Effigy
Imogen Blue (University of Canberra)
Somewhere in the bush, near a town called Kyogle: I whispered at the sky. I committed myself to devastation on that day in September. Somewhere in the bush, near a town called Kyogle.
On the ground was a hot, buzzing stillness. The sharp smell of dry leaf litter; the forest floor brittle and crunchy. The bark hung from the trees in long, thin strips like parched tongues; their roots suspended in the arid earth. Dead limbs in an empty bed. Leaves dust green and thirsty.
There was a man in a field nearby, cringing under the sun, face hidden beneath a wide hat. He wore long sleeves to avoid burning.
His tractor, a huge, orange mass of hot metal, sat dead on the grass. The man prowled around it, touching it, gritting teeth at it, refusing to know that the tractor would never work. Its spirit had already gone.
The insects screamed in the heat. The creeks and dams on the property had evaporated; the moment any water touched that hopeful earth, it died. Dried up, cracked the ground.
I whispered to the sky. I whispered of the hot sun and the still air. I whispered of how the summer was like a mouth closing over moisture and life.
I whispered of the things I could do if only the sky could help me awake. How I could take important things from plants and bodies and air and earth.
The sky listened. In the afternoon, half-baked and devoid of moisture, it began to conjure clouds on the horizon. Deep, black, they crawled like long-limbed monsters across the heavens, peeling across the blue. They snarled and cracked their teeth together and ransomed the rain.
At the eerie sound of thunder in the distance, the insects grew quiet and shivered amongst the dry bracken. The man in the field retreated to his feeble house and mused that rain could be coming.
The clouds brought the wind – that hot, dry wind – to blow through my bones. That day, burning was easy. Like a magician had come and conjured me from nothing, pulled me from a hat filled with modern horrors.
A deafening crack, a sudden spark, and I awoke. A tiny baby ember: I lay in a cradle of blackened grass, smoking gently. Small me. The hot wind nursed me, loved me tender. It nudged me out of the cradle the lightning made onto feeble legs, into the dry leaf litter. I matured as fast as I could grow limbs; from an ember to an adolescent scrub fire to an adult inferno. I began to eat, eat, eat.
That day, a little inland from the north coast of New South Wales, where the usually rich, green country had turned arid and fragile, I made Australia an effigy. I began the hungry work of burning her alive. It would span months and turn every dry patch of bush into a looming threat. A tower about to fall. And like a true terrorist, I made people look suspiciously and fearfully at the trees they had once climbed, the hills they had hiked over, the nature they had once enjoyed.
I raged and laughed.
***
On a night in November, I visited a home in Bobin Creek, a long way south of where I’d started.
An old home, made of stone and splintering wood, threadbare carpets and the smell of furniture that had lived there decades. On the stove, I shivered blue under a simmering pot, watching them sit at their dining table with frowns on their faces and a television in the background that murmured solemnly. The house was heavy with family history, held to the hill on which it sat by the weight of it. The floor was covered in dust and dried grass because no one had thought to clean in days. And all around the place the mountains waited, snug under their blanket of dry forest.
At the table a roughened old man sat. He studied a map with solemn concentration, his calloused fingers making gentle swishing sounds as he ran them across the paper.
He said: ‘If it comes over the mountain here, we’ll take the Bridal Trail out, head over the mountain there, onto Kenny Hennigan’s land and through the state forest. We’d come out ‘round here in the end.’
I come, I come, I whispered from the stove, hiding under the pot.
The woman had long brown hair that would make a wonderful flaming veil and melt into her flesh. Her hair would dissolve like ice cream in the sun; dropping fiery bombs wherever it slid from her head.
‘And what about if it comes through here?’ she asked, pointing at the map.
The man shook his head. There was a noose of silence around his throat. I could feel the delicious aching of his frightened old body. For a few moments, he didn’t seem able to answer. His eyes scattered across the map. Then he said, ‘If it comes over there, we’re fucked.’
The woman stood abruptly and moved over to stir the pot under which I hid. I found myself staring at the roundness of her belly. I wanted to reach out and grasp the fat with burning hands. Make it sizzle and spit.
In the silence, the murmur of the television grew clearer. The man and the woman both looked up at the small, radiant box propped up on a cupboard.
Someone with a microphone and a serious expression told the three of us how very bad things were and how it would never get any better and I could taste the despair like hot, sweet velvet. Fire season. Catastrophic conditions forecast. Evacuation. Air quality. Fire front. Out of control. Terror. Devastation.
‘We should leave,’ the woman said.
The man with the white hair shook his head. ‘I won’t lose the house.’
As I burned away, I promised them silently that they would not lose their house. I promised I’d leave a perfect circle of green grass around it. But I would take their breath.
***
There was a magic to me to me that year. I am angry. You know why. You should know. I’ll say nothing else.
Over Christmas, I burnt down the east coast of New South Wales. I called to the sky to feed me lightning and I called men to spark me. I raised violent fingers wherever I could and made myself unbreakable.
I attached myself to flesh. I ate my way through layers of skin. I dried up blood or made it burst out of fresh burns, boiling out of bodies. I drank it and made it steam. I splintered bones and made marrow into arid dust. I fried vital organs, and less vital organs too. I penetrated deep into the most living of things and turned them black and brittle. I cooked them. I maimed them. I killed them. I burnt right to the very extent of my limbs.
There were places I could not reach, of course. People fought hard for their concrete and glass. They sprayed pink slashes across their borders that felt like stinging ice when I touched it.
So, to the cities I could not touch, I sent my hot, stinking breath. I choked the air. I forced them underground. I lapped at their terror. I made sure there was nowhere on earth that did not know Australia was burning.
After New Year’s Day (hot, panicked, barely human), Canberra watched the sun set through an orange, nicotine-stained sky. An easterly breeze pushed at my exhalations, my fierce smoke, and rolled it across the city. There was very little to do there now but take shallow breaths and taste smoke with every spoken word.
A mother sat in her lounge room, on a couch, with all her hair tied up off her face. A cup of something cold dripped condensation on a table beside her. And there was a child with round, fleshy arms and legs, playing on the rug at her feet. Outside, the father smoked a cigarette. As I burnt away this weed and he sucked me into his lungs, I watched his family.
The smoke unfolded itself over their home as it had done every night for weeks. The child coughed. The mother raised her chin and sniffed the air.
‘Fuck! Joel, close the door!’ she cried.
The father hurriedly pressed the cigarette out in an ashtray. The adults together rushed about their house and slammed doors and windows. Their panicked footsteps echoed through the wood floors. And the child coughed. I was in their lungs. I was burning the inside flesh of their throats.
No keeping me out.
After I had extinguished all detail from the night, the family watched me through their windows and wondered aloud to each other when it would ever stop.
‘I don’t remember what clean air smells like,’ said the father. The child coughed.
On and on it went. I dragged myself across worlds; sometimes sneaking up quiet in the dead of night to catch something sleeping and eat its wails and entrails; sometimes raging forward like a tsunami or a cyclone, borrowing tips from the force of water and crashing against matter.
Behind me I left mountains reduced to hills skewered with blackened twigs. Bushland looking like a bed of nails. Manmade. You did this.
You did this, cried the wind.
The ground behind me was dry and black. My smoke lingered heavy in the air. I hid in tree stumps that stuck up from the ground like jagged tombstones, then I exploded out when I smelt blood on the breeze. The smell of iron that sets teeth on edge.
I left homes with sagging foundations, all softness burnt out and smothered. People bloomed from their houses in terror; they bought out long hoses and cleaned their gutters and tried their best to hold themselves against me and still feel powerful.
I proved their weakness.
And just when I had pushed the people of Australia to the very edge of their exhaustion, after I had been singeing their heels while they ran from me and they were just about to give up, the season turned. The summer sun set, and the following new autumn morning birthed a cooler, gentler star.
And then the rain came. The hot wind sank, tired, to the ground to lay limp and happy and spent. The clouds joined forces with the yellow suits and bathed me. I simmered and steamed and sighed to sleep. Content. I had forced bandages across most of the country. I had burned nearly two hundred thousand square kilometres. I had claimed so many little lives that no one could keep count.
By March, they were celebrating. The very last spark had been extinguished. They celebrated as if I’d been defeated. But I did what I had come to do. And they knew why.
Now, I’ve slipped away a while, I’ve left them to the next great consequence. I left, whispering to the sky, whispering as they celebrated that I would be back to feast again. I would burn the skies. I would boil the seas. I would chew on their country and sacrifice it in the name of their skin. I would hang them from the trees.
Imogen Blue is a PhD candidate at the University of Canberra researching the philosophical convergences between sexuality and spirituality for Australian women as recovering victims of violence. Her prior academic credits range from religious philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, literary theory, and creative writing
