Delirious

"There's not a lot could split a cow open like that," Franklin thought out loud. He'd given up on keeping his ideas to himself, having been trapped in hot, dry solitude for almost a day. He stood above the carcass, popped open down the middle, with the hues of cow innards decorating the sand. It looked like a coloring book in the hands of a child with a head wound.

Franklin looked around. Was the heat just getting to him? He'd practically sweat through his t-shirt, and the scenes of increasing violence that he seemed to be stumbling upon were not instilling much courage.

"Why did I even get out of the car?" he announced to the sand dunes. "What point was I trying to make? Jesus..."

The cross country road trip had been Sandy's idea.

"It'll be fun," she swore, "It'll be like we're two hermit crabs living in the same shell."

"Doesn't one of them eat and kill the other?"

Sandy shook her head. "Weirdo."

"Nature is terrifying," Franklin replied, using a phrase that had become his mantra.

Well, of course the road trip that started in San Antonio had gotten about as Flagstaff before the blistering tension snapped their relationship in half like this cow's spine.

"You want me to go?!"
"Yeah, go!"

He jumped out of the car, and before he could say "Wait, my shirt tail's caught in the car door," she was gone, taking two years and a sizable portion of his clothing with her.

"It's gotta be in the water," he breathed. The sun was directly overhead and that cow wasn't getting any alive-r.

He'd already deduced that the cow belonged to that farmer he'd met a few hours before. That was, at the given time, all that really made sense about Franklin's life for the last day.

"I crave isolation," the farmer had told him over dinner. "I drove a truck from Chile to the Yukon for 19 years, never picked up a hitchhiker or brought someone along. By the end I was chatting up the seat warmers and giving them names."

He gestured to the meal on Franklin's plate.

"You enjoying your chinchilla?"

"Not at all, really," he replied.

"Well, you gotta be patient. Not a lot of meat left on chinchilla bones, 'specially when they've blown up. Just hope that cow 'o mine that' run off doesn't stumble into one of my traps."

He went back to devouring his meal.

"Sorry to hear about you and your girlfriend. But you sure as hell can't walk anywhere. Won't get more than a day out there without the basic necessities."

The farmer took a large swig of water and... and...

That's the portion of the story where Franklin stopped believing himself. A few seconds later, the farmer's stomach had torn open, after a series of terrified screams and a spattering of human emotion/insides all over the table.

Franklin excused himself from the scene and, running out the back door, glanced down to his right as he made his escape. The farmer's dog had apparently suffered the same fate, facedown in its water bowl, inside out.

This was getting old fast.