Should the stay on the coast or move somewhere else?
He didn't remember requesting it. He was sitting in a roadside diner in Oregon, the kind of place where the coffee tastes like wet paper and the clock on the wall has been stuck at 4:12 for a decade. He tapped the notification. Download IMG 1618853906723 jpg
He looked back at the woman in the yellow coat. She was holding something in her hand—a small, rectangular object. A camera? No, it was too thin. It looked like a postcard. Suddenly, his phone buzzed again. Another notification. Should the stay on the coast or move somewhere else
The notification appeared on Elias’s phone with a sterile, mechanical chime. He tapped the notification
It was a woman standing on the edge of a cliff, her back to the camera. She was wearing a yellow raincoat that seemed to glow against the darkening sky.
He opened it. This one was a close-up of the postcard. On the back, in handwriting he would recognize in a sensory deprivation tank, were four words: “Stop looking. Start driving.”
“Haystack Rock,” he whispered. Canon Beach. But that was eighty miles north.