Author Information
gold that stays
Folder:
2026
The driver comes late to the district,
shirt smelling of long miles,
ute coughing in the cold
behind the shops.
He has already worn through three maps.
The first was gold on gold—
a child’s sketch of a place
where every surface shone back his wanting.
The second was a surveyor’s grid,
lot numbers, cul‑de‑sacs,
a legend for future driveways
and the price of each small view.
The third was only weather:
creases of hill shadow,
a rumour of water
where the fog kept folding.
He asks at the servo counter,
EL DORADO?
The kid shrugs, taps
the charity tin by the till.
He asks the old woman
locking the community hall.
She nods at the netball court,
chalk scores half‑washed by rain.
He asks the man on the pub veranda
rolling a smoke with slow fingers.
The man taps ash into a stubby tray,
says nothing, but shifts his chair
so there’s an empty one beside him.
Night comes in like a brownout.
Streetlights drine, then hold.
The driver walks now,
leading the ute by its tired momentum,
coaxing it along the kerb
past fibro, brick veneer,
a single jacaranda
still remembering its purple.
He peers into lounge‑room windows:
a woman folding school uniforms,
a boy at the sink with rubber gloves,
someone laughing at a show
no one will recall tomorrow.
His armour—what’s left of it—
is only a suit jacket
shiny at the elbows,
thread bare at the cuffs.
It reflects nothing.
It asks nothing back.
At the edge of town
there is a paddock,
wire sagging between star pickets,
a dam like a dark coin
pressed into the earth.
He stands there, finally still.
The ute ticks as it cools,
engine settling into the night.
In the black water
he sees no city,
no spire, no minted street—
only his own outline
broken by a small wind,
and behind it,
the patient shape of the hills
that have been here
longer than his language for them.
A truck moans along the highway,
then is gone.
He lets the maps fall
one by one
into the dam’s quiet mouth.
Gold, he realises,
was always the word
for what he did not yet know
how to speak of:
a chair pulled out
on a cold veranda,
a light left on
over a doorstep,
a town that does not ask
who you were
before you arrived.
He stays.
.
