Stories of Hope

by Aussie Speculative Fiction

  “Reckon that’s bullshit, Joel,” Janine replied, lighting up again. The glow of the cigarette illuminated her weathered face and laugh lines. Lines like those in the grooved earth around them, covered with fine dust.

  The ash.

  “Feels like it’s true, though.” He patted his belly and took the smoke for a drag. “I watch it every day. How does something so green grow out of nothin’?”

  “You need a new job, darl,” Janine said. She turned and looked into his face with questioning eyes. “You should be a horticulturalist.”

  “I studied for a while,” he replied. “Land management. But . . . well, you know.” Best to sum up that difficult part of his life by saying nothing. “I try not to worry.”

  They were silent for a few minutes.

  “Fire’s getting closer,” Joel said, nodding his head eastwards.

  “You’re not concerned?” Janine asked. “Shouldn’t you prepare?”

  “Like I said. Try not to worry,” Joel replied. He suddenly felt uncomfortable. “They’ll take care of it. The fireys. Someone.” Finishing the cigarette, he slipped away, back to the station.

  Distracting himself with odd jobs, he checked the pumps and topped up the windscreen water. He used to get so many complaints from people who couldn’t clean their cricket-smeared windscreens for lack of a bucket of soapy water. Not so much anymore; rising temperatures meant fewer insects. Now it was just smoke and dust. Joel climbed back behind the service counter as the stars came out, gleaming faintly through the smoke. He coughed occasionally.

  He was rotating the pies and sausage rolls when the harried tourists came in and knocked over the sunglasses stand with a gust of warm air. He sighed, and wiped stale pastry from his hands on his green shirt.

  The cicadas had stopped.

  “Thank God you’re open,” said the father of five, his family huddled anxiously around him. “We’re almost empty. We haven’t been able to get fuel anywhere. They’re out, all up and down the coast.”

  “We should be able to sort you out—” Joel started, when the fluorescent lights above them started to flicker. Glancing out the window, he could see the same thing happening to the bright green and white lights advertising the service station. Frowning, he went outside and stood for a second watching them when, with a sudden cut off of the regular hum, they went out altogether.

  “Shit.” Realising the fire must have burnt out the power lines to the east, he started swearing, and walked over to the repairs shed to find the emergency back-up generator. He was surprised when Janine materialised in front of him and handed him a torch.

  “No good,” she said, “I just checked, the generator’s got no fuel in it.” She shook her head. “There’s no power.”

  Wondering how she had been so quick to check and find torches, he turned back and faced up to the family.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you any petrol.”

  “What?” the father exclaimed, his voice rising with tension.

  “Without power, there’s no way we can activate the pumps. Or take any electronic payments, and who has cash these days, hey?” He meant the last as a joke, but felt embarrassed when he saw how flat it fell. “Look, I’m sorry but there’s no way to get the fuel out of the storage tanks without power.”

  “But we’re empty!” the man complained.

  “The fire’s coming!” his wife interjected. “What do we do?”

  A sudden strong gust of wind blew across their faces, carrying leaves, ash and an old newspaper with it. All the crap was blowing in.

  “Maybe we should move inside. I’ll see if I can call emergency services.”

  Once there, Joel realised he had no reception.

  “Anyone else?” A quick check revealed that everyone’s networks were down. Fuck. “Look let’s just wait a while, I’m sure they’ll sort things out, or someone will come and check on us.”

  He pulled out camp chairs from the storage room, and passed around soft drinks and stale pies.

  They waited. The fire glow in the east grew brighter, and they began to fidget and complain. The hot winds were blowing strongly now, tossing the branches and bending trees. A fire truck came roaring along the road at one point, but had disappeared before Joel could get out the door and wave it down. Janine came out and offered him another cigarette.

  “Christ, not in this smoke.”

  “Good for you. Glad to see you making a change,” she replied. Burning cinders were drifting around them. Janine suddenly started talking rapidly.

  “I’m changing jobs, you know? I was in real estate. Not any more.” She placed the cigarette back in the pack. “You wonder how they grow green grapes here out of soil so shit? Well back home, they grow towers of shit over a space that used to be so green. All those fucking apartments, like termite hills, poking up everywhere now, everywhere. You know they concreted Sydney over the best land in Australia? The most fertile? Where they should be growing stuff? Why were they dumb enough to do that?” She took his arm. “Why do we build so many houses, Joel? What’s the point, if they all just burn down anyway?”

  They were distracted by the sounds of car doors slamming.

  “Hey!” Joel yelled out. The family members had come out of the station, and were piling back into their car. “You can’t. It’s too dangerous, you’ll get stranded.”

  They had evidently decided to take their chances, driving off along the highway, between the fields and into the night.

  “Well, we can’t both ride my bicycle out of here,” Janine said bemused. “Do you have a car?”

  “I live here. Trailer out the back,” Joel said, flummoxed. He felt the need to explain. “I’ve been saving up. Sort of. Just till I get on top of things.”

  They both started as a roar of flame burst into the sky. A tree had caught fire just off the highway. Resin bubbled and dribbled down the trunk like molasses, the tree’s dark blood, boiling away into nothing. The fire was upon them.

  A fire engine came screaming around the corner and pulled up at the station. Several firemen leapt down, their fluorescent striped yellow tunics flapping, and started unravelling hoses. Panicking, Joel ran back into the station building and slammed the door, with Janine close behind him.

  “Is the fuel safe? Will it go up?” Janine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joel replied helplessly. “I just don’t know.”

  She looked at him as if to say ‘there’s a lot you don’t know.’

  “I guess they’ll take care of it, now they’re finally here,” she replied, staring back out the window. A row of firemen stood as dark silhouettes along the highway. Beyond them rose the inferno, a wall of flame, leaping into the fields. Grapes began to burst, and vines began to wither like skeletons in the night. Janine shook her head, and then looked back at Joel, her expression more sad than fearful.

  “Worried yet?”

  “Jesus, who do you think you are?” Joel snapped, and then lashed out awkwardly at the glasses stand with his palm, sending lumps of cheap black plastic flying across the store.

  “The question is who you think you are.” She gazed at him. “Horticulturalist? Scholar? Teacher? Or recluse?”

  “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

  “You have to keep trying. You do have to worry.”

  Shut up!

  “Or you can pump petrol while the Earth gets hotter and hotter, until the day that the inferno is right on top of you.”

  “What else could I have done? What else can I do?” Joel yelled, flummoxed. “Recycle? Study? Vote differently? Top myself? It’s all too late now . . .”

  Another flare of flame went up. Out there, behind the squat angular ruddy redness of the fire truck, a great cloud rose, like a mushroom, awful, terrifyingly elemental. The fire had crossed the highway.

  Janine reached out and, taking Joel’s head between her hands, pulled it around to look into her eyes.

  Keep trying.

  Joel was surrounded by light
and dark as the flames engulfed them. Orange light flickered, the searing heat of the fire, the passage of the inferno, but also other lights, white light, magenta, violet. Red. Even green. Like the grapes. Everything was rushing, falling, changing.

  Make a difference.

  He was sitting somewhere, a table, a desk. Reading through books, looking up websites. Plants, fruit, grasses, trees. The lights played behind him, like a waterfall.

  Have a go.

  He was moving, running, talking. With students, academics, country folk, indigenous elders, pointing up and down, at the land, at the stars whirling overhead.

  Try.

  And then it stopped. He was outdoors again, at the petrol station, everything intact, listening to the cicadas. He and Janine were standing next to a new car—an electric model. And he was wearing a suit. But his worried attention was turned to the east. The fire glow was still there, coming closer.

  “I’ve never seen this before,” Janine said excitedly.

  They watched as several men came through the trees. They were unhurriedly manipulating small controlled fires to clear the brush away from underneath the larger gum trees.

  “Native fire management,” Joel said, strangely aware of what was going on.

  “Yes. You studied and you learned from the elders, and you helped to pass the knowledge on. You’ve made a difference.”

  But I didn’t, he thought, confused, frantic.

  “You can do so much more.” She looked at him happily. “It’s not too late.”

  Shaking, Joel pulled away from her. This wasn’t right. He had never done this, didn’t deserve this, this weird parallel life. He wanted to jump in the new electric car and drive away. But Janine pulled him close. From her pocket, she pulled out a small bag of grapes. A mix of green and red. She put one in his mouth.

  “It’s ok, Joel. Poor soil, sweet taste. It doesn’t matter what you start with.”

  She kissed him.

  Just keep trying.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ROGER Patulny is an Associate Professor of Sociology from the University of Wollongong, with a research focus on contemporary social interaction and loneliness, emotions, masculinity and urban issues. He also writes and publishes creative fiction. Creatively, he runs the Authora Australis and Silence of the Pens writing groups, and writes contemporary social, historical, and futurist inspired fiction prose and poetry, with publications in The Suburban Review, Cordite, the Urchin Press collection Imaginary Worlds, and the sociological fiction zine SOFI. Excerpts and links to Roger’s recent published creative works can be found here.

  Dragon Slayer by Paul Mannering

  “LISA! WHERE’S YOUR brother?!”

  I could have answered Mum, but I was mesmerised by the colour of the sky. It had been yellow for days and this morning, it started to change. Like mixing paints, darker and darker. Banana yellow to orange, and now red-brown. It was as if the ground had become the sky.

  Grey flecks began to fall, drifting against the veranda roof and catching on the window. I’d only seen snow on TV, and it looked like that—except this was grey. Ash from the fires burning towards us. A dragon, Old Colin called it.

  “Hey Pubeless!” Lisa yelled. “Mum wants you to help pack the car!”

  I turned away from the window and poked my tongue out at my sister. She’s older and that is the least annoying thing about her. Lisa had been in a bad mood since the power went out and her phone stopped working yesterday. The only updates we could get were over the radio and all that said now was ‘get out’.

  We were ready, Mum and Dad made sure of that. Dad was moving the last of the stock on to the truck and the dogs were in the ute with him.

  I picked up my bag, some books, toys, and down deep where Lisa would never see it, Misfit the koala plushie I had since I was a baby.

  I could hear Mum swearing, low and steady under her breath as she went from room to room, checking everything one last time. Saying goodbye to her furniture, her treasures, all the things she couldn’t replace, like the photo of her, Dad, Lisa, me, and Old Colin, taken when Lisa was my age.

  “Mum, is Col’ gonna be okay?” I asked from the doorway of the living room.

  “What?” Mum straightened up and blinked hard.

  “Is Col’ coming with us?” I asked again.

  “Ah, no Toby, Colin is going to stay and fight the fires. He’s been here longer than any of us. He’ll be fine.”

  I wished I was younger. Young enough to believe everything that grown-ups said without doubt. “Why can’t we stay and help?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Tobes. There’s not been fires like this before. It’s not safe. We’ll be at Aunty Jane’s by dinner. You haven’t seen Sammy since last winter. It’ll be nice to play with him again.”

  While she talked, Mum moved around, picking up china ornaments and then putting them down again somewhere else. She had a collection of little sheep and cows. I had broken one when I was little and got yelled at. I guess that’s why I’m a bit scared of them. The models that is, not real sheep and cows.

  “Mum! Where’s my laptop!” Lisa yelled from elsewhere in the house.

  “Toby, get in the car and wait for us there,” Mum ordered and marched out of the room.

  I glanced goodbye at the china cows and sheep. Even if I didn’t like them, Mum did, and if they got burned up, that would make her sad.

  I fitted the P2 mask over my mouth and nose the way we had practised. Opening the front door, the heat and smoke blew through the flyscreen like someone had lit a bonfire in the front yard. With my eyes screwed shut against the smoke, I went into the wind and hurried to the car. Mum’s station wagon was dark with ash and dust and I wondered how anything could breathe for long in the thick and choking clouds.

  Opening the front passenger door, I realised it wasn’t the wind I could hear. This was a howling worse than any storm where the gusts would strike the house in crashing waves. There was something deeper in this wind. A savage rage roaring from a burning throat fifty kilometres wide that swallowed everything in its path.

  Now I could see the glow of the fire through the darkness. I climbed into the car, for once not gleeful that I had beat Lisa to the front seat. With the doors shut and the air still the fire sounded muffled as if I had my fingers in my ears.

  I sat, wishing Dad would come home. Wishing Mum and Lisa would come out of the house and jump in the car and we would go to Sydney and I’d get to beat my cousin Sammy on all his console games and then we’d read comics by torchlight under the blankets until his mum told us for the third time to go to sleep.

  The home paddock lit up like a birthday cake as the trees along the far edge went up. I stared, mouth hanging open, forgetting to breathe as the beast feasted on the trees that had always been there.

  A couple of years back, Lisa and I had built a hut in those trees. That summer we’d been pirates, explorers, and astronauts. She would never remember it now. Lisa was too old and only wanted to play on her phone, wear clean clothes, and forget kid stuff.

  The fire twisted and writhed, a gigantic thing with yellow teeth and orange flanks. Bristling with white smoke and a thousand red tongues lashing the trees, making them scream as they were eaten alive.

  Dad always said there was bugger all grass in the home paddock since the drought, he said it was a break for fire. But now burning hail rained down and pattered across the barren field.

  I could feel the heat coming; feel it like standing next to the barbecue and helping Dad turn the snags. Sweat was trickling down my face and I swiped at my eyes, not daring to blink in case the dragon leapt the paddock and swallowed the car in flames.

  Mum ran past the front of the car and Lisa dived into the back seat. Mum slammed her door shut. “Seatbelts!” she yelled and started the engine. We pulled out of the yard and onto the dirt road. Windscreen wipers sweeping dirt as Mum hunched over the wheel, her eyes wide and face pale as she drove as fast as she dared through the burning fog.

  We bo
unced down the track, heading towards the creek which had been dry for as long as I could remember. Old Col’ said the trees along the banks could smell water, and they dug deep and grew tall with it.

  All the water buried deep in the creek couldn’t save them now. Burning embers swarmed like flies over the trees and they went up so fast Mum barely had time to slam on the brakes.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Mum . . .” Lisa sounded scared and that scared me. My sister would rather die than be scared in front of me or anyone.

  “It’s okay. We’re okay,” Mum said, staring at the engulfing fire that blocked the road ahead.

  I looked behind us, the home paddock was holding the fire back but the air swirled with white ghosts. “We can go to the home paddock?” I suggested.

  Mum glanced out her window and shook her head. “Too close to the fire, Toby. We’d get hurt.”

  Smoke and embers fell in waves, the hot sparks flashing and hitting the car with a dinking sound.

  “Mu-uum,” Lisa was almost crying.

  Mum revved the engine, staring at the narrow gap through the burning trees along the creek. The concrete bridge would hold and once we were through, the main road was beyond that and then we would be in Sydney by dinner and Sammy and comics by torchlight.

  Old Colin walked past my window; he had come from the direction of the house behind us. Under the sweat-stained, wide brimmed hat, his thin white hair rose and fell in the swirling wind. His beard flapped like a pine-board all knotted and stained yellow with age. He wore the same ragged khaki shorts and shirt he did every day. His boots were so old they had hobnails in the soles, and I reckon he must have the toughest feet in the world if he could walk on nails.

  “Colin!” I yelled and he didn’t even look at us. He kept walking, lean and tanned dark by years in the sun. His hands like driftwood swinging by his side.

  Colin stood in the middle of the road, facing the fire that had us trapped. He lifted his hands, spreading his fingers apart and the air rushed in as if he had taken a giant’s breath.

  Tornadoes of fire leapt on the air and charged at him. Colin moved his hands and I saw lightning flash, cold and white from his cracked and filthy nails. The fire seemed to draw itself up, rising from the feast of the trees and turning to face us.