Wedding Bush Road by David Francis

Author:David Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028746
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2016-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE DOG BARKS then silence but for the din of crickets, the occasional flapping of wings cast up by the night. My fingers throb, my hand re-bandaged too tight. Steadily, I unwind the gauze, feel the roughness of the stitches, scabbed slightly. Then a vague thrumming, like rain but far away on another roof. I look for my watch. Two in the morning. Still that sound. Not my mother’s radio, no static; it’s from the small bathroom down the far end of the hall, the shower’s running. The image of my mother splayed out with her neck caught in that chair. I spring from the bed, wrap myself in a towel, wind the bandage back about my hand.

Without knocking I open the bathroom door, a shroud of steam through the light—a cattle-hide vest strewn on the floor, giant work boots, jeans with a leather knife sheath thrown at the chair. No sign of my mother, just a too-large silhouette in the white shower curtain, the top of a wet, balding head above the rod. “What the fuck . . . ?” I shout over the sound of the water as a wide weathered hand appears round the edge of the curtain, another hand wiping water from a gaunt windburned face, freckled and undaunted. A high receding brow but still easy to recognize. Walker Dumbalk.

“What the fuck you doing?” I ask, my voice cracked with fright.

“Sharen locked me out,” his voice is raspy and deep, his stare unblinking. Leaden rings below his eyes.

“It’s bloody two a.m.!” Tucking my towel as if it might protect me from the dark wells of his eyes. “I’m out looking for Reggie,” he says. Steam rising off him like hot damp smoke. His unshaven jaw even meaner than I remember, flecked with gray. “I know the little bastard hides up here.” He disappears back behind the curtain as though this is his house too, for all the years his mother put in cleaning here and cooking, not spending time with him. Washing himself with my mother’s cloth, her soap in his underarms, the acrid smell of his steaming clothes, as I stand here on the tiles. His work boots on her towel, a thick leather belt with a silver longhorn buckle drapes off his jeans like a python.

He opens the curtain again, his face creased up as if inconvenienced. “I’ll be out in a minute,” he says. An accusation in his tone that has me close the door behind me and stand like a child in the hall. The memory of him out in the paddocks making trouble, while his mother served us food. Coming back to haunt us. All that happens as my mother sleeps.

The dog chews a small slab of meat on the living room floor. I kneel and hold him, pray he’s just been silenced, not poisoned. A squeal of taps from the bathroom, the scrape of curtain rings then a hollow quiet. The dog skulks off with the piece of red flesh in his mouth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.