Offerings Not Easily Accepted

They found him lying facedown at the end of Crossing Street, hair matted around the sides of his head. Arm extended, his lifeless fingers held a Pepsi bottle as if in offering to the highway beyond. His rusty shopping cart was full of plastic bottles, and inside each they found a paper on which a date was scrawled. Every bottle had one, and the earliest they found was in a completely flattened bottle, dating five years before. It was a newspaper clipping, and on the other side was written an address: the other end of Crossing Street, seventeen miles away.