Free The Untold by Courtney Collins Page B

said OPEN ALL DAY ALL NIGHT , only here, in the only pale space remaining between her shoulder blades, was a single word, SORROW .
    As he read it the other women ran in and folded around Lay Ping. Then the curtain was drawn and the music reached a crescendo.
    Sorrow.
    It was still on the men’s lips as they sat in the darkness of the hall and it was still being whispered around as the front doors were opened and the daylight swept in.
    On either side of Jack Brown, some men sank into their seatswhile others stepped right over him to get out. He did not move from his seat.
    As the men departed, dust poured in through the open doors of the hall and covered the men who had saved their money to stay. Jack Brown decided then, like any free man, that at last he should be one of them.

M ore days and nights passed with the sounds of the storm and the sounds of the dog and the forest and the old man and old woman arguing. Jessie was biding her time. She tended to Houdini when she could but most of her energy was spent keeping out of the old man’s way.
    She could not collect supplies for her escape as there was nowhere to hide them, so she spent nights mapping their location in her head and charting the surest, fastest way to move through the house, to the stable and then away.
    Early one morning she woke to silence. She did not understand why the silence sounded so vast until she realized the storm had finally died down. The cottage was utterly quiet.
    She lay there for some time, recalling the map to her mind, knowing the time had come and she was about to launch herself out of bed when she heard the door of her room open. Her skin bristled as she saw the silhouette of the old man moving towards her.
    She lay perfectly still as he stood squarely over her. And then her hand rose quietly in the dark and even her fist hitting his jaw was quiet and her legs swinging out. It was the sound of his head hitting the chair that finally made an awful crunching.
    She did not care what damage she had done. She shut the door behind her and moved into the kitchen, collecting from the cupboards and the drawers a knife, a gun, a packet of matches, apples,the old woman’s coat, the old woman’s boots. The feeling of escape was familiar and she did not care to feel it again and so soon.
    She set everything onto a tablecloth and then bundled it up. She was tying it to her waist when she noticed the old woman standing in front of the fire.
    Go
, the old woman said.
    The old woman stood as solid as a statue. Jessie could not clearly see her face in the dark, only her white hair, which was luminous. Jessie felt locked in her view and she did not move until the old woman raised a trembling hand and pointed to the door.
    I’m sorry,
said Jessie, and she pushed out into the yard and up to the stable. She mounted Houdini and rode out. She rode up the steep slope and did not look back. She could not tear straight up the mountain in the dark so she zigzagged as far and as fast as she could. The bundle loosened on her waist and she wrestled with it as she rode, tying it tighter, prizing all of its stolen contents. She steered Houdini by his mane and felt a strength pulsing through her arms and across her chest, as if her body was remembering itself as she rode.
    As soon as the sun tipped the horizon she tore up the slope. It was only when she reached a solid ridge that she dared to look back down into the valley.
    There was no sign of any human presence and she could not see the old woman and the old man’s cottage or any other hut. Below were empty fields but for clusters of trees and the river. The river stretched south and wound its way across cleared paddocks, a measure of how far she hadcome.

III

T he earth, as I can feel it, is pressed together at points and ruptured in parts. And so events seem to fold into one another, like burial and birth. It’s not like the smooth and undulating beauty of a ribbon streaming out. No. The