Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Fastball – The Way

The Way, a shortcut through worlds of mystery, worlds that might have been, worlds that have been abandoned, known only to those who have given their lives over to life on the open road.

======

It was only on his last walk around the 4×4 and caravan that Pat spotted the bug. Wedged between the bullbar and the grille, it looked like a cicada or a locust but about the size of a small dog. Its shell was pale green and covered in barbs. The bug must have been stuck there for the last couple of days, drying up in the hot sun, but he hadn’t noticed it until now.

Before each time Pat and his wife Cheryl set out from one of the caravan parks, he ran through a checklist. He’d printed it up before they started travelling and had it laminated. Check the air pressure in the tyres, the wheel nuts, the safety chain and electrical cables. Check the windows and door and awning were secure and make sure the lights were all working. Remove the handbrake and turn the hot water and the gas and the water pump off. Then a final walk around the vehicles looking for anything he might have missed. Well, he’d missed the giant insect until now and felt equal parts dismayed, embarrassed, but quietly pleased that his meticulousness had paid off.

Returning to the caravan, Pat fetched a pair of long handled BBQ tongs. Digging behind the bullbar, he got a grip on the oversized insect and pried it free. Fractures ran through its barbed exoskeleton and goo had dried along the seams. He carried it to the nearest garbage bin and buried it beneath some wadded takeout containers that were already starting to smell in the morning heat.

Pat rinsed off the tongs and returned them to the utensil drawer. Cheryl made her way back from the shower block, towelling her hair. She wore a fluffy pink bathrobe and plastic crocs.

“Everything alright?” Cheryl asked.

“Fine, fine,” Pat said. “Just doing my final checks. All systems go, Mission Control, we are in the green and ready for takeoff.”

“Not until I’m dressed, Major Tom.”

Their caravan was six and a half metres long and just a hair over three tonnes, with white and grey sides, saddled to their white 4×4. Cheryl got dressed and then joined Pat in the 4×4. Both the vehicle’s trunk and backseat were loaded with supplies and souvenirs but Pat kept the front spotlessly clean.

“Where to, Major Tom?” Cheryl asked.

“You have the map, Mission Control, we’re due in Hartog by lunchtime.”

“We’re taking The Way again?”

“If that’s alright with you.”

Cheryl gave Pat her shivery little smile. The one that made her look like a much younger woman, even a little girl, again. Ready for an adventure. From beside the passenger seat, she dug out a road atlas more than three decades out of date. Amended, battered, folded, dogeared and torn, pages covered in scrawlings of red and blue pen ink, its cover sunfaded from years resting on the dash of various vehicles. Pat turned the engine over and pulled out of their assigned space, the big vehicle easily accepting the weight of the caravan that had been their home for the last four years.

At that early hour of the morning, the caravan park was quiet. It was outside the school holidays so most of the spots were unoccupied and the only residents were grey nomads like Pat and Cheryl. Retirees who had uprooted their old lives to spend their golden years traveling in RVs and caravans around Australia’s roads and highways. A couple of men of Pat’s vintage, balding and paunchy, gave them a friendly wave as they pulled out of the drive.

Once you had circumnavigated the country two or three times, strange patterns began to emerge. Byways and shortcuts that didn’t appear on any modern map or piece of navigational software. From what Pat heard, it was the same in any country to those that traveled their roads and highways for long enough. Over campfires and cups of tea, they’d been inducted into a kind of secret society. They shared the knowledge of secret shortcuts that they called ‘The Way’.

Leaving the park, Pat headed away from town. They quickly found themselves surrounded by farmland and low rocky hills covered in scrubby brush. Cattle milled between meadows and strands of gum trees. Cheryl consulted the battered road atlas.

Access to The Way relied on paths both precise and utterly random. They wouldn’t appear on any official map. Roads that once existed but shouldn’t any longer. Others that were proposed but never built. Local shortcuts that just didn’t exist for out-of-towners.

“One-point-one kilometres past this next road, there should be a turn on the left,” Cheryl said. “And then turn right whenever you feel like it, and then right, and then right again. And then you need to be looking for another turn three kilometres after that but it could appear on the left or the right.”

1.1 kilometres later, an unmarked road that appeared to lead to nowhere in particular branched off the left side of the road. Pat took it and they wound between farms. It seemed like sooner or later the road would end up at some farmhouse or gate because there was nowhere else for it to go. When his gut told him it was time, Pat pulled the car to the right. The caravan protested a little behind them. There was a road there that he might have otherwise missed. That maybe hadn’t been there until he turned. He did it twice more, turning right and then right again, a process that should have brought them back to the original road but somehow didn’t. Three kilometres later, one eye on the odometer, he searched for another turn. The looking was the important part. If they weren’t looking for it, the turn wouldn’t be there. The turn was on the left and he took it. He could feel a kind of tension vibrating through the skin of the 4×4, like a high wind hitting the caravan. The steering wheel fought his grip. It was part of it, like they were building up a charge.

There was no singular moment. The road descended and the landscape transitioned from dry brush into wet, living green, branches and leaves and vines hanging heavily with moisture. Flowers the size of human heads broke up the greenery with their own vivid colours. The road, unmarked, cut through the jungle flat and black and straight.

The Way. Pat and Cheryl’s surroundings might have been mistaken for a valley down close to water but there was a pulse in the air that didn’t belong in their universe. Large insects flitted through the trees, half-glimpsed. It was somewhere like this, some world like this, that Pat figured they’d picked up the dog-sized bug he’d found wedged against the front of the truck that morning.

“Do you want me to put the book back on?” Cheryl asked.

“Sure, sure,” Pat said.

There were no radio signals along The Way. Through her phone, Cheryl started playing the audiobook they’d been listening to on the stereo. Pat didn’t pay too much attention though, distracted by the view outside the windows.

Greenery stretched, unbroken, along both sides of the blacktop for twenty minutes. Huge, birdlike shapes slipped occasionally behind the trees. Insects flitted between trees and splattered the windshield. The number of bugs reminded Pat of driving back in the Seventies and Eighties. They saw no one else on the road, of course. The only other people found on The Way from time to time were other nomads and savvy travellers but they were few and far between.

Jungle transitioned abruptly into desert. Sheets and spires of glassy material covered swathes of the yellow rock and sand. A strange shimmer filled the air and there were dozens of stars in the sky that shouldn’t have been so visible during the day. The audiobook droned between chapters. Eventually the stars disappeared and the desert turned to grassland, savannah, just as flat. In the distance were vast trees with black bark and mushrooming canopies. Unless Pat’s sense of distance was completely thrown off, the trees were hundreds upon hundreds of metres tall.

Herds of animals that looked much like small giraffes with darker fur moved across the savannah. Pat and Cheryl parked and got out to take some photos although it was difficult sharing anything from The Way with anyone who didn’t know about it. They didn’t stray far from the 4×4, knowing The Way could be dangerous.

Pat kept driving. The landscape transitioned into another grassland, subtly different, with stunted trees and low, rocky hills. Pat could almost have been fooled that they’d pulled off The Way and back into the normal world again except for the feeling in the pit of his stomach. After five minutes, they spotted a massive pyramid of glittering white stone. Big enough that it took a good few minutes to drive past it. There was no other sign of life or civilisation. No one had ever reported seeing native humans living on any of the worlds The Way passed through. There were worlds where it appeared people were long gone or were absent for some mysterious reason. Pat thought some of the worlds they visited might have been occupied but they just entered them somehow out of step with the inhabitants. Separated from them by some kind of quirk of time and space.

Pulling off The Way, Pat and Cheryl found themselves on another backcountry road and then navigated their way back to the highway. They arrived in Hartog an hour earlier than they should have done. From where they’d started, even in a straight line their journey should have been a minimum of 251 kilometres. Their odometer only showed them having travelled 143.

xXx

Over the next few days, Pat and Cheryl pottered around Hartog and tried the local cafes. Pat visited the war memorial. Cheryl checked out the craft stores, although an excess of craft supplies were already testing the limits of the 4×4 and caravan’s storage.

The caravan park where they were staying was a temporary home to other grey nomads. Through coded language, Pat and Cheryl met another couple who knew of The Way, Greg and Moira. Together, over cups of tea, they compared notes until late into the night. Talking about some of the most unusual sights they’d seen, they got onto the topic of the scariest things they’d come across on The Way.

“Spiders,” Greg said. “It looked not so different from the area where we were travelling, there were houses and trees off the road, but everything was covered in spider webs. And the webs were crawling with them, hundreds, thousands, everywhere you looked. The car and caravan ended up covered in them, we had to hose it off when we got back to the real world.”

“We came across a world with no light at all, not even a moon or stars, just our headlights, and even they didn’t seem to shine as bright as they should have done,” Cheryl said. “All we could see was the road. But the worst part was that there were things out there. They were about as big as people but we couldn’t get a good look at them, they kept flitting in and out of the very edges of the lights. It didn’t hurt them, it was like a game to them. You could feel it, it was a game. If we’d broken down there, I don’t know what might have happened.”

“Have you ever seen people on The Way? I mean, not other drivers but native people?” Pat asked.

“Never,” Greg said. “The way I hear it, it’s like that everywhere. The Way only ever passes through places where all the people are gone, or never arrived.”

“Of course, makes you wonder who even built the road in all the places where there were never any people,” Moira said.

Pat struggled out of his folding chair and went to their caravan. He returned with the heavily earmarked road atlas that Cheryl used to navigate The Way.

“Do you have one of these too?” Pat asked.

“Don’t need it.” Greg grinned. “I always go off my gut. That’s the way you find the best shortcuts, the places no one else has been.”

The next morning, Pat did his checks on the 4×4 and caravan. They’d both been washed since their last trip through The Way, sides and windows gleaming. He found nothing out of place on his last walk around the vehicle, doing so once and then a second time to be sure.

“Do you want the map out, Major Tom?” Cheryl asked, as they climbed into the truck.

“No, Mission Control, I want to try going off my gut.”

“Because of what Greg said?”

“Not because of that! I’d just like to give it a go, and see what happens.”

Caravan in tow, Pat drove out of Hartog and rejoined the highway. Traffic was light and swiftly moved around the slower vehicle with its load. Pat’s eyes tracked the sides of the road, looking for an exit that would spark a twinge in his stomach. Cheryl played their audiobook and knitted by feel as she watched the scenery.

Pat felt a hook nestle in his gut as a side road appeared on the highway ahead. It was signposted normally, attached to one of the myriad of small towns and suburbs that they drove past every day. Towns he had never heard of before and would never think of again. He flicked on the indicator and slowed to take the exit.

“Is this it?” Cheryl asked.

“Maybe,” Pat said. “We’ll see.”

Pat pulled off and turned toward town. He drove without thinking. They passed another caravan park, dotted with grey nomads and empty yards. Before reaching the outskirts of town, he felt an urge to turn. They found themselves climbing uphill. The road forked and he turned without thinking. The slope became steeper and their 4×4 laboured. A different kind of tension began to run through the skin of the vehicle as well. The world got thin. It felt like they should run out of road but it just kept climbing.

Snow started to drift past the car, as if they’d climbed high into the mountains. It wasn’t snow, Pat realised a few moments later, it was some kind of pollen. Fluffy, pink-white balls of material that covered the windshield and the windows. He switched on the wipers but could hardly see the road. It was there, black asphalt surrounded by pinkish haze, but he couldn’t see anything else off to either side.

“We’re through,” Pat said.

“Honey, slow down! I can’t see a thing.”

Pat wasn’t worried about other cars and the road appeared dead straight but he slowed down all the same. Drifts taller than the caravan layered the sides of the road. They crawled along for another ten minutes before a gust of wind seemed to clear the pollen.

They found themselves driving through a riverlands. Strata of shallow tributaries and muddy banks stretched away to either side, giving way to swirling rivers all the way to the horizon. Floating islands, clumps of plant matter the size of ships but with ambulatory limbs, steered themselves across the surface of the calm waters.

The riverlands gave way to rows of endless grey houses. Concrete walls with dark windows and flat rooftops, not a single side street or alleyway between them. Thousands of them stared emptily at Pat and Cheryl as they passed but they didn’t see a single person or any other living thing.

They passed into a winding grasslands. A wall of black smoke fumed on the horizon above the haze of an inferno. Herds of towering kangaroos bounded through sheaths of yellow grass, even crossing the road in places. A wombat the size of a car dug a barrow by the roadside. What might have been a marsupial lion, like a giant quoll, lounged on an expanse of flat rock.

They crossed a desert where the dunes were made from human skulls. Unimaginable numbers of human skulls. Monstrous, spider-legged machines picked their way across the horizon. The heads of enormous Disney characters, scaled with rust, eyes glowing, swiveled to watch them pass.

Pat didn’t know where The Way was taking them. The thrill of discovery superseded all those concerns, he was just along for the ride. He wondered just how far they might travel relative to the real world and whether there were records to be broken. What wonders they might see, what dangers they might surpass. There were stories, of course, of those who joined The Way and never returned. Rumours of abandoned cars and caravans and camps spotted on the roadsides of The Way.

They passed through rainforests and snowfields and cratered hellscapes of burning glass. The Way then wound between low, dark, loamy hills seamed with arteries of gold. Verdant waves of thick, bluish grass covered the tops of the hills. Squat and unthreatening trees with streamers of pale leaves beckoned in an unfelt breeze. It all looked beautiful and tended and safe, like some impossible garden. Most remarkable, however, was the sky. Although the sun was halfway to midday, the clouds were daubed with peach and mauve and lavenders like the most gorgeous sunrise or sunset that Pat had ever seen. It shifted with depths and subtleties as they drove.

“This place looks like Heaven,” Cheryl said. “It’s a paradise.”

The road they followed wound along the coastline. Sheer cliffs seamed with gold dropped away to the frothing surf of an azure sea. The view was not so very different from part of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria but run through some kind of filter that made everything slightly alien, more vibrant, hyperreal. Shifting crystalline colours moved through the water. Surf sparkled as it misted the air. Seabirds with plumage more like parrots and tail feathers like peacocks arced above on shifting currents of air.

Pat spotted a broad plateau overlooking the ocean. Pearlescent boulders jutted out of the soil in the middle of the clearing but otherwise it was totally flat. A couple of low trees framed the space. Grass waved invitingly, looking as soft as a feather mattress.

“Lets stop up here, huh?” Pat said.

“Do you think it’s safe?”

“It looks safe, doesn’t it?”

Pat pulled off to the side of the road. There were no other cars of course and it was unlikely that they would see any so he parked the 4×4 and caravan then switched off the engine. They could hear the crash of the surf and musical cries of the seabirds, taking them in for a couple of minutes before daring to open the doors.

Even the air tasted sweet. Pat found himself gulping draughts of it, drinking it in. It had an effervescence to it like the bubbles in champagne. Crossing the plateau, the grass and soil felt springy underfoot. He wanted to take off his shoes and feel it combed between his toes. They chanced as close to the lip of the cliff as they could. Waves crashed rhythmically against the rocks a couple hundred metres below.

“How long did you want to stay?” Cheryl asked, after a few minutes.

“I don’t know, it’s so beautiful here, and peaceful,” Pat said. “Maybe we should have lunch here?”

“We’ve never done that before, but, you know what? I don’t want to leave either.”

Pat and Cheryl noticed a couple of mounds nearby. Somehow they had missed them at first but they were the perfect height for sitting and Pat was amazed how comfortable he was when he sat down. The colours of the sky and sea shifted constantly in an extraordinary tableau. Pat didn’t know where to look for fear he would miss some other gorgeous but fleeting detail. Cheryl committed as much of it as she could to her phone’s memory.

“This is amazing,” Cheryl said.

Seabirds landed in the nearest tree, showing no fear of the humans. Their bejewelled feathers draped underneath them. Their songs were as musical as any songbird that Pat had ever heard. Other small creatures moved through the grass. Wallabies crossed with domesticated rabbits, with upright postures, long, soft fur, and floppy ears. They, too, showed nothing but curiosity toward their visitors.

Eventually, Pat decided to take a closer look at the tree. Fruit, green and golden hued, dangled heavily from its branches. They looked almost like mangoes but even larger and bulbous like gourds. One of the boughs almost seemed to dip into his hand to offer him one.

“Are you going to eat that? It could be poisonous,” Cheryl said.

“I’ll try just a little bit, make sure I don’t get sick. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

Pat took the fruit back to the caravan and cut a piece off the butt end. The skin was thick but parted like silk. Its flesh was golden and smelled like syrup. Cheryl watched carefully as he cut off a sliver and popped it in his mouth. Flavour exploded across his tongue. It was like the piece dissolved instantly into sweet but somehow nourishing juice. He swilled it around his mouth, making sure it didn’t burn or sting then just savouring it before swallowing.

“Jeez, that’s good,” Pat said. “I don’t even know what to compare it to but it’s really good, juicy!”

Pat held off on eating any more in case, as Cheryl suggested, it might be poisonous or otherwise make him sick. It wasn’t easy not to go back for another piece though. They ate the sandwiches they’d packed for lunch then waited another hour, sitting on the mounds and watching the sea. Slicing off some more bits of the fruit, getting its sticky juice on his fingers, Pat fed some of it to the floppy eared wallaby things who seemed happy enough to have it. Once they were convinced the fruit wouldn’t kill them, he and Cheryl sliced up some more and gobbled it.

“That is good!” Cheryl said. “Better than good, wonderful!”

“What if we camped here tonight instead of continuing?” Pat asked.

“Camp here? Has that been done before?”

“Some people join The Way with no intention of coming back for weeks, so they must. I don’t want to leave yet, do you?”

The two of them set up the caravan as they would normally do. As the afternoon stretched on, the colours in the sky and sea became even more beautiful. A storm closed in. Lightning struck the sea again and again. The bolts of energy were white but each tinged with a different colour as if viewed through a prism. Rolls of thunder struck different chords until they joined together in a symphony.

Pat was concerned he might have taken too big of a risk by staying. The storm hit with just as much violence as any storm in their world. Wind and rain lashed the caravan but the coloured lightning kept its distance. After a while, when he felt brave enough, Pat stood under the caravan’s awning and held a travel cup under the rain. Tasting it, he found it as sweet and satisfying as the air and the fruit.

Pat and Cheryl slept that night with the rain and musical thunder like a lullaby. When he woke before his wife the next morning, Pat felt as healthy and refreshed as he could remember. Stepping out of the caravan, he found the grass heavy with damp. The sky and sea looked brushed clean, painted with fresh colours.

Pat turned to the nearest trees. More fruit hung from their lowest branches. Fat and ripe and golden. As he approached, leaves rustled. He plucked another to cut up for breakfast.

Something else had changed. Pat’s eyes swept the plateau. The big white rocks, like giant pearls, they hadn’t paid much attention to them yesterday since they were probably the least interesting aspect of the landscape. Pat could swear they had been rearranged slightly. There might have even been another one emerging from the ground. Four of them divided up, leaving spare ground between them that hadn’t been there before.

“What the heck?”

Pat’s eyes were drawn to the mounds closer to the cliff where he and Cheryl had been sitting the day before. They’d taken on a distinct shape. Still covered in shags of dewy grass, they had backs and armrests and seats molded to their backsides. They looked like a couple of armchairs that had been abandoned and claimed by nature.

Pat hurried back to the caravan and shook Cheryl awake. “I think this place is reacting to us being here,” he told her.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you.”

Pat took Cheryl outside and showed her the dirt armchairs. He pointed out that more fruit had grown on the trees and the way the rocks seemed to be separating. Seabirds flocked overhead and those wallabies circled through the grass.

“Is there someone watching us?” Cheryl asked, drawing her dressing gown around herself.

“I think it’s this place, this whole place,” Pat said. “I think it’s made itself perfect for people, like Heaven. And now that we’re here, it’s adjusting itself even more.”

Cheryl looked unsettled. “What does that mean? Should we go?”

“If it meant to do us any harm, it could have by now. I think it wants us to stay.”

Curiosity kept them from moving on. Instead, they cut up another of the delicious fruit and took advantage of the terribly comfortable chairs that had grown out of the dirt. It felt like they could spend all day staring at the sky and listening to the soothing sounds of the surf. The air was vitalising, Pat felt healthier than he had in ages.

In addition to being delicious and juicy, the fruit seemed strangely filling for what it was. Pat wondered just how long a person could live on it. They pottered around the site the same way they could on a lazy day at a caravan park. He read and did some work on the caravan. Cheryl read and knitted, and both of them watched the sea and the sky and their shifting colours. When evening approached, they still didn’t want to leave.

xXx

Over the next two days, Pat and Cheryl started calling the place ‘Eden’ for obvious reasons. Eden took care of their every need. Strange reeds began growing near the roots of the fruit trees. When bitten into, they tasted starchy and carby and satisfying like some combination of root vegetable and freshly baked bread. When they desired meat, several seabirds swooped overhead and dropped wriggling fish on the grass for them to cook.

Even stranger were the rocks in the middle of the plateau. Round and head-high to begin with, the stones reshaped themselves slowly like slabs of ice somehow melting into new shapes. They flattened and stretched even as they spread apart, becoming walls and the beginnings of a roof. Holes drilled themselves through the wall, windows and a doorway. Eden was creating them a more permanent home, taking inspiration from their caravan. He wasn’t sure if they were really rocks or maybe some sort of fungus with a skin as hard as marble.

The third morning, Pat woke up early to find the sea and sky simmering with colours and the white stones having completed their transformation. Birds chattered musically in the overburdened trees. A couple of fresh fish, still wriggling, had already been dropped off. The new home looked like a squat cottage. It only had one room, walls smooth and white and without detail like something molded from clay. Taking a look inside, he found furniture also molded by invisible hands. A bed from dirt and sheathed in grass, and what could have been a table and stools grown from the same material as the rest of the building.

In spite of the idyllic scene, Pat felt an uncomfortable pit in his stomach. The awkward feeling of having to reject an unwanted favour. When Cheryl woke up, he showed her the little house as well.

“How much longer can we stay here?” Pat asked, once she’d gotten past her initial delight.

“What’s wrong with staying? You were right, this place is a paradise.”

“But that’s not what we set out for, is it? I mean, if we just wanted a comfortable place to settle down and live out the rest of our lives, we could have stayed home.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m worried we’re getting too comfortable. We stay here much longer and we’ll risk getting stuck.”

Cheryl nodded. “I suppose you’re right. But this place has been awfully good to us.”

“We could always come back, someday. If we remember the path that we took. But for now, I think we had better move on.”

The two of them packed their things and got ready to leave. Waves crashed against the foot of the cliffs below. The birds flocked and started singing with a determined edge to their music, almost sorrowful. Pat decided to collect some fruit for the road but he found the branches pulling out of his reach. Strands of grass tangled his feet. Stumbling, he glanced toward the ocean and saw a storm gathering over the water.

“I think we need to hurry!” Pat said.

Pat rushed through his checklist, making sure the caravan was safe to tow. Wind howled in a mournful dirge. The birds and wallabies scattered. Lightning speared the ocean as the storm approached with impossible speed. Rain started to hammer as Pat and Cheryl climbed into the front of the 4×4.

“It doesn’t want us to go, whatever it is that controls this place,” Cheryl said.

“All the more reason to leave,” Pat said. “Now that it knows we want to go, it could do something to damage the car or strand us here.”

The 4×4 lurched forward and pulled the caravan with it. Lightning crackled just off the coast, tinged with rainbow shades, and thunder rocked the vehicle with a symphony of sound. They left the white home Eden had created for them behind. The road wound along the coastline, revealing more sheer cliffs laced with gold and plateaus carpeted in blue-green grass, now soaked in rain.

Lightning struck the road directly ahead. Cheryl let out a small scream as thunder rattled the windshield. A glassy crater marred the centre of the road. Pat kept up his speed and swerved around it. The vehicle and caravan were battered by wind rising over the cliffs and shoved sideways.

“I think that was meant to be a warning shot!” Pat said.

“What do we do?” Cheryl said.

“Keep going! It doesn’t want us dead, it just doesn’t want us to leave!”

Pat followed the road. He would leave The Way as soon as he could but that required time and motion. Lightning flared and threatened but they weren’t hit. Beneath the car, the road rippled. Suddenly, a section of rock wall beside the road heaved. Several tonnes of soil and broken threads of gold tumbled into their path. Pat hit the brake and screeched to a stop across the wet asphalt.

“There’s no way we can get around that!” Cheryl said. “Should we go back the other way?”

Pat checked the side mirror and saw a sky filled with dark clouds. “It could just as easily box us in that way as well.”

More rain lashed the car. The wind sounded like a voice moaning for attention. It almost formed words. Pat really didn’t know what he should do.

“What if we tried talking to it? Cheryl said.

“Do you think that would work? That it would actually understand us?”

“It understood what to feed us and how to make a home for us without even asking?”

Pat stepped out into the driving rain. It soaked through his clothing although it smelled so sweet and was a nice enough temperature that the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

“Hello?” Pat shouted into the wind. “If you’re listening, if you can understand me, I wanted to say we’re sorry! We took advantage of you. We came and took what we wanted, then we didn’t even say thank you when we wanted to leave! So, thank you, and we’re sorry, but we do need to move on!”

Pat wasn’t sure what kind of response he expected. Cheryl watched from the 4×4. He thought the rain and wind might have lessened but it could have been a temporary dip or just his imagination.

“I’m not sure what you want to keep us for, are you lonely? Because there are others we could tell about you! We could tell them how to come and visit! But we have a life we need to get back to, we have families, grandchildren, waiting on a call from us! We’ll always remember you but we have to go!”

Pat and Cheryl waited. Lightning fractured the sky and thunder rolled the length of the coastline but the storm seemed to be retreating. The wind and rain definitely lessened. Half a minute later, it was only drizzling on his damp clothing. Sunlight, and shifting colours, began to peep through the dark clouds.

“I think it’s forgiving us!” Cheryl said.

“Thank you, thank you! We mean it, we’ll tell others and they’ll come to see you as well!”

Pat wrung out some of his clothing. Climbing back into the 4×4, he regarded the landscape before them. The soil and rocks and gold, however, appeared to melt. Sluicing off the other side of the road, it ran over the nearest cliff and disappeared.

“Where to, Major Tom?” Cheryl asked.

“Final frontier, dead ahead, Mission Control,” Pat said.

======

Sean: Honestly, I’m not sure if any story I could write would be as intriguing as the real life events that inspired the song in the first place. An elderly couple, one with Alzheimer’s and the other recovering from brain surgery, who jumped in the car to go to a festival in a nearby town and wound up 350 miles away in another state, at the bottom of a ravine, and weren’t found until two weeks after they disappeared. I’m usually pretty good with directions but I can think of a couple of times in my life where I’ve taken a wrong turn and wound up totally disorientated about where I am and what direction I should be going and it’s never fun. Coupling that with dementia and you just have to wonder what was going on inside that car on a drive like that, what was going through their heads. Did they even know how lost they were or did they think home was around the next corner? The song and the story behind it has always fascinated me.

If you’ve been reading all the stories in the Mixtape series, you’ll probably have spotted some parallels between this one and the first official entry in the series, (Nothing But) Flowers. A kind of genius loci embodied in both of them, thankfully this one’s a little bit nicer.

The next two coming up are good fun, been aiming for some that are a bit shorter and sharper, and then I’m going to have to figure out what’s next! Remember, you can find the growing Mixtape mixtape on Spotify for a taste of what’s coming and for other updates you can find me on Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

Next Track: The Rolling Stones – Heart of Stone