chapter 27

[Finale]

She is driving home, now.

Billboards line the city expressway, flashing eye-grabbing colours like dramaqueens flying past her peripheral vision at 100 kilometers per hour, each board screaming (so to speak) in contradiction with its neighbours - be thin, eat bad food, be thin, eat bad food, be thin - oscillating back and forth to bully the subliminal zones of drivers' minds into a cowering corner, submitting to both voices at the same time. But here is Melissa, not so easily beaten. Among the warzone of intentional typeface and elegant designs, her spirit ascends to the challenge in one direction only, defying the other; at the next shopping center, she pulls into the parking lot, very ready to have an afternoon snack far too large to be considered advisable.

From hills and horizon to emptying park, the day dims on us with the sun sinking red down the sky to soon vanish and let the moon give us light. Melissa shuts the door of her car, locks it on us, and we are left here, watching, as a set of bodily curves strides away with more assurance than we found her with. Ghostly sprites of potential words, stories and universes dance around her, unseen to the eye until she will give them form. With parting doors, the shopping center has taken her away from us, for now.

We rise to see the city entire, here among rapidly cooling clouds, nine square kilometers of city central skyscrapers and three thousand more of low suburbs bleeding out like stars spilled across the land as city planners activate the lights which will make clear the roads for countless souls who do not yet feel sonder, the epiphany put on hold until jobs have been done, paychecks have arrived, cars have been driven home, children have been fed, bills have been paid, sleep has been had, and then for most, put on hold only for the rest of their lives...But here we foresee the great Atlantic presence, understanding that it has already extended one of its many United octopus limbs invisibly and silently, seeping into both government and corporate zones, presently having wrapped itself around the near-future of three million Australian citizens, all sinking into rapid eye movement, dreams influenced however obviously or subtly by the societal order to be slender. But perhaps it is already too late. One of an infinite different variations of the possible future is headed this way. A big one.

Somewhere, in a fictional universe linked to ours by the love of readers and dreamers, Charlene is ascended to heaven.