Rest Stop, Kilometre Zero

The sign said Rest Area 0 km, which should have been her first warning.

Marguerite had been driving since Roma. The road west was a single black ribbon pinned beneath an enormous sky, and the stars were so thick out here that they seemed to crowd the windscreen, pressing close, curious. She had not seen another car in two hours. When the rest stop rose out of the dark, a single sodium lamp humming over a picnic table and a tin shelter, she pulled in without thinking.

There were people at the table.

---

Four of them. An old man in a wide hat. A woman in a nurse’s uniform, the style of it decades out of date. A boy of perhaps ten, holding a torch that was not switched on. A young man in a suit, his tie loosened, his face very tired.

None of them had cars. The gravel lot was empty except for hers.

You’re the first in a while, said the nurse, kindly, and moved over to make room.

Marguerite sat. She didn’t know why. The lamp buzzed. Moths turned slow spirals in its light. Out past the edge of the gravel, the land fell away into a dark so total that it seemed less like absence than like a held breath.

Where are you all headed? she asked.

They looked at one another. The old man smiled, not unkindly.

Same place as you, love. Just waiting on the road to say when.

---

They talked until the sky began to pale. The boy told her about his dog. The young man described, with great precision, the exact taste of the coffee at a roadhouse that Marguerite was fairly sure had burned down before she was born. Nobody asked her name. Nobody offered theirs. It felt, somehow, like good manners.

When the first grey light touched the horizon, the nurse stood and brushed off her skirt.

You should go, she said. Road’s open for you. Not for us. Not yet.

Marguerite walked to the car. When she turned at the door to wave, the table was empty. The lamp was off. The tin shelter was rusted through, half collapsed, overgrown with spinifex, as if no one had stopped here in forty years.

She drove on. The odometer, she noticed later, had not moved the entire night.

And on the passenger seat, where no one had been sitting, there was a small torch, switched off, still warm.