Flex

The wind was up. It got into the kids and sent them into their own tornadoes of sound and movement. The summer holiday cottage had lost all power during the worst of the storm. It was not big enough to contain all of them so Amy opened the backdoor to set them free.

‘Boots, raincoats, stay away from the cows,’ she reminded their tumbling bodies.

She sat to pull on her own gum boots and caught up with them by the creek. The storm of the night had picked her family up and dropped them into an entirely different landscape from the one they’d explored when they arrived. The creek had gathered the rain greedily for itself and rushed eastward, breaking every bank along the way. Amy took the hands of her two children and pulled them to a safe distance from the edge. They were laughing, the blood in their veins roaring as vigorously as the water.

Above all the noise of laughter and torrent and the agitated birds in the treetops, a crack shook them where they stood. Amy looked first to the sky, grey and heavy, only just holding back the next downpour. She expected lightning to follow the thunder, but the vibrations were in the earth not the sky. Downstream, a red river gum shuddered.

They’d picnicked beside this tree the day before. There were eucalypts dotted along the bank but this one had drawn them. It was old. Really old. She and the kids hand to hand could not stretch around its girth.

‘I reckon it was here when the explorers came through,’ the kids’ father Ben had said.

Ben was still in bed now. Hungover. It was his holiday too and he worked hard. Amy had told the kids this when they’d wanted to jump onto the lumpy holiday cottage mattress next to him at the crack of dawn. They’d left him to sleep in. So he was not there with them to see the huge red river gum collapse.

Yesterday the roots had been like old man toes digging into the land. The rain since had turned the solid ground into a quagmire, and the wind did the rest. After the great static crack announcement of movement, there was silence. Even the cockatoos littering the other side of the creek were hushed over the space of a held breath. And then down it went.

Amy reached into her pocket for her phone to take a photo. There was no mobile coverage out this way so she hadn’t been glued to it; probably left it lying useless on the kitchen bench with the box of special occasion sugary cereal. Its camera was always functional not matter what so she regretted her lapse of preparedness.

She turned to her youngest. ‘Larry, run in and get my phone.’ She had to raise her voice as the world started to turn again with full volume. Darcy took off after Larry, then doubled back, then turned again, oscillating madly between competition with his brother and the great black hole of discovery that had opened up beside the creek where the red gum had been.

Amy heard the back door slamming as she walked carefully beside the creek alone, making sure there was firm ground under each step. The air was scented with cough drops, stronger than a sick room. Eucalyptus menthols. Undertones of Vix VapoRub mixed with the great unwashed. The rough juddering trunk of the red gum stretched just short of the other side of the flooding water. It fought against the flow, smaller branches whisking the current into a foamy froth. The entire root ball that had anchored the tree to the ground now stood at 90 degrees from its normal position. When she faced it, this upended disc was almost as tall as she was. She could see dirt, wet and dark, and tangled roots some as solid as steel rods, others tapering to tap roots, tubers, gnarled fingers and swaying tendrils. If she was prepared to move in close, she was sure she’d encounter shocked worms and beetles scurrying along earthquake highways.

 But she did not go close enough. Ben called her overprotective, a wet blanket on the boys’ adventures. And she did collect stories: all the things that can and have gone wrong; all the dumb ways to die. She’d heard of trees that’d stood back up. Impossibly uprooted, by all appearances felled, then a flexing of timber – wasn’t timber used to build boats for just this property – and a sudden spring back upright. Such a will to life.

She wondered what it would be like to give up and just rest.

The boys brought back their father, a thrown-together, dishevelled version of the man she’d married. He was probably still drunk after the big night before; there was no longer any point counting how much alcohol he got through. She had her hand out to Larry for her phone but Ben had his heavy SLR on a strap around his neck.

‘This will take better photos,’ he said as he went into directorial mode. ‘Into the crater boys, don’t worry about a bit of mud on your shorts. That’ll wash off later.’

‘Only if their mum cleans them,’ Amy muttered, and yet this irritation was nothing to the dread rising from her chest to her throat as Larry slipped into the maw of the tree. He righted himself and slapped his muddy hands together to dislodge the mess. Darcy slithered after him and began to trace a finger along a root the diameter of his skinny, little primary school arm. This root was not entirely airborne. It stuck itself still into the earth at her children’s feet.

If the old red gum decided to reassert itself at this moment, it would gobble her boys up. They’d be the lost children of creek country. Because how could she dig them free them with her bare hands?

The wind whipped around her head. How could he be so reckless? She was eating hair when she closed her mouth, her scream to get out of there this minute swept entirely away.

‘Smile,’ Ben called as he focused his lens on their children. The reds and greens of their new summer t-shirts popped against the earthy root ball and the rushing grey of the creek beyond. Cameras no longer click. This was a silent recording.

Amy could not look. She turned downstream, stumbling on a mass of leaves that bounced back. A nest? No, mistletoe shed from the tree as it fell, a parasite bush that had hung like a beard up in the crown.

She could hear Ben calling out now for new unlikely poses. Directions to recreate a Michelangelo drawing: arms out, legs apart, stretching the limbs of each boy along the radii of this circle of roots and dirt. As if Darcy and Larry knew the Vitruvian man from a Pokémon. They obeyed without quibble. They’d do anything for Mr. Goodtime Guy who was barely home, who was laying down the bestest memories for them to stumble across in later life.

Amy’s eyes were stinging. The rain was starting again. The world was moaning. She stepped away from the mistletoe which had never been a home to birds. But, she realised, the idea of something as exciting as a nest would bring her boys running.

‘A nest!’ she cried as loudly as her voice could reach. She mimed and pointed to the ground at her feet.

They caught her voice on the wind, used it to pull themselves out of the hole. If the tree flexed now, if the tension in the timber let go, their heads and arms would be clear. Maybe then they’d have a chance to fight out from under the roots if the tree righted itself. Except: she’d be able to see their pain as they did. Hurry, hurry, she prayed under her breath.

Their father turned the camera on her. He was a cyclops. The lens stared blankly. She could not tell if he took a photograph of her or not.