Fiction is stranger than truth

So, in what may prove to be a momentary lapse in judgment, I've decided to post a few hundred words from a creative piece that I've been working on. Similarly impulsive moves haven't really been working out for me lately, but screw it. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't know that the vast majority of people who'll read this are folks that I know (and trust...for the most part).

There's no title to the piece at the moment, and the main character doesn't have a name. This selection is the beginning, and it's very rough (hedge hedge hedge).

So, yeah. Here it is. My one request would be that if you have something particularly vicious to say about it, send it to me in an email rather than posting it in the comments section.

Driving northbound on Interstate 91, a few miles past the Massachusetts state line, [name] pulled the car off the highway and into the parking lot of the Vermont Welcome Center. Characteristically lead-footed, he was making great time and could afford a rest stop.

A shock of frigid northern New England air assaulted him when he opened the driver’s side door. Thanks to the miracle of climate control, he had spent the past two hours driving in a comfortable cocoon of recirculated 70 degree air. He was surprised by the sharp drop in temperature between this spot and his starting point in New Haven, only a hundred and something miles away.

The cold air made him jealous. Connecticut had been experiencing an unseasonably warm winter. He’d had virtually no occasion to don a pair of gloves or his favorite knit scarf this season, and it was already early February. A sub-tropical climate seemed to be overtaking the southwesternmost New England state, working its way from the wealthy outer suburbs of New York City and creeping steadily up the Long Island Sound shoreline, its progress encouraged by the fuel tanks of SUVs that were standard issue in those parts. He was sure that it wouldn’t be more than a few decades before his home state was stripped of its New England bona fides altogether, left to graft itself begrudgingly onto the Mid-Atlantic likes of New Jersey and Delaware.

On the short walk from the car to the entrance of the Welcome Center, he pulled on a tight-fitting grey wool hat, thrust his hands into the pockets of his synthetic fleece jacket and shrugged his shoulders up towards his ears in defense against the cold.

He had visited this rest stop once before. He had been traveling with his mother to Hanover, New Hampshire, where he’d scheduled an admissions interview and campus tour at Dartmouth. He thought of the Dartmouth campus, recalling its uniform architectural style of white brick and deep green shutters. He wondered what it was like to be a Dartmouth man. It must be nice to go to school out in the woods, he thought, far from the pressures and judgments of city life.

The edifice that rose above him now was rustic, and was built to resemble an old barn. The dark stained wood planks that covered the exterior seemed authentic enough, but the date on the cement cornerstone—1999—betrayed the building’s youth.

Each of the double doors to the main building was affixed with a long wooden handle, carved to depict a woodsy tableau. The plank on the left showed a pudgy beaver hunched over a stream, a buck-toothed grin etched onto its face and its flat tail raised in a kind of wave. In the background stood a pile of logs stacked so neatly they might have served as the foundation of President Lincoln’s childhood home. On the opposite side of the stream stood a lone living tree, a portion of its trunk gnawed down to the size of a baseball bat—presumably by the giddy beaver.

The handle on the right was dominated by head, upper torso and front legs of a large moose, which gazed thoughtfully off into the distance. Behind it stretched a placid tree-lined lake, the sky above it dotted with what appeared to be a formation of loons or some other migratory bird. As [name] opened the door, he allowed his hand to graze the moose’s bas relief antlers.

I can't believe I'm about to post this. Eesh.