Journal 54: The Outhouse at the Gap (time-slip fiction)

The wind off the Spanish Peaks carried a strange chill that morning. It was the kind that doesn’t come from weather but from waiting. Eli Turner parked his dusty Subaru at the pullout near The Gap on Highway 12. Just past where the road wound through a break in the land, a narrow opening in uplifted Dakota sandstone. The road squeezed between walls of golden rock that seemed to breathe the heat of a thousand summers. He was a weekend hiker, a geologist by curiosity, and a collector of strange stories by nature. But nothing in all his wandering, not ghost towns, not cave petroglyphs, not even the old logging ruins on Raspberry Mountain prepared him for the outhouse.