Week One

The Goldmine Hotel, a bar that during its heyday had acted as the beer-soaked townhall every Saturday night, was now a place that seemed abandoned by time. Only a few bombed-out relics from the old days would frequent it now. One notable regular was John Dunn, a bloated old man that had the look of an old cowboy actor. John drank whiskey—and that was evident on account of the smell he exuded. Anybody enticed by the bar’s lurid neon that draped its front façade would eventually fall victim to one of John’s stories. What he had to say did not seem at all true, but rather a version of his life that seemed to comfort him in its telling. One could at least gather from his stories that he was once a wealthy man, but how he accrued his fortune was still a mystery. People supposed he was either deliberately quiet on the subject, or that the whiskey had helped him forget it. Either way, John would wail on about some character he knew once or something that happened on one of his ‘trips’, while the other patrons would look into their beer glasses as the jukebox spit out a tinny country song. Each of his stories ended the same way—with a resigned sigh, which sounded ghastly due to his removed lung, and an assertion that everything was different now, and that things like that didn’t happen anymore.

Week Two

You wake up to the sound of ambient bickering on morning television. ‘Amazon announced today an exciting new app to track the mental health of its warehouse staff’, the puffy-faced anchor reads. Your eyes flutter open as you notice a familiar metallic and sterile smell coming in from the window. Another accident at the Alphabet server banks across the street, definitely. News alerts on your phone: more climate-related flooding in Japan, 15 dead, thousands displaced.

‘A terrifying look at the future,’ a journalist writes, ‘if we don’t change how we treat our earth’.

You don’t have a lot of time to stay in bed. Lumbering out of the sheets, you start your routine: teeth, shower, coffee, breakfast, coffee, get to work. Walking towards the McKinley building, you recall how its sheer size and emanating indifference towards its surroundings used to unsettle you; now you don’t think about it all. You engage in mundane small talk with your co-worker while riding the elevator to your office. ‘Did you hear about all those floods?’ they ask you.

‘Yeah, scary stuff’ you reply.

‘Well apparently there’s a meeting about it today.’

‘What?’

The elevator stops with a sharp chime, interrupting your conversation. The doors open and suits pour in.

It’s nearly the end of the day now. You’ve been busy with your co-workers, drawing up a marketing plan for a real estate company which has strategically bought land in Japan, which has now become lucrative coastal property. This kind of work used to bother you, but that was during your heady, idealist period. Now it’s the 2040’s, and you have to be more realistic.

Week 3

The burning neon mixture of reds, greens, and blues spattered across the wet pavement like a lurid crime scene. Young natives strutted down the main street as if they were kings of the town, screaming drunken decrees in their jackets and blue jeans. In the quietest bar he could find, Marty sipped gin while trying to hear himself think. He was supposed to meet someone tonight. But now he found himself scratching his head and tugging at his tie, trying to figure out why they didn’t show, and more importantly, what he needed to do. He slammed down his drink and nodded to the barman on the way out into the night. It was oppressively cold tonight. But that had never stopped this town before—the people here were too restless.

Marty would always grip his snub-nosed tightly on the way home. Seldom did he have to use it, but in this part of town you couldn’t take chances. Stumbling into his apartment, Marty plundered his liquor cabinet in search of a nightcap. While attending to his drink, he noticed an odd chill that had invaded his apartment. He quickly studied each room, hoping he hadn’t foolishly left one of his windows open. Walking into his bedroom, he found shards of glass scattered across the room, twinkling in the light of the moon. Someone had broken in. He rushed to his desk, as if he already knew what they were after. Sure enough, he found the lip of his locked draw chipped and cracked in several places, and all of its contents gone. Marty sat on his bed and sank his head into his hands. An already confounding night had gotten worse. The only thing that comforted him was that the break-in through the window and the shoddy work on the drawer screamed that this was an amateur job. But was he set up by the man who didn’t show, or did they get to him to? It was too far into the night to answer these questions. Slowly sitting up from his bed, he retreated back to the bar, where a drink made in a much simpler world awaited him

Week 4

‘I never knew you could you feel this old,’ Roland said, as he surveyed the wall in his den that was adorned with mementos and memorabilia. ‘I thought I would have bloody forgotten all this by now,’ he said while pointing at all the faded photographs, ‘but it’s all still there. The lot of it. I hate it.’

Week 5

In his first few bouts of consciousness all he could feel was an intense pain all over his back, as if a mad man had ripped it apart and left him lying on the ground. As he opened his eyes and manically flailed his head about, all that his vision granted him was dull colours of the earth. Coming to what was left to his senses he picked himself up off the ground, stumbling as the pain seemed to move from his back to his knees. The gnarled ashy white blobs surrounding that rose from all around and the heat made him think that he had been cast down for all his sins to a hell that all he crossed wished him to. Soon the figures he saw turned to trees and looking down he saw that he had been cast not to the afterlife, but a dam bed that was so dry and cracked that it was if the heat of the midday sun had caused the earth to blister.

As his grogginess passed he became familiar with each gash and bruise on his body. When he tried to recall how they got there or what had brought him to this place that no soul had tread upon before him, only the sounds of horses galloping and pistols firing rang in his ears. He walked into the bush, hoping to find a hint of what had happened or even just a trace of life among the pale dirt and dried leaves. But all that met him was the sounds of his awkward, heavy footsteps and the gormless squawking of birds perched on those apparitions-turned-trees. Dusk descended, and the blood red sky cast a profound sense of dread on the man: for he had found a place worse than hell. A place where the earth was so dominating that it had cast his soul away leaving a husk that was doomed to merely float about, oppressed by the heat and dryness of this land but without the ability to leave even a small mark upon it.

Week 6

I grew up in a town where everybody my age said it was dead. Every Friday night we would go out and revive it, only to tear it back down again by Saturday. Our parents would ask us what we wanted to do when we grew up and our only answer was ‘be anywhere but here.’ We were eighteen and already pissed off at how our lives had turned out. So when the war came around and all of us could go overseas we were elated.

Amazingly I remember the day before we departed well. We had gone to the pub in the early afternoon to drink ourselves blind. We played pool and sang songs all with stupid grins on our faces, because we all knew we were getting out of this fucking joint. Soon we would be there and not here, gone from a place where nothing ever happened. That night we drank all the booze in the town and when they ran out we burnt it down to the ground. Then we marched off—not to fight for our country, or whatever the politicians or the protestors said, but to be anywhere that wasn’t ‘back home’.

All of what happened over there, and why it happened, is gone now. We sit in the RSL or in front of the TV to hear stories of ‘bravery’ and ‘mateship’, but all the rest has disappeared. Maybe we were all sent there to find something, for ourselves and for Australia, and we came back with nothing but stories.