Plum D’Oborries woke up baking in the hard sun in a ditch in the road the exact shape and form of her own body. She smelled crispy. 

‘Fuck,’ she said. 

‘Oh, fuck. Fuck.’ 

She considered her circumstances. The sun was blinding her. She looked dumbly at the insides of her eyelids, bright red. 

‘Wait. No.’ She thought and thought about where everything had gone.

‘Oh. Fuck.’ She sat up and felt everything twist and turn with her. Her joints ratcheted. Everything that could have ached, ached. 

She patted herself on the chest, patted her throat. She raised her right arm in the air, in the sun. It was made of dull gleaming tarmac. Oily tyre marks were embedded on her wrist. She blinked, and it was skin, again, her skin, nobody else’s, not the road’s, hers. Hardy, rough, tanned from sunlight. 

‘Oooh, damn it.’ She pulled herself gracelessly from the ditch, shaking off gravel and dirt. She took her sleeve between her fingers. It was bumpy and rigid. It felt like a very thin sleeve-shaped chunk of tarmac. 

‘Thanks for not leaving me naked, at least.’ 

The sheoaks hulked, diagonal, on either side of the road, hard and jagged and protruding from a dry carpeting of their own stems. A hot breeze flicked dust and litter over the road, swept through the trees, hummed dull melancholia. The air over the road rippled like it was a thin sheet that was going to tear. Everything seemed brown and yellow and white. She glanced back at the ditch in the road. 

She’d been told a long time ago that potholes were where the road birthed witches. They grew in the dark secret places under the tarmac and the cars and the rainfall loosened the road’s skin and on days when divine forces were away and when the dead muttered and birds flew in strange numinous patterns they burst free. 

The pothole she had emerged from was huge. It looked like it had been peeled away by a truck. Plum D’Oborries was a big woman. She had arms and legs like tree trunks and fists that were giant brutal squares when she clenched them. The shoulders on her pothole silhouette made nearly perfect right angles. She had teeth like slabs and a clifflike face with hard creases and corners that were well suited to expressing things like anger, annoyance, and agony, a mix of which she was expressing at that very moment. She had jaggedy dark hair and small tired eyes. She was a mess, though, far less of a mess than the situation might have called for. 

The road stretched up a lazy hill where a bright yellow sign saying 100 SPEED LIMIT winked in the sunlight. It loomed up to the horizon, all wide and empty with the sheoaks reaching for it like fingers. Dark silent birds wheeled through it. 

The charred corpse of her car was wrapped around a tree, up there. 

‘My car,’ she moaned. She ran for it and every step felt, just a little, like being set on fire. 

The car’s hood had split into a V on either side of the sheoak, which bent disgruntledly back at the inconvenience. It was charred, slightly, licked, but it had withstood worse. The whole front of Plum’s car had a quality like an accordion. It zig-zagged. The windows were cloudy with threading cracks. It stank like oil and smoke and burnt wood. It stank like burnt hair and skin. It smelled crispy. 

‘Come on,’ Plum murmured. ‘Oh, come on.’ 

There was a dark form in the cracked window and she approached her car. There was a humming dark warmth around the whole thing. She jabbed the window with her forefinger and it crumpled, almost popped, tinkled to the forest floor like snowfall. 

‘Fuck off, dude,’ she said to her own burnt corpse, charred form tangled horribly over the wheel, face embedded in it, arms flopping unnaturally over its sides. Her spine had definitely broken. If she thought hard enough, she could even remember what that felt like. 

She folded her arms and grimaced and, as she watched, there was a noise like a quiet cough and her corpse sloughed fluidly forwards and turned suddenly into dirty and stinking oil, slapping over the chair and floor and glovebox. 

She would never get that cleaned out. 

She sighed. 

‘Hustum! Hustum! Are you dead? Hustum, you bitch, are you finally dead?!’ The air was fat with heat and her calls seemed crushed by it, caught in the ripples in the air, subsumed by dry sheoak stems. 

If Hustum actually was dead, she realised, she would probably look like a real asshole. 

‘Hustum! I’m sorry if you’re dead! I was trying to lighten the mood! Hustum! HUSTUM!’

‘Oh and how are you, Plum? How’s it going? How’s it doing? How’s the spine feeling, huh?’ 

Plum looked wildly from branch to branch until her eyes closed in on him, hanging like a raggy scarf. Crossroads Hustum looked mammalian, generally. He had dark beady judgemental eyes and small triangular ears and a body that was a tube of inconsistent length. His fur was a misty vague white. Another hot breeze came and he flapped in it. Tiny bits of him came off, floated away. The sunlight went through him, slightly. He was made from the same sort of stuff that made up jellyfish, and nebulas, and the things you see in your peripheral vision. He was bleary and wavering and looked like he had never slept once in his entire life. 

‘Oh. You aren’t dead. Hey.’ The concern on Plum’s face washed instantly away and her features sunk into the kind of peeved grimace that Hustum always made her end up wearing. 

‘Like a car crash would do me.’ He swung lazily and shut his eyes for a long moment. ‘But you. Huh? You shoulda seen it by the way. The crash I mean. I was actually worried. Your whole body was like…’ He waved his arms vaguely around. ‘You know? Like…’ He suddenly spread his arms apart. 

Plum shivered and shook her head. ‘I don’t wanna even think about it. Christ.’ 

Hustum jolted and yelped. His fur stood on end. He collapsed out of the branches and thumped heavily to the forest floor, flinging sheoak stems and dried leaves into the air. 

‘Stop with that name, I keep telling you! I always tell you! You keep saying it!’ 

‘Sorry. Listen. Hustum. I died. This is the worst day of my life. I’m not thinking straight.’ 

‘I’m glad your brush with mortality hasn’t changed you, at least,’ Hustum whinged, sticking out of the leaf litter like a petty shark. 

‘Oh, fuck off.’ Plum stood with her hands on her sides watching her car, aching and burning all over. She felt like she was melting. It was almost relaxing. ‘The boot looks fine. I guess we could try–.’ 

‘Wait, shut up.’ 

Plum grimaced so hard she quivered. ‘Hustum, I just died and my car is ruined and you’re just the right size and shape that I can fit you in my hands and–’ 

‘Can you hear that?’ He stood straight and his ears were twitching. He looked, vaguely, over the road. He rumbled like the surface of a lake. ‘Oh, hide, hide,’ and with a puff of leaves and dirt he vanished. 

Plum heard it, too. Plum felt it. Hard rubber wheels up her spine and the petroleum gas grazing her skin dry. She felt the weight inside it, the weight of the thing at the wheel. The air seemed compressed. Felt it fluidly, felt it brushing in waves. She wanted to puke. 

She stumbled into the forest, grunting quietly, scratching herself on branches and twigs, squatted in a ditch by a low shrub with dainty shining spiderwebs. The sunlight fell in softly wavering beams, pulsated on her skin. The wind picked up, scattered dry dirt in her eyes. 

Hustum’s voice emerged from nowhere: ‘I thought it was gone, dammit.’ 

Plum clasped a sharp twig in shock and it bit into her fingers. She caught herself before she yelped. ‘Oh, oh, Chri–’ 

‘Shutupshutupshutup.’ 

‘Sorry.’ 

‘Plum,’ whispered Hustum. They both watched a thin slit in the stems and branches that framed the car, the road next to it, the litter twisting in the breeze. Nothing was there. ‘You didn’t forget why you crashed, right?’ 

Plum splayed her hands out violently. ‘I died.’ Plum didn’t know how to emphasise this enough. ‘All I remember is being on fire.’ 

‘Alright alright alright, chill out,’ said Hustum, and a black car rolled to a gentle stop on the road. 

Sunlight rolled down its oily skin like a whale’s back. Its windows were tinted. It was elongated, stretched. It looked like it had been painted there. Its engine thrummed. There was a noise like an exhalation. 

‘That… that’s a bad choice of words…’ Plum’s mouth was dry. She wanted to puke. 

The door opened. The air turned sour. A perfume crawled over the ground, coiled in the air like something dying. 

He had a body like he was somebody’s dad. He was tall and broad shouldered, mildly chubby. He was dressed in what could only be described as business casual, a buttoned white shirt, pressed black trousers, a belt. He had soft blond hairs on his knuckles. 

Plumes of dirty smoke swirled out of his collar. Oily, filthy smoke, smoke that clung, that even looking at it made you feel dirty, feel its heat coagulating in your throat. He shut the door, and stood, still. He was unmoving, except for the smoke, spewing and flowing, clinging to itself and dissipating. 

He swayed melodically as he walked to Plum’s car, looked over it, suddenly frozen, again. He moved only in spurts, window to window, stepping suddenly away to gaze at the car from a different, farther angle. 

Plum didn’t breathe. 

He stepped away from the car and paused in the middle of the road. He looked into the forest. His arms were splayed out and his legs were apart. He looked at Plum. Sloughing, rushing smoke, spinning, thick. He looked right at her. 

He turned suddenly back to his own car, drifted through its door, slammed it shut, and drove away. 

Plum and Hustum sat there in silence. 

The stink faded and the wind blew. The heaviness sloughed away. Plum realised the birds hadn’t been chirping. A cabbage butterfly landed on a leaf near her face. 

‘Gone, right?’ she asked, after a long while. 

‘Yeah.’ 

Plum turned and puked into the shrub. 

‘OK, wonderful, good. Just do that. I really like human bodily functions, yeah.’ 

Plum wiped her face, coughed, straightened out. The breeze came back, crawled all over her. She was drenched in sweat and she felt it all go cold. 

‘Do I even count anymore?’ Plum pondered, moving carefully through the shrubbery towards her car. She kept looking up, down, the road. 

‘Do anything, Plum, but get philosophical,’ Hustum advised. He had, after checking up and down that Plum was sufficiently clean, scurried up her leg and back and wrapped himself around her shoulder. ‘It’s not worth it. It’s the worst.’ 

‘I guess.’ 

Plum remembered, now, why she had crashed, recalled a black car like a blot in her eyesight, slick and oily, how everything seemed to slide off it. It chased them for a very long time, chased them over the road, chased them up the hill. She had no idea if it was the same black car. They all looked the exact same. 

They had killed her. 

‘We need a car,’ Plum said, looking at the wreckage. She felt the car’s boot over, ran her fingers over a groove above the licence plate. She found the button, clicked it. The boot groaned in agony as it opened. ‘There was a ritual for this…’ 

She looked in it, looked up, down. She sighed. She nearly smiled. 

It was a nightmare in there. Everything had been strewn about. A thermos of captured road rage epithets stuck out of a bag of Anathemetist hairs. Phials of ant souls laid in a corner, one of them shattered, and tiny ectoplasmic ants marched across the boot, dissipated as the wind picked up. The dead men’s lies and the field spirit whispers had all gotten into each other and Plum cursed her constant refusal to properly label their bags. It smelled like a wet, electric dog. 

‘Or, or or or,’ said Hustum, scrabbling up into the boot and smugly tilting his head. ‘You can finally stop putting off getting that damn broomstick already.’ 

Plum groaned and fished uselessly through her scattered things. She was fairly sure the ritual called for a few millilitres of truck oil that had travelled exactly seven thousand and seven hundred and seventy seven kilometres. 

‘Don’t groan!’ 

Plum moaned. 

‘This is the perfect situation. There’s centuries of memories farting out of the wood here. This place wouldn’t even still be here, if we left and came back, I reckon.’ 

‘And, what, I’ll just chop a tree down and make a broomstick? In the wilderness?’ 

‘That’s the point that’s what you’re meant to do. That’s how that works.’ Hustum was gesticulating wildly. ‘It needs the imbuement. The connection. Birthing. What, what are you, gonna get one from Ikea? Are you nuts?’ 

Plum raised an eyebrow and looked very hard right into Hustum’s eyes. 

‘You know, you’re not an actual familiar, right?’ 

Hustum puffed up and looked right back. ‘You’re not an actual witch!’ 

‘Nah,’ said Plum. ‘I’m not. Tell me the fuckin ritual, Hustum.’ 

Hustum was a wood spirit from a country very far away. He had come over trapped in a poorly carved souvenir of a moose bound in resin. His knowledge of witchcraft extended about as far as the knowledge of any spirit extended, plus whatever he could scrounge up on Plum’s phone. 

He scrolled through Wikipedia and scratched his head. 

‘And a few millilitres of truck oil that’s travelled exactly seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy seven kilometres,’ he concluded. 

Plum grinned and nodded. ‘I could’ve told you that.’ 

Hustum sniffed. ‘Well, you didn’t.’ 

The sacrifice piled up in a cheap wok, jutted over its sides. Slabs of frozen battered fish and cheap spring rolls and Gleam-Sailor flesh seasoned with salt and lake water and shavings from a worm horn. Plum drizzled it all with a mix of olive oil and truck oil and admired her handiwork. It glistened. 

‘What a feast,’ said Plum without a hint of irony. She realised just how hungry she was. Her guts felt like they were made of paper. 

‘Time to light it up,’ said Hustum unenthusiastically. 

Plum rifled through her boot for her lighter, held it up, and locked eyes with Hustum. 

‘Come on, Plum. Just a shot.’ 

‘Ugh.’ 

‘Plum.’ 

‘Uuugh.’ 

She curled her fingers and splayed them at the wok and nothing happened. She wiggled them and nothing happened. She inhaled deeply, calmly, took in everything around her, the trees brushing each other and the ants in ordered rows on the tarmac and a bird flitting through the treeline, took in her own guts, felt her heart beating. She waved her arms at the wok and nothing happened. 

‘Fucking…’ Plum hissed and she jabbed a finger at the wok and CRACK, a sharp hard light flashed flinging smoke that stank like grease and salt and a single piece of frozen fish pirouetted in the air, charred a deep black. It fell back into the wok, smouldering. 

‘The lighter,’ Hustum said, holding it out to Plum, but a tiny spark bled from the charred fish and they both jumped back as the entire thing suddenly erupted into spewing swirling filthy flames. 

The fire spun, danced, threw dirty shadows and heaved fat puffs of smoke. 

‘Not a witch, eh?’ said Plum in her most smug voice. 

‘Yeah, good job, really. That was really great. Extra points for style on that spinning fish.’ 

Plum nodded, choosing to ignore the sarcasm. ‘Now what?’ 

‘We gotta wait. Hey, did the cards survive?’ 

The playing cards, which had been in the glovebox, were drenched in the thick and musty oil that had been Plum’s corpse just a few moments earlier, and they both decided that they didn’t really want to play another game of Speed, anyway. 

Lights shifted. The wind softened, grew cooler, wetter. The shadows of pebbles and tree swept in slow angles. The sun went red, as it sank. 

Clouds had come out, finally, thin things, shredded looking. They were catching fire, deep reds and oranges and pinks, their guts dark grey, almost blue. Their sides were flayed off them, came off in desperate tatters, licking tongues of fire. Birds criss-crossed them in geometric patterns. 

The horizon sank in metamorphosing bands, of all colours shifting into each other in differing stratum, of reds sinking into yellows into deep greens into a deep velvet blue, bereft of light in itself but shimmering, somehow. The wind smelled like flowers and water. The tops of the trees turned to syrup. 

The wok’s fire died down. It shrivelled and crept and tiny sparks were plucked from it and smited in the air. Thin lines of smoke dissolved. 

The side of the road where the gravelly tarmac and the dry crunching dirt met under Plum’s arse was beginning to feel comfier and comfier. Plum exhaled through her nostrils, blinked slowly. Her face was dry and warm–her back was freezing. 

Hustum was asleep already. He existed permanently on the line between consciousness and unconsciousness, and Plum was always amazed at times when he would be at his most frenetic and screechy and she would look away for just a second at something else and find him in the deepest, deadest sleep she had ever seen someone have. He was coiled up into a spiral, resting his head on his own back, and, separated from his waking personality, it might have been adorable. 

A low darkness settled over everything. It was a comforting, carpeting darkness, a sort of quiet darkness where everything seemed to breathe softly. A flying fox chirped and clumsily bashed through the branches. 

Hard bright headlights flushed down the road and Plum yelped, grabbed Hustum and rolled stealthily backwards into the woods and crashed instantly and noisily into a bush with brutally sharp branches that clasped hard onto her. 

Hustum was still asleep. 

Plum watched, unable to move, as the car rolled to a stop. As the headlights flicked off. 

A frog croaked and moonlight rolled over its windscreen. There was nobody in the driver’s seat. 

‘Oh. Oh! Oh my God!’

‘Gaaaaaaaah!’ Hustum screamed, uncoiling instantly into a rigid, electric stick. ‘The name, the stupid name! Stop!’ 

‘Sorry. Hustum! Look!’ 

‘Oh. Finally.’ 

It was a nondescript silver mass of a car. It was reminiscent of a cow, somehow. If it ate, it would have chewed cud. It looked like something somebody’s mother would pick them up from school with. It had great fat wheels and a back that was a wide rectangle. Dust smattered its windscreen, its hood, the headlights. It was the least cool car in existence. 

‘I love it so much,’ said Plum, pulling the door open and feeling the warm air inside smelling of dust and a cheap orange-scented air freshener. The key hung in the keyhole. A beam of moonlight turned it a deep, clean blue. 

‘We gotta start moving over stuff!’ Plum announced to Hustum, who was asleep again. She nudged him with her foot and he awoke. 

‘Yeah, OK. Hey, so, where’d the wok go?’ 

‘Dunno.’ 

‘Alright.’ Hustum scratched his head. The segment of road the wok had been on seemed to quiver. He swore he could hear something like metal crunching. ‘So, where are we gonna go?’ 

‘Dunno.’ 

‘Alright. And why do you think the road keeps–’ he gesticulated wildly. ‘Doing this? Why’s it even care?’ 

‘It’s my patron,’ Plum answered cheerily. 

‘Why’s it your patron? Why would it even do that?’ 

‘Dunno.’ 

Hustum’s eye twitched. ‘Plum, do you know literally anything?’ 

‘Not a thing,’ Plum answered, chucking a set of small brown bags that smelled of burning metal to Hustum’s feet. ‘Help me pack, dude.’ 

‘This is a nightmare,’ said Hustum, hauling the packs to the new car. 

‘I think everything’s gonna get better,’ said Plum. 

 

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