So I was doing my usual lunchtime bum around the internet, and I happened upon this piece by Matt Ruff over at the Hugo House. I saw him read it last year. It's called "Safe Negro Travel Guide," and Ruff said he originally wrote it as an idea for a TV show that combined The X-Files, H.P. Lovecraft, and race relations in segregationist America. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Victor came upon the sign at dusk, on a wooded stretch of road somewhere in the Allegheny Mountains. The sign was a rebus, two glyphs drawn in black tar on a boulder: a long-eared donkey and a setting half-sun.

Tucked into the back of the journal Victor carried with him was a reference sheet marked “Things to watch out for,” and if he'd had any trouble interpreting the sign he could have looked it up there. But he already knew what it meant: he could go no farther along this road, not safely anyway.

The problem, as he was only too well aware, was that he could not go back safely, either.

* * *

Victor had found the ad in the colored section of the Chicago Tribune's help wanted pages:

==========
Researcher, “Safe Negro Travel Guide”
SEE AMERICA! GET PAID!
CAR A MUST—ALL MAPS PROVIDED
==========

You can read the whole thing, again, over here. It's kind of sad to see that this is Ruff's idea of a television show that would be big on a commercial TV network—he does not have his finger on the pulse of middle America, to put it lightly—but I'd love to see this story expanded into a novel, at least, or a series of movies. And from the way the story has lived so vividly in my memory for almost a whole year, I can assure you that it's definitely worth a few minutes of your faux-work time.