The dust picks up in a cloud, coats the backseat window in dirty ochre and veils the road behind. We pick up speed. Particles fall like rain around us and I think I can make out the hazy image of a face in the residue collecting on the window.

The car is silent except for the white noise of static that plays from the grainy speakers. I don’t think Mum even notices. A fly lies dying in the centre console cup holder. On its back, it rubs its legs together and flutters its wings. In the vibrations I make out a sound. “I spy with my little eye… something beginning with you… I spy with my little eye… I spy with my little –” I turn my gaze back out the window. Every ten metres a new sign; they blur together as we pass them. McDonald’s. Turn off. Jesus saves. Followed by a rest stop. Life insurance. Turn back now speed up don’t let them get you.

In a shitty roadside cafe where the walls are moulding and the vinyl peels off the rickety chairs, we stretch our legs and appease our growling stomachs. Mum orders a coffee. She says she needs it to wake herself up. It arrives in a white mug with a chipped handle and a lipstick stain on the rim. Mum and my sister eat in silence, tearing apart charred bacon with dull knives and drenching their rubbery eggs in sauce. The waitress watches us from behind the counter. She doesn’t even break her stare when I meet her eyes. The more I look, the more familiar she seems. Her hair is choppy and greasy in the same way as mine and her body is all harsh edges. Just past her in the kitchen, out of the corner of his eye, the chef watches us. There are red stains around his mouth and when he grins, I can see the red coats his teeth too. I avert my gaze and study the only other customer. Though his head is down, I watch as the eye on the back of his head blinks slowly at us. I scowl.

“You look like your father when you do that,” Mum mutters.

The expression falls from my face as if someone has clicked the shutter on a digital projector and one image replaces the other seamlessly. I push at the food on my plate without taking a bite. Mum gives me a look that says stop fussing. I look back down; the mess resembles bloody organs spilling out of maimed roadkill.

*

Back in the car. My sister’s drink tips over as the wheels struggle over a gaping pothole in the road; looking into it I see a person crumpled at the bottom of the crevasse. Their arms and face are scratched and beaten and they gaze up at me without really seeing. Dregs of strawberry milkshake spill out onto the seat and when I turn back the drink curdles, coagulates, builds itself up like clay being kneaded together. A hand rises out of the mess. Its fingers stretch, as if working out a kink in the joints before it reaches out and grasps at my hair. I pull away. Glance at my sister. I know she can feel me looking but she ignores me anyway.

*

Time is non-existent. Intangible and unknowable. We’ve been driving for days… maybe months, impossible to tell. My legs begin to cramp; losing feeling in my lower extremities until pins and needles sets in. No known end in sight. No way to determine when I’ll be able to stretch my legs.

We keep driving.

Looking out the window, I watch bushland pass by, stretching on and on. Gumtree roots growing and spreading out onto the tar roads in an effort to strangle and swallow. Consume.

An old farmhouse up ahead nestles in an opening within the bush as if the trees have grown around it. In the front yard a cow is giving birth. Its belly protrudes and every now and then something kicks violently from within as if trying to break free. The cow screams and screams and screams and –

*

A tiny, abandoned church on the side of the road has its roof half-caved in, crumbling, disintegrating. We pull up beside it. At the entrance, the wooden door lies rotting and gnarled, mangled hinges still attached. Mum enters. My sister follows. I walk around the back.

The grass crunches as I follow a barbed wire fence to a rusted gate. Pushing it open, I find myself among gravestones. Though each one varies in the extent of its ruin, the epitaphs read the same. You are food for the earth, your body sustains us. A shiver crawls through me and goose bumps erupt across my skin.

I leave the graveyard. When I enter the church, I find it empty. Stepping across the threshold onto damp carpet I watch as the sanctuary explodes in flames, the fire contained within the holy stage. Red, orange, and yellow flicker and dance against the towering stained-glass windows. Glass shatters in the heat. Sweat pools in my collarbones. Within the flames, the tabernacle gleams.

*

Ahead a child stands in the middle of the road. It’s dark but the flickering streetlight bathes her in yellow. Although the distance between us narrows as the car progresses, she does not move.

Mum doesn’t see the child. She keeps driving. I try to wave the child out of the way but she just waves back. A toothy smile dimples the baby fat in her cheeks.

*

Our motel for the night is built in front of an old railway station. Abandoning my bags to a cramped room with moth-eaten curtains and stained walls, I head out. I walk along the train tracks, my arms stretched out horizontally as I step quick fast, one foot in front of the other. Wobbling, twisting at the torso, invisible hands push at my shoulder, equalising me once more.

Scattered along the rails are piles of bones, previously owned by various foxes, possums and wallabies that had wandered onto the tracks to die. Most are greying but some are in the first stages of decomposition, scraps of blood and matted fur clinging desperately to the skeletons. Like they believe that if they keep their original state long enough, they can somehow resurrect themselves.

Dread settles heavy like cement in the pit of my stomach. I am overcome with the sensation that I’ll become stuck here, at this motel, on this trip, in this car, as I slowly begin to decay. Until eventually, my bones join these forgotten ones around me. One of the many. Is this my final stop?

An earthquake shakes the ground, and the bones rise and swirl around me, picking up in a tornado. I am trapped in its eye.

*

The road stretches on.

We pass a decrepit farmhouse. A naked child is in the garden  covered head to toe in blood and mucus, sticky with amniotic fluid. It stands over a dead cow, the cow’s belly burst open, innards spilling onto the grass like a piñata. The child turns to look as we drive by and I see a second head growing from the side of its neck. Four eyes blink at me in sync and suddenly I am the cow rotting at its feet, cut open, my ugliness exposed to the world.

Bile pools in the back of my throat, burning my uvula, assaulting my sinuses with the stench of acid.

*

We stop at a Shell. Mum gets out and my sister kicks at the back of my seat. Pushing open the door, I step barefoot onto concrete; my boots lie discarded in the front. Darkness creeps in from the horizon, enveloping the last of the sun. I collect the key to the toilets and make my way round the back. The tiny cubicle is dim and grimy. The overhead light flickers, trapped moths disintegrating in the fixture. I clench my feet as if that’ll prevent the bacteria from growing. From fungal spores accumulating over my skin, claiming me as part of their ecosystem.

I wash my hands and splash my face with water, looking into the mirror. A girl stares back. I do not recognise her, though she shares my bone structure and our deep eye bags are the same shade of bruised purple. I reach a hand up to touch my cheek, she does the same. She digs her nails into the flesh and tears. The skin pulls apart, revealing the bloody meat beneath. She continues to tear and tear until all that remains is bare bone. I blink. In the mirror the same face, unharmed, stares back. Her hair has changed and she looks older. Thin white scars line her cheeks — the only sign of her previous butchery.

My fist fractures the glass. I watch as tiny splinters run up and down the mirror and pieces fall like hail, collecting at my feet and glinting. Blood dribbles from the cuts in my knuckles. I know at once that she and I are the same, anger and destruction festering deep inside our rib cages, permeating our veins. I walk back into the shop, depositing the key and pocketing a packet of gum on my way out.

*

In bed that night I turn to lie on my back. The pillows are too thick and my skin feels wrong stretched over my frame. An angel at the end of my bed blinks at me with its hundred eyes. The angel’s robe is soaked and hangs heavily from their shoulders.

I raise my head to get a better look. What does one say to the angel waiting at their bed in the middle of the night?

It opens its mouth, revealing rows of tiny shark-like teeth and garbles out a strange screeching noise. Then it is gone, swallowed back into the universe.

I dream of home.

*

We leave our thin sheets and damp rooms as the sun struggles over the horizon. Kookaburras gurgle on the roof gutter. In the parking lot a shadowy figure looms, puffing on a lit cigarette that does nothing to reveal its face. It watches us as we swing out of the driveway and the Vacancy sign switches on.

The car feels more cramped now and I push at the suitcase that boxes me into my seat. I can barely see Mum or my sister around the bags but I can hear them humming a vaguely familiar tune in synchronisation, though the radio is not on.

We drive by a farmhouse with a mailbox shaped like a cow leaning crookedly next to the driveway. On the porch sits a teenager who watches us as we pass. Its two heads are stitched together and I can’t determine where one ends and the other begins.

*

A dust storm builds in the middle of a dried-out field, nothing but burnt sugar cane and the corpse of an unemployed scarecrow. The wind picks it up in a thick, whirling cyclone, ploughing its way towards the road until our car is swept up inside it. Specks of dust creep through the air vents, sticking in my throat and scratching my retinas. I begin to choke. Tears cling to my lashes and I blink furiously. The dust coats the front windshield in ochre.

I can no longer see the road ahead, yet Mum keeps driving.

Image: Deniz Demirci