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skeletonguard.bsky.social
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new story up now on substack. THE SWIMMERS, about a catastrophic flood in 2105 and the people in it. with beautiful illustrations by stacy gougoulis infinitegossip.substack.com/p/the-swimmers
Excerpt of a story titled THE SWIMMERS: In the long, cool summer of 2105 the Alpine River overwhelmed its banks and floodwaters reached Greenpine and Bonnie Vale, where the wooden mountain cottages built to hold out winter snow gave little resistance to the torrent and collapsed into beaver dams of luxury rubble. Maggie Butler and her daughter and son-in-law and their six-year-old son Michael chased dry land up the mountainside with all the other evacuees. To Brookfield and the evacuation point at the Mike Foley Rec Centre, and then on to the Valley View Motel at Green Hollow when the river started to lap at Mike Foley, then finally to the tarp city at Winton when the deluge found Green Hollow. There they sat in the gloom, under their tents under the canvas awnings under the fog and the gunmetal sky, waiting for the water to recede. Full text can be found at infinitegossip.substack.com. Excerpt of a story titled THE SWIMMERS: Along the natural depression mud and rubble tore away bushland and the hillside villages. In the valley the pastures and farmhouses vanished. Crops were washed away and the topsoil poisoned. The people in the valley who hadn’t evacuated had climbed onto their roofs when the wet came up, and there they sat awestruck as the wall of brown water like a tidal wave swept down the valley from the broken dam towards them. Full text can be found at infinitegossip.substack.com. Excerpt of a story titled THE SWIMMERS: Michael was a sweet boy with a faint personality. In the morning and the late afternoon when the intense white sunshine had weakened to a milder yellow his grandmother let him out to play. He trudged around on the smooth brown plain, making an effort to play. Maggie watched him through the plastic pod windows. The energy to follow him down the steps was hard to marshal. He ran aimlessly, scooped careful spadefuls of mud into a plastic bucket, tipped them out. She watched him make small piles and then stand back and observe them silently. Once, with great effort, she popped the pod’s front hatch open and called “Well done, Michael,” but he couldn’t hear her. Full text can be found at infinitegossip.substack.com. Excerpt of a story titled THE SWIMMERS: The next morning he took it outside and set it on an upturned box and with cautious and unpracticed hands began to make mud shapes. People, dogs (Maggie assumed), a tree, a hut. He placed them on the plate to dry and sat looking rapturously at his creations. It was not easy to play with such crude and crumbling toys but he persisted, muttering under his breath as he did so. [Illustration of a young boy playing with mud figures.] He played for hours. The next day, too, and the next. Maggie felt an unexpected and immense sense of relief to have his eyes off her. The next day he pestered Maggie to play with him and she magnanimously agreed to but when she sat down and picked up one of the brittle characters her hands shook and it broke. She felt so terrible she snapped at him that he needed to figure out how to entertain himself. Later inside, crying, she asked him to forgive her for being sharp with him. OK, he said, wide-eyed and anxious. Full text can be found at infinitegossip.substack.com.
November 13, 2024 at 10:32 PM