"Just draw the line," a voice whispered.

A tattered road atlas lay open on the teak coffee table, turned to the two-page spread near the front that showed all the Interstates connecting the country from Maine to California, President Eisenhower’s gift to the nation. Birds outside were announcing the coming sun and the clanking window unit air conditioner was already no match for the morning's humidity.

With black pen and ruler in hand, John Bridges feared what he was about to find by drawing the line, and he was certain the revelation would be unwelcome.

He placed the edge of the wooden ruler on Seattle and lined up the same edge to Orlando. He drew a black line down, bisecting the nation diagonally.

"Fuck," he said under his breath as he sat staring at the newly defaced map. He stood up and stared it, clasping his hands atop his head, still cursing, and then sat back down to stare at it longer. He lit his second cigarette of the morning. The first one was in nervous anticipation of what he was about to do; this one was because the newly drawn line had increased that nervousness.

The line crossed directly through the town he was sitting in this early morning of July 4th; Springfield, Missouri.

The significance seemed mystical, or maybe it was just coincidental, John hoped. But of late he'd become a believer in signs. An old and crinkly correspondence, saved in a box in attics, garages and rented storage units for twenty years, held the original clue.

Three friends, John one of them, had been dispersed across the nation twenty years earlier after a few years together in Germany as military dependents. Upon arrival in the States, one of the three had sent identical letters to the other two. The letters contained a map of the US, their new locations pinpointed: Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, Fairfax, Virginia, and San Diego, California. The points were connected by lines to form a very long triangle that stretched across the country from the southwest to the northeast. Written in the neat hand of a teenage girl was the word "Geometry." It was a class the three of them had taken together.

The friends lost contact after a while, as old friends with new families often will, but the Internet had changed that for everyone now. John was from California, brought to Springfield by stupidity and fate. The sender of the correspondence, Sharon, had lived in Kansas for a time and was now in Seattle. Karen, formerly of Virginia, now lived in Orlando. All the old gang of Cold War brats, the acquaintances, the half-friends and the best friends had found each other in recent months through a website devoted to their old alma mater. In an email, one of the three casually mentioned the old letter, and yes, they all remembered it.

John connected their locations again, like Sharon had done twenty years earlier. But there was no elongated triangle anymore. It had been flattened and reversed. It was now a straight line, cutting the country from northwest to southeast, and John was sitting right on it.

Synchronicity. Coincidence. Happenstance. Accident. Any of those would've been a better option to what Bridges was thinking. He wanted to believe that way, but he knew better by now. The signs had been building for years.

He had to clear his head, gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he did out among the final resting places of so many of Springfield’s fine citizens. He wouldn’t show this to Karen and Sharon until he’d walked the graves and talked out loud to himself, alone in Maple Park Cemetery, a block’s walk away and then through a hole in the fence. Dawn was near. He wouldn’t need to get dressed. Most nights of late he’d been falling asleep in his clothes on the couch, the teak coffee table his nightstand to hold keys, coins, smokes, lighter and wallet, all sitting beside the road atlas and some magazines.

The graves would tell him nothing, like always. He knew most of their names by now, out there in the rolling pasture in the heart of the city. A place of peace, the ground hallowed by the tears and prayers of a thousand funerals, and regularly kept holy by the visitations and tears of surviving family and friends. The traffic din was gone in here. Just squirrels and birds and the light trickle of Fassnight Creek, which ran along the south end of the cemetery.

“So, it’s true, isn’t it?” John asked. “The old man’s vision. It’s about this place. It’s us, isn't it?”

He walked in silence, his eyes on the ground in front of him. He stopped in mid stride on the dirt path just as his foot was about to cover a scrap of cloth that lay half buried, stepped on before by others, or perhaps rolled over by lawn mowers. He pulled it loose from the dirt. A torn remnant from a tiny American flag, faded, dirty, but recognizable by a few stars and a couple of stripes, likely placed on the grave of some veteran on Memorial Day, and then maybe blown loose by a summer storm. A veteran, like John’s dad. Or Karen’s dad. Or Sharon’s dad.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” John pocketed the scrap.