What he didn’t know was that the casino was a chain, with a location just miles away. It’s in one of those desert towns much like ours that’s just a glorified highway strip mall vaguely adjacent enough to trailer parks that skip lots and shift shape despite congealing into one singular location manifested in collapsible mirages of houses and streets that clone one another like a cancer, infecting every tract parallel to suffocated rivers damned to occasional muddy creeks riddled with disease and **** stink. The type of town that pounces just as you nod off during a long road trip where you stared too long and hard at the sprawl of asphalt slicing cyclical bundles of brush and succulents before dashing away just as quickly as it appeared, evading all manner of maps and backtracking even though there’s no other highway where you could have been. Places that bounce in and out of your peripheral, where no one seems to live, that you might escape to from where you began. Where only a moment passes and you look down at your withered hands realizing you’ll soon be dead. And that moment so fleeting, so nothing, that death will be a gift. Barely noticing the web of footsteps surrounding you. Who have you abandoned? Or did they abandon you? A gas station, one of six corporate grocers or a hastily repainted marketplace waiting to be purchased, a pawn shop, church lots stuffed with tireless cars, a landlord’s passion project of craft store, cafe, or other undercustomered business model for a place most will only ever know as Where I Pissed Once, and occasionally, one of many franchises within a casino chain. (I saw the sign on the way to pick up his body.)