He wouldn't have been able to tell you about when exactly it started, or even why it did at all.
As he recalled it, it was an overcast day staring bleakly down on the twisted and mangled skeleton of a car, blood dripping with obscene silence into the upholstery and gasoline matting the friction shorn earth. He thought it was a dream, maybe; a boldly lined nightmare splashed in Technicolor and left running on an old, creaky film projector in a dusty old theatre. He could smell the rank age in the rust - that this place, this old thing hadn't been violated in a while.
Rust, death, what's the difference? It's all decay, and it's all too sick to imbibe, but you breathe deep and you taste it down in your gut like it's burning bile regardless. Drink deep - remember the way that the driver's arm was bent too horribly out of place; disjointed bone jutting out awkwardly and impossibly into the web of broken glass; blood and sinew severed and sailing on the cold morning breeze. Taste it like the rust and the gasoline clinging to your cold, damp nostrils, through the rasping of winter, hissing of the dying engine.
He could tell you about when it started, why it did. He simply chose to believe that he couldn't.
In his mind, the misted road stretched out before him like a dark funeral pyre strait quilted in carbon fog. His hands sweated, slick against the wheel of the old Ford Mondeo and he heaved not at all unlike bent and broken old codger shovelling coal into a darkened train hearth. There was still smoke in his eyes and in his mouth, choking him like all the tears that somehow wouldn't threaten him before. Pray, why couldn't you have sobbed when you needed to? Knelt by the pyre and wept like an orphaned child, the last in a dying world where love was the only tangible fuel to drive the engines of humanity. In those wisps of smoke and fire, love left him and his world entire. Why not weep for the loss, when finally there is nothing else to lose, and the wreckage paints your loneliness in watercolour; oil spatters seeping fluidly in the grey rain.
It was a greying Sunday afternoon. The funeral must have been... what, a few hours ago? A day? A week? He couldn't possibly say. He'd no flint to tally the time on the stone walls of his mind. He thought to stay with the casket, scratch the concave surface underneath the downpour and pray that soon his hands may meet that poor soul inside, rasping for the last tendrils of air. No way could he be dead - he was waiting, right? Surely. Denial was a pretty little thing, a girl to sit with on a cold and lonely night and share a few drinks with. She'd fill him with such ideals of riding this out, that it was a minor setback; extrapolate his executive decline out into a sky rising, black, jagged line. It'll all be okay, she said. He'll come back and you won't be so alone anymore, driving down this travel road with nary a sense of direction to your name and the burnt tatters of a map you tore up a long time ago. He remembered seeing a sign directing down a rural road into a place called Hawick. Kielder too. He didn't recognise the names, nor the woodlands. All he could remember was leaving the funeral in a black Ford Mondeo and never once looking back; drive north, he thought, just drive north.
The road he trode was a lonely one this particular Sunday afternoon. Fog quilted the asphalt like a thin duvet to warm the wood either side of the narrow, country road. Around him, the woods seemed to speak nothing to him, a solemn silence flanking a one-man funeral procession and their winds calling to him like the wounded cries of the mourning. Through the mist, they tilted their heads, beckoned by a low whirring breeze. A draft breathed through the tiniest crack in the passenger side window where he had left it open. Why is that open? There was nobody else in the car.
He thought there was. Little brother there chiding him for his reckless driving.
The sky looked to be full of rain, like the rotund gut of a gorged beast about to spit and spew everywhere. He thought of the silly tales he used to tell his brother; of greedy dragons. He thought of the roguish grin of his brother in the passenger seat. He stopped. Bury those memories like you did his broken corpse - he won't come back to chide you anymore no matter how oft you weave lines into this road.
Perhaps, he thought there was aught to be gained in the heedless reverie of his darling little brother; cheeky smiling, crass remarks and his slender hand snaking over big brother's thigh and-
Don't, Loki, you'll make me crash, you devil.
You're implying that isn't my intention.
Such a memory didn't taste as sweet any longer, rather it seemed more rigid on his tongue, like the metal and rust of Loki's old, mangled car; his tongue rolled under it, and under it he spoke no such mourning shudders. No sobbing, no groaning, no childish weeping for little brother. Loki. He still remembered a time his tongue worked and he sang tomes of love for a little brother he thought would never leave him. He remembered their room, sheets askew. He remembered the hazy morning smiles, sunrise in Aquarius. He remembered how little brother's slick thighs felt as he rode up and down on his surging hips; settled in the swing like a natural rhythm and harmonic. He remembered how they were never silent, and he remembered how Loki liked his cup of tea afterward.
Slow going on the road, he watched the fog roll into abstract shapes on the roadside. He never did get to lie in a field at summer and watch the skies float on by with him. There was a face, a serpent, a rabbit.
A man.
He slowly pressed on the brakes and swung into the hard shoulder, peering out of his window with great wariness. 'Twas only a patch of fog and dense thicket, was it not? Must have been. With lack of care, he writhed his way out of his seatbelt and out of the door, into the bitter cold of the fog drapery and roadside breeze, pelted with frost and exhaust enough to choke a man. He folded his arms, stared out down the road and watched the fog roll by some more. Remember all those tales he'd tell; those stories during the night when he'd try to stop his big brother from sleeping if only for a laugh. Ghost stories, monster stories.
For a moment, he considered the tales of highway haunts; the ghostly hitchhikers; roads in the fog unmarked on any map; the mother's spirit that rose up to save her sleeping baby from the wreckage hiding off in a nearby ditch.
Is he out there waiting now? He himself, a highway haunt? A ghostly hitchhiker? The brother's spirit that rose up to save his beloved now asleep to the world in a wreckage he couldn't even begin to dismantle? Oh he would fancy that, would little brother - a tale to be told to impressionable youngsters; to frighten awake or to bed. He would like that. Thor smiled into the fog. Come back to me, Loki, he murmured, so quiet it merely birthed subtle melody to the wind, come back to me, please.
Drifting through the fog like it was a waning barrier between death's halls and the waking world, he breathed unsteadily. Would that he could, he'd reach out into the dark, hold his little brother's hand and tug. Please, brother. Life is fickle, but death is terminal and irrefutable. Death can never be ended, and it can never be breached. Try as he may, he could not pick through that fog, he could not find his brother, and he never would again.
He could have stood there all day, contemplating the patchwork of the fog between the trees, finding his brother dancing 'tween the patterns of the thicket and just how much it hurt to be without him. In all truths, he had felt pain before, he had known loss, but he had not experienced the true bitterness of a resentful and angry God until he had seen his brother burnt up in that car wreck. Never had he felt the true emptiness of having his soul forcefully broken and torn apart, scattered 'cross the world like shards of an old, fanciful relic in all. Future people would piece this death back together; study the rise and fall of a mortal man and humanity's true mortality in the face of the absolute and inescapable; not in death, but the theft of the soul.
In all, true death would be a reprieve, for there was no worse a fate. He was denied and condemned to painting his words in tears on the surface of that coffin all that time ago. One day. Two days. Three days. More. Do you even recall time, or is it too an illusion like your mortal fortitude? It probably is. In a world where such beauty is so fickle and fragile, the foundation is a fallacy.
Another few moments passed, another few whispers to the fog like a child to be soothed. Thor finally returned to his car, but he did not close the door. He sat and examined the photograph hiding just above the cigarette lighter. And they're happy again, just like they always were. Eventually, Thor closed the door and started up the engine once more. He listened to the hiss of rain begin to fall on the roof and the engine purr beneath his feet. Closing his eyes, he rested back into his seat and listened to the air con whistle into life.
Brother… brother…
A word like the dream of loving itself. He, or the air con? He couldn't even tell.
Thor opened his eyes again, stared out onto the road ahead and parsed the fog like the alien scripture of a God he could never begin to understand or forgive. He put his hands to the wheel and his foot down, and once again he was northbound, knowing not what the unknown would bring him or why he was going there. Sweet escape, perhaps.
Behind him, the hairs on the back of his neck prickled like little brother was breathing there, tracing lines with soft kisses.
He chose not to remember how it started, or why it did at all, but it had followed the same pattern ever since it did. Systematic anger, denial and acceptance; hallucinating the dead and longing for it like an old friend to be met in the rain; finding dear brother again in the mist and truly believing it's his hand snaking down 'neath the waistband in sweet rhythm, with groans patterning pleasure on the cold windows. And it always started with a backward glance on a travel road.