A premonition in my left arm. The words of a text message presumably being written across my wrist, underneath my raincoat. I’d try to glance at them, but I’m in a fun stretch of a local state route; a two-lane country throwback in knobbish hill country betwixt affluent suburbia, at night on All Hallow’s Eve, in the rain.
The radio cuts out but only to silence. Perhaps the content of the text is so terrible that Cortana can’t manage the words to even offer to read it aloud. The pause extends past mere hesitation. The silence of the cabin seems to grow, to drown out the sounds of the rain outside or the wipers. No howls of wind to be heard that eve, nothing but the silent cabin of an electronic conveyance.
The easy and obvious answers are that my bluetooth is not quite properly in conjuncture on this late hour’s ride home, or perhaps simply a mistake exists in controlling the volume of my devices.
But one’s mind wanders in that silence on a night like this. Maybe that’s how you find out you’ve died in a terrible car crash in this modern world, it speculates, with merely a text message that you cannot read and cannot hear but you know is there, silent and mournful and only a shiver down my left arm. All there is to do is but to keep driving through the disquieting quiet, there’s a parking lot not too far from here, I’m sure of it.