sandstorm

On the edge of the town, red earth, a plain of dust and spinifex thorn bushes twining like stunted hedge mazes across the cracked skin of the land, i sat, crouched in the arms of an old salmon gum, warm eucalyptus breeze stirring the locks of wispy blonde hair falling over my eyes. The clean parched air rippling below. A bungarra slowly swishing across the black ironstone to lay, blood-lazy with clotted warmth, on the rock. His tongue, blue-black, flickered out to lick his nose. i could tell he was thirsty, like the trees and all the land. in my dirty hard hands i turned the arrowhead over and over, feeling its sharp rusted edge, the coolness of the metal, the ridge down the centre its forged spine, the sense of pain it suggested, of pierced flesh and wood protruding from bone, lodged somewhere within, better to push through than attempt to withdraw. A clean bisection. My nose ran a little and i wiped it on the back of my hand, already sticky with half dried mucus. The archery field lay about three kilometers from my home. Out beyond the rock that had strange discolorations like the markings of a face. Maybe the traces of some lost artist, his own dust bones gently caressing away the pigments ground from river stones and massaged into the stone’s porous quartzite skin. The field was an empty space of dry red dust, turned of most large stones, fast being reclaimed by the straggling weeds and creeping spinifex of the desert. Remnants of wooden target stands lay in piles of decay at the far edge. I’d run into the place with a sense of profound awe. The empty field carved from the waste by the hands of men long since passed on, never to return. i’d stepped on the sharp arrowhead with my hard black feet. Like some kind of image in a film. i saw myself glance down, pick it up, turn it over and over. Still turning it.

In the tree i felt all of a sudden the immense stillness of the moment. The lullaby motion had ceased, a slow imperception. My hair hang motionless and soft in my eyes. i brushed it aside with my arrow-hand, running the edge of the blade across my forehead gently, visualising the pink line, opening into blood for an instant – a smooth visage. The warm wind had stopped. i peered up into the branches. Smell of eucalyptus. Everything was silent. The leaves barely rustled against eachother. There were no birds. Even the clicking cicadas and crickets held voiceless. i didnt speak much, but i was used to listening to the speech of the world around me. This was disquieting. i squirmed uncomfortably.

From the corner of my eye something caught my attention. A slight darkening on the horizon. The blue arc of the sky shadowed at the edge by perturbation, unsettlement. The silence and a distant, subsonic murmur. i felt the air picking up, a smell of electricity, of energy infusing the spaces between things, everything. i looked down; the goanna was gone, sashayed off to some dark cool hole. The world was dimming. The sky had flowed to ultramarine, navy, jet. A dull red haze began to saturate the skyline. i could see a shadow on the horizon, growing as the silence, as the noise grew. The arrowhead lay dead and hard in my palm.

This was like no storm i had ever seen. No moisture, no smell of yearning parched earth. The earth here shrivelled away, retreated, turned its face in towards its stomach, shied from the sky. Not a drop of water. i opened my lips and the stillness sucked my mouth dry. i could see this, this red storm, like a wall of dark dry blood massing on the edge of the plain. An army mustering troops, gathered from all four corners of the world, sweeping in lines across the stone land, dust rising like the beacon of some approaching violence, some heavy dead killing mask. steel and dust. the dead of the world and man. and the army came marching at me. implacable. resolute. mindless. not a machine but a force. driven, without recourse, without hope of return. To the ends of the earth. the wall of dust would blanket the earth until the winds came to blow it away.

i jumped from the tree. landed awkwardly on an old mallee root, grey and rock hard, twisted my ankle. a cry from my mouth. high and thin. a tiny sound against this roar. The sandstorm was a wall gathering at my shoulders. The sky was crimson black. ash and dull coal. but dry. so dry i thought i could not live an instant in that dust. that the water of me was a lure to this hungry things thirst, unquenchable as the desert, drinking down the world in its infinte dry belly.

i ran. limping. for the house. my ankle firing like arrows in the heel. back past the copse of eucalyptus, through the sand piles, over the hedge of withered roses my mother pretended to tend in the summer, leaping the parched yellow bullgrass lawn. the wall of sand buffeted my shoulders. the smell was of ageless stone ground into fine powder, proud mountains reduced by time to near-nothingnesses, bitter somehow about this diasporation, each one amongst so many countless millions. a collective of lost glory. dry eyes searching for the currents of blood. i leapt onto the verandah, stumbling on the top step, staggering forward to tear open the glass sliding door and slip inside through the crack, ripping it closed behind me as the first dry tongues of sand licked my shoudlers. and then the wall hit. the world went black, red. The world was noise. impossible noise. the windows vibrate