The Road North

“Some roads don’t take you anywhere new. They just make sure you never go back.”

The road looked like it went on forever.

Not like the roads back home, where trees leaned in on either side and dappled your face with flickering golds and greens, where shade and birdsong followed you like faithful companions. This road was bare. Honest in its bleakness. A long, straight scar carved into the ancient land, surrounded by silence so thick it felt like something you could step into and get lost in. No tall trees to mark progress, no gentle turns to suggest change—just that unending ribbon of black tar, cutting through a world that didn’t care where we’d come from or where we were going.

The road itself felt reluctant to curve. When it did, it was the barest lean, like it was being forced to accommodate a stubborn hill or an ancient riverbed long since dry. It curved the way someone sighs under obligation.

Ahead of us, the asphalt shimmered in the distance, heat mirages turning the road into a liquid surface that melted into the horizon. It looked like you could dive into it and never come out again. The centre line ticked past beneath us in perfect rhythm—white dash, gap, white dash, gap—like the ticking of a clock or the beat of a tired heart. I found myself counting them without meaning to.

The sky was high and pale and endless. Not soft like summer skies that made you want to lie on the grass and watch shapes in the clouds, but brittle and dry, stretched thin over the world like a sheet that might tear with one strong gust.

The winter sun offered no comfort. It lit the world like a lamp in a cold room—unforgiving, functional, not concerned with warmth or kindness.

Inside the car, the silence had settled again. Mum hadn’t spoken since we left the motel. Her eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead, her hands on the wheel at ten and two, her body curved forward slightly like she was bracing for something that hadn’t yet arrived. Her jaw moved occasionally—small, unconscious clenches like she was chewing her thoughts into manageable pieces.

Mack had his head against the window, arms folded, eyes half-closed. Not asleep, but not really here either. The kind of stillness that meant he was far away in his mind, back in some memory or possibility where things made more sense than this.

The car vibrated gently beneath us, its mechanical murmur a kind of background heartbeat. I could feel it in my feet and fingertips, a low thrum that reminded me of the inside of a seashell pressed to my ear—a sound that belonged to somewhere else, but followed you anyway.

I had my notebook open again, pencil in hand, but the page stared back at me blankly. I didn’t know what to draw. Everything outside the window looked the same—red, dry, distant. A landscape carved by wind and sun and time into a shape that didn’t change no matter how many kilometres passed beneath our wheels.

I tried sketching the trees—the twisted, ghost-limbed ones with bark like shredded paper—but they came out looking like monsters. I tried drawing the cows, but they ended up as awkward blobs with ribs like ladders and eyes too sad for cartoons. I tried the road, just a black line into the distance, but it looked like it was swallowing everything. I stared at it for a long time.

Then I turned the page.

Left it blank.

Some things, I decided, didn’t need to be drawn. Some places refused to be captured.

They just had to be survived.

Beside me, Mack had shifted slightly, sitting with his arms folded, the seatbelt twisted awkwardly under one arm, cutting into the side of his neck where it should have rested more gently across his shoulder. He didn’t bother to fix it. Just sat there, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the road as if staring hard enough might reveal answers buried in the bitumen.

He hadn’t said much since we’d left the motel. Not a single joke. Not a single snide comment about the flickering motel sign or the soggy pies or the weird receptionist. That wasn’t like him. Even when things were bad, Mack usually had something to say—some way to jab at the world, to force it to acknowledge him.

But now he was silent, and his foot tapped against the floor—rapid, uneven, like a Morse code only he could understand. A tap-tap-pause, then a tap-tap-tap-tap, too fast to follow. Like his thoughts had escaped him and were now trying to claw their way back in.

The side windows caught our reflections—Mack’s, mine—and overlaid them with the landscape rolling past behind us. We looked ghostly. Transparent. Like we weren’t really in the car at all, just fragments of memory stuck to the glass. I looked pale, my features distorted by the curve of the window and the slight vibrations of the road. Mack looked older somehow. Washed out. Not quite real.

Mum was fiddling with the radio.

She pressed the seek button again with an impatient sharp little jab. A burst of static. Then a man’s voice reading rainfall totals with the enthusiasm of someone reciting ingredients off a cereal box. Another press: a gospel choir for half a second, then gone. Another: someone shouting about interest rates or immigration or something else I didn’t understand, the anger in his voice clearer than his meaning. Another: a song, soft and familiar—but we only caught the end of a line before it slipped away, like a fish darting from a net. Static again. Then nothing.

Mum jabbed the button a few more times, each movement stiffer than the last, then slapped it off altogether. The sudden silence was jarring. Final.

But it wasn’t real silence.

There was still the soft hiss of the tyres rolling over asphalt. Still the shhhhhh that sounded like someone gently scolding the world. The wind whistled faintly through the passenger window that she’d left cracked open to stop the fog building on the glass, the breeze carrying the smell of dust and eucalyptus and the faint, metallic scent of car interior. The engine groaned now and then when we hit a dip or an incline, making a low sound in its throat like it was tired of pretending everything was fine.

It was a different kind of silence.

The kind that filled your head and made everything louder inside. The beat of your heart. The tick of your thoughts. The unanswered questions that had begun to stack up behind your teeth, waiting for the right moment to spill out—or for the wrong moment, which was more likely.

I looked down at my notebook. Somehow, without really noticing, I’d started a new drawing.

A tree — tall and thin, its branches twisting like they were stretching for something they couldn’t quite reach. It wasn’t finished. Just the shape of it, sketched in soft lines. I didn’t remember deciding to draw it. It was just… there.

I added a nest near the top, imagining something warm tucked inside. Something feathered and small and oblivious to all the strange, invisible things we were running from. I gave the tree roots that stretched wide and deep, burrowing into the red earth like hands searching for steadiness, for history, for proof they belonged. Then a hollow in the trunk, like a secret, with a pair of eyes peering out — nothing menacing. Just watchful. Curious.

The pencil moved in slow, thoughtful strokes. My drawing wasn’t the world outside the window, not exactly. It was the world I wished I could see instead. A world with refuge. With purpose. With creatures that knew where they belonged, even in a place as wide and wild and unknowable as this.

I kept drawing. Because drawing was the only thing I could still control.

Then Mack spoke.

“Where are we going?”

His voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t crack or strain. It just... landed. Plain. Quiet. Solid. No accusation in it, no challenge. Just a question.

Mum’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

Not slightly.

Her fingers gripped hard, whitening at the knuckles, the tendons along the backs of her hands standing out in stark ridges like bones pushing through skin. She didn’t turn her head. Didn’t look at him in the mirror. Just stared at the road like it was the only thing left holding the world together.

“North-east,” she said, too fast. Too smooth. “Quieter roads. Avoiding the highway traffic.”

I blinked.

There hadn’t been much traffic.

Not since the motel. Not for hours.

Mack didn’t say anything right away. He turned his head and looked out the window again, exhaling softly. His breath fogged the glass in a short-lived circle that vanished almost immediately, as if even it didn’t want to linger. Then he turned back, slowly, and I knew from the set of his jaw that the question wasn’t finished.

“Why not Dubbo?”

That did it.

Mum’s whole body tensed. Her shoulders lifted beneath the cardigan like she was expecting to be struck, or like the weight of the question had hit her between the shoulder blades. The car swerved—just a touch. Enough to jolt the steering and send my pencil sliding across the page in my lap, drawing a crooked slash across the page. A mistake I couldn’t erase.

“Because I said so,” she snapped.

No warning. No preamble. Just those four words, delivered with a sharp finality that left no room for argument. The kind of phrase designed to stop conversation cold. The kind that rang out too loud in small spaces and left echoes in the silence after.

The air thickened. Not in temperature—but in pressure. Like someone had closed a lid on us and turned off the oxygen.

Mack didn’t argue.

He just leaned back in his seat slowly, the way you move when there's glass on the floor and you don’t want to step wrong. He didn’t cross his arms like he usually did when he was annoyed. Just let them drop into his lap, fingers tangled loosely together. But his jaw—his jaw was working. I could see the muscle there twitching, clenching and releasing like he was biting back a hundred different things.

I looked down at my drawing.

I didn’t want to look at them. At either of them. I just wanted to fix the tree.

I shaded its leaves darker, pressing the pencil too hard. The sound of my pencil scraping the paper was loud in the quiet, and the lines came out all wrong—jagged, nervous, broken in places. My fingers cramped from the pressure I was using, but I didn’t stop.

Until the tip of the pencil snapped.

Just like that. A soft, high crack, like a small bone breaking.

It made me jump a little, even though it wasn’t loud. A reflex. But neither of them reacted. Mack didn’t flinch. Mum didn’t blink.

I dropped the broken stub into the cup holder and fished out another pencil from the pencil case, my fingers cold and clumsy. Started again. This time, I tried to soften the picture. But it wasn’t working. The new lines wobbled and shook under my hand like they were catching the vibration of the road—or the nerves I couldn’t press down.

In the front seat, Mum’s hands stayed locked around the wheel. She gripped it like it was the only thing tethering her to reality. Her thumbs tapped out a rhythm—left, right, left, right—soft and persistent. Like she was counting seconds.

Her eyes didn’t waver from the road. Not once.

Her mouth kept moving, twitching at the corners. Like she was chewing something invisible. A thought she didn’t want to swallow. A memory that tasted bad and wouldn’t go down.

No one said anything else.

The car hummed on.

The sky stayed pale.

The road stretched ahead in perfect, impossible straightness, and I kept drawing things that didn’t belong in this world, because pretending something else was possible felt better than watching this one fray at the seams.

The road kept going.

Another dead kangaroo on the verge—its shape swollen, legs twisted unnaturally, fur faded to a decaying grey. A few flies clung stubbornly despite the cold, circling like tiny black orbiters around a planet long dead. We passed it in silence, but the image stuck in my head anyway, stubborn and heavy, like something my brain didn’t want to keep but couldn’t quite let go of.

A white reflector post stood nearby, flashing once in the sun as we passed, winking at us like it knew something we didn’t. A burnt tree followed it, black and skeletal, its limbs jagged and raw, stretched upward in a silent scream against the sky—another reminder that the land here remembered its own pain, even when people didn’t.

We passed a road sign: Bourke 103km.

It meant nothing to me. Just another place in a long line of places. Not on our school maps. Not coloured in. Not memorised for a test. Not anywhere in my mental picture of Australia with its shaped borders and labelled states and capital cities in neat bubble writing. Just another unfamiliar name, rising up out of the ground like a marker on a board game we didn’t know the rules to.

Then another sign, slanted and warped—Detour ahead – local access only—its metal spine twisted as if the road itself had tried to shake it off. The letters were half-gone, worn down by years of wind and sun and maybe hands. Faded like an old warning nobody thought they needed anymore.

But Mum didn’t slow.

If anything, her foot went heavier on the pedal. The car surged forward slightly, the engine's voice rising, a low groan that matched the new tension in the cabin. The speedometer edged past a hundred. Her shoulders tightened like someone had turned a key in her back.

Mack noticed.

I saw him watching her—not accusingly, but analytically, like a detective might. His gaze flicked from her hands to her face, tracking the way her jaw kept working, the way she adjusted her grip every few seconds even though the road didn’t bend. He didn’t say anything right away, but I could tell he was building up to it.

I kept drawing. I had to. Something about the pencil in my hand made the silence bearable. I added storm clouds, towering ones, filled with impossible electricity. Not just grey—but full of life, like they were alive, like they were planning something.

I gave one a fork of lightning.

Because it looked right.

Because it felt right.

Ribbons sat beside me, leaning against my leg, her worn button eyes reflecting a shard of sun that found its way through the window. I adjusted her position gently, tucked her in tighter. Her fur was still cool from the night, still carrying the motel's scent of dust and disinfectant.

Mack shifted again.

His fingers began tapping on his knee, the same rhythm Mum tapped on the wheel—left, right, left, right. It was faint, but unmistakable. Like they were both counting down to something without realising it.

He broke first.

“Mum—” he started.

Just that. One word. Neutral. Soft. But full of potential.

She didn’t let him finish.

“I know what I’m doing, Mack.”

Flat. Clipped. And final.

He sank back, eyes flicking toward the window, spine softening slightly as if the fight had been knocked out of him before he even began. He drew a small circle in the fog on the glass with his fingertip, and I watched it appear and then disappear as the warmth of the sun caught it. One small gesture in a world too large for gestures to matter much.

I looked back to my drawing.

The clouds now loomed large. Beneath the tree, I drew Ribbons again, now wearing flying goggles and gripping the reins of a fresh cow. Her ears streamed behind her like flags. I gave her a scarf, too. Striped.

It made me smile.

A tiny one. Just for me.

But even the drawing felt quiet.

Even it knew not to take up too much space.

The silence in the car had taken on mass, a kind of gravity. It didn’t just sit between us—it surrounded us, pushed against the windows, filled up our lungs until it was all we could breathe. Not the peaceful kind of silence. Not the kind you get at the beach or under the stars. This was the silence of people holding back what they really wanted to say. Of fear disguised as control. Of truths that weighed too much to carry out loud.

Outside, the road kept going. The landscape shifted, but only slightly—different shapes of the same. More fence posts. More dust. A crow watching from a rusted gate, its feathers glossy black, head tilted like it was judging us.

The sun was higher now, but still cold.

We kept going north, carried by Mum’s silence and the road’s indifference. Away from something we didn’t talk about. Towards something we hadn’t yet named. Under a sky that was too wide to measure, along a road that didn’t end, in a car that felt smaller with every passing kilometre.

And still, no one said a word.