By Ashley Zhou
From the first electric twang, I’m in a battered middle-of-nowhere gas station, back burning against a Toyota in the dry heat. Grit blows freely; my white socks are closer to brown and I feel speckled rocks in the crevices. It clings to the car as I wait for a refill and there’s the gurgling of oil, the murmur of other trail chasers, the groan of rusty, wheeled miracles melting onto potholed tarmac.
A lady in a mid-60s yellow dress pops out from a vehicle I don’t recognise, somehow wholly, perfectly in-time in the time-stopped place. The sky seems to ebb as she walks, flows as she tilts her head. She speaks and the melody draws dust into a swirl, wrapping around my ankles and stuttering smoothly, like a Hollywood animation flipbook. Sock rocks rumble. Torrid air crackles with electricity; I feel it in the shock of metal on skin when I move my hand.
I squint and Vancouver blurs into the extraterrestrial.
In the filmy light, antennae spike from her scalp, round at the tips and glinting. Blink and they’re gone; she’s asking for a receipt. Spacey and lilting, her words are accompanied by a dirty baseline, tin-can drumbeats, singing violins. Tilt your head and it melts into the onomato-poetic brown noise of the outpost. badum, badum. Dreams of you / Visions of doom.
Car keys weigh down my pocket; they cut a bit, they’ll leave a mark. Everything hovers over the edge of humdrum revelation.
I think to ask a lanyarded someone if they could fix my radio, but decide against it. Static ripples, already in the air. If I concentrate just enough, my body aligns with a frequency; off-tune charity shop guitars, repurposed patchy sofas, a voice that might be the same—possibly if it was underwater and I was behind glass. My rings feel tingly where they wrap around the fingers.
Wild one, you can do what you want.
Over there, she trills: something to do with nearly-expired shop chocolate, gas station money, darlings. There’s a murmur in my ear. Everything I must’ve heard before; excitingly different, comfortingly familiar. Schmaltzy, sour on my tongue. I test out the words myself, a burning memory,
and time has absorbed me. Heady, calm, blistering, breezy, shockwaved. The line ends, time resumes, and I realise my chest is heaving. I try it again and I find I can’t—everything tilts a little to the left, rotated something like 20 degrees.
My vision is fisheyed when I light one up and ground myself with char. The blazing heat crawls into my chest. I check my gas meter. I drop cigarette ash on cheddar chunks of the moon and it falls next to crumpled coke cans. Oil glug halts.
But I left it all behind.
The voice stops and we’re back in Canada, at the ‘Durham City Limit’, one much farther away. Familiar and different. The lady in the yellow dress heads back into her car and it grumbles to life and away. Desert heat and waves of sound warp in her wake. Full-bodied, round-edged tinkling; drowning harmonicas, slanted strings. They chorus mournfully as she’s dragged away by the dunes. The cutoff is abrupt.
I get into my car and swipe my hand over the scorching dash. The signal’s suddenly good enough for Spotify, and I ditch the crackling radio for Bluetooth. Freak Heat Waves comes on, as does a vaguely familiar voice with an undertow of the outlands. I shake alien blues off my shoulders and drive.
Featured Image – Cindy Lee