SANDS OF DELUSION 

By Tessa Harvey

INFERNO

The fire crept back into his mind, tiny tendrils of live flame in an old stump, dying down to grey embers, then flaring into molten lava, spilling over, racing through dry dead grass, fingering the gum trees, then leaping high like kittens to reach the threads of branches...

    He had heard the fire was coming, and was up on his roof, filling the stopped gutters with water from his old trickling hose, resentful at the wanton waste of water.

    In a country of water tanks and scant rainfall, such a precious resource was not squandered lightly. 

    For a while he had been aware of cinders drifting, falling, burning. The firies had shouted, "Mate, go, there's no time," as they had screeched past his land in their already scorched truck.

    Then there was a terrible roaring, and the fiery inferno had crested the rise before him. Jax had been stunned - somehow he had thought the fire would follow the old winding road to his town.

    But, stretching from the thin eucalypts, with greedy, grasping fingers, the leaping flames had found the glorious grove of old pines and bounded gleefully across the road. Fueled by such an immensity of old timber, the blaze had swept diagonally across country, burning all in its path - houses, cars, boats, animals... Birds dropped from the hot sky.

    As the young man watched, wallabies, hares, quolls raced past, enmity forgotten in shared terror.

    Birds flew ahead, those that were wise and swift, heading for offshore islands. Jaxon dropped his useless sputtering hose and ran.