The Australian

Short story

Total and complete fiction. — MH

The earth was red and the sky was blue. The heat swept high into the barren heavens and rattled hard in the lungs of those who knew this forgotten land. God had never been to this place, this wide raw wound of nothing that spun long and hard over the desert. Only cattle bones, with their white innocence, disrupted that endless dead grave they called Vos’s Plain.

Mr Vos called himself the King of the River. There was no river, and there hadn’t been for many years. But still he sat there, watching the sands licking the burnt grasses, long legs spread like an arachnid with a rifle over his lap. Once this had been cattle territory, and now it was mining land, the skin of the country puckered with ugly scars that leaked death and bubbled with lost workers who belonged to no one and nowhere. And Vos, tall, blue eyed Vos, sat unelected dictator of the underworld on that porch, three days from anywhere, and anyone.

Vos would say he left the village. And this was true, in so much as he’d abandoned his mother and everything he ever was with the ruthless efficiency of shedding the skin of a snake. As Daddy had left him, now he left all those who had cloyed and needed him in the fumes of a long departed truck out west. Vos had suckled at the breasts of greed and now viewed people with an easy…