The Guardian
The worst thing about camping in tents: when you were mad, you couldn’t slam a flap behind you as dramatically as you could a door.
Just didn’t have that same flair.
Her boots crunched through the dry grass underfoot, drowning out his whining voice. She threw a finger up, aiming it in his general direction even though she knew he wouldn’t follow her. He never did.
The summer heat was oppressive — thick, suffocating, pressing on her limbs, holding her down and making it hard to lift her legs. But if she spent another second in that tent — with him and his body odour and his stupid vape and the way his nose whistled as he breathed and how every time she tried to shift or move he was always right there — she was going to stab him.
“‘Let’s go camping’.” She shoved grass out of the way, scowling as the sharp fronds grasped for her face. “‘It’ll be so much fun!’ Fun my fucking ass.”
Pausing for a second, she pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her shorts. As she tapped one out and popped it into her mouth, she glared around herself to get her bearings — the Murray was to her left, far less impressive than Google Maps made it out to be. There were no smiling families to be found here, with their cheerful caravans and tinnies on the water. The camping grounds were achingly lonely, caged in with the dried scrub. The river itself wasn’t a rich roaring blue, but drawn back from the parched banks. Dead trees, like burnt skeletal hands, reached for the darkening sky from the middle of the river. The water was covered in a fine layer of something slimy, red-green and foul.
It reeked.
Shooing some flies, she lit the cigarette and took a deep, satisfying draw. She could already imagine his look of disgust, but fuck it; she couldn’t stand his lolly-flavoured vape clouds and e-juices. She also couldn’t stand not showering two days in a row, and since their current camping ground didn’t have plumbing, she was fuming.
Glanced back at the tent. Something inside her popped, and she turned on her heel and started marching again, through the thick grasses that towered over her head. She didn’t care where she went. She just wanted to be as far away from him as she could possibly get.
Sweat trickled down her spine. It collected at her elbows, in her knee pits, her armpits, along her hairline. She felt grimy, dirty, sticky, disgusting. She hitched up her shirt, tying it into a knot at her waist, but the South Australian air was too heavy. She undid her ponytail, tied her hair up into a bun on the top of her hair; anything to let her skin breathe.
There were cicadas singing, loud and incessant. Flies constantly buzzing around her head. Eventually, she gave up trying to wave them away. There were birds, too, cormorants softly crying, darters darting in and out of trees up ahead. She could have sworn she heard a kookaburra at one point, laughing at her as she stomped sweatily through the bush, swearing and smoking and sulking.
The river beside her, cool and wet and stinking.
Her cigarette burned down to the filter, so she flicked it into the water, watching it make a tiny ripple in that stillness. The red-green slime parted slightly as if to welcome the butt, before swallowing it up hungrily.
A shiver ran down her damp spine.
She turned away.
Something splashed behind her.
She spun, but there was nothing — only faint ripples in the water, the red-green bobbing up and down gently. Distantly, in one of those dead trees, a bird sat on one of the bony fingers, wings tucked against its body. Its head was turned to one side, beady eyes watching her.
The back of her neck felt hot, but not like before — it was like there were little insects, hundreds of little midgies, biting her all at once. She slapped at it, but the feeling didn’t go away. Hand still on her neck, still eyeballing that stupid bird, she started to walk away, into the grass -
- and her foot didn’t step onto ground but into water and slipped in the mud, she lost grip completely and she plunged into the cold cold water, tumbling head over heels into the darkness, the putrid water finding its way into her mouth and her nose as she opened her mouth to scream and she couldn’t find up she couldn’t find out she couldn’t see what was that something touched her amber eyes see her it was slimy sharp teeth help out help touched the ground touched the slime ground up -
- she pulled herself out of the water, gasping, shaking, shivering, stinking, covered in thick red mud. There was dry green grass all around her. She couldn’t tell where she was, didn’t know if that was where she fell, the trees didn’t look familiar. Pushing herself up, standing up, turning in a circle, still coughing and spluttering — it was all tall grass and one dead black stump and red gums and nothing else, nothing except the stink of death and silence.
“Fuck!”
She shoved her hands into her pockets, pulled out her lighter, her cigarettes, her phone. It was meant to be waterproof — that’s what they’d said at the shop — but as she stared at the screen, she knew it was hopeless. The screen was dead. With a scream, she crumpled the cigarette carton and threw it into the water.
It was then she noticed the fish.
Hundreds of fish, upturned and bloated and rotten. Their unseeing eyes staring at her along the banks of the river. Some weren’t quite dead, their little mouths and gills gasping futilely as they drowned on land.
She held a hand to her nose, trying to block the smell.
And then she heard it: a booming, howling, barking, but nothing like any dog or bird or — anything she’d ever heard before.
It was from right behind her.
There was no other sound — no other insects or birds, no wind rustling in the trees or bushes.
It was dead silent, except for water, splashing as something moved through it.
Fast.
The back of her neck burned.
The thing boomed again, closer.
And against all sense, she turned.
It had almond-coloured eyes.
Black, seal-like fur.
And its mouth, its huge mouth, was filled with teeth so sharp.
Those teeth were the last thing she saw.
