This story first appeared in 'The Quotidian: The Sydney University Student Anthology 2017′.
It was pleasantly warm out.
This felt unfair to her, as if the surrounding devastation deserved torrential rain, or some bitter chill.
This was far from being the most unfair thing to have happened to her in recent weeks, but it was a simple thing. It didn’t require much thinking or explanation, and so she seized on it. She forced herself to ignore the bigger picture, in favour of silly little things that she could scowl and curse at. It made her feel vindictive, superior, though she couldn’t explain why.
The girl picked her way through debris, rusted metal posts and piles of rubble. She stepped out onto the road to avoid walking in the shadow of a dangerously listing brick wall, but was forced to get off the road again when a large crater took up the width of the road. She snickered at that. A lucky break for the local government. Now they had a pretty good excuse for not fixing that pothole.
Nearly home, she thought, just down the street and round to the right.
She hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday, and her stomach was not letting her forget it. This was, therefore, an inconvenient time for her gaze to wander over the abandoned bakers shop that had once stood on the street corner. Part of it still stood there, but the absence of a few walls and a roof had put an end to the little shop.
She’d worked there a little while, she remembered. At first the girl had loved it, the customers’ banter, her co-workers' camaraderie, the freshly baked loaves she would occasionally sample. But then the veil lifted; she was sick of her co-workers’ sloth, and the jokes grew repetitive. By the end it was no longer a charming exercise in socialisation, just a process done by rote - greet, take money, give bread, thank the customer and farewell. It gave her a little vindictive thrill to see it gone, but she pulled her mind back before it could approach the question of the shop’s erstwhile owners.
As the girl rounded the corner, the sun hit her full in the face, the jagged rays spraying out of the harsh blue sky. She shielded her eyes from the light, and stumbled over a fallen wall that lay inconsiderately in her path. Before she could fall, she pulled herself to a halt, sparing her hands and shins from grazes that she’d suffered so many times before.
She succeeded in arresting her momentum, but not before kicking her toe against something sharp and hard. She couldn’t see past the glare, so she poked at the obstacle with her foot. It was something metallic, though she didn’t have feet dexterous enough to understand further. She spent a wonderful few moments wondering what it could be, without ever looking at the thing. She thought of nothing else for those few moments, though every now and then she could feel other things tugging at her.
That childlike interest - that attitude of one who is desperate not to be bored - faded eventually. Her glacially encroaching thoughts of mature pragmatism told her it was just some rebar jutting out of fractured concrete. She didn’t like that answer - thought it dull - but she had to admit now she was just wasting time. She could no longer convince herself that this diversion was unintentional.
With that, then, she pulled herself away from the still-undefined obstacle, and wandered down the road.
Her house was a few doors down. It’d only been a few days since she’d been there, but that was long enough for her memories to seem frayed, hard to grasp. Perhaps it wasn’t the passage of time that had done that, but rather, how much had happened.
She slowed to a stop outside her home, looking in through the empty windows and doors. They stared and gaped like hungry voids, with only the faintest of silhouettes distinguishable from the outside. It looked cold in there, despite the weather.
Grandma’s been going around making sure all the lights are off, she told herself. The girl could wait no longer, and slipped inside. There’d been no sign of others out on the streets, but she didn’t much feel like talking anyway.
Inside, it wasn’t all that dark. It must have just been the sun’s glare that made it look like that. It still seemed cold, but at the same time not. The girl couldn’t work that one out.
As she entered, she heard voices. Her heart thudded, but it was only a radio left on in the living room, two politicians debating. She recognised one voice - a firebrand, an extremist on the fringe of his party. He was berating his opponent for being soft on the current crisis, for not empathising with the victims, for not being strong enough to condemn the—
The girl switched it off as fast as she could, blocking her conscious mind from processing the words. She hated radio anyway. What was the point, when the television had sound and picture?
With the radio off, there was silence in the house. Near silence, anyway. Certainly there was none of the chaotic din that such a large family could produce in such a small house.
She didn’t call out or try to see if anyone was still home. Instead, she strolled down the hallway to the kitchen. Motes of dust floated through the air, lit now and then by beams of light passing through a multitude of unseen holes in the wall. The girl stopped just before the kitchen, as she saw a deep hole in the floor before her. Some structural damage had collapsed the floor here, and if she hadn’t been careful, she might have just fallen through, down into the cellar.
She skipped lightly over the gap in the floor, and felt a piece of rubble crack and fall. She was pleased she hadn’t followed it. It would’ve put a real dampener on the day.
The vivid, almost garish paintings her mother had put on the walls were coated with dust now. It was something of an improvement, if she was honest. She’d never said anything about it to her mother, of course, but the girl had always found it unlikely that there were worse interior designers out there.
The kitchen stood much the same as it always did. It was as dirty as ever, but now it was strewn with dust and debris, rather than her brothers’ mess. She steered her thoughts once more to the sardonic, the inane, and wondered if this was an improvement.
The girl slipped around the kitchen table, listing dangerously due to a damaged leg, and kicked a few rocks into a small hole in the floor.
‘Goal,’ she whispered to herself, quietly imitating the roar of a crowd.
She opened the fridge. If fortune favoured her, there’d be leftovers from three nights ago, or at least bread. And if she were even more fortunate, they’d be free of mould. If not, oh well; she had her mould scraping knife at the ready.
Inside, there were a few bits of food. Enough for now, certainly. Better luck - the fridge motor was still running. But she didn’t notice any of that at first. She looked to the back of the fridge, where the light was. It hadn’t come on when she’d opened the door. She stood there for a minute or two. She wasn’t waiting for the light to come on; at least, she didn’t think that’s why she stood there for so long.
But eventually, the dam burst. As she stared into the dim metal cabinet, her resolve collapsed, and even as it did so, she cursed the fact that this was what had undone her.
Why couldn’t the light have just come on?
It doesn’t even look damaged.
It always just… comes on.
I just want something to do what it’s supposed to.
Even through the wash of despair, she knew she was being petulant, but she refused to calm herself. She kicked at the fridge door, and it swung shut. Unappeased, she kicked at the kitchen table too, and already being unstable, it collapsed, kicking up dust. The girl thumped the fridge door a few times, ineffectually, and eventually her frustration subsided.
She placed her shaking hands on the top of the stove, steadying herself. She breathed. She waited. When the shaking stopped, she straightened, pulled open the fridge again and scooped out whatever was still edible, as quickly as she could.
She found a bag nearby and stuffed her haul into it, swinging it over one shoulder. The day was getting on, and it would be better not to delay. Outside the sun’s glare had lessened, though the weather was no less warm. If anything, the air was now heavy and damp.
Beyond the white-grey sprawl of the city, a swell of dark clouds, pregnant with rain, rolled down from the hills.
Oh good, the girl thought. That’s a bit better.
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