Intersection.
Synopsis: Driving home under the darkness of an Australian outback sky, a farmer decides to pick up a young man who’s walking – shoeless and wrists bound – through the night and away from his past.
Prompts
Genre: Open
Theme: On the fence
Emotion: Flabbergasted
When the sun’s gone, you always see roos,
Dingoes, damned foxes, even emus.
What you don’t expect, at this time of night,
Is to see a man, my son’s age and height,
Squinting into my headlight beams,
Wrists bound tight, and shoeless, it seems.
Do I pull over, help this young man?
Or drive on to town, fast as I can?
No signal, here. No calling a cop.
But I picture my son and, cursing, I stop.
“Thank you,” he sighs as he climbs in.
“My story’s a dark one. Where to begin?”
Town, I tell him, is an hour away,
“Plenty of time to hear what you say.”
It started, he says, in a city pub,
Chatting to a bloke amid the hubbub.
Then nothing – a blank – no recall so far,
Until he woke up in the boot of a car.
Hooded and gagged, feet and hands bound,
Tarmac to dirt, dirt to rough ground.
After – how long? – it came to a stop.
Dragged from the boot, his shoulder went pop.
Forced to his knees, hood whipped off,
Gag removed with a heaving cough.
He looked around, surrounded by scrub.
Kidnapped, it seems, by the bloke from the pub,
Who’d started to dig a person-sized hole,
Digging and digging, like some crazed mole.
“Nothing to say?” the kidnapper asked,
“You should be begging, not looking aghast.
You’re the drink driver who murdered my wife,
Ruining mine and my young daughter’s life.
Sal was lovely – she’d want to forgive.
But I don’t see why. Why should you live?
Tell me, and quick, if it’s life you crave.
You’ve got until I’ve dug your grave.”
Unable to meet his kidnapper’s eye,
The young man tried in vain not to cry.
“The beer you spiked? Non-alcoholic.
Other than that, it’s coke or tonic.
I’m teetotal now, but booze was my answer,
When I lost Ruby, my fiancé, to cancer.
That’s not an excuse. Do what you must.
You decide if I belong in the dust.”
This last he says, as we roll into town,
Streetlights. Dark windows. Nobody around.
I pull to the kerb, untie his wrists.
He sits in silence; hands balled in fists.
Just to our left, there’s the police station.
Over the road: The pub. Temptation.
I chew on the story, don’t know what to think,
When he says, in a whisper, “I so need a drink.”