by
©Vaughan Hoy
2025
2025 Rising Quill Award, First Prize, New Zealand Writers College International Short Story Competition-Flash Fiction
Goonac Farm, Western Australia, where the event took place. Image from Google Earth
The explosion, sudden. Violent. Hazel, little David in her lap, blown backwards out of their kitchen chair. Wilder, laying crumpled, knocked out against the wainscot wall. Flames from the mouth of the cast iron stove burned eye brows and lashes instantly. Stove top covers blown all over the room. The torrent of escaping flame retreated leaving a crackling fire. As if it had been burning quietly all day. Smoke, ash, everywhere.
“David! Wilder?” Hazel screamed rolling over sooted floor boards. She gasped looking for her three year old son.
“Mummy” he murmured turning to her.
“Wilder!” she yelled at David’s older brother.
“Ughhhh…” he grumbled coming to.
They pulled themselves together. Singed faces. Silence! First to laugh was Wilder. Then little David. Then all three melting into hysterical laughter.
“Too..much..kerosene..Mom!” Wilder exclaimed. They laughed, tears streaming down ashen cheeks.
‘Country living, temporarily’ Hazel thought, ‘What was I fucking thinking?.’ Hazel had called Mum Walker.
“Come and live here dear if you must flee your in-laws in Perth” she crooned. “I’m going to Europe. Just look after the farm, it’s only sheep. Keep the sheep around the house. They’ll eat the grass and keep the snakes down.”
Hazel blindly accepted. City girl shock. No electricity, hot water. A disgusting dungy. Isolation from any village.
She looked around the wrecked kitchen. Bad idea using a detergent bottle of kerosene to light a fire. Hazel sent the boys to the bathroom to clean up. One stove top cover had bashed a floor board loose. As she put it back, a small tin glinted beneath the boards. She picked it out putting it aside, finishing cleaning.
The boys asleep, sitting in front of the fire, Hazel opened the tin. Inside, a letter addressed ”Dear Mum”. Hazel transfixed, numb, opened it. A letter from Mum Walker’s son Eric. A letter never sent. Never seen. His story untold. A decade of loss. No one knew he walked out of the house crossing the creek, and the long narrow valley it ran down. Walked into the deep dark forest on the other side and blew his brains out. Never found. The wild animals got him first.
Hazel slumped in her chair, knowing, truth a looming ogre. ‘What should be done? The truth would kill Mum Walker’ she thought. In the fire light, Hazel held the past in the present. ‘To tell or burn’.