Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [36]
Then an air came, gusts and punches of it, with stench upon it and with something else, with a power. It sent through my mind a string of such visions that next time I glimpsed the real world I was under the table, and Dad was clutched hard beside me crying out, and Gramp up there on the charpoy, a lump hardly bigger than Dawn himself, shook over my little brother, his forehead buried in Dawn’s sleeping shoulder.
The air of the room was clear, though it ought to’ve been black, or green and red, beslimed, chockablock with limbs and bits, a-streak with organs and tubing and drippings and sludges. Fouled fleshes and suppurating, torn bodies and assaulted, faces dead or near-dead, stretching in pain, greased with fever or a-shine with blood—the smell, the gusts of it, blossomed these pictures before me. Bury my face in Dad’s chest as close as I could, still the air got in, and like a billowing smoke the scenes built one another and streamed and slid and backed up, and gaped and struggled at me.
Next Mum was there with us, Hickory across her lap, sodden, burning at the centre of us. Then Gramp too, and we were a solid block under the table, all wound around Hickory, keeping the thing off him, keeping the air off, which whap-whapped through the room, which beat outside in the streets, over the town, shaking the night, shaking the world. Our house would fall down on us! We were all as good as dead! Thank God, I thought, at least we are all together. And I kissed Hickory’s hair which was like wet shoelaces tangled over his head, and I sucked some of the salty sweat out from the strands. He was so hot; he was throbbing heat out into us as if he were made of live coals. Gramp was whimpering in my shoulder now, and Dawn’s head lay sleeping on my hip. I grabbed for Mum’s hand and she held mine so tight in her slippery one, it was hard to tell who was in danger of breaking whose bones. The noise blotted out every other noise, louder than the wildest wind, and composed, in its beatings, of beating voices, crowds shrieking terrified or angry or in horrible pain I could not tell, and the groans of people trampled under the crowd’s feet, and the screams of mourners and the wails of the bereaved, all the bereaved there have ever been, all there will ever be, torrents of them, blast after blast.
I woke still locked among their bodies, my dead family’s bodies, still under the table. Outside people ran and screamed still, but they were only tonight’s people, only this town’s. And they were only—I lay and listened—they were only Gypsies. The only Dukka I heard were calming Gypsies, or hurrying past muttering to each other.
The room still stood around us; it was not crumbled and destroyed or bearing down on the table top. The air—I hadn’t breathed for a while and now I gasped a bit—the air was only air, carrying no death-thoughts, producing no visions.
Dawn sighed on my hip. His ear was folded under his head; I lifted him and smoothed it out, and laid him down again. None of them were dead; what I had thought were the remnants of the beating wind were all their different breaths, countering and crossing one another. Hickory, even. He lay, his normal colour so far as I could tell, in the lamplight-shadow of Mum and Dad, who were bent forward together as if concentrating very closely on Hickory’s sweat-slicked belly, that rose and fell with his even breathing.
It was still hot under there, and so uncomfortable. My right leg, pressed against the floor-stones that way, was likely to snap off at the hip, any moment. But it was safe— we