Every morning just before the sun rose, Merle unlatched the back of the faded white van.
Inside: cones, barrels, signs that said LANE CLOSED or EXPECT DELAYS, and one that simply read CAUTION in trembling orange.

There was never any work.

Where's the crew, he'd muttered that first morning, staring at the empty road. The company—unmarked, no number to call, only a logo of a perfect circle with nothing inside—just delivered a clipboard each week with coordinates. A stretch of road, a grocery aisle, a bridge. Always empty.

He placed the cones with reverence, one by one, in perfect intervals. After what happened at his last real job—thirty years at the highway department before the incident—this was all he could get. No questions asked meant no explanations needed.

A rhythm developed. Kneel, place, straighten. Drivers slowed. Shoppers turned around.

"How long will this section be closed?" a woman asked by the frozen peas.

"Indefinitely," Merle answered, because that's what he always said.

She wept, softly, clutching a paper-wrapped steak. No one else ever questioned.

He was paid in cash. Crisp bills folded into an envelope on his front porch, no return address. A new one every Friday. Always the exact amount to get by. Once, he thought he heard a voice as he collected his payment, but when he turned, there were only taillights disappearing down the street.

He lived alone in a dim apartment in the shadow of the water tower, with no furniture but a chair and a small television that only played static. Sometimes, in the static, he swore he could see headlights. Or hear footsteps.

"Hello?" he'd whisper to the screen. "Is someone there?"

Cones appeared in places he hadn't put them. Floating in the town lake. Sprouting from flower beds like strange blossoms.

"Did you put those there?" the mayor asked, pointing to a perfect circle of cones around the town fountain. A ROAD CLOSED sign stood in the center, though no road had ever run through the plaza.

"No," Merle said.

The mayor nodded like this made perfect sense. "Good work," he said, and walked away.

His back ached from lifting. From placing. From arranging warnings.

One night, a woman pulled over beside his latest project: a shoulder barricade on a bridge
that hadn't seen construction in thirty years.

"What are you protecting?" she asked, voice hushed like it might wake something.

Merle looked at the water below. Still. Too still.

"Not protecting," he said. "Warning."

"About what?"

"I don't know."

She didn't ask more.

Weeks passed. Then months.

He stopped removing the cones. The town grew tangled in orange. Detours led to dead ends. ONE WAY signs pointed in contradicting directions on the same street.

"I've been driving in circles for days," a man told the gas station attendant. "Every road leads back here."

"Stay on the marked path," the attendant replied, eyes fixed on something distant.

"What path?" the man asked, but received no answer.

People began circling endlessly, headlights crawling like insects. GPS systems blinked out: "Turn around," they whispered, even when people were home.

"Daddy," a child said, pointing out their bedroom window one night. "There's no street there. Just woods. Why is there a cone?"

The father just hugged the child; he didn't know why.

"Look at this," the librarian said, pushing an old newspaper across the counter to her coworker. She pointed to a photograph of last year's parade. "These weren't here before." Orange cones lined Main Street in the photo, standing at perfect intervals between the crowd and the floats. A WORK ZONE sign hung from the mayor's float. There had been no cones, no signs.

Merle woke one morning to find his own apartment marked. A MEN AT WORK sign blocked his door.

He sat down in the chair. Turned the static up.

The van was gone.

But the cones, the signs remained.

Everywhere.