The light coming through the dust, from the low angle of the sun was making Eadie Bendtner squint as she looked up the dirt road for other cars or trucks. Unsurprisingly, there were none. The oppressive afternoon heat lingered. She closed the driver side door of her old, red station wagon, took two steps towards the rear door, and opened it to retrieve the empty garbage bag. Her varicose veins bulged as she trudged, wearing a customary grimace, towards the dead animal she had just driven past.
She hadn’t hit it, of course.
As she approached it, she went through a list: Ring-tail possum? No. Wallaby. Poor little bastard. No point ringing council to come and clean up the mess. They usually didn’t come for days. A week sometimes. By that time, the flies and the smell would hit you even if you were driving fast. The disposal of such things had become something of a ritual for her. A self-appointed duty in which she secretly took a morbid pride. Eadie pulled the top of her white cotton shirt over her nose and mouth, the hem of it soaking up a little of the sweat that had formed there.
She was not sure which came first, the sound of the approaching truck, or the sense that the temperature was dropping. Her response to both was to stand still as she watched the truck approach her from the west, slow down and pull over within a few metres of where she stood, still clutching the bag. The driver stepped down from the cab and started slowly towards her. She could see broad shoulders, muscular arms, a stained white singlet and well-worn jeans. Boots. A rusted shovel in his right hand. Yes, a man, but… his face was somehow obscured, perhaps by a shadow thrown by the sun behind him. Eadie tried to move her arm to shield her own face from the sun but found that she could not. Her inability to move, combined with her difficulty focussing on the stranger’s face, caused Eadie to wonder whether she might be having a stroke. These things happened to people at her age.
And then a voice.
‘Hello Eadie’, it said. It was a deep, distorted echo that did not seem to come from the stranger. She could hear it though, unreasonably close, as though it was coming from inside her own head. Paralyzed, she could not summon the bodily resources needed to move her mouth to reply. ‘Let me help you’, it said, almost soothingly.
A trickle of urine made its way down Eadie’s leg, soaking her sock. A small whimper escaped her throat as she was forced, by invisible hands, to bend impossibly at the waist in an act of unnatural human puppetry. Her face drew closer to the carcass of the wallaby until spilled guts and gravel were all that occupied her vision. The sound of her lower spine snapping reached her ears as a wave of excruciating pain shot through her back, buttocks and legs. The pain was so intense, she barely felt the blade of the shovel connect with the back of her skull.
(Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash)