GRACE AND GRAVITY

by Lauren Kardos 

had three bars of service and 5G data. She could tell without looking. The buzzing in her denim jacket pocket hadn’t quit since she steered the hulking Ford Transit over the West Virginia state line hours earlier. She should have turned notifications off, or at least switched to sleep mode. 

Unfortunately, Carly peeked at Instagram when stopping for gas outside Somerset.

trishhhaaaa67: Where is he, Carly????

gunzngutz: wut a dogface, ofc dale left her 

yournextcountryadventure: Clearly, they’re going through a rough patch, ppl. Give them a min to figure it out, they don’t have to share all the gory details. Dale, Carly, I know how hard this must be for you both. We understand and will be ready to support your future adventures, together or separate, whatever that may look like. 

Should she describe her heartbreak, no, heart shattering, via a simple post, asking for space in the caption? Or should Carly host a Live video, encourage followers to join, and get their horrible opinions out in the open? She was reminded, not for the first time since she and Dale quit their desk jobs last year for the #vanlife, follower and engagement stats soaring, that there was no single way to get through to millions of people.

Dale thought up The Van Enigmatic. Scrolling through their shared account’s content as the gas stung her nostrils, most photo decks and videos began with his metro-lumberjack plaid and trim auburn beard over a bone-sharp jawline. And those green eyes. Emeralds piercing through the screen. Standing in front of an abandoned mill or sitting atop the ridge of a long-forgotten dam, Dale’s baritone, his clipped New York accent, could hook the nonhistory buff into listening to their feed’s encyclopedic rundown of ghost towns old and new. 

Carly lived behind her iPhone’s tripod stand. Dale told her not to breathe too hard during takes. Carly, who picked up editing, sound mixing, and research, only appeared in blooper stories. Messy bun, gigantic sweatshirt, blushing at the camera as Dale toured the van’s camping setup over breakfast. Dale’s divebomb cheek kisses as she hunched over the laptop late into the night were his favorite way to tease viewers about their next stop, zooming into the tabs open in Carly’s browsers. She didn’t mind the heavy lifting. Didn’t mind the long sleeves and layers, hiding the bruises. He pinched in his excitement, swatted to get her attention. All innocent enough tics, but she agreed with Dale. They made their adventure together, and there was no space for their love to be misunderstood. She thought they were on the same page. 

A fiery pink sunset over the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Charlottesville. A rusted lighthouse, abandoned near Chesapeake Beach. Jefferson Rock on a drizzly Harper’s Ferry weekend. Carly posted fleeting snapshots to The Van Enigmatic accounts over the past few days as she traveled north alone. She didn’t care if followers worried over the zigzagging locations, the longest delay between videos since they’d started, or Dale’s curious absence. 

Some hours past Harrisburg, she pulled over. Sitting in the driver’s seat, seatbelt on and windshield wipers useless against the mist ascending the nighttime Poconos, her thumb hovered over the button to post. Would the sunset over piles of anthracite she caught earlier cause a greater stir, or might it bring some calm among their viewership? How the hell could Carly make it easier to share? Dale was donezo, finito, out of the picture.

Tap, tap, tap. She brought the screen closer to her ears, increasing the volume to examine the draft post. Had she accidentally taken a video earlier, catching the nearby mines in action? 

Tap, tap, tap.

A small beam of light blinded her from outside the driver’s side window. Carly flung her phone somewhere under the pedals, and her scream pierced the cabin. “Ma’am?” Tap, tap, tap. The end of the flashlight knocked on the glass. 

Carly rolled the window down two inches, right fingertips brushing the keys in the ignition.

“You scared the shit out of me,” she said, glimpsing a mustache and widebrimmed hat in the gap. 

“Apologies, though I could say the same myself.” The edge of his lip quirked up. A joke, or flirtation? With her left foot, Carly toed the floor around the pedals, making sure the area was clear. Just in case. 

“State Trooper Martin, ma’am. You havin’ car trouble?”

For the first time since her tear-blurred vision required the stop, she looked beyond the headlights. A winding backroad pockmarked with potholes; half of the van parked on the thin median beside rusted guardrails. The other half blocked the road. She couldn’t remember the last time she heard a car drive by.

“No, no car trouble,” Carly said, hoping her snot-choked nostrils wouldn’t betray her. “I’m meeting a friend up in Scranton. Just stopped for a few to get my bearings.”

“Roads are empty out this way.” The officer inched closer to her window. 

“I know that,” Carly kept her voice light, her foot circling for her phone. “I grew up around here. Decided to take the scenic route.” Wasn’t that the cherry on top? Days freshly single, and the first man she encountered gave her a cold sweat. 

He squinted through the gap, bushy eyebrows squiggling like fuzzy caterpillars. “Don’t I know you from somewhere? One of those podcasters, right?”

Carly’s heartbeat chased its way up her throat. Her breath caught. If Trooper Martin could see her smartwatch, gifted from a recent sponsorship, he’d notice the heart rate monitor climbing to marathon-level beats per minute. She had to swallow, had to respond. “Just one of those faces.” 

He turned off the flashlight and stepped back. “You’re not planning to pass through Midpoint.” It sounded more like a command than a question. When she didn’t answer, he continued. “The land is real unstable out that way. Sinkholes, sudden fires. Hooligans get stuck every few months. Truly nothing much to see since the state tore everything down a few decades back.” 

Carly placed both hands on the steering wheel. “Nope. Just straight to my friend’s now. I dropped my phone when you spooked me, but GPS said Scranton is about an hour from here, yeah?”

Trooper Martin retreated again. “Drive safe, ma’am,” he said, turning toward the patrol car barely visible through the fog. When she found her phone wedged under her seat, Carly ignored the fifty new notifications and locked the screen. 

+

Carly couldn’t sleep, a theme these past few nights. Doubling back to the highway and parking at the far end of the Walmart lot, she’d slept a few hours but woke to an acrid tang. What use were dreams you couldn’t remember? Cocooned into the quilts of the tiny full bed Dale had installed in the retrofitted van, she replayed their earliest clips, horsing around with fake ghost hunts in frat house basements. Glowing phone nearly pressed against her eyeballs, she ignored dawn nudging through the slats of the shuttered windows, switching to teaser footage from weeks ago.

Midpoint, Pennsylvania, was The Van Enigmatic’s Holy Grail. Covering it was set to be their next miniseries. Carly and Dale charted out a visit in their earliest viral video days, growing obsessed together. She only learned of the once-town’s existence from Dale, Wikipedia diving to distract from finals before graduation. He was shocked Carly hadn’t known, her family still stuck in the sticks, forty miles south. Wouldn’t it have been on the news? Wasn’t it whispered about in the spooky story recess club she said she founded in fourth grade, a cautionary tale told by teachers? Carly had shrugged. Talking around politics and uncomfortable subjects had been a core principle of her small-town upbringing. She fell in love with DC after her tenth-grade field trip. From the energy on Capitol Hill to the unflinching Smithsonian docent at the National Museum of the American Indian, residents addressed hard topics head-on. She returned home inspired, ready to be a force for change. Carly applied only to universities in and around DC, where for better or worse, she met Dale.

Their first Midpoint episode was ready. Interviews, oral history, folk retellings, spliced with footage from across the years. Carly’s mother rubbed the side of her nose, thinking. “Sure, it made the papers. Aunt Cindy’s first husband was born in Midpoint.” The FaceTime call was recorded in the months before Carly and Dale told their families about going on the road indefinitely. Before Carly’s mother blocked Dale’s number and sent Carly pleading texts, weekly. Texts Carly left unanswered.

“Weren’t you worried? A whole town sinking? Toxic fumes in everyone’s basement?” For once, in rewatching videos featuring herself, Carly didn’t cringe at her voice. Who was this person on her screen? Not a hint of her current dark eye circles, her lips in perpetual grimace.

Though not in the scene, Dale had sat to her left at the van’s fold-out table. Digging into old message boards, he’d said.

Her mother rolled her eyes. “What were we supposed to do, Carly? It was an hour away, nowhere near our backyard. The governor paid well for those people to move on, and everything was normal here.”

Hadn’t her mother been angry about the negligence, fearful for the families displaced? The authorities, in all the news articles she read, scratched their heads and shrugged at each new sinkhole, each neighbor rushed to the hospital from whitedamp creeping up from their cellars. How had the underground fire started, burning up coal seams faster than the foremen could order the miners out? The answer, it seemed, was lost or covered up. 

Her family hadn’t liked Dale. Not from the moment he pulled up in a sleek silver Audi during George Washington University’s spring break. Hell, Grandma Pearl nearly stabbed him at first encounter. Insinuating a price tag on the neckline of his Arc’teryx jacket, she nicked Dale’s earlobe with a paring knife. His eyes swivel all the way to the back of his head, Pearl had told her later over a mug of chamomile tea. It’s not love, the way he treats you, her mom’s favorite text during Carly’s silent treatment these months. 

With Dale gone, the background noise of his constant talking no longer present in every waking moment, she realized he had one-upped her family, in a way. At his encouragement last year, she blocked her family on every online account. Turned spam filters on high alert. Hadn’t phoned her mother or sister in ages. Forget those rednecks, babe, he loved saying. 

Who could she call when Dale told Carly she talked like a mouthful of lug nuts? When her bank accounts were overdrawn from student loan payments and Dale refused to buy her anything other than salads with his card—really his father’s credit line? When she found the pictures in Dale’s phone?

Why let people into our lives who don’t support us, babe? It was Dale, his sweet talk that sounded so sensible at the time, who handed her the scalpel. But Carly knew her hand had done the severing.

+

The trees pressed against the narrow backroads. She left the music off, the windows cracked. Insects thrummed, birds sang, and the woods pulsed. Loud enough to be their own soundtrack. Loud enough to replace the playlist’s shuffle that might summon one of Dale’s favorite songs. Loud enough to shove away the memory of Dale’s dating profile recordings, the the suave flirtation Carly thought was his gift to her alone.

After moping the day away, she got fast food. Things Dale would never let her order. A burger with all the fixings. Fries dipped in a supersized milkshake. She took a sink bath and dressed in leggings and baggy flannel. She was back on track, on the road as the evening tree frogs called. She could film the miniseries herself, release some teasers, until she figured out her next step.

Along cracked pavement winding through the hillsides, she drove as if passing a school zone. She looked for Midpoint’s imprint of houses in the encroaching flora, hastily torn down by eminent domain. The street signs and town’s welcome banner were long confiscated by those same state authorities the trooper had mentioned. 

The night swallowed her high beams, and instinctively, she hovered a toe above the brake, searching for the flicker of eyes among the tree trunks, though deer season was months away. She hunched over the wheel, cruising around a switchback bend when her cellphone pinged from the cup holder, volume loud. Glancing down at the bright screen, wondering how Do Not Disturb switched off, she flung her left wrist at the driver’s side window to silence her stinging smartwatch and its flood of incoming notifications.

Her phone screen wouldn’t darken, each banner popping up swiftly, replaced by another from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and texts from unknown numbers. Carly bit at her watchband, the vibration rattling her teeth, but couldn’t pry the rubber notch from the clasp. A flicker danced along the road, toward the berm of the next bend. Possum? Raccoon? She swerved, grateful when the wheels produced no roadkill tha-thump tha-thump, and finally the aspens and pines parted on her right. Gravel skittered and dinged the bumper as Carly pulled into a dark parking lot, heaving. 

Buzz buzz buzz. Ding ding ding. 

13 new voicemails vanenigmaticfanpage: girl this rly doesn’t look good. where is Dale?

gunzngutz: my dude’s moved on, saw on reddit he’s dating a model. much 

more Dale’s style, imho.

New Private Message Request: Dale_Enigmatic. Accept?

At this last one, Carly tasted bile. People were sick. Bullying and trolling the comment section was typical, but creating a fake account? The way she had found out about Dale’s cheating was stupid. He had copied his personal Instagram username, verbatim, for his dating profiles. An anonymous fan emailed her screenshots, all confirmed when Carly created her own test account with open-source model photos. 

Real Dale was too lazy to think up a different username, yet she couldn’t help thumbing “Accept.” 

Dale_Enigmatic: I know what happened, Carly. Let me go.

Carly tossed her phone to the bed and flung herself outside, crouching, willing the vomit to stay down. Willing the band of sweat along her hairline to dry, her jaw to unclench.

No one knew. No one could know about Dale’s spur-of-the-moment request to film a mini-sode at an abandoned mill town. The GPS frozen en route for lack of mountain service. The ragweed-ridden field they hiked through outside of Asheville. The way Dale scratched at his throat. His emerald eyes bulging, reddening, glazing over. His rasping that he hadn’t had an asthma attack this bad since elementary school, big gasps turning into little fish-lip gulps. The only inhaler Carly found in the first aid kit was empty, the prescription labeled two years overdue for refill. 

“Midpoint Lutheran Cemetery” read the chipped wooden sign, letters faded with time and noxious fumes. As she stood and took in her surroundings, she softened her stomach, allowing air to reach the deepest point of her lungs. The sulfur-tinged breeze almost sent her running to the compost toilet. 

She’d read about this place. Officials tore down the houses, the stores, the community centers, but left the cemetery. It was impolite to move the dead, sure, but really the authorities learned that excavation was a crapshoot. Half the graves had been eaten up by the underground fires, and workers might trigger a steaming, gaseous belch or worse, a sinkhole that brought the fires above ground. The bodies would stay, and families, now forced elsewhere, could visit. Mine vents installed around the cemetery borders, engineers reasoned, would prevent the worst from where mourners walked. 

Her watch buzzed. The text Carly skimmed had her opening the back door to dig out her phone.

Momma Bear: Aunt Cindy said you’re heading toward home. Any chance we can see you? We love you so much.

Only in Dale’s death had Carly understood how helpless she’d become. A puppet in the never-ending Dale show. Her fascination with the rural macabre, empathy for places like her hometown region, was Dale’s sideshow, his runaway train life made possible by a trust fund and defined chin. The Manhattan lawyers his family had on retainer, the town attorney her mother could never afford. In that forgotten North Carolina holler, the plywood covering the old well lifted easily. The emerald of Dale’s still-open eyes quit twinkling long before the splash. 

Miles north, in another Appalachia ravaged and forgotten, the night grew heavy. Carly no longer heard the tree frogs, and the air daggered her insides. Thick, smoky wind blew hot from the back of the cemetery. The van’s high beams barely reached the furthest vent, but it appeared to be swaying, creaking, the surrounding wrought iron border fence began sinking, spoke by spoke.

Forehead slick, Carly put the key in the ignition. Could she rid herself of this last vestige of Dale and his excess, escape from the constant change, forget the world spinning so fast? She drove slowly, deliberately, toward the roiling fumes, and unhooked her seatbelt before the last row of headstones. She was almost sad she hadn’t set the tripod up before tumbling out the driver’s side door, her exit movie-perfect. The vent crumbled, the van nosed downward to some unseen hell, the back wheels spinning midair. 

Carly unlocked her phone. Only forty-five percent battery left. She held her thumb on the screen until each little square wiggled. Instagram: Delete. YouTube: 

Delete. TikTok: Delete. She gulped down her tears and dialed. “Momma, I’m near home. I need some help.”

---

Lauren Kardos writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, Spry Literary Journal,Folklore Review, hex, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications that feature her stories and poems. You can find more of her work at www.laurenkardos.co.