The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read Online Free

electrical cables. A vague smell of burning, as if the whole house is quietly smouldering, the slow combustion of oak beams plundered from vessels shipwrecked off the coast.
    I undress to the lilt of Burl Ives. Out in the windmill paddock I can hear horses; one begins to canter, followed by the thunder of elderly geldings galloping, pummelling the dark sandy earth. I get into the senator’s bed, the same cream sheets unwashed from last time, the stale smell of my own night sweats, but also the smell of wheat. Against my leg, a wheat bag of my own, heated and carefully placed by my mother. I try to sleep but am wide awake. The spurned look in Sharen Wills’ bright blue-green eyes, a kind of stricken ferocity that’s never quite left my mother’s. Sharen Wills who will not leave under these provisions .
    I hold the warm wheat bag against my body and listen to the burr of talkback radio, the groans of the cypresses. I dream I’m clambering up through the hole in the plaster, crawling through attics crammed with rows of wooden coat-hangers, leather handbags hanging from hooks like small curing pigs. Possums, eyes wide with beady judgment. The sound of a distant explosion and I’m wide awake. Two a.m. on the bedside clock. The muffled noise of my mother, her bedroom door shoved open against the carpet, her quick jolty steps out onto the windswept veranda. A sound so loud even she heard it.
    I pull the curtain and watch her out there, her nightie blown against her narrow body, her wild night hair pushed back from her face, glaring into the distance. Flames rope up from a fire at the edge of the bush. Within seconds I am joining her in my boxers and T-shirt, our eyes glued on the flicker of orange. ‘Is that the house?’ I ask.
    â€˜I hope so,’ she says, rubbing her favourite spot below her hairline, pretending to be inured to the sight of fires, how things here start and end in flames – like the time there was a fire in the Station Road paddock and she searched for my father so he could help. She found him out there in bed with his girlfriend, in the house that now seems to be burning, lit like a candle on the horizon. In a wind like this with the trees so dry – I watch my mother hug herself, knowing this could incinerate a thousand acres and the town.
    â€˜Don’t let the bush burn,’ she says, as though it’s up to me. The remnant vegetation, native plants and species, bandicoots and mallee firs, the bush is a place of Aboriginal significance. Not to mention the field where those big dark horses live. I know how horses get panicked by flames, run through barbed-wire fences.
    I’m already back in the house, dialing the Country Fire Brigade, the number on the list taped to the wall, above my father’s number at Kim’s, above the vet and Sharen. ‘A fire on Rawson’s place, the end of Hopetoun Road.’ I talk as if I’m not from here, and now I’m pulling on clothes, running cross-country, wondering if the whole place might just combust in the wind, the bush and the houses, cattle and horses trapped in dry carpets of grass, feathery fetlocks catching like torches.
    Down at the windmill, fumbling with the latches on gates, I realise it’s not the house that’s gone up, but the car in the field. That’s what exploded. The great shadows of the heavy horses circle it like spectres, a dance of retreats and advances between the bounds of their fear and fascination. I leave the gates wide open and call out with my father’s cry: ‘C’mon, c’mon.’ One of them turns but not for long, back to its wary appraisal, the orange and crack of the flames, the floating of embers to sniff in the air, while the small house on the rise lies dark as the night, feigning innocence. The car wrapped in flames and the fire-engine wail bathing the thick night air.
    I race near as I dare to the blue-orange heat and stamp fire that spreads