WINNER, Summer 2023
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY BRID CUMMINGS
It’s early morning and the red dirt is already a hotplate beneath my feet. The air, saturated with the menthol tang of eucalypts, is heavy and humid and reluctant to release any oxygen to my lungs. Still, it doesn’t stop me dragging on a ciggie. God knows, I need something to calm the nerves, sat out here on the edge of the veranda, watching the scrubland, knowing whatever is out there is watching me right back.
Behind me, from inside the cottage, Bazza’s boots shuffle across the kitchen lino. The fridge rattles as it’s opened. No surprise what he’s having for brekkie. And no judgement either. The night-time watch has gotta be the worst. At least I can see out here in the daylight—low clouds smothering the skies and fifty metres of baked earth giving way to that endless ocean of scrub.
“Throw us a beer too, Bazza,” I call, grinding the ciggie beneath my boot as if it were a roach. Not that there’s any roaches out here. Nor ants. Nor birds. Not even a fucking fly, and who’s ever heard of no flies in the outback?
The door swings open and the old man emerges like a bear out of hibernation. He scratches his scrawny belly, tosses me a can.
“Reckon the rain’s gonna come?” he asks.
“Nah. It’ll pass over.”
He raises his beer to his lips, slurps noisily. “You’ll shout if you need me, then?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll go kip in the rocker chair. Hear you better there.”
He plods back into the abandoned cottage that has been our home for the past six weeks. He looks exhausted, rake-thin; his smart crocodile-skin belt ran out of notches a fortnight ago. Our supplies will last another month, but we’ve both decided that soon as the weather cools, we’re gonna try and make it out on foot. We say it’s cause the mine is empty. That the strange symbols etched on the walls likely say as much. And anyway, how can we work the mine now there’s only two of us left?
Johnson was the first to go. The rains came heavy that night, fat droplets falling onto the rusty roof like a hundred marching boots. Rainstorms aren’t so unusual out in the bush, but the jarring hum that accompanied the downpour was like nothing I’d ever felt before. My thoughts grew a little twisty. A weight seemed to press against my chest. Then Johnson got panicked about the Ute—said if the creek bed flooded, we’d lose our only way out. We shrugged. But he was right. We found the Ute the following morning, a crumpled wreck sunk beneath the flood waters. Johnson, we didn’t find until three days later. None of us questioned why he was a hundred metres upstream. And though we could see slash marks around his neck, we all agreed they must be from the flood debris—not from his own hunting knife. [continue reading…]
