This time Frank woke up without a hangover but still with a headache.

It was bright out.

Squinting, he tried to take in his surroundings.

He was still in his car—passenger seat. His clothes were dotted with dried vomit. He was still tied up.

Fuck.

It took a moment to get past the anger to realize they were parked and the woman—Jane—was not in the driver's seat. He was alone.

Outside, the trees whispered in the breeze, shushing each other, rocking gently, knocking shoulders like a restless crowd waiting for a concert to begin.

Through the front window the road continued on to the horizon, straight and unstoppable. The absence of deserted vehicles suggested he was a long way from any major city. The sky was cold and blue. Nothing smacked of death or decay.

In fact, the dense trees on either side of the road bristled with verdant life. Looking at this empty strip of highway, one could almost believe the world was still alive.

But at that moment, Frank wasn't concerned with such musings.

He leaned forward, straining, until he could just get his little finger in the door latch. He yanked, feeling his knuckle pop painfully, and the door swung open against his weight.

Next thing he knew, the breath had been knocked out of him as he lay on his back looking up at that blue, peaceful sky hoping his body weight hadn't snapped his wrists in the fall.

A shadow fell over him.

"Hey, I was just fillin' up the tank. You have to pee or something?" Jane was standing in silhouette with her hands on her hips.

He hadn't really thought about it until just then. A pressure rose in his bladder.

"Yeah," he said.

She helped him up, averting her face as much as possible. There was something endearing about her embarrassment—like the way a high school girl pushes her hair over her face in the presence of boys.

"Alright, look... this is what we'll do," she started as she began to untie the rope around Frank's wrists which thankfully were unbroken. "We'll forego all the captive/captor bullshit and I'll just untie you and hope for the best."

Frank rubbed at his wrists the way he'd seen people do in the movies, as she knelt down to undo his ankles. Once he was freed, he wondered if he should rub his ankles too. Instead, he opted to shake them out as if kicking away caked mud.

"There," she said. "Now, if we can manage to act like reasonable adul..."

Her sentence was interrupted by Frank's fist. She fell back against the truck and slid down to the ground in a heap. Frank stood in a readied stance, low and wide, waiting for retaliation. But she didn't attack. She just looked up at him, her lip split but dry.

"That didn't hurt," she said. It wasn't a challenge, it wasn't a show of machismo, it was a simple realization. She felt no pain. Her fingers dabbed at her lip, checking for the expected moisture of blood. "Man, that is weird," she said, eyeing her pale fingertips as she braced herself on the door panel and slid back up to standing. "I can't feel a thing." She turned her hand to show Frank. "And no blood."

Frank made the mistake of dropping his guard for a second to examine her fingers then immediately felt his testicles jammed up into his chest.

He was on the ground again.

"I bet you can feel that!" Jane said breathing heavily. "You can still feel that, huh? It fuckin' hurts, doesn't it? You know what that means, asshole? It means you're alive! You might not be able to have kids now, but you're still alive. I'm not, you... you dick." She looked at her lip in the side view mirror. "Stupid," she muttered as she assessed the damage. "I wonder if... I don't even know if this will heal."

Frank was still fetal in the gravel, moaning.

Jane walked to the back of the truck and returned a few seconds later. She tossed a small pile of bunched up clothes at Frank's writhing form. "Oh, stop it, you big baby. Get changed and walk it off. And don't..." she bent down and pointed. "Don't hit me again." She soft-kicked the bottom of his shoes.

"Damnit," Frank managed.

"Do I have to tie you up again? I thought maybe we could just be adults about this whole... well... awkward situation and maybe ride together in peace. Can we do that?"

"Yeah," he groaned waving a hand in her direction. He hoped it looked like an affirmative gesture but mostly, it was just a reflexive movement pleading for her to stop beating him.

When he was able to sit up, he wiped the tears from his eyes and sat still on the edge of the asphalt, his heels digging into the loose gravel, every muscle in his body tensed. The pain was dulling but still poked the occasional sharpened stick at his insides.

She sat on the shoulder next to him, legs crossed, hunching forward. She plucked a piece of grass, rolled it in her fingers then flicked it away.

"You still have to pee?"

He looked at her, but she was staring straight ahead, her long hair obstructing her face, hanging bone-straight and thick as a curtain. It was long and healthy, the ends extending all the way down to her lap.

"Yeah, maybe... I don't know," he said. "It's kinda hard to tell right now."

"Yeah."

"Let me just sit here a few seconds."

"Sure. No rush," she said, plucking another piece of grass.

So, they sat there, side by side, looking off into the dense foliage.

Aside from the rustling trees and grass, there was no sound. No birds or distant cars or commercial jets or traffic helicopters.

Frank cleared his throat and readjusted.

"Well, while we're waiting for my balls to descend, why don't you tell me a little about yourself. Where you grew up, favorite color, do you prefer the strong silent type, or men who aren't afraid to cry? Is that your natural hair color? Do you wax, shave or pluck? Did you ever have any lesbian experiences in college? What the fuck are you? Have you eaten brains? Did you like them? Did they taste like chicken? If not, then what? And what do you mean 'metal shit?'"

"Metal shit?"

"That's what you called my music. 'Metal shit.'"

"Well, it's not really my thing."

"Does that mean you have to insult it?"

"No. You're right," she said, tossing the piece of grass. "That was unfair."

"Okay then."

They still hadn't looked at one another.

He suddenly felt old. He glanced at Jane and her veil of hair and wondered what kind of music she listened to.

What' s popular these days?

What kind of slang do people use?

For the longest time he thought lmao was the word; I-M-A-O. Imao? As in I, Mao Tse-Tung.

Were kids into Communism?

Had that become cool?

Eventually, he discovered the "I" was a lowercase "L" and the fucking thing stood for, "laughing my ass off." So, anytime he'd see an internet-acronym, he'd get furious, as though they were just another demon confirming in code the relentless march of time.

Then there were those goddamn emojis.

Fuck all that shit! Just the fact that when he typed the word, emoji, and spell check didn't underline it in red, was yet more confirmation that he had passed his prime.

Things he didn't understand were becoming socially acceptable, morphing into the collective consciousness of a world that was leaving him behind.

Pants were getting tighter as his stayed baggy—hair was getting long again but his stayed relatively short. Clothing company logos were completely foreign to him, so he stuck with his closet full of generic jeans and blank black tee-shirts he'd had since college.

He didn't feel unfashionable, but the terror was that he didn't really know. He'd look at himself in the mirror for way too long before making a simple trip to the supermarket.

His smile lines showed when he wasn't smiling. There were crow's feet stamped into his temples—his pores seemed to be getting wider. He was sure his hair looked like a rat's nest even though he'd done his best to maintain the shorter wispy look.

Eventually he'd just say "fuck it," but not mean it, as he left the house.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Jane's voice jolted him from his ruminations.

"What?"

"Fuck what? LMAO... baggy pants... crow's feet? What the hell are you babbling on about?" She was looking at him now. "You sound like a crazy person."

"I was just... I was..." Actually, he was just shocked to discover he'd been talking out loud. He wondered how long he'd been doing that. The habit must have formed sometime after deciding he was the last human on earth. Maybe it was just another way to feign human contact. "I don't know. I was just thinking."

"Well, normally, thinking takes place quietly, inside the brain."

"I... I didn't know I was talking."

"How long you been alone?"

"Too fucking long."

"It would seem so." She looked back out at the swaying trees. "What were you saying though?"

"I don't know... just thinking about getting older. Not that it matters now."

"You don't look that old."

"I'm thirty."

"That's not old."

"It feels like it sometimes."

"At least you're not dead." She said. "I was twenty-five when I died." She looked up at the clear sky. "God, that's a weird thing to say. I died. Well, I guess I'm still twenty-five. Wait what month is this?"

"September, I think."

"Well, if that's true, I'm twenty-six."

"Well, happy birthday."

"Fuck off," she said on a laugh.

They sat there a few more minutes saying nothing. He wondered if she could smell the forest. If not the forest... his brains?

"Well, let's get going," she said, slapping her hands on her oversized blue pants, standing.

"Wait, I still have to change... and pee."

"Well, get to it." She walked back to the car and put the gas can in the rear before closing the hatch.