Lunch in the Middle of Nowhere

“It looked like a roadhouse, but it felt like something waiting for the story to catch up with it.”

We hadn’t seen another car in nearly an hour by the time Mum pulled into the roadhouse.

The silence on the road had taken on a shape of its own—dense and breathless. It wasn’t peaceful. It was pressure, a kind of invisible weight that settled over us through the car’s thin metal skin, growing heavier with every passing kilometre. The engine noise had morphed into a full chorus of complaints—clicks, groans, and a persistent rattle beneath our feet that now sounded less like a loose part and more like something trying to break free.

The landscape outside had changed, though change felt like too hopeful a word. It had thinned. What little vegetation remained had retreated further into the background, leaving only the skeletal outlines of trees and the occasional rusted fence post, leaning drunkenly at the roadside like forgotten sentinels. The earth was the colour of dried blood, cracked and exposed, with no sign that it had held moisture in recent memory. It felt less like a place people travelled through and more like somewhere people came to disappear.

The roadhouse appeared without warning, like something conjured rather than built. It didn’t exactly look open. But it didn’t look closed, either. It occupied that strange middle space—the same space we all seemed to be living in lately—caught between past and present, function and failure, surviving only because it hadn’t quite collapsed yet.

It was a squat, square thing of corrugated iron and old effort, squatting under its own rusted roof like a dog curled up in the only patch of shade it could find. The roof was blistered and eaten away in places, letting columns of dusty light slant through from above, turning the dimness beneath into a kind of weary halo. Two old petrol pumps stood out front, long since stripped of their shine. Their red paint had turned to the colour of brick dust, numbers on their cracked faces faded to ghost digits, needles trembling faintly as if they hadn’t quite given up the idea of movement.

Above the door, a sign declared in cracked, sun-warped letters: MILK • BREAD • COFFEE. The words looked like they’d been carved into the building’s memory rather than painted. Beneath the current yellow flaked layer, ghost traces of older attempts were visible—blue, then white, then raw timber. Each layer a previous version of hope. Each one surrendered in turn.

Behind the roadhouse stood a dead windmill, all angles and silence, its blades frozen in place against the white sky. Its body was contorted with rust, joints locked up like an arthritic spine, the weather vane stuck pointing nowhere. It looked like it hadn’t moved in years, and no one had expected it to.

Mum brought the car to a stop with a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh, but deeper—lower. It came not just from her lungs but from somewhere else, somewhere hidden. A long exhale of resignation. The engine clunked to a halt, its final rattle sounding more like relief than defeat, like it was grateful we’d stopped before it had to ask.

“We’ll eat here,” she said, flatly. No rise or fall in the tone. Just a line drawn in dust.

It didn’t sound like a plan. It sounded like a surrender. Not a choice, but the absence of one.

No one argued.

The idea of food, even in a place like this, overrode the instinct to question. We were hungry, and the car sounded like it might not take kindly to being asked to start again without at least a meal’s worth of rest.

So we sat for a moment in the quiet that followed, not relief, not quite. Just a pause. A breath between failures. And then, slowly, we reached for the door handles.

The inside of the roadhouse smelled like the past. Not a specific memory, but a mood—something dim and heavy and frayed around the edges. The kind of air that held its breath with you, thick with old dust and echoes. Sunlight slanted through grime-streaked windows in uneven stripes, catching on floating particles and illuminating them like glitter in a snow globe left untouched for decades.

A single fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, flickering just enough to make me question what I was seeing. It cast a sickly light that made the shadows shift at the corners of my vision, so that even the stillest objects seemed to breathe, to twitch slightly, like they might come to life if you turned your back.

The floor was concrete, cracked like old skin, stained in places that told stories of spills and accidents no one had bothered to clean properly. The sealer—what remained of it—had long since lost its shine, the floor dulled into a kind of weary acceptance. I could feel its chill rising up through the soles of my shoes, grounding me.

The counter looked like it had been cobbled together from someone’s leftover dreams. Laminated wood with years of scratches and one exposed corner where the top layer had chipped away, revealing a wedge of splintery chipboard. Someone had tried to patch it with duct tape, a neat little rectangle of silver-grey that had long since given up the ghost, curling at the edges and collecting a fine beard of dust and lint.

Behind the counter, a fridge groaned like it was having a bad day. The compressor rattled and wheezed, working far harder than it should’ve had to, struggling to keep its cargo of limp milk and lopsided soft drinks remotely cold. The shelves inside tilted like they’d lost faith in the concept of balance, bottles leaning together like passengers on a bus too tired to stand upright anymore. Everything looked tired. Nothing matched. It was like the products were just resting here for a while, not really expecting to be chosen.

A hand-lettered sign taped to the fridge door read: DOOR STICKS – PULL HARD. The writing was neat, almost school-like, but the letters wavered just slightly, like they’d been made with too much concentration and not quite enough conviction. I stared at the words longer than I needed to. There was something comforting in their smallness, their effort.

The woman behind the counter looked like she’d been carved from the same material as the building—weathered and quietly enduring. Her hair was pulled back into a knot that didn’t seem to care about appearances, held together with a rubber band that had probably once held a newspaper or a bundle of mail. Her rolled-up sleeves exposed forearms that told their own story—tanned, sinewed, marked with old nicks and cuts and a scattering of freckles that had merged into one another over time. She moved without urgency, placing cans on a shelf with the slowness of someone who wasn’t in a rush because rushing never changed the outcome.

She didn’t greet us, didn’t smile. Just blinked once, slowly, like a lizard taking note of something non-threatening. Then went back to stacking her tins. They made a sound that echoed in the quiet—a soft clink of metal on metal that felt strangely calming.

Mum cleared her throat. It came out louder than it should have, the kind of noise that didn’t belong here. The woman didn’t turn around.

“What you see’s what we got,” she said, her voice dry and unbothered. Not unfriendly—just... uninterested in ceremony. The kind of voice that assumed people could see with their own eyes and didn’t need to be hand-held through disappointment.

Mum didn’t reply straight away. She scanned the shelves with the eyes of someone taking inventory not of possibility, but of survival. A few dented tins, packets with faded labels, a loaf of bread that looked like it had been sat on and then rewrapped. I could see the way her shoulders adjusted—fractional movements that showed calculation, compromise. Acceptance.

The bread sat lonely under a sign that claimed FRESH DAILY in biro’d capitals, though nothing about it looked fresh and I doubted “daily” meant what it did back home.

The drinks fridge hissed as she tugged it open, the rubber seal shrieking like a protest. She grabbed three bottles—two lemonade, one ginger ale—along with a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips from the wire rack beside the counter. There was no asking if we wanted anything. No soft “what about this?” or “do you like that one?” She didn’t have that in her this afternoon. Maybe not in general anymore.

I didn’t say anything. Just stood beside Mack, close but not touching, and watched her move through the quiet like someone trying not to wake a sleeping house.

Mack had wandered toward the back of the shop and was now standing in front of the newspaper stand, his body suddenly very still, his head tilted slightly—not with curiosity, but with the tense alertness of a fox catching the scent of something wrong.

I followed his gaze and saw what had stopped him—a fresh copy of the day’s paper, folded neatly and slotted into the wire rack like any other morning edition. But there was nothing ordinary about the headline splashed across its front page. The bold black letters screamed something that didn’t belong in the lazy hush of the roadhouse.

DOUBLE HOMICIDE SHOCKS BROKEN HILL
Elderly Couple Found Dead in Outback Property—Police Seek Public Assistance

The bold font made the words seem louder than they had any right to be. Beneath the headline was a grainy photo of a weatherboard house that looked too familiar. Grandma’s house. Shrunk down to two columns wide and printed in cheap ink, but unmistakable all the same.

I couldn’t read the article from this distance, but I didn’t need to. My chest felt tight. Ribbons sagged in my grip, forgotten. Something cold crept up the back of my neck.

Mack didn’t move. His eyes were fixed on the photograph, but I could tell he wasn’t really seeing it anymore. He was somewhere behind his eyes, sifting through memories too sharp to hold.

Then I glanced at Mum.

She’d been halfway to the counter with our bag of soft drinks and stale snacks, but now she’d stopped completely. Frozen mid-step. Her face had gone still—not blank, not surprised, but locked, like a door you weren’t meant to open.

She didn’t speak. Her mouth pressed into a flat line. Then, abruptly, she moved—too abruptly—marching the last few steps to the counter and dropping the items onto it in a way that felt more like an exit strategy than a purchase.

“Do you take cash?” she asked, voice too brisk, like it had been sped up just slightly. Something unnatural in the tempo. Too fast to be calm. Too forced to be casual.

The woman gave the smallest of nods without turning from her shelf, still arranging her tins.

Mum didn’t wait for further conversation. “No hot food?” she asked next, the question as performative as her tone.

“Delivery’s been off. Quiet lately,” the woman said, her voice level, matter-of-fact. “This place’s running on ghosts and petrol fumes.”

Mum left several notes on the counter and didn’t wait for change, just grabbed the items and turned.

“Come on,” she snapped—not angry, but with the desperate edge of someone whose options were dissolving by the second.

I didn’t look back at the wall. I couldn’t.

But the headline followed me anyway, lodging itself somewhere just behind my ribs. Not just the words, but what they meant.

DOUBLE HOMICIDE.

And even though I didn’t know everything that had happened in that house after we ran, I knew enough to understand that something awful had, and that whatever it was, it had found its way into the paper now. Into the world.

Which meant people would be looking.

And eventually, they’d start looking for us.

Mack lingered by the wall a second longer, his eyes still locked on the newspaper clipping, trying to extract meaning from the grainy photograph and whatever grim story lay behind the bold headline.

We sat on the edge of a low concrete lip that jutted out along the front of the building—the kind of thing you could imagine used to host fuel tanks before they were pulled out and forgotten, left to history and heat. The concrete was cold and rough, gritty beneath my legs, the coolness soaking slowly through my jeans like it wanted in.

We passed the drinks around without speaking. The lemonade was barely cool and tasted faintly of plastic and something chemical—sickly-sweet and disappointing. The ginger ale fizzed too violently when Mack opened it, froth rushing up and dribbling over his hand. He didn’t flinch, just wiped it on his trouser leg. The chips—salt and vinegar—were sharp enough to sting my tongue, too sour and too strong, but I ate them anyway. Hunger didn’t leave much room for fussiness anymore.

Mum perched on the bonnet of the car, one boot wedged against the bumper, her elbow resting on a drawn-up knee. It was a pose that was meant to say ‘relaxed,’ but the tension in her shoulders betrayed her. Her fingers opened and closed around nothing, like she was trying to hold on to something that wouldn’t let itself be caught.

None of us said a word.

It wasn’t the kind of silence you fall into easily, the good kind that means comfort or calm. This was silence like a stone in the throat. It pressed down on everything. A silence full of questions that were too heavy to ask aloud. Thoughts that didn’t want witnesses.

The only sounds were small and close—the whisper of crisp packets, the soft fizz of fading bubbles, the occasional scrape of denim against concrete.

A breeze stirred the air, kicking up a slow curl of dust across the car park. It smelled dry and faintly metallic, undercut by something darker—burnt rubber or the sour tang of hot engine oil. Somewhere in the distance, a bird let out a single call—a long, descending note that didn’t belong to anything familiar. Not a magpie, not a crow. Just a lone sound that made the world feel wider, emptier.