Yellowcake River
This was at three in the morning, just after I’d noticed the entire city flicker on and off several times, and heard the Marj’s emergency power system kick in. Could it be something to do with the plumbing in the new desal reactor? They are still having trouble fixing all those little bugs; “teething troubles” is what Sir Ziggy called them in the early days of his spruiking. ’Course he’s long gone now, dead and buried as per his request - with the first tranche of spent fuel rods in synthetic glass somewhere over in Kangaroo Island. Still they say everything is 100 percent safe. Let’s hope so, there are enough super bugs in this hospital without pumping them full of plutonium.
For thirty minutes the glorious liquid flowed, and then it stopped just as abruptly. I watched it disappear over the floodgates alongside the golf club. What was left was only the faintest background glow - an echo of the Torrens as if I had been staring at a great big, flexible Torrens River-sized fluoro tube and suddenly turned it off.
I prayed that the golden river that I saw was a vision splendid from my own high, or perhaps a discrete test run of the new Shiels-sponsored Fringe Festival launch, or at the very worst some sort of literary tool used by the author of my crazy life to create a symbol analogous to the toxic yellow river running from my body along the tubes and into the jug at the end of the bed.
It was all too much. I flexed my thumb and tapped the pain medication button and slipped back into a dream that I hoped I wouldn’t remember.
