Free Remember to Forget by Deborah Raney

the soles of her tennis shoes when she stepped onto it. Shading her eyes, she entered the terminal—which wasn’t muchmore than a convenience store—and bought a can of Diet Coke from a vending machine.
    A man wearing cowboy boots and a leathery complexion tipped his Stetson to her as she exited the building, but no one paid much attention when she headed for the highway. Traffic zipped past as she walked along the graveled shoulder.
    She walked half a mile or so to an overpass. From there she looked west, her eyes taking in the sun-scorched landscape. The corner of her mouth quirked in a sardonic smile. She’d landed smack-dab in the middle of a Little House on the Prairie movie set. The terrain wasn’t pancake flat the way she’d always heard Kansas described, but the sparseness of trees on the gently rolling hills extended the vista for what seemed like a hundred miles.
    She moved to the left side of the road and crossed the overpass, hugging the dented guardrail and praying no one tried to add another dent while she was there.
    Every driver who passed waved or honked until she checked to see if she had toilet paper trailing her shoe or something. Was it that unusual to see a girl walking along the road in Kansas?
    The last of the Coke was warm and syrupy by the time she drained the can. Sweat trickled down the bridge of her nose, stinging her eyes, and her blouse was plastered to her back.
    But soon the sun dipped to the horizon, and a breeze fanned her face. Behind her the town had disappeared save for a row of grain elevators peeking over the sphere of the earth. On one side of her was a field of golden plumes she guessed to be wheat. Wasn’t that what Kansas was famous for? And on the other stretched miles of rocky pastureland. The grassland was fenced in with barbed wire strung through tilted posts of gnarled wood, or in some places, thick posts carved from porous yellow stone.
    A pickup barreled over the hill behind her, spraying sandy dust as it passed. Alarm rose in her throat when the vehicle slowed, lurched,then started backing toward her. She kept walking, and the truck shifted gears again and crawled along beside her.
    A man who looked remarkably like the man with the Stetson back at the bus terminal rolled down his window and leaned out, resting a tanned elbow on the window frame. “You need a ride?”
    “No,” she said. “I’m fine.”
    “You have car trouble?”
    “I’m just . . . walking. Thanks.” She quickened her pace.
    He shook his head as if he thought she were crazy but put the truck in gear and drove on.
    A few vehicles whizzed past, not seeming to notice her. But she hadn’t gone half a mile when another truck stopped, and another tanned farmer in a cowboy hat offered her a ride. Maggie was starting to feel as though she was a player in some sort of bizarre Stepford Wives –type movie.
    Again she declined. Did these people really think she was such a fool that she’d accept a ride with a man—a complete stranger—on a deserted country road?
    But as twilight pulled a cloak over the landscape she started to wonder if she was a fool. Whirling in the road, she looked back toward Salina. A haze of light rode the horizon where the town was sprawled. She’d probably walked thirty or forty city blocks, and there wasn’t a building or a light in sight, save for a couple of white grain elevators that occasionally peeked over the rolling terrain. Maybe she would be better off going back into town for the night.
    Go west.
    That voice again—or whatever it was. She couldn’t go back.
    She traversed a narrow bridge, and when she came to the next crossroad, she decided to turn off the main highway and walk south. Maybe there wouldn’t be so much traffic on a side road. She stopped short, seeing two small wooden crosses jutting up from the prairie grasses in the ditch. She scrambled down the gully and stooped to inspect them closer. The crosses, one slightly larger than the other,