Nomads
Hello again Night Hawks.
This summer has been more than a little trying in my personal and professional spheres, resulting again in a longer than desirable pause between posts. It hasn’t been any fun to be away, and I’m glad I’m here with you now, for a while.
As well, Trunk Stories, in order to be truly from the Trunk, need to have been through the rounds of submission and to have been lost or abandoned for a time, to have foundered on unknown seas and come to rest at last on a distant shore, browned and dried in the suns of other climes and blown on winds toward far peaks. Then to be discovered anew, placed carefully in the footlocker and brought out just at the right moment, on the occasion of our meeting.
NOMADS is such a story, though its journey, in our world’s days, has been brief, and the time within the story itself is even more so.
I developed NOMADS early in 2025 as a stunt-writing piece (something I refuse to ever do, and always regret doing when I stop refusing) for a literary journal based on prompts, times, dates, and other items. Then in the late spring, the journal in question turned away from NOMADS, leaving it to wander, then to follow the circuitous path as above to your screen.
I like NOMADS. It’s a strange one, but this blog is the place for the leftovers, the remainders, the half-sharp and rough-tendered.
Here’s hoping NOMADS brings you a smile, gives you to question. What happens to our main character? Is she able truly to depart from her meeting, and if so, does she return to where she came? And where is that exactly?
That’s all for you to decide. The beauty, for me, of some flash fiction is that it leaves you wanting, and so I hope NOMADS does this also. My characters are usually unfinished, lacking something, in between this and some other-where. The kind of people who interest me, who I am.
This story’s characters are no different. Spend a minute or so, with the NOMADS.
Until next time, Night Hawks.
Nomads
Maybe we bring our darkness with us, she thought.
Heading East on I-70, not far outside WaKeeney in the direction of Ogallah, she watched the ranked brown stubble of late winter cornfields comb past. Ahead, a pale cellophane moon haunted the horizon. Behind her was dusk coming on, the setting sun a lip of gold.
She’d be there by nightfall.
Maybe we bring our darkness with us.
She came into existence with the flashing codes of the obstruction lights, high on the red and white radio tower a few miles back. Like she had many times in the past. The flashes spelled her name, coded her from silence: “M-E-L.”
Melinda closed her driver’s side window. The third iteration through the code this evening, it was just “_ _ L.” A glitch. Fitting, she realized. It was missing “ME.”
A black case sat in the passenger seat, still warm. That could be true, that it had absorbed the sun’s heat as it sat waiting for her to pick it up.
She knew what it contained. Paper documents. Too sensitive ever to be on any computer system. She was the closest that a synthetic intelligence would come to them.
A stop at Flying-J, only intended to get gas. And she did, filling the tank of the Ford truck so that all the tracking sensors would match the activity with the length of time taken.
When she returned to the cab, she opened the case. The first time, the only time, she had ever violated a requirement of her operations.
The papers, some typewritten and some with numbers added by hand, contained timing logs. What car passed a certain point, past a refinery and onto a dirt road with no name, at what time. Pages and pages, over a period of weeks.
Only seconds passed before she placed them back in the case. There was no mechanism to record that she had reviewed them. No tracker would alert the time differential of this stop with its intended purpose.
Still she was nervous, returning to the highway, now minutes from her destination. Would he know? And what would happen if he did.
When she pulled up in the side lot of the abandoned weigh station, off what still was called Old U.S. 40, she saw the man waiting.
It was the same man as those times before. Balding, faded plaid flannel shirt, grey work pants and brown boots. This man so exactly characteristic and American, who was in fact neither.
“You can go,” he said, as she handed over the slick black case. She ensured there was no telling pause in her movement, no irregular eye contact.
Walking back to the truck, would she feel the bullet, or would he have some electronic means of deactivating her, returning her to a series of fundamental procedures to await the light next time. If there would be a next time. If there would be a light.
You can go. Mel started the engine.
I can go.