Free The Sky So Heavy by Claire Zorn Page B

over the head with it. He slapped my hands away from his face.
    ‘We’re burning furniture,’ Max yelled. ‘Not your wood.’
    Mr White’s head snapped to the fireplace.
    ‘It’s the chairs from outside. Not your bloody wood.’
    He dropped his hands to his knees, leaning forward. His back heaved with his breathing. Max picked up Zadie. Mr White straightened up. He looked back and forth between us, jaw rigid.
    ‘It’s the chairs from outside. We didn’t nick your wood,’ I repeated quietly.
    He didn’t say anything, just turned and walked out the back door, the way he had come in.

Fifteen
    Zadie grew quiet. In the afternoon she vomited all over the Transformers doona.
    Another day passed. Max sat next to Zadie and read her books.
    Water was okay but our supply of food was getting low.
    I had never seen such stillness. There was not even the movement of shadow as the day passed. There were no shadows. I wondered where the birds had gone. I wondered if they were dead from the cold. Where do birds go to die? Do they drop from the sky while they are flying – their hearts stopping dead like my gran’s when she was at church, halfway up the aisle to get communion?
    Now there is movement, lots of it. Mainly the movement of my head, my cheek slamming into the brickwork. I imagine how the scene would look from behind us, I see the arch of the torchlight up the brick walls. I see the white pressure marks from his fingers in my neck. There is spittle in my ear and I have had no practise at fighting since last time. I’m not really doing a whole lot of fighting anyway, you don’t, when there’s a gun pressed into your skull. And now things seem to slow down. I feel a creeping warmth up the back of my neck. A comfortable warmth nestling in the base of my skull. I close my eyes.

Sixteen
    Two cans of tomato soup, a handful of sultanas and a cup of rice left. Two and a half litres of water though. That was a plus.
    Still no Mick.
    Zadie vomited again, twice. She was quiet and slept a lot. We fed her soup from a teaspoon and did not talk about what was happening to her.
    Mum had said not to go into the city, but I couldn’t imagine that everyone there had been left for as long as us without more rations. The thought that we might have been abandoned was beginning to follow me around and I couldn’t shake it. If Mum was still there she would have a plan. Leaving would mean letting go of the hope that Dad would come back for us.
    If we were to go we would need a car. Either way we would need more food.
    I decided to go for a walk, see if I could track down more food. I wasn’t naive enough to believe that someone would just hand food over without anything in exchange. My eyes roamed the living room for something I could trade. They landed on Dad’s liquor cabinet. I selected three bottles of whisky and placed them carefully in a plastic grocery bag.
    When I finally prepared to go, as I looked at Max and told him that I would be back, I thought about what the air would feel like outside on the street, what the space would feel like. I remembered going on holidays to the Great Barrier Reef, riding out on the clear sea in a boat with Mum and Dad and Max. My diving mask fogging up again and again as we waited to plunge into the blue. (‘Don’t breathe through your nose, matey,’ Dad had to keep reminding me.) The expectation of it was an ache in my stomach. The space, above and below. It was freeing, that endless space. But at the same time intensely threatening, like the grey that seemed to now stretch on forever.
    The asphalt was smothered in snow, unbroken by footprints or tyre tracks. I kept to the side of the road where there was grass beneath the snow – better traction. I didn’t want my palms skinned by the ice if I lost my footing. My feet sunk into the grey. I climbed the hill and felt like I was climbing into the sky.
    When I reached the bus stop at the top of the hill I stopped. The cold was brutal, sharp in