The Green Detour
Rocky Rhodes & Rodie · Story One · The Origin
The day I stopped being flesh and blood began with a sedan stealing most of my stopping distance.
It darted around my hood, slipped into the gap ahead of me, and immediately hit its brakes.
“Obviously, you trust my brakes a lot more than I do.”
Rodie lifted his head from the passenger seat. His reddish-gold ears perked, and his tail thumped against the cushion.
“Don’t encourage them.”
He yawned.
My truck is Dragon Storm. The name sounds dramatic, but when you spend most of your life hauling freight across the country, you’re allowed one dramatic decision. Mine happened to involve a highly detailed dragon painted down the tractor and trailer.
Rodie had been my other dramatic decision.
A friend had called me five years earlier about an accidental litter. I’d gone over with no intention of taking a puppy home. Rodie climbed into my lap, chewed through one of my bootlaces, and fell asleep against my stomach.
Naturally, I left with a dog.
He grew into a compact Golden Retriever and Cocker Spaniel mix—friendly, intelligent, and small enough to move around the sleeper without stepping on everything I owned. He loved truck stops, strangers, and any CB conversation that included a familiar voice.
The radio crackled as traffic began slowing ahead.
“Eastbound, you might want to back it down,” a driver warned. “Highway’s closed about five miles ahead.”
I picked up the microphone. “What happened?”
“Overturned tanker. Nobody’s getting through for a while.”
Brake lights were already stacking up across the desert.
“Well,” I told Rodie, “there goes our carefully organized schedule.”
He wagged as if delays were something I planned for his entertainment.
An orange sign directed commercial traffic toward an older state route. The road was paved and wide enough, and two other trucks took the exit ahead of me. That made it look official, which proves several bad decisions can travel in a group.
For the first few miles, everything seemed normal. The road wound between low hills, and the CB remained busy with drivers complaining about the detour.
Then the pavement narrowed.
One truck turned onto a county road. The other pulled into a dirt lot to wait things out. I continued toward the next marked junction, trusting a sign that claimed the highway was twelve miles ahead.
The pavement eventually became patched asphalt, then gravel.
My navigation screen showed a blank space where the road should have been.
“Well,” I said, “apparently we’ve driven beyond the known world.”
Rodie stood with his front paws on the passenger-side floor and stared through the windshield.
There wasn’t enough room to turn the tractor and trailer around. The shoulders dropped sharply into drainage ditches, and backing several miles around blind curves wasn’t an option.
Forward remained the least terrible choice.
The CB grew quieter until only static came through the speaker. My phone lost its signal a minute later.
The road descended into a shallow valley surrounded by dark rock. No utility poles. No fences. No tire marks except mine.
That was when I noticed the glow.
At first, I thought sunlight was reflecting from something ahead. Then the road curved, and the green light came fully into view.
It stretched from one side of the valley to the other—not a beam or a traffic signal, but a luminous curtain hanging across the road. It shimmered without moving and cast pale reflections across the hood.
Rodie pressed closer to the windshield.
“That is not an endorsement I’m prepared to accept.”
His tail started wagging.
“Of course you like it.”
I eased off the accelerator. The rig slowed to a crawl, but stopping didn’t solve the problem. I still couldn’t turn around, and the light filled the entire valley ahead.
The CB crackled.
“Rocky, you copy?”
I grabbed the microphone. “I hear you. Barely.”
It was a driver called Mesa Jack. We’d crossed paths enough times to recognize each other’s voices.
“You still on that detour?”
“Unless I’ve accidentally entered another state, yes.”
“You sound strange.”
“I’m looking at a green glow stretched across the road.”
The radio went silent.
Then Jack answered, “What kind of green glow?”
“The green kind.”
“I gathered that.”
“Imagine the northern lights came down to pavement level and decided to block traffic.”
More static swallowed his response.
I stopped fifty feet from the shimmering curtain.
Rodie looked at me.
I looked at Rodie.
“We could sit here until somebody comes along.”
He wagged.
“Or we could make the questionable decision the story clearly expects us to make.”
Another wag.
I put the truck into gear.
“Your judgment has always been suspicious.”
The hood entered the light first.
The engine continued running, but its sound vanished. So did the gravel beneath the tires, the rattle from the cup holder, and the hum of the air conditioner. Every noise disappeared at once.
Rodie barked.
I saw his mouth move, but I heard nothing.
The green light surrounded the cab. For several seconds, there was no road outside—only shifting shapes and faint lines that resembled highways viewed from far above.
Then something flashed beneath us.
The steering wheel jerked in my hands.
I held it straight and kept moving.
We emerged into ordinary sunlight.
Sound returned so suddenly that the engine seemed to roar. Gravel snapped beneath the tires, loose items rattled in the sleeper, and Rodie barked again.
This time I heard him.
“All right,” I said. “That could’ve gone worse.”
Then I looked down.
Two skeletal hands gripped the steering wheel.
I stared at them long enough for the truck to drift toward the shoulder.
“Small correction.”
I brought the rig to a stop and set the brakes.
The hands moved when I told them to move. Every finger worked. I could feel the texture of the steering wheel beneath bones that shouldn’t have been capable of feeling anything.
I touched my face.
No skin. No beard. No nose.
My fingers found the smooth shape of a skull.
I pulled down the visor mirror.
A skeleton wearing my ball cap stared back at me.
My work shirt still hung from my shoulders. My jeans and boots remained where they belonged. Everything inside the clothing, however, had undergone a fairly significant reduction.
“Well,” I said, watching the skull’s jaw move in the mirror. “That’s new.”
Something clicked beside me.
I turned toward the passenger seat.
Rodie’s collar rested around a narrow skeletal neck. His golden coat was gone. So were his expressive ears and the white patch on his chest. A canine skeleton stood on the seat, staring at me through empty eye sockets.
“Rodie?”
His tail wagged, tapping the side of the seat with a rapid series of clicks.
I held out my hand.
He sniffed it—or behaved exactly as if he still could—then pushed his skull against my palm.
There was no hesitation. No fear. He knew me.
I knew him.
He barked once, hopped down, and sat beside my leg.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re still us.”
The CB came alive.
“Rocky, answer me.”
I picked up the microphone.
“Yeah, Jack. I’m here.”
“Where did you go?”
“I’ve been on the same road.”
“No, you haven’t. I lost you for almost ten minutes.”
I glanced at the clock. Less than a minute had passed since we entered the light.
“I may have found a shortcut.”
“Where are you now?”
I looked through the windshield. The gravel road had disappeared. We were parked on the shoulder of a divided highway with traffic passing beside us.
A green sign announced a rest area two miles ahead.
“I’m back on the highway.”
“How?”
“That explanation may require diagrams.”
Jack was waiting in the rest area. I almost kept driving.
Explaining the situation over the radio was one thing. Letting someone see me was another.
But I needed to know whether this was real outside my cab.
I pulled into the truck parking area and stopped several spaces from his rig. Jack climbed down and walked toward me while I remained behind the wheel.
Rodie stood on the passenger seat, tail clicking against the door.
“You stay,” I told him.
He sat immediately.
Jack reached the driver’s side and looked up.
I opened the door.
He froze.
His eyes widened, and one hand grabbed the mirror support.
I lifted both hands where he could see them.
“Before you ask, yes, I’ve looked better.”
He took a step backward.
“Rocky?”
“Same voice. Same truck. Same inability to follow a simple detour.”
Rodie barked from inside the cab.
Jack looked past me.
“Is that—”
“Rodie.”
At the sound of his name, Rodie wagged hard enough to shake his entire frame.
“Can he come down?” I asked.
Jack stared for another moment and then slowly nodded.
“Rodie, okay.”
Rodie jumped down, trotted toward Jack, and stopped several feet away. His tail swept happily behind him. He gave one excited bark, looked back at me for permission, then approached.
Jack crouched cautiously.
Rodie pressed his skull beneath the man’s hand.
Jack released a nervous laugh.
“He’s still friendly.”
“He’s disappointed you didn’t bring snacks.”
Rodie sat beside him.
Jack looked up at me. “What happened to you?”
I turned toward the highway.
Traffic continued passing as though nothing had changed. Cars, pickups, and trucks moved east beneath the evening sky. The road behind me looked ordinary.
“There was a light,” I said. “Green, stretched across the whole road. We drove through it and came out like this.”
“Why did you drive through it?”
“I had a fifty-three-foot trailer and nowhere to turn around.”
“That’s your explanation?”
“It made more sense when I had skin.”
Jack stood and studied me again.
I expected fear. Questions. Maybe a call to the authorities.
Instead, he nodded toward my truck.
“Can you still drive?”
I looked at my hands. Then at Rodie, sitting patiently beside him.
“I got us here.”
Rodie barked.
“Apparently he thinks so too.”
I didn’t know what waited beyond that rest area. I didn’t know whether the change was permanent, whether the strange road could be found again, or how I was going to explain any of this to the next person I met.
But I still knew who I was.
Rodie still knew who he was.
The CB still carried voices from one lonely stretch of highway to another, and somebody out there would eventually need directions, a warning about traffic, or just another person to talk to.
I climbed back into the cab.
Rodie followed, turned around twice on his seat, and settled beside me.
I released the brakes and pulled toward the highway.
“Let’s keep it between the lines,” I told him.
His tail tapped the seat once.
“And maybe avoid glowing detours for a while.”
Rodie barked.
“Fine. No promises.”
Continue the series: Dock Twenty-Seven →
