Electric Sky Over Exit 42

Marcus hadn't planned to stop at The Rusty Spur, but the sky had opened up somewhere between Wichita and Tulsa, sheets of rain blurring the windshield until the eighteen-wheeler in front of him became a gray ghost. He'd been driving west for two days since Elena served him papers, since she told him thirty years of marriage had dissolved like sugar in cold coffee.

Now he sat in a booth that had probably been upholstered when Nixon was president, watching the waitress—young enough to be his daughter, old enough to look tired—refill his coffee for the third time. Beyond the rain-streaked window, across the parking lot, a massive mechanical **bull** stood frozen in mid-buck outside a shuttered steakhouse. Its red paint had peeled to reveal patches of rust, and one glass eye was missing, giving it a pained, asymmetrical expression.

"You gonna finish that burger, honey?" the waitress asked, not unkindly.

Marcus shook his head. His stomach had been twisting since he'd left Chicago, since he'd packed his life into a Honda Accord with 140,000 miles and no clear destination. The phone in his pocket remained stubbornly silent.

The front door chimed. A man in a faded **orange** construction vest stumbled in, rain dripping from his mustache. He ordered whiskey, asked if they had a TV for the game. Marcus thought about his son, twenty-six and working in tech, sending emails instead of visiting. Thought about Elena's voice—steady, terrible—saying she'd done everything she could.

Outside, **lightning** shattered the darkness, a white fissure that turned the parking lot into a strobe photograph. In that frozen instant, Marcus saw the mechanical bucking bronco caught mid-leap, its metal torso gleaming, its missing eye suddenly not pathetic but defiant.

The construction man laughed at something on the TV above the counter. Marcus's phone buzzed once—a weather alert. Not his son. Not Elena.

He watched the waitress wipe down the counter, watched the rain slash against the glass, watched that damn bull keep trying to throw someone who wasn't there. And somewhere between the third sip of bitter coffee and the fourth rumble of thunder, Marcus understood: sometimes things break because they were always going to break. Sometimes you don't find yourself again. Sometimes you just get in the car and drive.

He left a twenty on the table, stepped out into the downpour, and didn't look back at the mechanical animal that would never stop bucking against an invisible rider. The storm had hours left in it yet.