Family Teeth By Mark Furness

The wind hits me. Wakes me. Scorching smoke. I’m lying on my side. Alone. On a bed of brown grass. Smoke like steel wool in my chest. But I have to breathe. Acid in my eyes. Prickles in my skin. I remember. Lunch: benzodiazepines and beer. Again.

I roll face up. Tall trees with orange heads in silver haze. I guess I’m in a bushfire. Where is she? I tracked her here. How long ago? Did I start this?

I stand. Stagger. Find my keel. Put my back to the wind. I sail. Let it push me. I look down. Feet. Moving. Socks, no boots. I hit a wall. Real. Corrugated iron, rippled, silvery. A wooden door: old, half-hinged, half-open.

Inside, against a wall: a sink, a tap. God I’m thirsty.

Less smoke inside. Floorboards rotten. I imagine a tightrope. I walk the floor joists to the tap. Turn it. Empty. A groan, a sad old animal in pain, about to fall. No, no. The shed is rocking in the wind. That’s all.

The shed is lined with timber slabs — wrinkled, grey, hand-cut by axe and saw — plastered with crumbling sheets of newspaper. Stories of drought, mustard gas, atom bombs, the price of wheat, a shearers’ strike over wide cutting-combs, a serial killer using arsenic tea, a cure for polio, a missing child. A lifetime’s worth. Vroom! The door is aflame.

There is a way out. Down a wooden slab chute to the dirt underfloor. Where shorn sheep were once pushed. It must lead outside. To the dam, water. I slide down. I can’t stand, so I squat. Less smoke here. Less light.  Crackling above.  Nothing stops. Does it?

I see a figure, its back to me. It sits in the dirt against a wooden post.

“Sweetheart?” My voice, I think. It’s that sort of place.

Shoulder length hair on the little figure moves. The wind’s work? I shiver, shuffle closer. A sleeveless dress, skinny arms, bare feet. I move to her side. I see the leather and bone face. No eyes. Ants walking in those holes. She is cradling the chalk shell of a baby.

I fall back. Whack! Crunching pain on my ankle. The steel jaws of a trap have me. I jump, smash my head into the under-floor. Ruby oil runs down my face. I search my scalp, push a finger in the hole, fiddle with torn membrane. I see the nail spike, winking at me.

I fall. I hear my heart. Blood finds my open lips. I spit it out with filthy words. I wipe the sticky blur that’s in my eyes. It won’t clear. Tears are better. I don’t have any. The smoke thickens. So does the heat and crackling. I see a hole in the wall. Crawl. The steel teeth in my flesh and bone jerk me back. The teeth are chained to the post. So are my daughter and her child.

© 2014 Mark Furness

Mark Furness is a writer based in Sydney, Australia

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