After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,3

kiddo,’ she had said and tackled the stairs in her stockinged feet, mindful of their slipperiness.

Those women, the ones with the clothes that smelt of piss and smoke, the ham thighs showing through the slits in their skirts, the skin and bone of their chests and the unlikeliness of their make-up, the rouge that seemed to float above the skin of their cheeks, the lipsticked teeth either false or yellow. The smell of his mum was gone from the house a month after she was in the sea, and it was replaced with something wide open and stinking. After his father stopped baking bread there was nothing to mask it apart from the smell of old beer and damp rot, like the house was growing soft and sinking into the ground.

The wood of the dunny shed had turned silver and it snagged the tips of Frank’s fingers when he opened the door. Inside, the porcelain bowl was almost hidden beneath fireweed that geysered out of it, some of the plants five feet tall. Through the green he could see a crack running the whole way down the throat of the toilet, something black, like good soil, pushing behind it. It had been a joke his dad had loved – the porcelain drop dunny. The smell was like a garden shed, no shit, but a gentle manure, potato-y, cool. Spiderwebs coddled the corners, white and flossy, and a skink ran across the cistern. The whole thing looked more like a fancy bird bath than a loo, and he closed the door and let it alone. The burning mattresses gave off a smell of rubber. He watched the fingers that peaked on the fire and snatched at the moths gamely flying over the top, disintegrating them in snaps and pops.

He thought of the morning Lucy left. How he’d sat at the kitchen table, listened to the sound of the schoolkids on their way to soccer practice, the shouts and magpie noises of girls laughing. A line of sunlight cast on to the checked tablecloth, and he had counted the squares. He’d walked his finger on to a red square and thought of her marching towards him, sticks that she found interesting under her long arm, her hat throwing a shadow down to her shoulders. White square; pale hot hair that flew in her face, white clay, dust, and thrash caught in it like a gill net. Red square; the first time they’d had sex, all knuckles and knees. White square – the mole under her breast – red square – the clasp of her eyelashes – white square – the smell of her neck – red square – the sound of her sleeping – white square – the sound of her crying when she thought he was asleep – red square – the silhouette of her hand over her mouth in the dark – white square white square white square.

The sun had moved across the table and on to the floor where it disappeared up the wall. He’d listened to the kids returning from soccer practice, had heard the bell sound in the school up the road and the day ending for them in kicked cans and squabbles. He listened for keys in the front door. He drew his fingernail around a red square so that it stood out from the others.

She did not come back that night, and it was dawn before he’d moved to the toilet where he let out a jet of strong greenish piss. He didn’t flush but went into the bedroom where he’d checked the wardrobe. Plenty of her things were still there, but her pack was gone, along with her good jeans and her work jeans. They were not in the dirty clothes. He avoided the photographs around the house – the ones that he knew off by heart anyway. Three on the mantelpiece, two on the chest of drawers in their bedroom. One by the window trying to catch his eye with its reflection. Taken soon after they met, she wore some terrible yellow dungarees and her hair had blown into Frank’s face. His teeth showed, smiling, through the hair, wide and laughing. You couldn’t see the kink in his nose where it had broken. You could see the crows’ feet, which made him look older than he was, and happy, and the dark line of his eyebrows tilted upwards like he couldn’t believe his luck, not yet thirty and suddenly there was all he’d