We stole a shopping cart from Walgreens and decided to push it into the Pacific. When we began, the ocean was only a murmur whose brine had dissolved in desert heat. In the expanding avenues we sang songs of honor and progress. We named our cart Rocinante. One of us rolled their ankle and we took turns pushing them as the sunset radiated purple over Fontana. Under the hum of power lines, we slept between bushes. In the morning one strip mall unfolded into the next and we imagined the lives of those glimpsed inside taco joints and nail salons. At a derelict auto shop we named a deity in its honor. Rondor does not forgive. And the rest of the story goes like this: we gave up halfway, abandoned Rocinante on the curb at the LA County Fairgrounds, called someone's girlfriend and got a ride the remaining forty miles. We slept on the beach in a cold fog, intermittently awoken by chattering sandbonis. But before that, there was the night we emerged from a stretch of darkness into the fluorescent wash of a Domino's, a mushroom pizza atop Rocinante's canopy of sleeping bags, the box open, a veneer of grease shimmering in streetlight, the gaze of a flashlight beam on the road ahead.

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