My neighbours ask how I’d vote if I could. I cannot remember if the red stripe comes first or the white. There are only two answers, really. How does it end? The pattern, I mean. The sunlight here so intense, everything fades.

Every day on my drive to work, I count Fonterra flags. I lack discipline, or something more. The difference between devotion and devotional is faith, or perhaps just vestments. How dirty do you get at work? My father gave more than three decades of his life to supply lines, Union Pacific rails, a short hour drive from where two tracks united a nation. They gave him railroad branded calendars every year. From the day he retired, I never saw another train in the house.

At any given time, my hands, my clothes are covered in the spit and detritus of a half dozen diners, the grease of the dead, the oil splatter of the fryer. But it will never be enough. The butcher calls a politician ‘the slut.’ Rails about the good ol’ days. A straight shot from here to there. I tell him, ‘you and me, we’re just waiting to be eaten.’ Sometimes the tracks warp in the heat. It spoils everything.

I was born under a flag. These days, I can go weeks without seeing it. It’s only remarkable when I point it out the way I’m doing now. I can remember the directions for folding it, 25 years after I last did so. If I look hard enough, I can find it in my clothing, in the scraps that fill my wallet. I can recall the way my neighbours’ oversized version would snap in the wind like old rubber recoiling on skin.

A stranger tells me I should renounce my citizenship. He is identifiable only by a picture of obsolescence. Stars and Bars. Close-up. A malignant cell under a microscope. He calls me a cancer and he is not wrong. I am spreading. I must keep going. Beyond the field. Beyond the selvage.