Cuddy peered into the gloom of their lantern-dim headlights and wondered if it was still safe to drive.
The sun had risen recalcitrantly as the engineer left repeating station that morning, and the hasty approach of oncoming night had brought with it a vast blanket of snow spanning far beyond the fields of tussock and mire. Ember flecks of passing snowflakes were caught in the headlights as a blueness slowly overcame the horizon, a blue that deepened into the grey of gloaming dark and then deeper still into the encompass of patient night.
The road was quiet. A level cut of single laned highway struck into the fields that stretched away from the station, bending to follow the slow fall of ranges and orchards that surrounded the distant city beyond.
Wearily Cuddy nudged the scan button of the car’s radio and let the static chatter safely from the old ute’s speaker. Anything for noise, anything to remind them of the bustle of their home. The apartment blocks that stood as if silos of light, the rattling trains that squealed and sparked as they wordlessly migrated from station to station. Out here there was only wind.
Lightly the whisper of night coiled across the lonely field, fogging the windscreen of Cuddy’s ute and causing the engineer to squint as the road slowly disappeared. Slowing they pulled to a stop and scanned for headlights in the distance.
Nothing. Just flakes of falling snow and the steady rumble of the car’s engine.
There was a rest stop somewhere behind them. The dreams of a warm bed and ticking radiator joined Cuddy in the ute’s cabin for a moment as their breath turned to condensate against the windshield.
A storm was forecast.
Ticking their tongue, Cuddy shifted back into gear and continued along the piebald road, the car’s tyres skipping and rumbling as they passed over piles of settled snow.
The world felt as though it existed in a haze. Fence and wire passed by the twin beams of the headlights as an occasional sign marked off roads that disappeared from memory as quickly as they appeared.
The morning had begun staring at charts so coated in dust that Cuddy had felt as though they had been buried, a dryness coated their hands and the smell of stagnant time lay trapped within the drill cotton of their uniform.
A storm tomorrow, four-hundred kilometres to drive before they could make it into the city.
Tennyson station had reported that the front was only passing and that snow was likely. Ice on the road would be manageable but a storm would mean another week at the station. Another week away from home.
Somewhere at the edges of reception a trumpet warbled through an old jazz standard amongst the static and Cuddy smiled for the sound. There weren’t many music stations that still bounced around the repeating loop. Most often they were just glimpses of stray signals caught unmonitored in bands that operators would go mad trying to record. But this wasn’t a dead broadcast. Somewhere in the distance there was a studio, a scratchy old announcer sat in the dark, playing vinyls stained by cigar ash.
Cuddy was driving faster now and had to pull themself back in restraint. Beat the storm, make it home, they thought still feeling as though they were driving towards a wall.
From the shadow a hare leapt away from the passing light, burying itself in the snowbank, the music returned to static and the radio continued to scan.
‘Repeater 19 to Cuddy, you still awake out there.’ The longwave chirped into life and woke Cuddy from their daydream, time seemed to have leapt forward and still only a dim road was visible in the glow of their headlights.
‘Awake enough,’ they replied after a moment of rubbing their eyes, ‘don’t tell me you’re already lonely.’
‘It’s hard to feel lonely when there’s so many alarms still on the panel. Weren’t you fixing these before you left this morning.’
Cuddy remembered back to the flurry of packing after they had decided to leave. Had they even left keys for the next engineer?
‘Everything is working that needs to be. You’d be talking to yourself if the terminal was broken.’ The operator was genuinely lovely, but it was all too obvious that this their first time without an engineer there. They’d have to brave the storm until Cuddy’s replacement came next week. Terrifying for someone who hadn’t learnt the difference between a buzz and an electrical hum.
‘I have a radio at home, just call if something seems wrong.’
‘Oh no, you’re ten minutes away from diving into a wineglass, I know it. The station is doomed, it was nice knowing you.’
Cuddy didn’t drink but appreciated the false melodrama. The operator was more reserved than anyone else that they had ever spent a shift with, but after they opened up they were easily the kindest.
After a time of idle talk the light of the radio faded from the reflection on the windshield and was then replaced by the distant glow of the stormfront beyond.
A brooding cloud-line pulled northward along the Landens river, static and sheet lightning illuminated the fields with a fearsome light unlike that of the sun. A peel of thunder passed in departing wave and Cuddy quickly switched off the radio, praying that it didn’t pick up anything stray. They were too close to home for this.
Another flash of lightning filled the sky and for a moment the headlights flickered amongst the static. The engine stalled and Cuddy pushed at the accelerator, the pedal pushing down without any feedback.
‘Not this close,’ they yelled, stomping on the clutch and refiring the ignition with a dim hope that the ute would return to life.
Three seconds passed and the old car began to lose momentum as Cuddy struggled to keep it from skidding towards the edge of the road. Rumbling tyres were deafened by a second ringing thunderclap as the car sunk into the snowbank.
The image of their home faded. A seat at their partner’s diner. Coffee properly brewed and not stale from some lousy packet.
Trying the ignition twice more, Cuddy stepped out into the slow falling snow and began to walk.
It was cold, further north the storm departed without anger as dying flashes of lightning grew more and more seldom.
Light once more began to moulder below the horizon as distantly the outlines of buildings began to form into something more recognisable. On the engineer trudged, sneezing frost from their nose and feeling the ache of the previous day in each blink of their eyes.
Too cold for morning’s song, the sky shimmered above the frozen countryside. Pink and orange whisps of trail-clouds tagged behind the channel cut by the static. It was as though time had stalled in the dawn glow and Cuddy had to stop for a moment to shake some feeling back into their feet.
The road had widened, somewhere in the distance the smell of woodsmoke drifted lazily and the sight of a passing car ambled past a nearby crossroads. The car stopped, pulling back around and heading in Cuddy’s direction.
They were so close to home.
So close to home.
~
J. McCray
2024
Sunday Short Stories 