road it ever closed,” he says, eyes fixed on the rain as though the sky were a book he’s already read.
When he asks to be dropped at the next exit, the request feels ordinary until the world outside tightens into a black, velvet fog. I oblige, steering toward a place that should exist on a map but seems to be written on rain itself. The moment he steps out, the air brightens with a snap of cold electricity, and he dissolves into mist that glides back into the storm’s mouth like a secret returning to its owner.
For a heartbeat, the seat is empty, and the car returns to its own quiet. Then I notice something on the floor—the edge of a ticket, damp and smeared, bearing my handwriting in a script I do not recognize. The road ahead remains opaque, the storm still singing. I realize, with a hollow breath, that I am no longer merely driving through a storm; I am a stormbound passenger, bound to a night that keeps riding me, one mile, one memory, one whisper at a time.