Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  She felt a simmering panic, like water bubbling furiously under a lid, but she didn’t allow it to boil over. Sanna took a deep breath. She saw grains of sand being carried by the wind, but she couldn’t feel the current of air on her skin—the breeze was too weak, and the day stood immovable and searing. The child wasn’t moving. Sanna thought it was listening and waiting, like the other animals, for the hottest moment to pass.

  She considered writing herself instructions, in case her mind started to fail. Write that she absolutely must not take off any clothes, no matter how hot she got. That she must not start drinking her blood or urine. But if she were in such a state, what good would written rules do? She conjured up an image of a massive computer and all the information it contained, of it sifting through every fragment of data that might be of use, that she could apply to surviving. What else did she know?

  She knew she had to follow any road or path or animal tracks.

  She knew she had to mark her trail so someone could follow her and so she’d be able to tell if she started walking in circles.

  If she saw electricity poles or base stations, she was to walk toward them; they would be close to an inhabited area, and an inhabited area would be her salvation.

  Now that Sanna had spent some time alone, she was even more afraid of Ralda’s influence. Sanna knew she wouldn’t be able to resist the woman a second time, wouldn’t be strong enough to convince herself that she, Sanna, was the saner one and that she had to listen to herself.

  On the second day of her escape, Sanna had used a charred stick from the campfire to scrawl, “HELP ME!” and a sooty arrow in her direction of travel. She had gritted her teeth as she scraped the message into the surface of the rock.

  The desert followed her progress, watched and monitored how she was doing. The lizards and the breath pulsing in their dewlaps, the standstill trees, the dead trunks. “I have no intention of dying of panic,” she said to the baby, thinking she could still distinguish her heartbeat from the baby’s, even though they were not distinguishable, not in these circumstances.

  “But watch me, one step, two steps.” She moved on, headed west. That’s where they’d come from, that’s where she was trying to return. The sun rose and set. How many days did she predict they could live?

  If a snake didn’t bite her, she might survive, she thought bravely. She still had strength and hope. Sanna kept her eyes on the Southern Cross as she walked, and her prayer was a simple one: Please, just one more night, give me the strength. Maybe she’d bring them to safety tomorrow. The stars seemed to be moving—maybe they were airplanes after all, or satellites, but Sanna presented the same request to each and every one: Please, just one more night, give me the strength.

  You never saw flies in pictures of the Australian outback, but they were plentiful, needling skin, ears, and eyes. Sanna laughed and sat down in the sand. The flies’ delicate legs tickled and had their own pestilent stamp. Rats and flies and snakes and spiders—they were all made in God’s cellar, somewhere in the darkness, and they bore it on them.

  But now Sanna knew that there had to be some muddy puddle somewhere. That’s where the flies were coming from. If she just calmed down and concentrated, she could see which way the flies buzzed after they walked across her skin. Sanna let them swarm, tolerated the graze of their intrusive legs, wondered if she’d last long enough in the desert to not even notice the flies on her skin anymore.

  Water had collected between two rocks, under a shaded cleft. It had a film of scum, insects dead and alive. She would have to boil the water. Sanna was beyond tired, but this was one of those moments when she had to outsmart her exhaustion. She gathered dried branches and bits of bark for tinder. Martti’s lighter was like a treasure, and the fuel receptacle still felt heavy. How grateful she was for it, but she tried not to think too much about their final nights together. It was too easy to get bogged down in the loss.

  Sanna wondered if she’d be able to ignite a small bush. The fresh twigs would give off a lot of smoke, and someone might see it, even from a distance. A wildfire would be noticed, too, but that would surround Sanna in a sea of flame.

  She remembered the pain she’d experienced in the teepee with the gong. Is that what would happen to her now? Would she burn to death?

  This land had been built on fires, the land thirsted for them as much as it did the rains. The trees and plants would survive. She could see the scorched black layers in the old trees. Fire nourished the land, and Sanna wondered why the tribes’ stories always interpreted the color of the soil as blood spilled during battles between animals and humans. Maybe it was fire that had been caught in the earth and smoldered there, maybe that’s why the land was orange.

  She scooped water into a dish and picked out the insects, even though she supposed she could drink them with the water. She’d already eaten some—there were flies everywhere, some of them minuscule, and it wasn’t always sand when her tongue felt the sides of her mouth. Sometimes she felt something soft that didn’t crunch.

  A swarm of insects seething in her stomach. These were the kinds of thoughts she shouldn’t think, the ones that were like a nest of snakes under the lid of her simmering panic. Sanna tried to remember the image of her child floating in the blue light, completely unharmed, but for now it was beyond her reach. There was only the dunghill of brush, flies, and snakes. Sanna stared into the crackling fire. Maybe those who weren’t fascinated by fire, nailed to the spot by it, had all died when it raged past.

  She flashed her headlamp in a series of three bursts. Before she settled down to sleep, she would spell out another message in rocks and twigs. “SOS,” so big as to be visible from a helicopter—if they were looking for her. Sanna wasn’t totally clear on who “they” would be. The Australian police?

  The thought occurred to her that she would have no idea if the rest of the world had slid into war and everything had been lost. But she thought even more about how everyone far away would go on with their lives. How Martti would continue to live his life at the mines. She would be the only one to disappear.

  Looking up at the stars, thinking about if all of this turned out badly, Sanna wished she could have told him, “I really love you.”

  29

  MARTTI

  Martti said to Lily, “We’re going to play a game, don’t step on the white.”

  The girl looked up at him with every footfall, and Martti felt his breath catch in his throat.

  “Just like that, good, come the whole way, then we’ll get some ice cream together.”

  Martti watched the child’s feet in the sand between the blast caps, socks but no shoes.

  “Don’t stop to pick up your sock, it doesn’t matter.”

  In the final few feet, Lily panicked and shrieked, “I forgot my helmet!”

  Martti cried out, “No!”

  Lily was startled and started to cry. Martti turned to the car—there were always a few helmets rolling around on the floor. He lifted one up and said she could have this one, with the better headlamp. The girl looked at him skeptically, then she broke into a smile and ran toward him. Finally, she was out of the cab. He couldn’t believe Jake had involved the girl. As Martti moved closer to Lily, he saw Jake rise in the cab, like a shadow in the window.

  With Lily in his arms, her arms wrapped around his neck, Martti sprinted for the blast barrier. The sand around them was smoking and raining down on their helmets. Lily said the red rain hurt.

  When they were far enough away, Martti lowered Lily to the ground and promptly puked. She wriggled back into Martti’s arms, and he was still holding her when the police arrived. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Timothy watching everything. Eva tried to take Lily, but the girl shook her head.

  Martti answered the police in broken, repetitive sentences. His ears were crackling and whining, like a radio going in and out of frequency. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the spot where the excavator had stood like a black statue, until it had exploded.
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  He thought it sensible to stress that things hadn’t been going well for Jake, that there hadn’t been any way of negotiating with the kid; he hadn’t been demanding an airplane or amnesty. There was nothing he wanted. The police were suspicious. Why had he taken the child if not to extort something? Did he want treatment? To call attention to some cause?

  “He sounded like he was on something, especially toward the end he was slurring. I’m sure whatever it was he took will turn up in the autopsy.”

  Martti looked at the police officers, first at one and then the other. They looked right back, waiting for him to realize. Martti turned around and saw the new red-orange ridge—there was no body for an autopsy.

  “How long had he been behaving unusually?” the police asked.

  “He’s always been strange,” Martti said, looking at Eva, who was eyeing the police nervously.

  Eva’s expression was defensive, pleading with Martti not to get her and Lily mixed up in this. Martti sighed. The tears were close, his hands felt limp; he didn’t know how to describe Jake, at least without making it clear that the kid shouldn’t have been on-site.

  “I’m sure they have a meeting every morning at the pit to divvy up tasks for the day. His supervisor must have been in attendance,” the police officer said and asked for a name.

  Martti nodded. “But in principle, in this situation, since I was the one called in, I’m responsible.”

  30

  SANNA

  Sanna dug a hole. She was completely focused, only pausing occasionally to explain to her child what she was doing, as if the child were squatting at the edge of the hole and watching.

  The burning sand moved aside and cool, then eventually damp earth emerged. Sanna placed her cooking pot at the bottom of the hole. It looked as if she intended on burying it.

  “That’s not what we’re going to do,” she told her child.

  Sanna spread the tarp across the hole and mounded sand over the edges so it would stay in place. Then she looked around and saw a round stone a little ways off.

  “Wait here.”

  Sanna strode over to the rock and grabbed it, oddly light for its size. She rolled it over to shake off the sand, shrieked when she realized the rock was skin and soft, a curled-up snake. She flung it away and realized it was a frog.

  “There might have been water inside it,” she said.

  The child huffed disappointedly on her behalf.

  She didn’t see another rock or frog, so she used sand as the weight, even though it seemed hopeless. Sand everywhere.

  The weight made the tarp taut against the pan.

  “Let’s hope this works,” Sanna said.

  The child nodded gravely.

  After walking westward for three nights and almost giving up, Sanna had seen the child for the first time. The child had been kneeling, eyeing her curiously and benignly, like a wild animal unfamiliar with the ways of men. He had white hair and dark eyes, a thin neck. “You don’t have your mother’s skin,” Sanna said, and gulped. “Neither does your mother anymore.” Sanna looked at her arms. She had torn off the sleeves when the heat burnt through the fabric.

  The child had swung his head from side to side. Don’t give up yet, not today. I’m here.

  “Good. Let’s make a plan.”

  There were nuts in the backpack, and even without food she’d survive three or four days. She and Ralda had done short daytime hikes, but now Sanna walked through the night. She didn’t get cold. She was making for northwest, remembered the road traveled east-west at the desert’s edge.

  She looked at her water collection contraption and sighed. She’d survive, maybe. She kept feeling like crying. She’d drink the tears if they’d only come. She wiped her face; her hands were dry and rough, hardened by the sun. Dryness tore at her throat from the inside, as if she had just run miles and couldn’t talk until she got some water.

  “I’m so thirsty it feels like I’m suffocating,” she said to the child.

  Then Sanna covered her face with her scarf, tried to wriggle her whole body inside the shadow of a boulder, and closed her eyes. When night fell, she’d have a long way to go.

  The desert was drop-dead gorgeous. Her hands and feet were dark blue under the cascade of stars. The child was kicking more, a nocturnal creature, too.

  She gazed back at the Southern Cross. It looked as if the stars were waving at her. The vast, unfenced land, not a soul in sight. If moving didn’t require so much effort, she’d have thought she was nothing more than a shadow on the sand, a dry, weathered, silvery tree.

  In the city, she’d sought out solitude, like an animal seeking out a place to die. She could see that now.

  She had to get back to where other people were.

  She found herself wondering if Ralda was real. Or had she just headed out into the outback alone?

  A compass needle jittered before her fatigued eyes. She needed to keep moving while the desert was still cool. But the needle just kept spinning.

  I’ll come back to you. I know the way, I just need a little rest.

  Sanna had passed out where her feet left her. She woke up in alarm. She still had to watch out for snakes, she told herself. The child was nowhere to be seen.

  As she clambered to her knees, Sanna felt the sharp bumps in the ground. She swept away the sand and discovered that a road ran beneath it. She tried to cheer, but no sound came. So she smiled.

  When and for what purpose the road had been built, she didn’t know. She didn’t even know if it would lead anywhere, or peter out in the middle of all this emptiness.

  Ignoring her impulse to rush off down the road, she built her water-collection contraption. Maybe she’d be rescued soon. But she had to stay careful and cautious now. It was better to wait for the cool of the evening before she started off.

  As she waited, Sanna flashed the mirror from her compact, even though the sky was empty, even of birds. Her vanity might just prove their salvation. She waited for the evening, the cool evening, and fingered the lighter as if it were prayer beads.

  As she trudged on, Sanna found it comforting that a road ran beneath the sand. A road built by tractors and road rollers. At regular intervals she squatted to make sure the rough surface of the asphalt was still there.

  There had been very little water, and she felt cornered by thirst. She wanted to tear at her skin and rage.

  You must not drink your own blood.

  The child flickered at her side for a moment, a silvery glow. Sanna didn’t have the strength to look at him.

  “You have it so easy, I’m carrying you.”

  The child stopped. Sanna started to cry. The boy came over to her but didn’t want her to pick him up. He crouched at her feet and examined her toes. His tiny fingers touched the tips of her toenails.

  Where were her shoes? Sanna realized this had to be a dream.

  In the light of day, she noticed that the road had ended or else she had meandered off during the night. She gazed at the expanse of sand, stunned.

  She figured she would have hit the abandoned town by now, if she were on the right path, or at least see it in the distance. The town couldn’t have disappeared that quickly.

  Sanna saw the stalks of dried reeds in the dunes. It had been a long time since she’d seen a single tree. No bark to mark, no gateways to heaven.

  Flies again, but after crawling on her they remained near her, and their buzzing revolted Sanna. She thought it might well be the last sound she ever heard.

  They’re not flying away because I’m the source of water.

  She didn’t feel despair. That would have demanded some depth of emotion, and everything had become two-dimensional. She had learned to read her environment, and it spoke its unambiguous language like a glossy magazine spread. She was not going to survive.

  She had found some scraps of food earlier. A last supper, now that she thought about it. A trash bag that had flown out of a car or been tossed to the side of the road. The child had kicke
d it like a ball. Sanna had thought the bag was a hallucination, too. The bag contained crushed water bottles, tissues, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer, a candy-bar wrapper, and three empty packs of cigarettes. In addition, there had been some cookies in the bag, melted and crumbled into a soft flour in their single-serving packs. Sanna tasted the sugar and the wheat, smelled the chocolate, the stains on the transparent plastic shells. Chocolate-chip cookies.

  When she saw the house, she didn’t squeal. Tears stung her eyes. Her skin was sensitive and her tears gave up on the idea of spilling over her lashes. Sanna rubbed her eyes, but everything remained shapeless and gray, as if she were swimming in a murky, muddy pond.

  Sanna gasped. Had she gone blind? She had irreversibly destroyed her eyes in the sun, and that house—a corrugated metal trailer—would be her final image of the world.

  “You’re not blind, Sanna, you can see,” she said to herself and blinked. But the view remained gray, the edges blurred into sky and sand. Like everything here, she thought. Like me and the baby, too.

  She could make out red parts of the building, figured they were window frames. Sanna headed toward them. She was going to survive, that was a house, and there would be people there, and a phone and water and food.

  Her heart was beating out of sync. “I have energy,” Sanna told herself. “Think about the cookies you ate, that couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours ago.” Why did she feel like she couldn’t walk another foot? Was her body giving up now, now that she had spotted the house?

  Her body was shutting down, relinquishing its adrenaline and the need to keep her moving, relinquishing its ability to think rationally. There was no need. Her feet had carried her to habitation, and that was enough.

  She felt the urge to vomit up the cookie mass but she gritted her teeth.