I have been asleep for a long time. The frost is crusting the window.

In my dream (for I do have a dream), I am walking the street I knew.

This street is the connection between the crescent my grandparents live on and the highway that leads into the city. While I walk, I realise I am holding a basketball. I greet the neighbours ad nauseam; they hold their hoses, tip their hats.

At the end of the street, a crow shrieks down and latches onto the ball. One of its feet is interlocked with my hand. It makes no noise but its beak is open, waiting to reply to anything I might say. I feel a pure and animal need to get it away from me. I can hear the highway. When I shake my hand to see if the bird will leave, it does not. I wake up around then.

My daughter had shown me videos of drivers with televisions and video games inside their trucks. They personalised their interiors with such thoughtfulness I wonder if they hired designers. I have not.

The frost retreats. I turn on the radio.

In these same videos, the drivers take many safety precautions. They loop their seatbelts through the inside door handle and attach it to themselves. But I have never encountered intruders in these places, and my nerves have loosened. I was jumpy when I was younger.

My daughter passed away. It is not on my mind so much.

I have curtains at my windows, which I open and attach to hooks.

I am carrying electrical cables this time. My partner supervised the truck loading in my place while I recovered from a case of influenza. When I arrived at the company lot to leave, the area was empty of people. The trucks were all white, stood as an army.

I drive a dry van truck. It was white at some point.

The cold cloud is long. Sunrise licks the rim.

At some point during the night, fruit foxes lined up on the power lines above my truck, dug claws into the wire, and died; in this morning they are lovely nightshades, humming in Farsi. I leave them behind.

The hours are veined blood, circular and facile. I watch black solar panels run down a hill like an endlessly-descending musical scale.

It is night again now. I sleep again now. I sleep easy.

Each morning my seatbelt jams on the first pull.

I pull into a trucker café on the side of the highway. It sits against a junction.

I see a town to my left. The streets are wide. The buildings appear crushed under foot, the jagged edges and rainless rooves consistent with a sudden, giant heel strike. Further in that direction stands a statue, a rather forgotten figure mounted on a roundabout. Names on plaques unmentioned.

I think of walking in, not driving. Meeting someone, nonspecific. We drink coffee. We shop in stores; we take the bags home.

A pie is $2.50 while a sausage roll is “Five”. Letters and numbers used interchangeably.

A girl with long fingernails and a quiet, soluble smile is drawing infinity signs in the dust on the counter.

“Yes?”

“Yes, that.”

I order a ham and cheese sandwich and coffee.

I sit a paper on my lap to be unread and look through the stained window at birds.

The coffee is poor. The thought of my own thoughts disappears with my first sip.

A “V” of birds in the sky above the town begins to fold on its right side, as some birds fly faster and overlap. The “V” disintegrates over itself, so it resembles a pack of ants pulling apart a picnic table.

When I turn, the angle of my sitting gives a perfect view into the kitchen. I see a man, maybe the manager, slap that girl from the counter. She must have moved when I was not looking. Her earphones are thrown from her ears and freeze in their departure from her as I glance. When I look away, I consider that they may still be in the air.

Such casual cruelty, such boring and bitter transcendence in witness, the meat of the moment in some raised arm.

I get in my truck and leave.