The Wax Conspiracy

Wallerawang is three stations back, two days away

Train out to Yetholme costs thirty whole dollars. Thirty on where you get on. Doesn't matter if that's off-peak or you're actually up and about at that time of day when it feels like the night before. Either way, burning plenty of coin rolling out west.

A real westward heading too. Not the west set at Marrickville that the folks of the Shire afear themselves to. Along the east coast, where the salt water breeze stamps their lineage with a Camberwell butterfly.

Cohen (no first name given (no assurances on it being a last name (not that you always need two names (some have three, the nerve)))) picks up enough from the busker's copper hat to take a trip, out on the trail of the inland facing estuary.

This is money splendid. A pocketful of wash. Currency of the streets and panhandlers, the beggars and chuggers. Where you can literally buy a ticket, but only if you have enough. And you rarely have enough. Unless you know how to throw down a dollar and pick up five.

Wheels of the carriage squeak along the last station, a resounding sigh of destination. Here we are then.

Reading the rivers of maudlin, Cohen picks up the path, clearing all that is muddy and brown to reveal... nothing.

patterned cans of drink
canned maudlin tastes bitter all the same

On the left, an oesophageal pattern. On the right, a circular path drawn without a hint of a circles at all. In the middle, the loose connector, a weak bridge. The wrong way up.

"You are not here," says the three-legged blue heeler, "and yet, I see you are." It walks off, toward the primary school.

The canine's destination bears no resemblance to any lines or contours on the map. And then the afternoon sun casts its yawn into evening.

Dark promises in their lines are all misleading. Here then, the mystery darkens into a crystal lake of brown, dying grass.

"I see," outs the mutter, as a lone shadow creeps along the bank to complete the shady composition.

Ethan Switch

Written on Friday, 26 February 2010

The Wax Conspiracy

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