Excerpt: Encounters

Turkeys on Board

It was on a cloudy November day, after the night of an extremely boisterous college Veteran’s Day celebration, that I found myself wandering along the small strip of land between the woods and the highway with my thumb growing numb from attempting to flag down a ride for the better part of an hour.

***
“I’m Chris by the way,” I said. If the rustling didn’t drive me crazy, the silence would.
“That’s nice.”
I blinked in my confusion. When someone offered their name, the polite thing to do, as my mother had continuously lectured me, was to be courteous and introduce yourself, and usually, among gentlemen, to shake hands. Now, shaking hands in the car was out of the question and uncalled for since I hadn’t offered a hand in the first place, but he should have at least supplied me with a name. His ‘that’s nice’ made me feel like that kid in high school who no one wanted to talk to, but whom they put up with anyway, just in case one day, when he decided to come in with a gun and start shooting, he’d remember that this person actually talked to him and wouldn’t put a bullet in their head.
“What’s your name?” I decided not to get hung up on what must have been a slip in his politeness.
“Well if I tell you that, you’ll get the wrong idea.”
As if I didn’t already regret hitching a ride with a man whose eyes I couldn’t see and a noise I was beginning to think was a hallucination.
“No I won’t. I’m sure your name suits you perfectly.”
Surely he possessed some feminine name like Jamie or Sam, or something that could swing either way. He was only embarrassed because he felt a chunk of his manhood had been torn away from him. I thought Sam was a manly enough name. However, my assurance drew a laugh out of him.
“You know that old line about curiosity killing the cat, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the cat.”