One Hundred Short Stories

11. Our Paradise

honestly we’ve been on the train for two hours and my legs are cramped from being jammed against the seat in front and there’s no space to put my bag, it just sits like a fat wombat on my lap. we decided not to succumb to the quiet carriage. i regret that now. i cannot hear my music over the sound of babies laughing and babies crying and foreign people talking in babbling voices and businessmen tapping impatient feet and slumped people snoring and teenagers playing their music at top volume, trying to drown out the rest of the world and pretend they are oblivious to it at the same time.

  but then we stop at one of the main stations and people pour out like blood from a wound, swarming insects on the busy platform. people are busy and rushing, like they have everything in the world to do right right now. otherwise they sit on benches like there is no goal in life and no purpose to existence. never both.

  and we stay on the train and wait as the landscapes pass, and the amount of stations that are only long enough for two carriages increase. and eventually it’s our stop so we trundle out and jump off the platform onto the gravel because there are no steps.

  the water curves around like a cat’s claw bay, slicing a sliver of cake out of the land. little houses perch right next to the water, looking like nervous divers about to topple in.

  and there’s the track. we start along it, and it seems hardly manmade – more like an animal track for lethargic wombats to plod along. the views are trees and trees and trees. little secluded glimpses of the lake peek out between the green. and the rocks overhang into caves and small caverns that we eat our lunch in. the patterns on them make it look like once upon a time there was a great rushing river here, and not monitor lizards but starfish, sucking at these same rocks with a curious mindless dependence.

  we see one tree that has a hole right through the middle of it, where two branches have grown up and met, and have somehow joined together. the join is still there, bumpy like an ugly scar. we look through the hole and see the sky.

  and then suddenly

  There Are Noises We Can Hear Like The Grinding Of Gears, Twisting And Turning And Pulling And Pushing Against Each Other. Zooming And Skidding And Racing And Beeping And Noise. We Look At One Another In Horrified Astonishment. Then We Look Up To The Horizon And We Notice Something That We Did Not See Before. There Is A Long, Slithering Gap Of Missing Trees Just Past Our Sight And Then We Realise.

  We Are Only, By Scientific Approximations, A Kilometre Or So From The Highway.

  And Our Paradise Is Not Really Ours.