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The Highway and the Lost Soldier

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Why you should not stop Travel Sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett

The Highway and the Lost Soldier

The midday sun around Adelaide River does something violent to the bitumen. At forty-five degrees, the Stuart Highway softens like melting fat; it turns into a black mirror, rippling with an unnatural, liquid glare that pools over every low rise. That is where it waits.

He is always trudging south, away from life and deeper into the blistering furnace, his boots making no sound against the tar.

From two hundred yards out, he resembles a stranded traveler you’d pull over to save. He wears sun-bleached, disintegrating drill cotton that matches the bone-white dust of the termite country, his head angled down at an impossible, broken angle against the glare. No broad-brim hat. No swag. No water bottle. Just stiff, unnatural limbs jerking with every stride.

Would you stop? Travel Sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett

“Driver... look at his face. We need to stop—why won't he turn around?”

He is no lost tourist. Could he be the linesman from the Overland Telegraph days who tore off his clothes and vanished into the razor-sharp scrub during a dry-season fever? Or the shell-shocked soldier who escaped the bloodied wards of the 119th Australian General Hospital during the 1942 air raids, wandering south until his skin boiled off under the scorching sun?

Never pull over. Locals know that on that cursed strip of tar, when the sky turns to a bruised copper and the road shimmers like hot grease, stopping isn’t an act of mercy. It’s an invitation for a hollow, starving thing to peel open your door and feast upon your bodily fluids.







John Bennett - AKA JJFBbennett, is an independent artist. You can view and subscribe to my work via Blogger, YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Instagram and Deviant Art. 

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Copyright

This artwork is protected by U.S. and International copyright laws. Distribution and/or modification of the artwork without the written permission of the sponsor is prohibited.

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