Alchemisland

Talk you want about speed and count horses, Jack

With Rosie driving, won’t be long until we arrive back

Not a single lynx-smelling Subie owner in the royal county would race Rosie, take the bends the way she took them

They feared the bends, they were like cave divers loathing their sopping pearlless satchels 

Rosie rode her red destrier, a modded Toyota Carina, but she was the road

Rubedo in her rearview, flinching strobes of warning amber from the chasing motor

Whether Lugs or Sergeant Slaughter it didn’t matter, save them a porter down the Masonic lodge bar

They would never take the turns like Rosie, she left the ghost riders in the sky in her wake

The wild hunt saw her passing like a blur

The squinting Garda saw nothing at all

Rosie’s lightless carriage like a shard of the void, a vacuuming vantablack that acknowledged no effulgent

Black unbent by brightness, as in the churning abyssal spheroids that accompanied God before creation as he awaited the plot’s arrival

Rosie tricked out her car, she knew a sick mechanic in Ballina who sorted her out

The dash had thirteen or fourteen buttons

She clicked the button beside the one she clicked last time

The car’s offed lights rejoiced to life when she was well clear of them

She skrrred into the hollow, looked up at the swollen moon latticed by the leafless treetop.