Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: Relationship infidelity, animal death
The Disappearance at the Rock
The road drones. Maggie leans against the window, the glass warm where her forehead squishes. The car eats up the road, the road eats up Maggie, and in the stillness she feels less upset, more like nothing. She watches the wetness of the wheatbelt and canola fields disappear as dryness seeps into the trim of forest at the road’s sides. She watches things pass: dead roo, dead rabbit, dead bird. There is a burnt-out car corpse amongst the roadkill, half-sunk into the earth, fringed with rust like rotted flesh.
‘That’s just how bucks nights work,’ Archie says, his eyes fixed ahead. He feigns concentration on the road until he cannot bear Maggie’s silence anymore.
‘So you’re just not going to talk to me for the whole drive?’
Maggie turns to him. She hopes, this time, that he will stare into her eyes and see what she really wants. Archie does stare at her, but his gaze seems critical, like he’s waiting for her to say sorry, and he turns away before the crucial moment. Then there is just the drone of the road until Maggie says she needs to pee.
Archie is familiar with the course of her tantrums, so he obliges, pulls onto the gravel at the beginning of a tourist trail to a granite outcrop. Maggie jumps out the car the moment it stops rolling, disappears into the bush before Archie can even turn off the ignition. He shakes his head as he exits the vehicle, stretches, lights a cigarette. He has tried to understand her. He knows she can’t help that she’s highly withdrawn—96th percentile on the personality test they took together—but why does she always have to make it so difficult? Just because she doesn’t go out. Just because she didn’t want a big bachelorette party. And why does she have to keep picking fights on these drives? There is no escape. She knows it. Always saves her complaints till they get onto the highway. He can’t just drop her off on the side of the road, can he? Then he’d be the bad guy in the stories she’d relay to her friends. But each time, something in her eyes dares him to pull over, leave her in the middle of nowhere. She never used to be like this, not in the early days, when they were hosting cocktail nights, volunteering at the members club, creaming it at mixed tennis. His friends used to say he and Mags were the best couple they knew. But now? Fights, every other weekend, always about nothing. Archie squints, tries to make out where Maggie slipped off to in the thicket of salmon gums.
What it really is, Maggie thinks as she hikes her pants up, spies the twisted spine of the hike trail just a few steps away, is one too many insinuations about wild nights, strippers, her not knowing what he was doing at 1am. It was a gaze that magnetized just a little too much to a backless top or a short skirt. It was just a little too much of lady-like pretending that she didn’t see, didn’t hear, didn’t care.
Archie’s cigarette brightens with an inhale. Maggie sights its small orange ember between the trees, smells its pungent ash odour.
‘Taking your time much?’ Archie says, arcing his neck to where Maggie might be.
It’s coming upon twilight. The bush seems verdant, virile as the reddening soil that feeds it. ‘Maggie?’
Small creatures flutter through the underbrush. But Maggie does not emerge. Archie flicks his cigarette butt away. ‘Alright. You’ve made your point.’
Sure, he occasionally partied with the boys, and yes, sometimes they’d order a skimpy for special occasions. But he treated Mags right, never touched the girls like some of the other boys did.
‘You done?’
Archie waits. Nothing. Damnit Mags.
Archie thinks about the way Maggie looked at him in the car, her eyes glassy with tears. But was there something else in them, too? Something calculative that makes all her affections—her freewheeling laugh, her offers to pick him up after client dinners or mend the tears in his shirt sleeves—seem vicious, possessive. Like he’s paying for her love in a way he doesn’t understand. Archie sighs, lets his shoulders sink forward. It’s true, what his uncle says—all women cost something, even if they don’t name a price. But this solitary indulgence has gone on long enough. Archie steps into the brush, slides his body through the cragged arms of dead vegetation, feels the poke of saltbush.
‘What are you doing?’
Archie’s voice trails off. Because Maggie’s not there, or visible within distance of the trail start. The eucalypt trunks are too skinny for her to hide behind. She’s ventured in deeper.
‘Maggie!’ Archie yells. The sound echoes to a distant place, somewhere in the sun-stained forest. She couldn’t be lost, not already. Archie walks until the granite rock appears, a female figure on it, staring at something on the other side.
‘Maggie!’ he calls. But Maggie doesn’t react. All Archie can see is the outline of her bobbed hair and jacket and skinny-leg jeans.
‘The hell is wrong with you!’
Maggie doesn’t respond. Archie steps onto the outcrop, steadies himself on its hard surface. It lends him a sudden lightness, and he strides up, feeling like he is floating. He breathes in the fragrant bush air, cooling now in the early evening. He reaches Maggie. She shushes him. He turns to look at what she’s looking at.
Down below. Cats. Two kittens and their mother and father, ginger coloured, snub-nosed and feral. Their ear tufts perk in animal radar at Archie’s incursion, their eyes frightened to wild moons. A dead mouse hangs from the mouth of one of them.
There is stillness between Maggie, Archie, and the cats, a thing powerful and complete against the liquid transition of the sunset, the syrupy chittering of darting birds, the fevered scurry of bugs within the rock lichen. Then the cats dart into the rock’s nooks, ephemeral as folklore.
Archie turns back to Maggie.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asks, but Maggie says nothing, her expression dark, glazed. His anger returns.
‘What the hell is wrong with you? Wandering into this desert!’
For a second, Maggie doesn’t speak. When she does, the words come out slow and deliberate. ‘This place isn’t really desert,’ she begins. ‘It only looks that way because of all the clearing. It’s actually woodland. One of the biggest in the world.’
Archie sighs, tells Maggie to just please get back to the car. He tugs at her arm. She trundles like a ragdoll behind him. Its then that Maggie remembers a thought she’d had many years ago, when she was on a gap year in Budapest and decided to walk back to her hostel with one of the boys staying there, both of them drunk on beers from some ruin bar or another. It was the realisation that risky independence is the only kind worth having. Because she could live like them, she thinks, like those wild, ancient cats. Imported to all corners of the globe, to all kinds of unfamiliar environments. Never drinking water. Extracting all the moisture they need from the blood of their kills.
Mara Papavassiliou lives in Western Australia, where she is inspired by abandoned mine sites and the gothic landscape of the Great Western Woodlands. She has been published in the Centre for Stories’ Under the Paving Stones, the Beach anthology, Mona Magazine and Verge, and was a 2023 KSP Writers’ Centre fellow.
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