Today’s story:
“The Cancer Diet”
by Daniel Wallace
In his rearview mirror Tony could see the last golden-red scrap of sun falling behind the curve of the world. It was beautiful, almost like somewhere far away an entire city was on fire, and he wanted to show it to Jasper. But Jasper wouldn’t have cared. His son didn’t care about the sun.
“How much farther, you think?” Tony asked him instead. They’d already been on the road for a while.
“What?”
“To Newton’s.”
Jasper shrugged. He looked out his window but there was nothing to see there now but the night. Just like that all the light was gone. He kept looking anyway.
“I’m kind of thirsty,” Tony said. “They have any water out here?”
“Pretty sure they do.”
Tony nodded, as if they were actually having a conversation.
“I bet they do,” Tony said. “You’re probably right. I bet they’ll have lots of water. I bet your buddy has water and he’ll want to share it. I bet we’ll find that to be the case. If he has a spigot. I used to drink water directly from the end of a hose when I was your age, but no one does that anymore. It seems a little third-world-ish now, doesn’t it? Drinking water from a hose on a hot summer day. Water comes in bottles now or it doesn’t come at all. I wonder how long before it’ll be the same way with air. Maybe when you’re my age you’ll look back at those days when you were driving down an empty stretch of highway in the night with your dad to some friend’s house and both of you were just breathing the air that happened to be in the space around your mouths. Ah, remember how it was before we had to strap canisters to our back and breathe through a tube? Those were the days!”
Nothing, nothing, nothing from his son…
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