She rolled down her window. Heat blasted her cheek. She exited the freeway and took a road next to some railroad tracks, rusted boxcars abandoned in a long chain.
The wind whipped through the interior, smelling of vinyl and exhaust. She stepped on the gas.
The irony was that she felt the carsickness less in the car. The irony was that the carsickness had nothing to do with actually being in one.
She drove past a lone barn newly painted white and a couple of one- and two-room shacks next to the road, canted picket fences lost in tall grass, dirty old trucks in the driveways. She passed the brown skeleton of a structure, not burned but somehow bared to its dark wooden bones, ringed by no trespassing signs on trees all around. It looked to her in its openness like an ancient place of worship, and she felt a brief urge to stop and sit inside its timbers, but she drove on. A sign read 60 miles to sacramento.
She could go see the capitol. She knew dimly that she would not. She knew dimly that she would never go near another city again.