The Sheep Are Nervous

A Virtual Fiction (Micro)Chapbook by Paul Allatson

The Sheep Are Nervous

It has a wide trunk, ten of him could fit inside its girth, his skin is smoother than the bark, he has the advantage of youth, his colour is paler, a touch of yellow on the cheeks that reflects his nearness to the grass made brittle by summer, the sun has no trouble reaching him, highlighting him, there is little between him and sky but leaf-diminished branches creaking as they stretch to scratch sky-blue, no shade then here at noon, no relief from the sun for him, no shadow from him, a thousand distrustful eyes peer above the grass at him, waiting for him to leave before shade reappears. He is in their spot, underneath the only tree in the paddock. But the sheep are patient, a little nervous because he is not one of them, indignities are brought to their kind by his, so they will watch, through grass, dry, hollow, chewing it is habitual, an exercise for teeth, they grind and stare, they shuffle away when his arms swing at flies, he can see and be seen for kilometres, although the tower on the city’s central hill is visible in the deep distance, this is the countryside after all, there are always insects, he waves at flies while looking at the tower, thinking he can hear a horse fly approaching, a buzz that demands vigilance in the heat, waves of it blurring the air above the barbed wire fence. The buzz is now deafening, an eruption of sound in the valley, he moves to bring the source of the din into view, too late to ponder on the enormity of this thing swooping along the paddock toward him, the tracer bullets rip through his chest before he has completed his turn, the sheep are running, circuiting the field, bunched against the barbed wire, some staggering, those too slow to avoid the ricochets, some already on their sides, some with their legs in the air, still plenty of them continue running a race around the paddock, around the tree, as far from it as they can get, far from the man twitching in dust, far from the flies that are always quick to descend on the wounded opportunities provided by the countryside, the silence now restored as the helicopter shrinks on its way back to the city. The sheep, for the most part, have stopped running, one has begun to approach the tree where an arc of shadow has emerged at the base, not far from the man, face down, no longer a threat, his fingers have stopped scratching dirt, the first sheep has reached the tree, the rest are following, tugging straw from the earth as they dawdle, their calm recovered, no eye whites bared, content in this heat to once again stand beneath their tree.

Redness Swimming

He woke, a spatter of warm liquid on his forehead, pinpoints of pain across his thighs. He was sitting in the green-canvas chair, his place for thinking or rest or for looking up at the dots of light that punctuate his shack’s iron roof, an approximation of the stars in his hemisphere’s immense night-sky. Some afternoons he sits in his shack while the sun is hottest and looks for clusters in the shape of a pick-up truck, a bounding kangaroo, a spray of wattle flowers. Today he woke startled to see rivulets everywhere breaching the rust.

For how long he had drifted off, he did not know.

He’d not heard rain like this before. He’d never experienced a day through such a murky film. In childhood perhaps, but he’d been here too long to claim any attachment to that past and its temperate, never droughty coast. The smell of damp earth was strong and cloying, yet oddly comforting. The rain was something to talk about on his next trip into town, three weeks away last Monday, as was the thick layer of red dust across the cement floor, now ingesting alien moisture. Little pools, like blood, were forming around his bare feet, near the door, everywhere. Redness ran down the plywood walls and the cupboard, and the dishes he’d washed that morning and placed in the rack beside the sink were dripping crimson. The few books on the shelf near the window were distended, their spines darkening pink. With its curtain like a bloodied bandage hung up to dry, the interior of his shack appeared mortally wounded. A stranger at his door might well survey him in this space and run, convinced of recent carnage.

Rosie was howling. It took him a while to notice, sitting under the downpour with wavelets licking his ankles. For a few minutes, after he’s chained her to the kennel next to the old gum tree, when he’s turned the ignition on his truck and she knows his journey won’t include her, that’s when she howls. At night, too, she is frantic if the dingoes are yapping over the rubbish heap. Either way, he doesn’t pay her noisiness much attention. She always settles down and curls into herself in the shade until he returns, or her howls peter out, and she’ll do a few nose-to-tail circuits of the potato sack on the floor at the end of his bed before collapsing in a long, slow sigh, her tongue outstretched on account of the heat. But now she was raving like a banshee in the rain. He felt her despair like fist to his chest. He’d chained her up that morning to keep her away from the roos he hadn’t managed to skin, still hooked along the back wall. My poor little werewolf, he thought, needs her dinner, expects her run and a rabbit hunt.

He wanted to stretch his legs then and there. He wanted to hold his rifle. He was curious about the rain outside. He had the urge to walk in it, with Rosie at his side, witnesses both to a rarely transformed world. He imagined the sky filled with clouds, dark blue and grey, swathes of it unequivocally black. He recalled a film he’d seen years before in which clouds slowly piled up into a brilliant emerald-green cliff, and he wondered if the rain, now slashing at his shack, was sent from such a colour.

He glanced down at his left wrist. Pooling condensation obscured the watch face from the inside. When he tried to twist his arm, to dislodge the moisture from the glass and so reveal the hour, he noticed the fingers on his left hand were stuck to the wooden armrest. He felt disconnected from time, an odd sensation for someone who’d always cared for a daily schedule: he rose with the sun and retired after dusk; lunch was at noon; the rabbit shoot was at five. But this rain was so heavy he suspected days could elapse without him detecting the shifts. He looked down and, as he tried to clench his left hand into a fist, he felt a hot sting, like a needle jab when darning socks or mending the rips in a threadbare curtain. Silvery threads, some beaded with moisture, trailed around each finger. In the curve between thumb and forefinger, a gauzy mass of white filaments gave his sun-browned hand the look of deformity.

He called out Rosie’s name but, he supposed, she could not possibly hear him above the din. He calculated the distance to the nearest dry creek bed and thanked his luck in being a good twenty kilometres from its line of straggly gums. Still, the land’s flatness could be trespassed easily. There’d been a flood here once in the twenties the size of Belgium the few townies who’d lived through the Great War said. Well before his time, years before his arrival. After calling out Rosie’s name, he couldn’t stop his thoughts from stringing into regret. What the hell had he been thinking, abandoning the town for this? Why had he done nothing but say, Yep, next August for sure, when he heard that satellite dishes were going cheap down south? Why hadn’t he built his shack a hundred metres further to the east where the red earth rose slightly? He called it The Mountain even though he could stand at his door and see right over it. He wanted so much to be on his Mountain and survey the rising waters. He wanted to stretch his legs and massage away the cramp in his calves, to rinse his matted hair in the rain.

Instead, he shifted slightly in his chair and felt a line of stings along his inner thighs. He swore, “Jesus Mary, fucking mother of God,” his dry breath squeezing between his teeth.

When he was used to the rain’s roar, when he could concentrate without blinking, he looked down and discovered how firmly he’d been fixed. He saw the chaos of white threads between his legs, like thistledown blown into a paddock’s overgrown fence corner, longer strands running from the sweaty crotch of his shorts, laddering all the way down through the hairs of his outstretched legs to where both skin and filaments were being lapped by red waters. Whiteness had been woven into his beard where the dark-grey hairs brushed against his chest. When he felt tickling behind his ears, he dared not shake his neck. Like the erratic patterns of a cockatoo flock in flight, white trails spread over the khaki of his shorts and the yellow of his t-shirt, and those trails too were beginning to turn orange.

By then he had become accustomed to the dim light. He was paying attention to his position, to the discomfort and his pounding head, to the rivulets of sweat cascading down his face and armpits. He could not believe it was possible to be rendered immobile by such fine, fragile-looking strings, by gossamer. The word came to him from God knows where, some fairy tale read in boyhood, perhaps a radio play heard once through static on the short-wave radio. And as he thought about his situation, he realised he was not at all equipped to deal with rain. Nor could he comprehend how it was that he had come to be sitting so still in his chair, so incapable of getting his fingers to the burning welts on his exposed skin.

Later he decided that he hated the rain. He imagined himself walking down the dirt track, smashing raindrops between his hands, stomping through the puddles, screaming obscenities at the sky, his rage curling the clouds away in shame. The thought did nothing to banish the frustration of seeing the largest of them scuttling over his wrists and knees, his belly, on sensing their business throughout his hair and, worse, on those intimate parts of him beyond his vision and reach. Some were small and globular, their dainty legs pointing away from their hairy grey bodies. On some, carelessly applied red arrows appeared to have been painted on their swollen, black abdomens. Others were tiny, impossible to see in the dimming light as they tickled their way through the hairs on his legs and arms.

They have no idea I’m here, he thought. They do not know what I am.

The waters had risen to his knees, and he felt like an ark. “I wish I had learned to swim, properly, with real lessons in a real Olympic pool,” he said to his shack below the roar of rain, and he began to laugh at the ridiculousness of that statement, holding his stomach muscles tight so as not to alarm his residents.

The rain stopped eventually. Like a world ending, he had a sense of silence stretching over the red plains all the way to the eastern ranges, and north as far as the American-owned cattle station, perhaps over the continental shelf and across its warm tropical seas. A cry for help would be useless in that vastness. The world was still. It smelled damp and rich. Were shoots of grass poking through the scarlet mud as he sat? He worried about Rosie on her chain and wondered why the cockatoos were not screeching overhead as they did each morning. He was sure it was morning. Light shafted down through the holes in his iron roof and constellations flickered above him. Perhaps there was a rainbow in the true sky. He regretted that he would not witness the phenomenon. Water dripped around him and, when he followed a droplet’s impact, his eyes tracked the ripples as they rolled into the dark corners of his shack.

The itch in his wrinkled skin worsened as the temperature rose. Throughout the rain, the humidity and heat had been like a blanket, invisible but thick, too heavy to shake off. After the rain, the heat was denser. When he inhaled, he was assailed by the stench of his own sour sweat and putrefaction of the kangaroos hanging on the back wall, coming to him like an unwanted meal. There should be flies out there, he thought, but he could hear no buzzing. He began to retch, viscous strings that looped down from his chest into the lapping redness, his heaving prompting a scurry of bites.

He woke, but could not tell if it was afternoon, evening, or early morning. Beyond his shack was silence. Inside, random drips from the roof into the waters around him at first convinced him that the rain had resumed. I would kill for a cigarette, he thought to himself, but even were he able to reach the packet on the table, its contents had long ago disintegrated. He sat trussed in his chair and tried to identify objects in the gloom: the raincoat on the door, the vague oblong of the bed, a cup filled to its bloody brim. A knot of invaders had gathered above his left knee, amongst them little balls of whiteness. They tend to their own, he thought, and looking down at his chest and arms he saw more balls of silk, tightly woven egg sacs randomly attached to the lattice of threads that cocooned him.

They are conserving their future, he realised. I am indispensable to them, and so I am alive, I must be alive. I have to be alive.

But he felt nothing in his limbs. He could smell his sweat and the rotting roos but could no longer tell if the air was hot or cooling. His fingers refused to bend.

Only shallow breaths were permitted him as he sat in his sodden chair, stranded in the waters, under the iron roof now creaking because of the emergent sun, his eyes raised and seeking out the pick-up truck, the bounding kangaroo, the spray of wattle flowers flickering across its rusted, perforated surface. The familiar shapes were a kind distraction, which was why he gasped when he saw a spider drop through one of the cracks, a parachutist swaying slowly on its thread until it came to rest on the kitchen table and began to agitate its legs on the fine strand stretching from its abdomen.

Perhaps, he thought, they have come from kilometres around because they knew of my shack, of my solitude, of me. He imagined them abandoning their havens under rocks, and among the discarded rusting cans at the dump he had dug years before some thirty or so metres from the shack’s western side. A mass migration caused by rain, seeking dry elevations on which to roost, dead tree stumps, termite mounds, even living fleshy objects like him in his modest shack. Perhaps he was an accidental find, a haven for hundreds, thousands of them, inching away from the pooling waters, hiding from the rain that was as alien to them as it was to him, rain that could resume at any time because everything is fickle in these flatlands, where even being under roof guarantees no solace.

He watched them moving in through his rusted iron roof, their threads slowly joining up and sealing the holes. Most were dropping down to find drier surfaces, seeking out the darkness that sustains their kind. He sat wanting sightlessness to come to him, trying with all his will not to keep glancing down at the newly arrived ones as they, too, began to spin his crevices. He sat quietly in his chair, festooned in silk threads, his thighs lost to view in the red waters, aware of the industry on all sides of him. He waited, praying that the numbness in his limbs would spread before the last star in his rusted sky flickered out, before the darkness finally disappeared him.

Salvatore Is Making Signs

Today Salvatore is making signs. They ask: “Who stole my beautiful plant?” The words appear above a meticulous black biro drawing of a very distinctive leaf. At the bottom of each sign is Salvatore’s telephone number.

 It was a plant thick with pungent leaves spread like hands, soft and serrated, a bushy plant for a big pot. They stole the pot, and they stole the bush. Salvatore would like to pin his words on lampposts, trees, and bus stops all over Sydney, but today he will limit himself to Newtown and Erskineville, maybe Redfern. Salvatore lives in Newtown on a terrace with a nicely cemented garden on a quiet street. But he knows now that in his neighbourhood there is neither security, nor shame.

 Obviously.

 Salvatore has walked for two days, up and down King Street, searching for his plant. He has sought the drowsy lids of guilt in a thousand faces.

 “You have seen my beautiful plant?” he asks.

 Some people are honest. They say, “No, mate.”

Salvatore has walked for two days and peered into the windows of countless shops and houses, some very nice houses. He has knocked on doors. Nobody would know my beautiful plant now, he thinks. Now, somewhere, Salvatore’s plant is in gaol, unloved, because nobody loves Salvatore’s plant like Salvatore. Or it has gone up in smoke, more likely. Not even Salvatore’s wife, Marreta, loved that plant like Salvatore.

“Get rid of it,” she told him four years ago when he first introduced it to her, “you know what that is?”

Now, seeing Salvatore’s sadness, she tells him, “No worries, we’ll buy another one.” But Salvatore wants only his beautiful plant.

“Is not easy buying a plant like mine,” he tells her.

 It was his fault. He put it on the verandah next to the front door. It looked very nice there. It caught lots of morning sun. It also caught someone’s eye. Every day Salvatore dusted the leaves and checked for insects. Every day for four years. New leaves unfurled each Spring. In hot weather, Salvatore wiped them with a cool cloth. Gently, every bloody hot day. Sometimes he would lick his plant’s leaking oil from his fingers. In winter, he warmed his plant with his breath. Every bloody cold day.

Now, Salvatore is walking. He cannot sleep, and he has lost his hearty appetite. Marreta is worried, but he keeps on walking, in all weathers, under unsympathetic skies. Nothing stops him, not even the police station on Australia Street. Salvatore walks, muttering, “Jesus, how I would to dead them bastards who stole my beautiful plant.”

BIO: Paul Allatson is a cultural critic, writer and academic editor based in Sydney, Australia, on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. His short stories and poetry have been published in anthologies and literary outlets in Australia, the USA and the UK. Recent publications include “Bin Chicken Wonder” in Griffith Review (co-authored), “Blood:Possession” in Trunk (Australia) and “The Island” in Pacific Review (US). He is currently working on a collection of stories and poems entitled “Little Intimacies” from which these pieces have been drawn.