You have reached your destination.
I craned my neck, scanned the nothingness on all sides. ‘And where the hell would that be, exactly?’

Pulling over, loose gravel chinked beneath my tyres.

I lowered the window. A stifling warmth wafted inside, as if I’d opened an oven door. There were no cows, no horses, but the air was thick with the smell of both. Further afield a wrought-iron gate was wedged permanently open to reveal a long crusher-dust driveway cutting a line through the bush and leading to a cluster of tiny houses squatting in a circle. I half-expected a cult of breatharians to appear between the trees, the vibe was so weird. What is this place? My car smelled like feet and was littered with evidence of carb-drenched meals-on-the-go. I’d driven all day with a talking fart machine in the back to rush here?

The first clue about where we were was an old, rust-bitten sign. Peeking through overgrown lantana, it was so bleached of colour I could barely make out the details. Brightside. The letters bled into a scene of a mother with a manic grin serving rosy-cheeked children; its wholesome goodness reminding me of a retro Vegemite commercial.

It had been thirty-six hours since August left. Left, in the  dead of night without any explanation. And the bastard still hadn’t even called to say he was okay, or to check on his son.

August being cagey about his past wasn’t unexpected – besides the fact that I was inexplicably drawn to the man, all I knew for sure about August Silverfell was that he had a son, he was a mechanic and he liked to swear a lot. He never talked about himself, but it felt uncharted when August had said he couldn’t take his son, Otto, with him – ‘not for this’ – and asked if I could have him ‘for a bit’…

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