Free Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy

landscape.
    She’ll leave it at his place at the table, ready. And their lunchboxes packed at the front of the fridge, where Al won’t miss them. For some reason, she keeps recalling Al, suddenly surprising her by shaking those pyjamas right-way-out with that one deft easy motion. She can’t think why, but the image comforts her.
    Back inside, the dawn light reaching the kitchen, she checks the time again: thirty minutes till the train, just over three hours till she’s in that doctor’s room again. She looks out the unpainted window at their little patch of bush, and at what’s becoming visible out there — the ridges of hard clay subsoil showing palely defiant through the grass, like a healing scar.
    Then, cold but wide awake and ready, she locates each of the five mousetraps she’s set and kneels down in front of each of them in turn. Carefully, with the flat of her hand, she releases the springs so that the small metal trays of bait slip from the jagged hook holding them in place. She’s humming to herself as she grasps each straining metal bar and guides it back to let it settle, with a benign and harmless snap, against the small rectangle of wood.

Like a House on Fire
    First, the humiliation of purchase, in which I am forced to watch my wife and eldest son, aged eight, lugging the Christmas tree we’ve just bought to our car. The Rotary guy, who’s sold it to me off the back of his truck in the supermarket car park, gives me a look he reserves for shirkers, layabouts, vandals and those destroying the social fabric by refusing to pull their weight.
    â€˜Back injury,’ I say to him, and he watches the two of them hefting it onto the roof of the station wagon, and just says, ‘Right.’ Behind him, the graffiti outside Subway reads, Only eight shoplifting days till Christmas , which under normal circumstances I would photograph or at least point out to Claire, except she’s busy passing rope through the open windows of the car, exaggeratedly checking her watch because she starts a shift in half an hour.
    When we get home she lugs the tree into the lounge room and mutters, ‘I have to go.’
    Very little eye contact these days, my wife. This is my fourth month off work with what my first doctor diagnosed as a compressed disc, a condition I have since heard described as a herniated disc, a ruptured disc, a bulging disc and, naturally, the good old slipped disc. Only two things to do if you don’t want surgery, and that’s rest and take fistfuls of anti-inflammatories and, of course, fail each week to bring home any sort of pay cheque. Claire clocks off from her hospital job, caring for helpless people who also lie down a lot, and comes straight back home to me.
    That Saturday afternoon I do the very thing I’d promised my physio fifteen weeks ago I wouldn’t do: namely, pull down the attic ladder after Claire’s left and try dragging the boxes and bundles of Christmas tree ornaments out of storage. I reach for the two boxes and grasp them in my arms, then when I put my foot down to descend I feel nothing but empty air beneath me where there should be a rung, making me instantly panic and let go of the boxes, both hands reflexively grabbing at the ladder. Even the jarring as my foot bangs safely down on the rung below sends a jolt up through me, a warning jolt. A 1.8 tremor on the Richter scale.
    The two boxes drop like stones and I can hear the assortment of ornaments inside crunch as they hit the floor. I stand still, letting a further loose tangle of lights and tinsel rain down from the attic and upon my head, and when everything that can possibly fall has finished falling, I step gingerly off the ladder and sneak a forensic glance into the smaller box to see that the whole ceramic nativity scene is shattered. The three wise men, who’d been fitted with unnerving false eyelashes so they look like they’re sashaying off to