TURBINE | KAPOHAU

You pull up beside the public bathrooms because no one will look twice. The car is scratched to shit, tracked through with mud and reeds and dried-out river silt. The cigarette lighter doesn’t heat up, only puffs smoke rings reeking of melted plastic. This means your phone is now at six percent and this is another problem, another failure on your part, unable to keep one tiny thing going. You turn off the engine and the car wheezes like an old bichon. 

YOU WILL SURVIVE, says the amorphous glowing blob in the passenger seat. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.  

‘Yeah, you said that. Seems unfair and bullshit,’ you say, because the blob has not yet offered to pay for any petrol or snacks, nor used its stupid energy field to charge your phone.  

The blob taps the dash with things that are not really fingers at all.  

YOUR ENGINE LIGHT IS ON.  

‘I know,’ even though you hadn’t noticed.   

The sun is still setting on the East Coast but here it’s already dark. You sit in silence a while. A kid skids past on a BMX bike, giving the car a wide berth. In the distance, you hear an engine backfire, tyres scream on gravel. The sky is thick indigo. The park is empty. You push the seat back and drape your forearm over your face.  

The blob fiddles with the radio, leaving a wet trail on the buttons and dials.  

SHE LOVED RNZ CONCERT.  

You hate that you’d already been thinking that, too aware that if she were here, she’d have the volume all the way up and her eyebrows screwed together like kitset furniture, her thumbs jabbing on the console and nodding along, vaping cotton candy, lamenting the erosion of the rules-based order and ending every fourth sentence with y’know what I mean? You never knew what she meant but she never made you feel stupid, not once.  

‘You dunno anything about her,’ you say, even though it’s the last thing you want to say. ‘Don’t wanna listen to that old shit either.’  

YOU WILL LIVE, the blob intoned YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.  

‘Piss off with that,’ you say, but there’s a tremble in your voice.  

You yank the soggy tuner towards the roof. Brahms is chased off by harsh static. It’s stark relief, except the blob is looking right at you, using its approximal eye holes to suck out your memories and turn them into stalks of pink sugar. It twists and braids and sticks them in its approximal mouth hole, chewing like a dog. You desperately want to punch the blob but know your fist would travel right through it. 

IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT, the blob says, like a fucking dickhead.  

You pick at the ripped plastic on the steering wheel like a day-old wound.  

IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. 

‘She had to go,’ you’re finally crying now, and letting the blob really have it, snarling at its dumb face. ‘I get it. And now you’re here. Now it’s you and me. And I’ve gotta put up with your angel bullshit every time the fucking radio comes on.’  

YOU WILL SURVIVE, the blob says. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.