4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
Kick to Unstick
Claire and the kids leave Broken Hill without saying goodbye — no stop at Grandma's, no last look, just the engine catching and the town shrinking to nothing in the mirror. Rose draws the journey in her notebook because drawing is the only language that still works. Hours later, a roadhouse appears from the dust like something time forgot to clear away. Inside, a woman with pale eyes and a face mapped by decades of outback sun watches them with an intensity that doesn't belong to a stranger. Her parting words aren't about the weather. And her gaze doesn't stay behind when they drive away.
The departure from Broken Hill happens without ceremony. There is no stop at Grandma's house, no checking whether anyone is home, no goodbye to the town that has been their world. Claire hands them food and water from a servo and drives east with her lips sealed and her eyes constantly flicking to the rear-view mirror. The silence in the car is not the peaceful kind — it is the silence of people carrying something too heavy to discuss.
Rose retreats into her notebook, drawing the road and the sky and stick-figure versions of herself and Mack swallowed by landscape. The drawings are her way of processing what language cannot hold: the building, the man, the girl, the impossible doorway. She draws Ribbons beside her. She gives Mack too many freckles. The ordinariness of the act is its own kind of survival — proof that she is still a child who draws, even if the things she has seen belong to no childhood she recognises.
The Noona Roadhouse materialises from the dust as though it has been waiting for them rather than the other way around. It is a place that exists in the cracks — half-forgotten shelves stocked with expired tins, a flickering neon sign that cannot decide whether it is open, a payphone leaning sideways as though it gave up years ago. Rose and Mack go inside for water and find something that does not fit the setting: a woman behind the counter whose pale eyes carry a weight and a knowingness that belongs to someone who has been watching this stretch of road for longer than seems reasonable. She studies both children with a flicker of recognition that is not social but something deeper, older, less explicable. Her parting words — a warning about a coming storm — land with a gravity that has nothing to do with weather. When they drive away, Rose can still feel the woman's gaze pressing between her shoulder blades, a new passenger in a car already heavy with secrets.
