Ghost route

You tell me that in this part of the country, the cacti are three hundred years old. You tell me they turn to wood and as we climb up the cobbled stairs I marvel at their spikes and spindles, surfaces that are rippling and peeling. One kind of plant morphs into another, green skin striated with brown. This species, you say, adapts to survive in the desert, where it doesn’t rain for months, years, maybe decades. As the rows of adobe houses flicker in the shadow of the Sierra Madres and the orb of the sun dips into the valley around us and the wagons that hauled silver between the old world and new trace their ghost route on the camino you drove to get us here, time freezes. It hangs in the dusk. The new leaves have already transformed, before we can notice, into bark.

Sick leave

Look, you say, and I crane my neck to take in the canyon that yawns west of the mountains, the world’s second largest. I clutch the steering wheel to stay on the ravine. I follow the highway that threads past farms and roadhouses and signs for strawberries! two dollars! and townships named for the Wiradjuri word for the lyre-bird. Everything gold, the river gums on fire, like the European painters that claimed this place got too much credit. They did not capture so much as they transcribed the light. We keep driving. We can’t stop. The highway commands us. We call in sick. We cancel plans. We fall asleep on bleached motel sheets and wake up to a dozen pink galahs screaming. We head back to the car, back on the road, the silence between us shouting, how long can we coast down this highway together, delaying real life?

The time between two places

This July, you never left home without your umbrella. Clouds the colour of steel-wool had displaced the clockwork certainty of endless, unending blue. Today, the sun was out. The pool at the base of the fall was surrounded by last-day-of-school-holiday picnickers. It was so full, it threatened to spill over. The water gushed down the face of the escarpment and the schoolboys peeled rocks at each other and the treefrogs rumbled in the reeds somehow everywhere and nowhere. You walked ahead of me: brisk. You are dedicated to using hours well. To collapsing, as efficiently as possible, the distance between coordinates, the time between two places.  But here, you paused to point out the monarch butterflies that zigzag through the jarrah. The tiny yellow starbursts that are sprouting in the grassland half a season before you expect them, way before they are due.

Plans and goals and outcomes

It’s been hours, you say. I have blisters on my blisters. I know we will find one, I say, as we amble through the labyrinth of streets along the Seine. Men in chapeaus play Piaf on the accordion and couples bound by navy-blue scarves kiss in corners and tourists lugging suitcases over the pavement gawk at wrought-iron balconies, gargoyles that are unfazed by the city’s beauty, scowling at us from their rooftop perch. I can see it in my mind, I say. You roll your eyes. We were like this: me, grandiose, you rational. Me up in the air, you on the earth, our architect of plans and goals and outcomes. Who would I be without you? We turn left, walk through an archway and there it was: the pastry shop of my imagination overlooking a perfect Paris garden. Are you happy now? you ask. I was.

Speedboat

The locals couldn’t swim. They revered the water. They saw portents in the ebb of the tide, could read the velocity of this morning’s current in the shape of last night’s fishing nets. The nets would appear on the sand, shrivelled, the sad dregs of an abandoned mission. Other times they would lie on the shore, a monstrous silver sculpture, heaving and throbbing with pomfret and mackerel and bream. I worried for you, that day, when you decided to go out. You learned when you were young. But the way the locals talked, I knew I couldn’t trust it. Your arms pinwheeled, your strokes strong, your form like the prow of a speedboat that careened towards the blue of the horizon. I watched from the safety of the tidal pool until you were a dot, then a speck, then a nothing, waiting and hoping for your return.