The new job - Sue

The local bus pulls away and trundles up the lane surrounded by clouds of red dust and dirty exhaust fumes. Arnie shades his eyes and watches his link to civilization disappear. The sun blasts from a clear blue sky, shimmers off the dirt road and sends drops of sweat to Arnie’s lips. His grey check shirt sticks like cling wrap to his wet soggy back and his hair resembles a grease ball.
Arnie’s tummy gurgles and flip flops as he suddenly realizes what he’s done. Two months ago he lost his job in the City. He’d been a prominent member of the Accounts Department at Russells and Jones, having worked his way up from a payroll clerk. His income paid for a reliable, boring way of life. An apartment on the river equipped with all the technological stuff imaginable, an annual overseas trip, a nice girlfriend and mates from schooldays. They met every Friday night at the pub.
In his spare time, and there was plenty, he took his trusty old Nikon out for the day.
Arnies tummy gurgles again and he remembers where he is. The dusty narrow lane leads to the ancient town of Perlew somewhere south of the Arizona desert and he’s standing under a crooked sign that points to the Bilboa track.
Arnie swallows, his tummy settles and he heads off across a dry creek bed to some distant but hopefully obvious track. It was along here that a couple of locals spotted a rare pink fungi and the National geographic had commissioned him to cover the story.
“God, how did this happen? I can’t do it. I’m going to make an absolute fool of myself. I probably won’t even be able to find the monstrous pink thing. I mean how do you find fungi? Where does it grow? How big is it?
He’d once entered a competition at National Geographic and he’d won. The photo, a fluke of course, was a brilliant capture of the eye of a tiger.
A track seems to suddenly appear, or is it a mirage? Arnie veers left between two man sized termite mounts. Just for a second, he chuckles as he plays hide and seek with no-one but his shadow. He weaves in and out of sandstone rocks of all shapes and sizes. Nothing stirs. It’s dead quiet. Now his armpits are streaming like waterfalls. The sun is relentless. There’s no shade. Only the flopping hat like Lawrence of Arabia shields his face.
In the distance trees cluster around what looks like a larger rock. Arnie s footsteps disappear behind him as he trudges on. The trees flop in the sun and slightly dance in the hot breeze.
Suddenly a loud cackle rips into the blue sky and a flock of bright pink cockatoos circle in the trees. Arnie crouches down and looks up to see a sea of pink, like a frilly eiderdown tucked around a branch.
“This is the life” he sighs “what another wonderful fluke”