Drought
December 10th 2007 06:00
I lie in bed unable to sleep as the wind whips through the dry Wangaratta streets. Still awake at this hour and the wind is still warm as it blows through this hated place. It wafts down over the brown hills where everything screams with thirst. The dusty, moribund land reeks with the stench of drought, reminding me of the scorching, aching distance between the ocean and my body.
The trees here wilt under the harsh sun like the ambitions of a pregnant teenager. It seems unbelievable to consider the way this land has been abused. Lone, skeletal trees, long dead and murdered by opportunistic and inexplicable ringbarking stand like Grim Reapers on the horizon. Their ghostly presence hinting at what was once here and mockingly showing us what is to come.
Flies here are to lazy to avoid swatting hands; they flop through the air like flicked boogers, sticking to eyes and lips with an insouciant regard to their own life. The men of the town stand at their back doors in a stupor; too hot to get drunk or too drunk to give a fuck they fleetingly contemplate suicidal insurance scams before the heat and the debt and the flies and the kids and the improbability of it all makes it seem like too much effort.
The lake dried up yesterday and two kids drowned in a drainage channel on a rice farm. Another bloke drowned in a silo of canola. Just get me to the ocean. In the river here fish are gasping for oxygen in the muddy, scummy water, fighting for breath as the filth is churned up by the carp, which have overtaken the waterways since being introduced by a lecherous Dutchman in a pair of khaki shorts pulled too high. The rabbits grow bolder and someone raped a sheep. Everywhere madness and thirst, man and animal stuck in a collective limbo awaiting a shower that will never arrive. Just get me to the ocean to swim with fish.
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