Nineteen Miles of County Road 6

County Road 6 runs nineteen miles between where I live and where I worked, and for most of that distance there is nothing but fields and a treeline and the occasional dead barn. I drove it home late almost every night for two years, usually around one in the morning, and I stopped noticing the dark a long time ago. You get comfortable with a road. That is the mistake.

This was a Tuesday in early spring, cold enough that the fog was sitting low in the ditches. About six miles out I saw a porch light off to the right, warm and yellow, the only light for miles. I did not think much of it. Somebody up late. But there are no houses on that side of the road for that whole stretch -- it is state land, has been forever -- and by the time that registered I had already passed it.

Four or five miles on, the light was there again. Same warm yellow, same distance off the road, hanging in the fog like it was floating. My stomach did a slow turn. I told myself there must be two houses I had never noticed, which is a thing you can tell yourself at one in the morning when the alternative is worse.

The third time I was ready for it. I slowed down. I wanted to actually look. And it was not a porch light on a house. It was a light with nothing behind it, just a glow the size of a window hanging maybe eight feet off the ground in the middle of the field, and standing under it, looking back at my car, was the shape of a person. Not walking. Not waving. Just standing in the fog watching me slow down, the way you would watch a car if you had been waiting a long time for one.