Brightlands

Skeeters

August sat bolt upright. It was pitch black and the shack was quiet. Outside, on the canal, the chirrup of cicadas and crickets culminated in a low, soft buzz over water. Then slowly, out of the darkness, the sound of careful footsteps on wooden boards. August breathed in quickly. Her eyes adjusted and in the blackness she noticed traces of moonlight through the last glass window at the far end of the room. She sat in complete silence, too frightened to move, listening hard. Finally came the soft rapping of knuckles on a wooden door.

"August?...You awake?"

It was Rex. August breathed out. She lept from bed and scampered across the boards in her bare feet. She lifted the latch and opened the door. Moonlight spilled into the room.

Rex's shape was hard to make out in the pale moonlight, but as he turned she saw the whites of his eyes.

"Is Mary still on the river?" he asked.

To August, it didn't seem that long ago that she and Rex were catching tadpoles and hunting tench together. These days, things were different, Rex was away for weeks at a time, searching for plastic, or selling it at Grench or Graves.

"Yep," she replied, her cheeks warming a little.

"Sam wants you to come now. Bring your dries and your boots but nothing you can't carry. He says you've got to hurry."

Sitting in Rex's raft, August clutched her rucksack while she watched Rex lift the pole lightly in and out of the water. The canal was quite blue with the light of the blackberries now, it being August, her birth month. The cicadas were all that remained of the warm summer's day. The night was clear but towards the direction of the river, the canal was quite dark; the water eerie and still. August wiped the tiredness from her eyes with her palms and in the chill night air pulled her coat close. On the opposite side of the bank Sam was already waiting. He reached out and pulled Rex's raft closer to the jetty. Before August could make a sound, Sam placed his finger to his lips.

"Shhh," he motioned

Sam and August waited in silence while Rex hid the raft in the tangled roots of an old willow. Sam watched closely as Rex tucked the back of the raft into a reed bed.

"It's hidden." Rex asserted.

Sam raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Then he motioned for August to scale the embankment towards their shack.

Once inside the shack August took a seat in her favourite chair, more recently it's seat had been lovingly repaired with duck down so the cushion was soft. Sam made her tea from a large copper kettle which straddled the hot plate over the stove positioned in the centre of the room. As she sipped from a chipped cup, she looked around the room. It was a clean room but cluttered in parts with objects, books everywhere and pictures carefully cut and stuck to the walls. Wires, electrical equipment, old batteries and even light bulbs poked from old chest drawers or boxes, stacked in corners. One one wall, a faded picture of a snow-topped mountain, on the other a picture of an angel with a pale, pinkish face, it's hands outstretched towards a seated woman holding a baby, both also pale with pink skin. Sam turned the dial on the radio, it quietly crackled to life. August noticed that blackout curtains hung over the window.

"You found new batteries?" August asked.

Sam said nothing.

"For the radio...." August suggested.

Sam smiled at August as he turned the dial a few times, the thin, scratchy noise retreating when it landed on the voice of a young man. "Strong chance of an easterly front, with hard rain and wind, approaching Grench by three AM this morning. Be prepared for difficult weather on the canals south of Grench and west of Graves in the early morning."