Paying Tolls

Kate Maxwell

This road: a hard-skinned parasite, sucking up your hours, stretched dull and thin as doctors’ waiting rooms or long church service. Three hours or more—hands on wheel, eyes ahead, while herding mind back to the road, pedal pulsing out of cruise control to slow for drivers who won’t merge and the endless funnelling of metal and fumes onto a heavy highway. A flicker of feathers, mound of fur by the side of the road might jerk your foot above the brake until you sigh relief mixed with regret at the sight of split stomachs, straight legs raised in rigor mortis stunned salute. At least they now won’t run toward your tyres. The passing waft of putrefaction seems to last for miles. Yet, you take this penance like the eternal pessimist home-spun from years of stoic, almost welcome disappointment. Best not to yearn, not to demand or ask for more. And you sit, arms bent, listening to eighties ballads on whatever local radio station you pass. Listen till you cannot take the, every breath you take hyperbole a second longer and static builds and builds like cicadas’ deafening tymbals song. You refuse to indulge in podcasts, other alternatives to tedium as you mea culpa your way down the highway. Sometimes, a fly head-banging on the windscreen might stubbornly deny the escape gap in the window. Let it buzz its scratchy irritation in time with yours so you can test your resilience together. Too many weekends burning rubber, fossil fuels, and patience from an already stretched marriage. We migrate back and forth, worried we’ll forget, worried we’ll relax into meals for one and turning on the light at 3.00 am. Hum of tyres—rhythmic, worn, reliable—drones through days. And now we’ve taught the child how to steer his own path: half-shaven chin set forward, focused on his brand new skill of detachment and too-soon leaving. Back and forth from harbour city to rural capital. Ocean to paddock, bluster to banal. All blur of clouds and cattle trucks, bitumen, complaint. One day this will end—this camping out in two houses, living less in one.