Dust, Emily Kowal
Dust
Australia was in the throes of a terrible drought that finally ended for some parts of the country when massive storms hit. Emily Kowal writes creatively about this phenomenal event.
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HE DUST GLISTENED IN the beam of sunlight, and for a moment I was transfixed. It twinkled, a lone spark of beauty in my frayed apartment. The omnidirectional buzz of the city slowed to a hum as I recalled the incessant battle fought between my mother and the dust. Though she rarely complained, it had always bothered her. Armed only with feathers, each day she would engage in a fruitless war. It was a nuisance, a pain to be dealt with, yet observing it now, I struggled to fathom how something we once found so abhorrent, could be so alluring. The memories of my childhood were tainted with dust. It covered our clothes, our shoes, a translucent film over our eyes. We grew immune to it, my brothers and I. Fathers would turn their eyes as we tumbled on the cracked land, their faces masked behind the bottom of a bottle. Our mothers pretended not to notice as our lanky bodies became lost in the folds of our clothes. Childhood innocence protected us, covering us like a blanket in the night. We were safe under its quilted mask, oblivious to the drought that was slowly wasting away our family. We did not see the bones that protruded from the cattle, nor the calves that clung to their mother’s teat, nuzzling for the elixir that would not appear. They would turn to us sometimes. Thinking it was a game, we would let them wrap their tongues around our sticky fingers, giggling as they tugged at our joints. Our father sent them early that year. My brittle hair absorbed the fire of the midday sun, as I stood beside him watching. When I tentatively touched his elbow to ask him why it was so early, his response was a whisper in the howling, parched wind: “it is cruel to continue to let them starve.” We ate properly for the first time in a month that night.
As we grew, the mask was lifted from our eyes and we began to notice the drought that sucked the life from us. 16
