Thinking About My Mother Today
Stranger
I got into a car with a stranger. I was five years old and temporarily deaf. I remember now getting off the school bus, at the corner of our street, then running across the bitumen road. It was on Lawson Crescent, in Orange, that I got into the stranger's car. I'd tripped over in the middle of the road and gashed my leg, I think. This car was coming down the street at the same time. It was almost as if the car, not the stranger, actually "saw me" as I lay there in the road, or had I got up by then. The stranger's car stopped next to me on the road. The stranger asked me where I was going? I said I was going home. Meanwhile, on the front doorstep of our house, only a few houses down the street my mother, who'd been waiting for me to arrive, watched with perhaps a mixture of horror and surreality (it was a hot day, the blue in the sky had vanished, leaving behind this white hot pressure combining with the bitumen road, covered with small sharp stones and balls o...
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