A Bucket Of Custard In A Ravine

• Emma Williams, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

It was a town of innocuous enough beginnings. Sweat dripped from it as blood drips from a corps, unwanted but necessary, natural but revolting. Insanity cascaded from its inhabitants’ inner-most sanctums while they gossiped over lemonade scones and Brazilian coffee, with the mayor as useless as his policies and yet wholly indispensable. The captive wilderness exchanged unholy appellations with the graziers who had kissed them goodbye and thrown away the key, opting instead to rear cows, born to be killed. Much like any western, conservative, small-scale monarchy struggling against the likes of consumerism, materialism and morality.

Originally, the bucket in the ravine was despised. Dragon flies laid their larvae, fern leaves flung themselves from nearby trees into the flaxen crystals and on blowy days, the wind picked it up and splattered it over the nearby clay walls. Animals and the primitive descendants of Adam however stayed far away, filled with fear not of disease or infection but of the superstitious unknown. Don’t get me wrong; they all knew who planted the bucket in the centre of the ravine, on a little red splotch of paint each morning (by many an all-day stake out) but the idea seemed so bizarre, so pointless that soon Thanan the landscaper had neither friends nor employment and his only avocation was the placement of that shiny red bucket in rain, hail or shine. “He’s one egg short of a carton,” some said while the mayor came out with a public statement establishing “Mr Thaw as a kindly old man who has done much for the Ravenshire community, however is considered to be clinically insane and a risk to the general public. PLEASE STEAR CLEAR.” The Average Joe, nevertheless, was confident that it was not insanity, not old age but grief that drove this passive gardener to this strange occupation. It was a tribute to his late daughter, Rebecca, who had died of tuberculosis while nursing soldiers in Tobruk. She loved custard. And red buckets.

At dusk, the silent, enigmatic Thanan would trudge down the well-beaten path and place down the holy grail. He would pause there, during his exchange of the new for the old, clasping it close to his chest with white fingers and sad, bulging eyes. He was radiant however, as he stood in that ravine. Not in the way of a gravid woman, nor of a newborn babe but instead of a man at peace who knows he has fulfilled his purpose. The clay danced with the intoxicated birds and the small stream matured into huge swells. Then, the light switched off. The ravine was dark. The birds, the clay, the stream were still. In a sharp movement he tipped that golden thread into that insignificant, silent creek.

The people were dumbfounded. 2000 kilometres away, in a shack down that same river, Thanan’s dumping of custard was also relatively topical with an old soldier, Rebecca’s killer, watching the accumulation of years of dumped custard as a constant reminder of his crime.