I got a new job yesterday. Which is good because rent is due in two weeks, and I’ve nearly blown through my savings. A tanned and plump hand slipped the assignment through the crack in my bedroom window. One whose arm reached impossible lengths and whose owner had their body tucked around the corner out of my sight. To avoid being rude to a house guest, invited or not, I took the manilla envelope and waited until the hand had completely retracted from my window to open it.

I'm a hitch hiker. I’ve hitched my way across every twisting backroad in the United States hundreds of times since I started hitching rides when I was young. How young? I don’t recall an exact age, but I was old enough and it was well before cell phones and cameras were every-damn-where.

Nowadays, I’m older than most that still walk the dusty black veins of our motherland. There’s fewer of us every year. Back when I first started, I used to spot a fellow hitchhiker at least once a week. Now, I see one every couple’a years.

The last one I saw was sixteen months ago. She was sitting in the backseat of a cream colored beat up Buick with Idaho plates. It sped past me, its lights flooding the pitch black highway I walked alongside. I caught a split second view of the hitcher through the back window. She was crying.