[I'm making what is probably my 20th attempt at writing a novel, and for once I'm actually really proud of what I've done so far. This is the first couple of pages--I've written more, but I don't want to get too ahead of myself.]

Imagine you’re at a payphone in a town you don’t know the name of, and you’re dialing 9-1-1 to report a murder that happened in another town you don’t know the name of. You hear: 9-1-1, police, fire, or medical? and you aren’t sure whether you should say police or medical, so you manage to choke out, “I think somebody just got killed.” And then you twist your body around and try to find a sign giving any indication of where you are, but you can’t so you tell the dispatcher you’re in a town with a bus station and a church and a motel called Come On Inn and someone just got shot in a town you’re guessing is about ten miles away. Then you hang up before the dispatcher can ask any more questions and you do the same thing that got you into this whole mess, which is hitchhike.

While you’re walking down the sadly desolate road that needs to be repaved as much as you need a hot shower, you think to yourself how it’s strange that the second time you called 9-1-1 to report a dead person felt a lot different than the first time. When you see a car approaching in the distance, you hope it’s not just a mirage because you are in the desert, and when the car finally pulls up next to you and comes to a stop, you grab the door handle and immediately your heart stops beating for a split second. You’ve seen the driver before, not in person but in a photograph. It was a photograph in the house you were in not three hours ago, and you know the lady driving this car is going to go to that house and when she gets inside she’s going to find her (husband?) dead and it’s kind of your fault. So you let go of the door handle and you take off running down the road until it hurts your lungs to run any farther.

You keep walking and eventually an ambulance and a couple of police cruisers whizz past you and you turn around and watch them until they disappear. You begin to laugh and it turns into uncontrollable laughter, because this is the second time you’ve called 9-1-1 to report a dead person and also the second time you’ve walked away from the dead person to let someone else deal with it. Life is funny like that sometimes.

You’ve walked for an hour or so and not a single car has passed you but it’s a desert so there’s a little town every few miles along the road. You wander into one that’s identical to the town you were in when you called 9-1-1 and you go into the church because it’s a free place to sit down and rest. When you get inside, there are candles burning everywhere and an old couple sits in one of the pews with their arms wrapped around each other and you sit in the very back where you hope they won’t notice you. You pick up the bible and open it to a random page and the passage you read is coincidentally about murder and you begin to wonder if you were led to this church by God to repent for the half-sin you’ve committed, even though you’re an Atheist.

Then you fall asleep and when you awaken, you’re in a bed in the hospital and the nurse tells you you’re suffering from exhaustion and severe dehydration.

Life is funny like that sometimes.