By Harriet McKnight

There she was, heading down the A40 free-way, the radio on full and her whole
life packed into the back seat. The heat was so heavy that she had all the windows down
and the hot air curled around her arms like an eel. She leaned the car into the sweep of the
road. The sunlight caught the first batch of ocean on the horizon. The sharp, sour smell of
the sea. Somehow all her senses were ringing and smarting and tingling. When she broke
the news, her parents had just sat there and looked at each other, trying to gauge how
much they should say, and she hadn’t even told most of her friends yet. The wind
whipped her hair out like a sea plant, like a live thing, and left strands caught in the
corners of her mouth and eyes. The sun, the heat and the speed all made her feel as
though the car was flying.

Months before, when she had stopped to fill up at the petrol station after that
out-of-town work do, she’d kicked off her sensible conference shoes and was astonished
at the whiteness of her skin in the sunlight. Her toenails were translucent, like dainty shells. The stark contrast of the paleness of her flesh and the rich gold of the ground made
her limbs seem two-dimensional. Like they were empty space. The whole place seemed
to be built on a shifting, sandy dust and she could feel every little grain beneath the balls
of her feet as she adjusted her weight from leg to leg. The heat was loose and melting, the
air slow and hesitant, as if at any moment the whole town could slide off into the sea.