Pies and Fear

The evening begins with a town that does not feel entirely real. Cobar materialises from the dusk as a loose scatter of dark shopfronts and spaced-out houses, the gaps between buildings too wide, as though the place was drawn and then allowed to drift before the ink dried. The Copper Post Motel sits at the edge of it under a red neon sign whose letters cannot agree on whether they exist. The woman behind the reception counter is old in the way that rock is old — carved and hardened rather than softened. She studies the three of them with an intensity that does not belong to a stranger checking guests into a roadside motel. Her eyes settle on Mack first, then Rose, then Claire, and her parting words — that Claire is smart to get them out now, before it really starts — carry a weight that transforms a routine check-in into something closer to a warning. A map on the wall behind her is studded with coloured pins in patterns that do not follow roads, and a calendar has every day of July crossed out in heavy black marks.

Room 6 is small, cold, and smells of industrial cleaner layered over years of use. Rose and Mack fall into the small rituals of making a space bearable — blanket walls, pillow forts, a joke about lizards. Claire is wound tight, checking curtains, fastening the chain, performing tasks too small to matter but too necessary to stop. Then she slips outside without explanation. Through the cracked door, Rose and Mack hear fragments of a phone call that rearranges everything: Claire's voice, stripped to something hard and frightened, talking about isolation, cameras, neighbours asking questions, promises that were made and have not held. Rose does not understand every word, but she understands the shape of them. They are not on a trip. They are being hidden.

Claire returns with pies and no acknowledgement of where she has been. The three of them eat in silence — Mack dismantling his crust with surgical precision, Rose taking small bites that fill nothing. Afterwards, Rose retreats into her notebook and begins drawing the motel room: Claire melted into a plastic chair, Mack tall and guarding the door in a blanket cape. When she reaches herself, the pencil stops. She cannot draw her own face. She does not know which version of herself belongs in this picture — the frightened one, the brave one, the one who saw impossible things, or the one who just wants to go home to a place that no longer exists. She leaves the circle blank, stares at it, then crushes the page and shoves it into the bin. The evening ends with Rose pressing her face into a pillow that smells of someone else's shampoo, the blank face still hovering behind her closed eyes, waiting for her to decide who she is supposed to be.