All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘I’ve seen what you done to Greta,’ Horace says. ‘You went too far this time. She came into town, Aubrey. She told the police. If we survive these Japs, they’ll be comin’ for ya.’

  Horace takes in the scene. His gravedigger daughter. The open grave. His grave older brother. His grave shadow.

  ‘Your wheels ’ave come off the train tracks, brother,’ Horace says.

  ‘I’m teaching your child a lesson,’ Aubrey shouts.

  ‘You’ve gone too far, Aubrey,’ Horace replies. He stares at his brother while he speaks to his daughter. ‘You come up outta there, Molly.’

  Molly moves towards him along the uneven surface, stepping on a glass box that breaks beneath her boots. Her father leans down and offers his right arm. Molly grips it with her right hand and is hauled to the surface with Bert the shovel in her left hand, her muddy boots tearing dirt from the grave walls.

  ‘Go back to the house, Molly,’ Horace says.

  ‘No,’ Molly says.

  Horace turns to his daughter. Aubrey laughs.

  ‘I’m never going back inside that house,’ she screams. ‘It’s cursed. This whole graveyard is cursed.’

  Molly spots her pan at Aubrey’s feet and she rushes for it. Pick it up, Molly, and run for your life. Dig, Molly, dig.

  But Aubrey stops Molly in her tracks by swinging the gun barrel towards her chest. ‘You gonna attack me, Molly Hook?’ Aubrey asks. ‘You are brave, aren’t you? Braver than my sorry little brother here, that’s for certain.’ He waves the gun barrel. ‘Get over there beside your father.’

  Father and daughter standing on the edge of Violet Hook’s grave. Aubrey points the rifle at them both, switching frantically between faces. ‘I was just trying to give the girl some answers,’ he says. ‘You know what I mean, little brother? Answers to the girl’s questions. Do you have any answers for her, little brother?’

  Molly turns to her father, briefly puzzled by these words.

  ‘Let’s calm down for a second, Aubrey,’ Horace says. ‘You need to sleep this one off. Let’s go back to the house.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Aubrey says. ‘Maybe the girl’s right. Maybe this place is cursed. Maybe you two are cursed. Maybe I’d be better off without you both. Maybe you’d be better off in that hole with Violet. Three pretty little faces all in a row.’

  Molly watches her uncle’s eyes. His eyelids are closing on him involuntarily, his head’s rolling. He’s tiring.

  ‘I’m so fuckin’ sick of diggin’ holes with you two,’ Aubrey says. His eyelids drop down, open again. ‘I think I need to get out of the gravediggin’ business, don’t you? Get back into the gold-diggin’ business.’

  Then the sound of engines in the sky. The sound of gas and death and war. The wasp of it. The tiger of it. Molly’s senses are sharpest and she looks up to the sky first. Her father looks up next and, lastly, Aubrey turns his eyes to the sky and his face lights up like he’s felt the breath of God and his mouth falls open and he laughs. He howls at the impossible sight of a Japanese air fleet moving as one perfect attack arrow across the vivid Darwin blue sky. His drink-skewed vision blurs and the terrible fleet doubles, triples, in number. And he thinks of locusts. He thinks of plague. He thinks of the great ending.

  ‘Insects,’ he says. ‘Buzzzzzzzzz,’ he screams at the locusts. ‘Buzzzzzzzzz,’ he screams at the sky. And he howls with laughter. He’s still smiling when he turns his face back towards Molly Hook and the flat back blade of Bert the shovel smashes into the left side of his face.

  More arrows of Japanese aircraft now and Molly rushing for her grandfather’s prospector’s pan. She scoops it up from the ground and dashes across the graveyard.

  ‘Get under the house,’ her father screams.

  Aubrey Hook falls to his right, staggers for three paces then finds his footing again on a fourth. Blood runs from the inside of his left ear. His tomato-coloured face. His rage. He shakes his stunned head into action and he brings the rifle to his shoulder and turns towards his fleeing niece.

  ‘Run, Molly, run!’ Horace screams as he drives his shoulder high into his older brother’s ribcage, now exposed by Aubrey’s raised right arm. A rifle shot explodes aimlessly into the sky and Horace and Aubrey roll onto dirt hard, the way shot black buffalo roll onto dirt. And the Hook brothers of Darwin, Australia, twist and turn and wrestle and roll in the soil as 188 green and grey and silver Japanese aircraft soar above them. Some eighty-one Kate horizontal bombers, seventy-one Val dive-bombers and thirty-six Zero fighters in attack formations.

  The brothers scratch at each other’s eyes and cheeks and they scratch at their shared past. Horace’s mouth finds the flesh of his brother’s shoulder and he bites deep into it. Aubrey’s hands find his brother’s Adam’s apple and he squeezes hard. Horace’s left hand finds Aubrey’s left eyeball and his thumb pushes against that white-flesh lychee organ. They are wolves, both, and they want blood, but blood is flying through the sky above them.

  ‘Run, Molly, run!’ hollers Horace Hook through his choke-gripped neck.

  Molly runs. Past headstones and trees towards the flat yard that leads to the cemetery house. Then a whistle sound, like a boiled kettle whistling, the largest kettle ever boiled, and this impossible kettle is falling through the sky. Now she hears other whistles: five, six in chorus. Giant boiled kettles dropping towards her. The whistle sounds seem to bend, like the very sound is fixed to a curved wire in the air and that wire is arched like a rainbow and that rainbow ends somewhere in Hollow Wood Cemetery. And the whistling gets louder and louder and louder and she knows the falling kettles are getting closer and closer and closer. But she can see the cemetery house now and she will go there even if it’s cursed, and she will hide beneath the house and lie flat against the downstairs concrete and wait all this out. Just Molly Hook and the brown snakes cooling their bellies.

  Run, Molly, run. Foot after foot. Boot after boot. But the whistling, that terrifying whistling, so loud and so close, it’s falling on top of her. A sound is falling on her. A sound that has transformed in the sky into something physical. Now it’s so near it makes her fall to the ground and put her head between her legs and her twig-thin arms over her ears and her scalp. And finally the terrifying whistling ends in a violent explosion that rumbles across the earth and rattles Molly Hook’s growing bones. Yard dirt rains upon her and she feels like she’s sitting beneath a tip truck and a team of town labourers are unloading a tray of council dirt on top of her body, and she knows she must get up and run again because she will suffocate beneath all that flying earth. She stands up and moves forward three steps, but something has wrecked her equilibrium and she falls face-first onto the dirt.

  She raises her head once more and tries to focus on something, anything, between the grey smoke and earth debris, and she finds what must be the cursed cemetery house, but it is no longer the house she grew up in. Half of the house is missing, flattened into the dirt. The other half stands exposed, like it has been sliced down its centre and its domestic innards are spilling onto the ground. Molly can see the kitchen stove in broad daylight. She can see her mother’s bookshelf, fallen on its side beneath half a tin roof sheltering devastation and destruction, household items – plates, glasses, ornaments – shattered and spread across the yard.

  More whistling now. Closer and closer. And Molly watches the earth away to her right explode in fire and dirt, and she runs forward but the earth explodes again up ahead, so she turns and runs and runs and runs back through the smoke and dirt and violence and war. The whistling sounds are all around her still and now she knows they are bombs, war bombs, falling from the sky and thumping into earth, and she barely has time to react to one earth-tearing explosion before she has to react to another, changing her direction with every thunderous eruption.

  But then the sounds fade. The whistling is not in the sky anymore. There’s only a sharp and thin whistling of a different kind in her ears. A ringing. Run, Molly, run. She can’t see her father and uncle. S
he can’t see the scrub in front of her. She can’t see the gravestones of Hollow Wood. Run, Molly, run. Foot after foot. Boot after boot. Her heart. Her cursed stone heart somehow beating for her. Pulsing for her. Moving her forward. Run and run and run and then fall.

  Molly drops into a hole in the earth. Her feet land hard on uneven ground and her body lands spine-first on uncovered bones. She wipes dirt from her eyes and looks up out of the hole she’s fallen into and realises she’s in the grave she just opened, a rectangular prism five-and-a-half feet deep in the ground. She turns and finds her mother’s hollowed-out face and draws a deep breath, then rolls instinctively off her mother’s skeleton. Yet this hole down here feels safe, safer than what’s happening up there, so she squeezes her body into the space between her mother’s left arm bone and the grave wall. And there she stays. As another bomb drops somewhere on the terrifying land above her, she reaches instinctively for her mother’s hand, the thin bones resting on the broken waist bones.

  Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Keep your eyes on the sky.

  And the edges of that grave become a window frame for Molly Hook. Then the smoke drifts away and all that fills the grave window frame now is a rectangle of perfect blue sky and the endless arrows of Japanese warplanes passing across it, dropping their bombs as they go. And time slows now and all that exists in this world is that view from the grave and those bombs look to Molly like bull ants. That’s all they are, Molly, bull ants. But that’s a day sky lie and the gravedigger girl is scared, so she squeezes her mother’s hand.

  ‘Can you feel it, Mum?’ she whispers. ‘We’re on top now, Mum. Can you feel it? We’re floating. We’re on top!’ And seen from the daylight blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, through the smoke and the earth debris, they are mother and daughter, flat on their backs and hand in hand, waiting for war to stop falling from the sky.

  ‘We’re on top, Mum,’ she whispers. ‘We’re on top, Mum. We’re on top, Mum.’

  BLOOD FLOWERS BLOOMING

  Black ants. From so high up in the sky, through the flat glass canopy window of a top-speeding Zero, all those scrambling soldiers and citizens of Darwin, Australia, look like black ants to Yukio Miki of old town Sakai. Helpless black ants zipping in and out of concrete buildings like the organised-chaos lines of the black carpenter ants he’d stare at as a boy. He would rest his chin on his knee by a pile of firewood near his family’s backyard incinerator and watch the lines of carpenter ants butt heads trying to figure out how they were going to make use of such a large plunder of wood. Yukio would run his boyhood fingers along the entry holes to the tunnel networks the ants had chewed inside the fire logs and he’d wonder how creatures so seemingly disordered could create something so smooth and artful. And he would marvel for a full hour at the relentless industry of those carpenter ants and then his heart would hurt when his father, Oshiro, would grip two logs filled with a whole microscopic civilisation of black ants, a whole world built by toil, and toss them so casually into the incinerator. The heat of that stone box. The flames from it. The fire. All that yellow and red.

  Everything inside his cockpit is hot and rattling now. Too much noise up here. Greased metal and unprotected mechanical controls: rattling cowl-flap controls, fuel-tank selectors, hydraulic system controls, buzzing electric switchboxes, landing-gear controls. Jammed in hard inside the cramped flying machine, part of the awe-inspiring and awful arrow of thirty-six agile red-sun fighters now nose-diving through the air towards central Darwin, Yukio thinks of his late grandfather, Saburo Miki, a strange and thoughtful man, who once told Yukio the riddle of the blood flower. ‘The blood flower blooms only when provoked,’ Saburo Miki said. ‘The blood flower blooms on battlefields.’

  All that flame, Yukio tells himself. And he remembers Pearl Harbor. How he kept firing and firing and hoping those American warship cannons would fire back and a direct hit would end it all for him and he would be at peace because he could then stop firing, end it all with his honour intact. All that burning, he tells himself. All that yellow and red turning to black down there. Down there where Darwin is being incinerated. Just like all those Japanese carpenter ants. All that work those people down there put into their little city by the sea, all set alight by Yukio and his brothers. The blood flowers are blooming across Darwin. The pattern of bombs dropped by the Nakajima B5Ns. Bloom. Bloom. Bloom.

  Yukio’s left hand reaches for the gunsight fixed between his two 7.7-millimetre machine guns. The Zeroes will strafe a series of military installations. The Zeroes will fire at anything in their way and they will shoot those black ants in the back and in the front and in the side, and those black ants will not fire back because they’re not ready to.

  The low-flying Zeroes on his left and right release their terrifying strafing fire and the machine-gun rounds thump through concrete and dirt and human flesh. But Yukio Miki can’t bring himself to pull his trigger. He cannot fire on all those fleeing carpenter ants. And if he cannot fire in this moment, if he cannot serve his brothers as he vowed, then he is a coward and he is an enemy of his brothers and the enemy must be vanquished.

  He reaches his right hand out to grip the photograph of Nara. He pulls it from the ball of gum above his fuel gauge and he slides the photograph carefully into the breast pocket of his shirt beneath his puffy flight jacket. And he knows now what he must do, and so he searches through his glass canopy window for a building tall enough to fly directly into at the Zero’s top speed of five hundred kilometres per hour, but all the buildings of Darwin have been incinerated. Then he pulls back hard left on his flight stick and the Zero suddenly veers away from the formation in an arcing left turn that makes no sense to his brothers on the wings beside him.

  But Yukio needs to fly away from here. He needs to leave the blood flowers blooming. He needs to find the sky again. And then he needs to find a mountain.

  THE BONE PILLOW

  Molly wakes. She hears the distant sound of the air raid siren in town. Her head is on its side and her eyes are adjusting to the image of her own left hand resting on the ribcage of her mother’s skeleton. Her fingers brush the worn and damp fabric still pressed to her mother’s chest bones. She needs to look inside. There are answers inside.

  Molly raises her head, rests her weight on her elbow. She stares at the square of fabric and it might as well be a curtain, the kind of curtain one pulls back on theatre stages or sideshow alleys to reveal great wonders never before seen. She closes her eyes and her thumb and forefinger grip a corner of the fabric and she gently peels it back, tearing away a layer of clay or mud beneath it. Then the fabric rips and Molly has to peel it back in strips. When she opens her eyes she is staring at the insides of her mother’s chest.

  Her mother’s ribs have a created a kind of home for something. This home is a pocket of air and dirt that has a ceiling of arching rib bones, and there is only one thing inside this home and it is a rock the size and shape of a human heart. A blood-coloured rock like none she has seen before, nestling in a bed of dirt inside her mother’s chest. A stone organ.

  Molly’s left hand digs through the dirt at the base of the ribcage and scoops out handfuls of earth. At first the rock won’t move because it’s fixed in place by old dirt beneath it, but Molly’s fingers claw like a dozer bucket beneath and around it and soon she gets a grip on it and works it back and forth until it breaks free from its dirt casing and the gravedigger girl pulls the blood-coloured rock the shape of a human heart out through the base of her mother’s ribcage.

  Smooth and crimson. Shaped like a strawberry the size of her father’s clenched fist. Heavy in her hand.

  Half of the midday sun can be viewed from the bottom of the grave and Molly holds the blood rock up to the sky and whispers one perfect word. ‘Mum.’

  *

  Molly finds her father’s left leg beside the backyard thunderbox. She knows the leg is her father’s and not her uncle’s because the shoe on the leg’s attached foot is a brown
leather lace-up and Aubrey Hook only ever wears black work boots. The leg lies in the grass like a misplaced theatre prop. Hollow Wood Cemetery is bomb-scarred and ravaged. One half of the cemetery house stands and the rest is rubble, concrete, brick and splintered wood spread across the dirt yard.

  For a moment Molly considers picking up the leg. She could slip it into the duffel bag that hangs once again over her shoulder. But then she thinks of where she’s heading and she wonders what use she would have all that way out there for her father’s bomb-severed but sensibly shoed left leg?

  ‘Who belongs to that?’

  Molly looks up to where the voice came from, keeping a firm grip on Bert’s handle. Greta. The great Greta Maze, toast of Darwin, all the way from the theatre stage to the blitzed lawns of Hollow Wood Cemetery. A Hollywood starlet. In the flesh, Molly tells herself. Such as that flesh is. Bruises across her arms. A black and swollen left eye. Stitches across her face. Molly tells herself not to ask Greta about her eye, about her face, because she learned the hard way how humiliating it is to answer questions about visible cuts and bruises.

  ‘It’s my dad’s leg,’ Molly says, staring at it.

  ‘You okay, Molly?’ Greta asks.

  Molly considers this question. She doesn’t respond. She turns and pads across the dirt yard, deeper into the cemetery. Greta follows. Greta moves slowly and Molly notices. Greta’s insides are hurting when she walks and her right hand clutches the right side of her abdomen.

  At the edge of the yard, a one-legged man is sitting in a sprawling oak tree, six feet off the ground. He’s wedged in awkwardly, his head pushed down into his lap, between the tree’s trunk and three thick branches that thrust skywards in different directions. One of the man’s arms is jammed absurdly behind his neck and the other hangs where his left leg used to be. Molly stares curiously at him. Her father, Horace Hook.