The Gorge

Karina Bailey

by Karina Bailey

Story

With a deafening crack, I am born in the night from the storm, in what would have once been early spring.

The seasons are strange now, and the ground here, the grasses and trees throughout the gorge are abnormally dry for this time of year. I bring light and heat into the gorge, and first consume the sad old gum tree which is now not much more than a smouldering stump.

I giggle and crackle with a new kind of power, feeling wild, feeling free. The creatures run from me as I eat my way up the mountainside toward the ridge. I am red and gold and glowing, and full of heat and a terrifying kind of energy.

I am so hungry. I nibble at the dry leaves that cover the ground but it’s not enough, and I send my tongues licking greedily up the eucalypt trunks to the branches, leaving trails of ash and smoke in my wake. I grow and grow at an alarming rate, creeping across the mountain, savouring the zesty tang of the trees’ oils, every mouthful causing me to double in size. I grow so large I no longer crackle but roar, triumphant, covering the mountainside, taking over everything, destroying, clearing, making way for something new to spring from the ashes I will leave behind.  

The warm winds encourage me, playing and egging me on, until I reach a place way up on the hill that I think I once knew. I pause there a little while, still sparking and smoking, and look out across the blackened hillside, the gorge.

Yes, I’ve been here before. Long, long ago.

How different the world is now.

And somehow, I am still here. Through all the churning years, through the seasons, through the lives and forms beyond counting, I exist.

I start to lose my appetite, and become calmer, smaller. Black smoke billows across the ridge and blocks out the moon.

How I wish I could forget. I am ready now, to forget. I feel so very, very old.

I think back across so many lives, across centuries, across millennia. I wonder if there will ever come a day when it can end. I know some long to live forever, but I think they don’t know what they’re wishing for. There’s nothing so lonely as existing as long as I have, when you remember it all as I do.

Rain patters down to join me and I am reduced to smouldering embers, a few flames lingering here and there in the trees, on the glowing, smoking mountainside.

It just keeps going. It circles and circles and circles, without end.

The rain runs tear streaks through the ashes and I wait to be returned again.


© Karina Bailey 2024-08-30

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