One day when she hits rock bottom eating a cold re-heated tinned soup and starving to her own bones, Maxine resolves to leave town alone, setting off w/out appropriate clothing or footwear.

*

Outside City Limits she pass first through a rocky wilderness, then through a green pasture, then through another rocky wilderness etc in which (i.e the latter, second wilderness, after the pasture) she gets total lost. Without water and without a map or workable sense of direction M. becomes dehydrated and in deep trouble of her life.

Come night fall, in the thrall of her starvation delirium Maxine finds wreckage of a vehicle from a convoy that was probably burned up very long time back. On the bonnet or windscreen dirt and/or dust someone has written the words DIE FOREIGN DIE and below it in a different hand, PAY ATTENTION MOTHERFUCKERS. She crawls inside to shelter the night and soon listens to howl of wolves from darkness beyond. At night when the temperature drops below zero (0) and there is no functional WiFi, Maxine is hallucinating, shivering and experience what the pessimist scientists call signs of upcoming extinction.

She hears

- more sound of animals outside

- echo song from childhood

- shimmering ‘eye movement sound’

- unsettled nautical skin hallucination of radio waves

Sometime she think she is really gonna die dead hidden in the bus vehicle in the deep of somewhere in the cold night when she feels a ghost hand on her shoulder. That ghost is ghost of Casper, a so-called ex-Boxer ex-Para and part-time ex-‘Jazz’ Promoter, the self-same dead man who in first part of story she was reading to when he actually went and died. Casper (ghost) takes her by shoulder and beckons her towards him, leading her out of the wreckaged bus vehicle and down the embankment of earth sand, across the field desert to an oasis.

*

Time passes.

In the Oasis (actually a Premier Inn) Maxine recuperates strength and orientation. Ghost Casper lingers in the room also while she is sleeping, listening to audiodescribed movies on demand to while away the time. When Maxine wakes up she reads him some of the books left in room by previous incumbent.

She reads him AtomKraft by Jon Slither, Solitary Confinement Dancer by Maisie Wahacha, A Ray of Light by Ash Diameter, The Rat Catcher’s Racist Rollodex by Riannon Gruel-Hindenberg (?) and Perspex Advantage by Claustrophobia Shanti.

When it comes time to leave they skip reception, go out the firescape down into the car park behind the building and off into the night without paying the bill.

*