3.
My family are moving into the country and there is no room for me in the car, so I follow on foot, hopping along the roadside in the fields outside the city. It is a glorious day and I revel in the falling sunlight, the rich mixtures of scent and sound. It is a beautiful day and I am happy to be alive, my leg has healed well and it was only a matter of adjusting to change, as with anything. I tap a cigarette against the back of my hand to settle the tobacco in as there's nothing worse than flakes of spicy tobacco on the tongue, I can tell you. Cars occasionally whoosh past but I pay them little heed, I know this is the road my family went down and it is just a matter of hopping until I find them. People throw things from the windows of their automobiles, pieces of chicken and almost-empty cans of soft drink, and it is a veritable feast by the roadside. I sit down on a fencepost and take a half-eaten apple from my pocket, and I watch the sunset as I eat the apple. The sunset like a child rocking itself to sleep. I finish the apple and bury the core in the ground, lest any scavengers come across it and pick up my trail. It has grown dark very quickly but my sight is unaffected. Months of living in a shed in the back yard have afforded me excellent night vision and so I get up and start hopping again down the road, following the white lines so that I don't accidentally fall into a ravine. The journey is quite uneventful until I begin to detect something in the air, a delightful fragrance, a perfume of sandalwood and mint and oranges. Delightful! I trace the source of this delicious aroma and can discern through the murk a woman standing on the other side of the road. She is walking back and forth and peering down the highway in the direction I am heading, and I see the sign next to her, and she is waiting for a bus, waiting for the bus into town. The last service was at six and there will be none now until five in the morning and so I call out to tell her this but she doesn't hear me. I must cross the road and let her know, offer her a place at my side for the evening beneath a tree, and we can press together and keep warm until morning. I hop onto the bitumen and begin bouncing across the road. She looks over and sees me and smiles. I smile back and call out a greeting but it is drowned in a noise, a bloated mechanical noise moving towards us, then a horn bearing down on me. I stop completely and turn towards the sound. Powerful white light in my eyes, so dazzling that I am rooted to the ground, immobile and amazed. They grow larger.
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