Militia Roadkill

More about Militia Roadkill

It was somewhere outside Tucumcari when the sun began to melt across the asphalt like a fried egg left too long in the pan. Militia Roadkill was sitting dead center on the yellow line, wearing a color-block dress that looked like Mondrian had gone into fashion design after a nervous breakdown. The road stretched to infinity — a hot ribbon through nowhere — and she was its patron saint.

Nobody knew where she came from. Some said she escaped from an Air Force recruitment ad; others swore she’d been living off cactus fruit and diesel fumes since the Carter administration. What mattered was the look — big sunglasses, blunt blonde hair, a face that said she’d seen too much and decided to make peace with it.

I pulled over, the engine ticking like a guilty conscience. “You alright?” I asked.

She smiled the way a rattlesnake might stretch before business. “I’m fine. Just waiting for the traffic of destiny.”

There was no traffic. Just the sound of cicadas and the dry hum of the world turning. She told me her name — Militia Roadkill — and it rolled off her tongue like a tabloid headline written by a poet. She said she used to belong to something big — a movement, a cause, or maybe just a bad idea with good marketing. “They all talk about freedom,” she said, “but none of them can stand what it actually looks like.”

She asked for a ride to the next town, and I let her in. She smelled like gasoline and summer storms. We cruised through the badlands, and she started talking about the war — not any particular one, but the one that never ends: the war between boredom and chaos, between people who still believe and those who’ve stopped pretending.

At a gas station painted the color of rust, she hopped out, kissed my cheek like she was sealing a deal with fate, and vanished into the horizon, just another mirage in the American mythology of lost souls and open highways.

Later, when the news came on the AM radio, they said a woman had walked straight into the sunset and disappeared into the heat. No one ever found her.

But sometimes, when I’m driving through the desert with the windows down and the engine purring low, I swear I hear her voice in the wind — laughing at the idea that anyone could ever catch her.

Militia Roadkill, patron saint of the long, empty road — she didn’t die out there. She became the highway itself.