Night Window (original prose extract, approx. 520 words)

The roadhouse at Tullamurra Creek closed at ten, officially. Unofficially it closed when Noor's father fell asleep in the office chair with the radio murmuring the cricket from somewhere across the world, and that was usually closer to midnight. Until then the lights stayed on, the pie warmer hummed, and Noor sat behind the counter with her chemistry textbook open to the same page it had been open to for an hour.

Outside, the highway did what it always did. Headlights grew out of the dark, swelled, and passed. Most of them did not slow. The ones that did were road trains, mainly, and the drivers came in smelling of diesel and sweet coffee, and they called her 'love' and bought things they did not seem to want: a packet of mints, a newspaper two days old.

At twenty past eleven a ute pulled in and did not park under the lights. Noor watched the shape of it, the engine ticking as it cooled. Nobody got out. She closed the textbook.

Her father had a rule about this. If they don't come in, you don't go out. He had said it the way he said most things, once, flatly, as though it were a fact about weather. He had not said what to do if they just sat there.

Ten minutes. The pie warmer clicked off and on. In the office the commentator said something about a change of bowling and her father did not stir.

Noor went to the window and stood where the driver could see her: a girl in a green polo shirt with the roadhouse's name on it, arms folded, not afraid. She felt, as she did it, how much of it was performance, and how little that mattered. The important thing was to be seen standing there.

The ute's door opened. A woman got out. She was older than Noor's mother would have been, and she was holding a child's shoe, just one, and she walked up to the glass and stood on the other side of it, and for a moment they looked at each other through their own reflections.

'I'm sorry,' the woman said. Noor could not hear it but she could see it. 'I didn't know where else to stop.'

Noor unlocked the door. Later she would not be able to say why. It was not the shoe, exactly, or the woman's face, which was ordinary and tired. It was that the woman had waited. She had sat in the dark for ten minutes deciding whether to ask for help, and Noor knew what that was like; she had been doing it, in her own way, since February.

Behind her, the radio went on describing a game that nobody in the building was listening to. Her father slept with his mouth slightly open and his hand on the desk, near the phone, the way he had slept every night since the funeral, as if waiting for it to ring.

'Come in,' Noor said. 'There's tea.' And she put the kettle on, and did not wake him.