Member-only story
Blue Deer Way: 1
Kenny’s problem wasn’t that he no longer felt like a man, though that was most certainly the case. His real problem was that he no longer even knew what a man was supposed to be or if it was something worth striving for or if it was something he should run like hell from. He’d tried every identity he could find and always wound up back at the same depressingly coddled starting point feeling flaccid in spirit and lost in his head, longing for some great test to pass but always inevitably finding only himself.
Maybe he never forgot any of those things at all. Maybe the truth was that he never knew them at all. He couldn’t even remember, anymore.
Either way, on the day of his thirtieth birthday he found himself driving too fast through the winding rainforest roads north of Aberdeen, Washington, hometown Seattle more than a hundred miles back over his shoulder. The roads had been transitioning between asphalt and dirt for an hour at least and the fuel gage of his ancient Subaru Outback now pointed directly over the “empty” line.
He didn’t care anymore if he wreaked or sputtered out in the middle of nowhere. That morning he’d looked at his unshaven face bathroom in the mirror and blasted the damn glass into spider webs with his fist. Without wrapping the hand or putting on any antiseptic he’d marched out to his car and headed west, struck by an overwhelming need to…
