Highway Blue by Ailsa McFarlane

Author:Ailsa McFarlane [McFarlane, Ailsa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

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In front of me the long length of the road wound out, wound out and wound on under hot sky.

And I drove and the road became hypnosis, a horizon and an end point in perpetual retreat, one long reel of flashing gray and cat’s-eyes.

And low in front of me the old wavering sun.

We turned off the main highway into swampy land with plane trees plate-like on a late yellowish sky and grasses and shining brown water broken by the snarls of great fallen branches all bleached out and covered in egrets, and occasionally the heads of alligators, snout and yellow eyes, and here and there were traces of people, some mining holes filled with water, a luminous chemical blue, and heavy heaps of mulch beside them, and the length of road empty in front of me cutting through and cutting on.

We drove through miles of swampland stretching bright with water in the late sun and we came to a new road as the sun went down somewhere to the right of us, flooding yellow onto the bottom of a deep blue sky, a few stars winking low on the horizon.

We were silent and tired.

I looked over at Cal.

His head was slumping forward on his chest. Every now and again there would be a movement as he jerked awake.

I put on the radio. There was some old song playing, blues, a male singer. His voice was sad.

It sat on the hot air.

It made me feel old.

I used to have dreams when I was very young of being a huge bodiless expanse of consciousness without end and I would wake up scared and wanting to go back into my body and at the same time exhilarated. It was something like vertigo, and every so often as an adult I’ve had vague hints, intimations of the same feeling, a sort of brush of a memory of it at the edge of my mind. I try to hold on to it and magnify it, but I can never quite get at it or draw it out enough to fill me up.

But I feel myself at the edges of it sometimes.

That night driving on that highway with the blotched sunset on deep dark and the few faint stars, I felt it then, the memory of vertigo.

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