Six Stories About Motoring Nowhere

By Ancient Champion

Six Stories About Motoring Nowhere is a collection of short stories by Ancient Champion. About motoring nowhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Disco City Books
• Release date: Oct 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780992900120

Book preview

Thanks Kirk, Meave, Damon and Jay

Andrée & Oona

I can never get far, but I wouldn't have gotten this far without you.

COVER ART

the artist, Damon Hayhurst

I BEGAN WRITING THIS an age ago. Then Trump came along and almost all of my time for four years was dedicated to just tons of news sources reading about his impending downfall for breaking the laws. For a while there, I wasn't alone.

LEAVING

THERE USED TO BE MORE industry round here is what I’m thinking as I pull the car over on Arc Welder Avenue. It’s pretty much all link-detached residential now and has been for a long while. The sole remaining business sat back from the street behind a chain link fence tips a derelict hat to Frank Gehry, that collapsing cardboard box iconographer. Fissures of fractured concrete constitute a forecourt. A few empty parking spaces. Of course there’s no destination architecture around here but Christ almighty you’ve gotta amuse yourself somehow. Anderson’s Motor Repair. A deconstructionist’s dream. An anomalous throwback. I don’t get why it wasn’t flattened with the rest.

The roll-up door at the front of the repair shop is wide open and foreboding. It’s gloomy in there. Reminiscent of the artefacted jpegs of the borough from decades ago that I'd seen blown up at a local gallery, just before the gallery closed too and became another neoclassical husk with a luxe apartment interior. Even from the glommed-on perma-gloom of the day out here, it looks desperately grainy in there. The only sign of life is an intermittent flash from an arc welder. It's a controlled violent crackle. Maybe that crackle is a memory, like everything is a memory. I know that sound. It pops and hums like a failing neon sign.

I leave the key in the ignition with the engine running and reach to turn down the stereo volume just as the vocalist is saying something about each breath being another step along extinction’s path. I’m momentarily distracted. I leave the door wide open. I’m worried about it locking itself centrally with the engine on. I head towards what I guess is the reception window of a small chipboard office. I’m not sure what heightens my anxiety the most, leaving the car running, with its door open, in the street, with the key in the ignition, what would normally be considered to be a series of poor decisions, or encountering Anderson’s mechanics. Like reverse engineering a soup. Who'd want to? I don't like talking to people if I don't have to.

It’s impossible not to imagine the self-harm wrought by stepping into the murderous toxic stew of hydrocarbons and airborne solvents whipped together by compressed airlines and idling extractors. A molecular fume, personalising an attack on the ill-prepared cells of an interloper. It’s grainy and grim. Natural light barely clinging on, or maybe there's no clinging. Maybe there's just suffocating. Maybe they just don't need much light in there.

There’s a motor running in the back. Drills in jigs clamber above the detritus of oily busted car components, boxes of bolts and filters and fan belts