The Wrong Road Twice

“Getting lost once is a mistake. Getting lost again—feeling it happen in real time—that’s when it starts to feel like a story you’ve already heard too many times.”

The sky was white and flat when we pulled out of Hermidale, the kind of white that didn’t feel like weather but absence—an emptiness stretched taut across the heavens. Not clouded, not clear. Just washed out. A sky that had once been something and was now almost nothing, like a sheet that had been scrubbed too many times, its colour faded to a weary sort of blank. The horizon had given up trying to separate itself from the ground; the earth and sky blurred into one continuous wash of pale, uncertain light. It felt like we were driving through the bottom of a giant porcelain bowl, every direction curving back in on itself, no edge, no escape.

Inside the car, the air was stale, thick with the residue of the night. A mixture of leftover motel smells—thin soap, artificial lemon cleaning fluid, and something vaguely damp—mingled with the sharper scent of smoke clinging stubbornly to Mum’s coat. It had soaked into the fabric, into the seams, into the strands of her hair. It was in the car now, too, woven into the upholstery and the space between us, impossible to ignore. The heater hummed on low, doing its best to push back against the cold, but it felt like we were losing. I could still see my breath when I exhaled a little too hard, little puffs of doubt and unease, rising and vanishing like thoughts I didn’t want to keep.

We hadn’t even been driving twenty minutes before the pattern started again.

It was always subtle at first—the way her shoulders rose just a fraction, taut and unyielding. Her fingers tapped against the steering wheel, not rhythmically but in little clusters, like messages sent in a language no one else could read. And then her voice would change—become clipped, ready to defend or deflect. I recognised the signs now, like weather watching. You didn’t stop the storm. You just braced for it.

She slowed at a fork in the road—no signs, no guidance. Just two faint dirt tracks carving their way into the pale landscape like hesitant thoughts. They reminded me of a wishbone held between two fingers, pulled apart without anyone bothering to make a wish. One track sloped gently left, barely rising over a soft incline and disappearing into a stand of skeletal trees, bark the colour of ash, leaves long forgotten. The other dipped and curved past a rusted water tank, its surface blistered and flaking, a relic from some abandoned need. Alongside it, a fence staggered toward the horizon, its posts crooked and defeated, half-swallowed by dry scrub.

Mum didn’t hesitate.

She turned left, hands steady on the wheel, eyes forward, mouth set. No glance at the map. No exchange of possibilities. Just the decision, clean and certain, made by something inside her I didn’t have access to.

Mack shifted in the passenger seat. The vinyl made that familiar squeak beneath him, and for a second I thought he might say something. But he just adjusted his position, pressed his elbow against the door, and stared ahead.

I sat in the back, legs curled under me for warmth, sketchbook balanced on my lap like armour. I hadn’t opened it yet. The pages were still sealed tight, unmarked and waiting. I just held it there, feeling the texture of the cover beneath my fingers, the slight indentation of the elastic band that held it closed. The weight of it was familiar—comforting, even. A reminder that not everything had unravelled. Not yet.

Sometimes I didn’t need to draw to feel better. Sometimes just knowing the pages were there, waiting for something other than fear or silence to spill onto them, was enough to keep my thoughts from spilling over.

The road changed beneath us. From gravel to something looser, rawer. A suggestion of a road. Two faint tyre tracks with dry grass growing down the middle, tall and long undisturbed. The car began to bounce more, the suspension creaking with effort as we rattled through ruts and over stones left to the mercy of weather and time. This wasn’t a road people used often. This was the kind of track that existed purely because someone once drove down it—and maybe never came back.

I kept my eyes on the sketchbook, but I didn’t open it. I wasn’t ready to put anything on the page yet. Not until I knew where we were going. Not until I was sure we weren’t already lost.

“You sure this is the way?” Mack asked.

Mum didn’t respond at first. Her grip on the steering wheel tightened, knuckles paling, and her eyes stayed locked on the narrow track ahead. She drove like the car’s motion depended entirely on her attention—as if loosening her gaze for even a second would send us careening into the skeletal scrub on either side. It wasn’t just focus. It was vigilance. Like the landscape itself posed some kind of threat.

“There was a sign back at the service track that said Northside Diversion,” Mack continued, gently. “That would’ve taken us through Warren. Would’ve connected back to the main highway. This one… it loops west. Away from where we’re supposed to be going.”

“I know,” Mum said, too quickly. The sharpness in her voice sliced through the air, turning the temperature down several more degrees. It wasn’t just anger—it was the kind of tension that came from being cornered, from someone asking you to account for something you no longer had the strength to explain.

“But it adds hours to the trip,” Mack said, still calm, unfolding the map with slow, exaggerated care, like it was a dangerous animal he didn’t want to startle. “And we’re running low on petrol. There might not be anywhere to fill up if we—”

“I said I know.”

She didn’t shout. But the finality in her tone was enough to seal the space around us in silence. A heavy silence. Still, underneath it—beneath the sharp edges—there was something fragile. Her certainty had begun to sound brittle, like glass that had already cracked but hadn’t shattered yet. You could hear it if you were listening closely. And I was always listening closely.

We hit a cattle grid, the tyres bouncing across metal bars with a hollow, resonant clang that travelled up through the floor and into our bones. It was jarring after the long hush of gravel and scrub, a sudden mechanical thrum that seemed far too loud in the otherwise muted world. A pair of crows startled from a fencepost as we passed, flapping into the pale sky with heavy, laboured wings. They circled once, calling out with rough voices that echoed across the emptiness before disappearing into the sparse tree line ahead.

Behind us, dust rose in slow, curling plumes. Red-brown and fine as flour, it caught in the air and trailed us like a ghost car—a silhouette made of earth and memory. I watched it gather in the rear-view mirror, billowing and settling, as though the land itself was trying to reclaim the space we’d passed through, erasing our presence as fast as we could create it. For a brief second, the dust looked like something living—something following. Not malicious. Just inevitable.

I glanced up from my sketchbook, though I hadn’t opened it, hadn’t even broken the elastic band holding it shut. I didn’t need to draw to feel the tension now. It was everywhere—etched into the corners of Mum’s eyes, coiled into the set of Mack’s shoulders, breathing through the vents with the stale warmth of recycled air.

Something in the light had changed. It filtered through the windscreen differently now—muddier, fractured by grime and motion. The road had narrowed again, no longer a track so much as a suggestion of one, just enough gravel pressed flat by old tyres to pass as a route. The trees on either side had grown more twisted, their limbs contorted as if they'd been through things too difficult to name. Bark peeled away in long strips, moving slightly in the breeze like tired skin trying to slough off the past.

And still, the forks kept coming. Splits in the track with no signs, no logic, no clue as to where they might lead. Just choices. Or the illusion of them.

Mum didn’t pause. She took each turn without slowing, eyes forward, jaw set. Her decisions came quick, like instinct—or defiance. Like she believed if she kept moving fast enough, she could outrun uncertainty. Or maybe she already knew there was no right path anymore, and this was just her way of not admitting it. A refusal to let the cracks show.

The windscreen was growing harder to see through, streaked with red dust, smeared with insect remains—tiny bodies that burst into abstract blots on impact. Yellow, green, ochre. Each one a small ending, a mark of our passage. Mum leaned forward slightly, squinting into the future like it might make more sense if she stared harder.

But there was no clarity coming.

Only more road. More dust. More sky that didn’t know how to be anything but white.

Mack pointed at the map folded on his lap, his finger tracking lines that had grown faint from use, soft from too much folding and unfolding. His touch was deliberate, not accusing, but there was weight behind it—a quiet insistence on truth.

“We’re here,” he muttered, almost to himself, then, louder: “Mum, we’re actually heading south again. That last fork… it took us toward Gilgunnia. We’ve already passed that way once.”

The message was clear: we were retracing steps we didn’t mean to take, looping back over ground already covered, wasting time, fuel, and whatever hope we had left of finding direction.

Mum didn’t reply.

The silence thickened, settling into the car like an unwelcome passenger. The tyres crunched and hissed over gravel, and every now and then a stone leapt up to strike the undercarriage with a hollow ping that made me flinch. The heater clicked into another cycle—on, then off again—its lukewarm breath doing little to ease the persistent chill that seeped through every seam in the car’s frame. It was the kind of cold that didn’t shout, just waited patiently, creeping in at the edges and settling into your bones.

She gripped the steering wheel tighter. Her eyes never moved from the road ahead, unblinking, fixed. As if she thought that if she just stared hard enough, the path would reveal itself, the landscape would give up its secrets and let her through. But there was nothing to find. Just the same grey trees, the same uncertain track, the same dusty sameness in every direction.

“Just trust me,” she said at last.

But it came out too soft. It sounded like someone trying to hold on to the idea of conviction because letting go would mean admitting she no longer had any to offer.

Mack turned to look at her, slowly, deliberately. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t push. But there was something in his face—a kind of tired, knowing calm—that made him look years older. Like he’d already weighed the situation, understood its shape, and was no longer pretending it was anything other than what it was.

“I would,” he said gently, “if it felt like you were trusting yourself.”

The words hit harder than shouting ever could. They found a place in her, a raw place, one she hadn’t managed to barricade properly. I saw it—the way her lips pressed together, the flicker in her eyes, the tight pull of her jaw. Something shifted, a crack in the composure she’d been trying so desperately to maintain.

Her hand came down on the steering wheel with a loud, flat slam. The suddenness of it punched through the car, making me jolt in my seat. The sound vibrated through the dash, the windows, even into the seat beneath me.

“Enough,” she snapped. Her voice broke on the word—just slightly—but enough to betray her. “I don’t need two of you second-guessing everything I do. I’m trying to keep us safe, and all you can do is criticise and question and make everything harder than it already is.”

The anger wasn’t what scared me. It was the edge of desperation that clung to it. A jaggedness that sounded like she was fighting not with us, but with herself.

I folded in tighter, knees to chest, arms around my sketchbook like it was something solid in a world that was growing less so by the hour. I didn’t cry. I didn’t speak. I just pulled inward, the way you do when the air in a room turns to smoke and you can’t find the source of the fire.

I wasn’t afraid of her. Not really. Not in the way that would make you run. But I was afraid of the cracks—the little signs that the scaffolding of our family was coming undone. That even Mack, who usually knew how to steer her, how to ask the right things in the right way, was losing traction.

And what frightened me most was this: that maybe we weren’t just lost on the map. Maybe we were lost inside her. And she didn’t know the way back.

The car lurched forward as Mum pressed harder on the accelerator, frustration spilling through her feet rather than her mouth. The tyres kicked up gravel with a harsher rhythm now—sharp, skittering clatters that matched the jagged tension radiating from the front seat. The sound wasn’t just noise anymore; it was a kind of protest, the vehicle itself objecting to the treatment, to the road, to the aimlessness cloaked as urgency.

We passed an abandoned truck, rusted and sun-bleached into the landscape, as if it had been there since the beginning of time. Its red paint had faded to a shade disturbingly close to dried blood, and the tray was filled with weeds and debris—bones nestled among them, pale and splintered. Sheep, maybe. Or cattle. Something that had once moved, once breathed, and then hadn’t. A failed refuge. A final stop.

Overhead, birds circled. Their black forms moved like thoughts you didn’t want but couldn’t shake, wheeling in the pale sky with heavy wings. They didn’t hurry. They didn’t need to. Out here, death wasn’t an interruption. It was part of the schedule. Everything fed something else, eventually.

I turned my head away, pressing my temple against the cool glass of the window. The scenery—if it could be called that—offered no comfort. Just the same endless repetition of stunted, half-dead trees and red earth cracking at the edges, a sky too wide and pale to hold anything but silence. It felt like being trapped inside a looped film, the kind that plays on an old television late at night when no one’s really watching.

I looked down at the sketchpad on my lap, not thinking about what I was doing as my hand reached for a pencil. The page remained blank for a moment, heavy with potential, and then a line began to form—curling, looping, twisting back on itself in an endless curve. A snake eating its tail. A cycle without escape. An image that felt more like truth than metaphor.

In the corner of the page, I wrote: LOST?

Block letters. I tried to make them look playful—bubble letters, the kind I used to draw in the margins of school notebooks when everything still made sense. But these ones didn’t feel like jokes. They felt like pleas. Desperate and out of place, like a birthday banner strung up in a house that was already burning.

We drove on. Minutes, then more minutes. The road kept shifting beneath us, directionless and dry, and then—there it was. A tree. Bent and broken, one long branch jutting out at an unnatural angle, pointing accusingly into the sky. A crooked signpost offering nothing but repetition.

My stomach tightened.

We’d been here before.

Not just figuratively—we’d literally looped back. Come full circle, not in a poetic sense but in the deeply practical, disheartening way that meant time and fuel had been wasted, and that hope—however thin—had been wasted too.

I glanced at Mack and saw the same realisation flicker through him. His shoulders slumped slightly. He let out a breath that sounded more like surrender than exhale. He didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. He just took the map, folded it once—soft, dry paper rustling in the stillness—then folded it again. His hands moved slowly, deliberately. It was the kind of gesture you make at the end of something. A small ritual of giving up.

He slid it into the side pocket of the door without a word.

The silence that followed wasn’t the strained quiet of earlier arguments. This was something deeper. Final, almost. A shared understanding that nothing we said would change what was now known. We weren’t going somewhere anymore. We were just moving.

Mum didn’t look at him. Didn’t acknowledge the repetition. Didn’t admit the failure. Her eyes stayed on the road, lips tight, jaw locked in that shape that meant apology wasn’t coming—not because she didn’t feel it, maybe, but because to offer it would be to acknowledge too much.

“I’m stopping at the next turnoff,” she said.

Her voice was flat. Not decisive, not curious. Just… performative. Like a stage announcement delivered to an empty theatre. The words didn’t match the world we were in. They rattled, loose and uncertain, held together only by habit.

But I heard it. The hollowness. The space between the words. The part she didn’t say.

She was lost.