Music is Life lettering with media controls

Harlan Voss drove the Tenmile road for thirty years with a cassette deck bolted under his dashboard, and the only thing it ever did right was the buttons. The rest of the van rattled. The wipers stuck. But that deck had five keys, and he knew every one like the teeth in his own head. Rewind took you back to the diner in Sayer's Wells where his wife sang along to the radio with flour on her hands. Pause kept you there while the windscreen cooled. Play carried you forward, and fast forward hurried you past the years nobody wants, and the little looped arrow was for the chorus, the only bit worth hearing twice.

One August a girl got in at the Ardell junction with a shoebox of tapes and no money. She said the deck was broken. Harlan said nothing was broken that a patient thumb couldn't coax. He pressed rewind, the tape whined backwards, and a voice that was not his wife's came out of the speakers, singing about a river that had dried up before anyone thought to ask it where it was going.

She cried. He didn't ask why. They drove until the sun sat like a coin behind them, and at the state line he pressed the repeat arrow and let the same song go round, twice, three times, until the road gave up its last bend and the tape spooled out, clean and quiet, onto the tarmac behind them.

Sit still a minute. That's the whole of it.