Smell Of Devastation

• Zac Launer, Grade 8, Clare High School
• Short Story
• 2016

Finalist in the 'Word Zone 2016' competition

With the rhythmic movement of the car ride, combined with the heat of the summer afternoon breeze, I feel myself slowly drift off into a light sleep whilst listening to my favourite tunes on my phone. There’s a smell of foul smoke, with a hint of death in the air, which wakes me suddenly my slumber. I can feel the smooth cord of my new $40 apple headphones as I gently take them out from my ears. I don’t think about pausing the music.
“What’s that smell mate?” I say to the driver as I look around confused from the strong odour.
I look beyond my seat, there’s a flat plain of road and greyness in the air. At first, I think something in the car may have caught fire.
I gaze to the far left of me, I see the source of the smoke. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s flourishing knee height flames, acres and acres of it.
“I wonder how the fire started,” I quietly say to myself as I’m reaching for my phone to look it up. The phone lights up with new articles after news articles about a bushfire that has begun in a small country town called Pinery, not that far from where we are driving.
“Wow over 3000 search results in over one day. Jeez, there are some pretty gruesome images up here.”
“It says here that they are unsure about the cause of the fire but many are speculating that it was caused by a baler that caught alight on a catastrophic fire day,” I read to the driver.
The fire had spread over 100,000 hectares within a day and the images I saw on the news, wasn’t compare to the reality of driving through the country devastated by the fierce blaze.
The more distance we travel, the more over-powering the smell is getting. It is getting to a point the driver changes the air conditioning from fresh air to recirculated air to alleviate the odour.
I look around at the landscape and all I can see is black smokey trees, flaming hay bales, empty spaces where fences are no longer and the remains of burnt out houses and cars. Gone are the colours that I am used to seeing when driving through the towns: the green, yellows and browns as they are now replaced with just black and grey. The blue of the sky no longer seems to exist because it is covered with grey clouds creating an eerie and extremely sad feeling.
“I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to be caught up in this. Those poor people and animals,” I say in disbelief.
The driver gives a big sigh and wipes away a tear.
We continue to drive in silence knowing that we will never forget those images which are now etched in our memory, and that the smell of fire will always bring us back to this moment.