SPRING WRITING COMPETITION
Dear Readers,
I am hosting an Spring writing competition.
The theme of your stories should be RENEWAL, in the broadest sense of the word.
You have until the 6th of May 2024 to get your stories in.
Please post your stories on this thread.
They be should be no more than seven-hundred and fifty words.
Because of the amount of reading that will have to be done, the competition is for paid subscribers only.
Write with freedom, without inhibition.
Your loving writer,
Hanif xx
Please excuse my typo. This is a SPRING writing competition, not Autumn.
TASMANIAN WILDFIRE
I’m born in a spark. Though I am small and weak, I am hungry. The heat nurtures me, the bush cradles me. My mother is Nature and my father is Man. But I wasn’t always this way.
At first I crackle through the dry grass like a snake. Almost silently. I smoke the buds of the bush pea and puff on the stems of a yam daisy. My bouche is amused.
Some seasoning is added to my plate. A little eucalyptus oil. The shod feet that pad around this forest often remark upon it. “What is that? Such a beautiful scent…”. Sweetness turned acrid is just to my taste, stirring my appetite for more. And more. I grow and I roar. Silver trees burst. Not into flame, they burst in my heat. Every piece of kindling makes me ravenous, for a branch, for a tree, for a forest, and for anything that lives in it. Anything that lives, really. Small and large, warm and cold blooded. Tendons twisted, sinew contorted, eyes baked. Everything served well done.
Roads melt before me. White paint blisters and black tarmac bubbles. It’s no toil, really. No trouble. I even dance across water as I grow too ferocious. The balance of elements is turning, spinning, burning. Burning away earth and water with the wind at my back.
I leave a wasteland of black behind me. April may be a time for renewal in your land. But in Tasmania, January is the cruellest month. Though, as I say, I wasn’t always this way.
A cousin on the mainland told me a story. Once upon a time, my mother was Nature and my father was men. For a long time, I was the jealously guarded secret of Gandji who would fly across the sky each day with a burning stick and bring light and warmth to the land, but always returned to his nest at night to hide my flame until morning. One day, some local men followed Gandji and stole the burning stick as he slept.
He woke in a fury and the thieves blundered. They set me free in their haste to flee! Gandji used his wings to spread my flames across the land. In horror, the men pleaded with the god to stop me from turning their home into ashes. Gandji agreed, but only if they shared me with their brothers and sisters, teaching them how to control me for the betterment of life itself.
Locals carried me with them in a hot coal fungus and, like an elemental touchstone, burnt back a galloping rainforest, here and there, for good old fashioned green pick hunting. Good hunting, of roos, possum and little pademelon. The locals kept the trade routes open on those cinder roads through the island. They knew me like they knew north was north. They just knew.
Tall ships on the horizon were like a lightning strike. With no beacon to light, the local men stoked the whole coast for miles into a wall of flame against the sea. The Bay of Fires is what they call it, the men who live here now. Well, they spread across the wilds like I do on a summer day baked in the sun. Unseen at first, then seen too late. They burned uncontrollably, across mountains and forests, through hallowed places and sleepy villages, clearing a hunting ground of men, women and little children. The trade routes were overgrown as the world opened up. They thought they knew me like they knew west was west.
I’m dying as clouds gather. My hunger is finally sated and my ardour cools. The wind that fanned my flames now chills my embers. The roar that shook the forest fades to a whisper. Rain fizzles in the air like animal fat, then turns my smoke from black to white. As if a wise decision has been made.
The wasteland looks black and dead. But the ashen dust the rain makes mud is that of earth and loam. It is rich and fertile. More rains come and seem to wash away the scars on the land. The silver trees are still blackened to the waist, but around their ankles, improbable green shoots appear one morning. They needed me as I needed them. Eucalyptus and wattle, tea tree and banksia all return, as do wildflowers, beasts of the land and birds in the trees. The men who live here return too.
The locals do not.