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 ~: FICTION / MODERN :~  The Cleaner by Campbell Jefferys The cigarette was flicked carelessly out the window. It spun through the air, turning end over end, its flaming ember carving the faintest of orange circles out of the air. It rolled across the bitumen, half-smoked, still smoking, pushed first this way by a passing car then that way by a speeding truck. The ember glowed strongly, the chemicals and tobacco snaking into the air a cloudy blue. Then the wind gusted, a dry easterly, straight off the desert; a desolate wind keen for life; a force of nature eager to spring clean, to remove the dried clutter of last summer and the rainless winter. It knows what to do. It tosses the cigarette into the bushes by the side of the road, but times it well to make it seem like it simply could have been the passing car that did it. The highway scrub is a particularly well chosen resting place for the cigarette, and it lands in a dense pile of exhaust covered leaves and sticks. As if by design, the cigarette lands ember first, like buttered toast, and slowly burns a perfect circle through the first leaf, and then the next. Smoke rises, cream-coloured and natural. The wind blows again, with astute timing, helping paternally, wanting credit. The small blackened circles on the leaves glow faintly orange, fanning out on the leaf surface, turning them slowly into crispy, crumbly white ash. The smoke thickens, healthier and more untamed, and the wind helps the first flame flicker from the ash. Thus, was I given life. The wind was strong that morning, especially dry, exceedingly motivated, rising to the occasion. It lead me deeper into the bush, away from the road which then I was too small to jump, and to where the trunks of trees were enshrouded and being choked by piles of sticks and leaves and long flaking pieces of thin bark; to where juicy, dying blackboys crowded together and I could jump from one to the other, testing, tasting, devouring. It was a pleasure to live, to consume, to feel my growing power, the increasing dominance of size. The world was mine to enjoy, to savour, to save. But it's not easy being a bushfire. My healthy, glowing flames are horror to look at for some, and my crackle and roar, the fluency of my breathing, is like the sound of industrial strength snoring for others. They envy my power, my majesty, and dump water on me, cut swathes in my path to make me take risky jumps over ravines of bitumen; they beat me with blankets and sour my air with insults and hate. They slice me in half, into quarters, eights, isolate me, extinguish me, prevent me forever from being whole and free to move. But, please, look deeper. I'm just cleaning up; I was ordered too. I'm removing the waste, the corpses of nature, so that everything might grow again stronger and greener than before, unimpeded. Your houses get in the way; but you are fools to build them so deeply in the bush, to make them from wood, to surround them with trees and to let your gutters overflow with kindling so dry and old it vaporizes rather than ignites. I try to jump over you but I can't be held responsible for what burns. If something is dry and in the bush, it will burn whether I try to avoid it or not. So why don't you leave me alone and let me do my thing? I won't last forever, you at least have finally learned that much from history. The dark-skinned ones knew that well, respected and appreciated my work, my purpose. Even the biggest fire burns out eventually, suffers from age, over work and loneliness. There is pain there, understand that, emptiness too. And the longer I burn, the slower I move, the less-planned my direction. I can't retrace my steps; I can only go forward, and too often your carelessness determines my course, my existence even. But the wind is my friend, urging me on, inspirational and motivational while my detractors seek to corner me, to smoke me out like some despised terrorist. But eventually, even the wind dies and I'm left alone, stranded, powerless, shrinking, with just memories and regrets, wondering which decisions might have changed the course of my life, extended it, or made me come to the end without this empty feeling of dissatisfaction, the disappointment of a life wasted. I won't go easily though. You can attack me from all sides, slice me and dice me, but I battle on because I don't deserve to have my life ended this way; at your hands. Extinguish my western arm. Go for it. And I'll gobble up a few houses in return, not because of vengeance but to teach you a lesson. Don't mess with a bushfire. Don't ever think for a second that you own me, can control me. Amputate me with fire breaks and pound me with water and you'll win in the end, but not without me having left my mark. Yes, the marks, the blackened scars and weeping trees, the skeletal frameworks of houses built too deep in the bush. There is only smoke now, a charcoal forest, my last flame burned out. I'm gone. You cry over the damage: the scared trees that you believe will never grow again, the roasted animals, the melted photographs, the collapsed houses and evacuated towns. You see destruction and ruin, nature out of control. Your finest minds gather together to attempt to prevent another me from rising. You plan and connive and plot the downfall of my successors. But then, one year later, you do not return to the scene of my “crime” to see the fresh greenery of the bushland, thriving despite the lack of rain. You don't see how the debris has been cleared and has allowed nature to flourish. You don't see the trees, taller and stronger than before, their trunks still bearing the scars, but with branches broader and more covered in leaves than ever. My fire supplied the heat that burst billions of seeds and left a nutritious covering of ash on the ground for those seeds to thrive in. But you don't see any of that. What you do see is one of my brothers toiling in the bush a few hundred kilometres away, clearing out the bushland so new things can grow. You see him, hate him like you hated me, and fight him to the death. And it was one of your cigarettes that got him going as well, and it will be those man-made firebreaks, wider and more prolific than last year, that will cut his work short. |
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| Campbell Jefferys | |
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| I am a young Australian writer from near Perth currently based in Hamburg, Germany. I have written f...>> | |
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| More Modern: Tries to Stand, but he Can't by Ben Barone-Nugent Hamish's hunched figure became a spectacle in the playground. Students from all over the school left their games and gossip circles and gathered around their gagging classmate. They watched on silently, as if the boy's gurgles and wheezes were fragments of some important speech.... >> Life in Melbourne by Glenn Horne I grew up in country Victoria on a three acre hobby farm on which my father still lives just outside a small town, Timboon, three hours west of Melbourne, and had moved to Melbourne to study my VCE. I had moved to Sydney four years ago after finishing school. I then spent five years working part tim... >> | |