A hot bastard day by Potkoorok Creek
By Buschell
- 400 reads
I was ready to chuck it all in. I'd had a guts full. My easy going ilk was being replaced by a creeping desperation. Each day I stared into my panning dish. I'd spy only my shambled reflection. No glints, no hint of anything more than grit. No gold here. Just my watery phantasm staring back at me.
It was bloody stupid attempting this in the mustard heat of February. The sun stroked me up and down until by noon each day I had to crawl beneath a river gum and collapse in a heap. Back aching, knees buggered. Always thirsty. My lips had cracked like bad leather. My brain poached through my hat. I lived on a griddle that never cooled. Things cooked all around me. My horse, rabbits, a fox.
Poison things lived on despite it all. Big red, stinging ants. Spiders the size of my spread hand. Bastard snakes that mocked me by sunning themselves without a care. And there were armoured lizards and skinks. Skitterish wallabies. Shrilliant parrots of every kind. Their screeches rubbing me the wrong way.
I was no bush man, no prospector. I was cut from softer cloth. The muslin of a city dweller. The silent crush of debt had sent me packing. In the last year I'd developed an expensive taste for opium. It had ruined me. The Chinamen that plied me would not be denied their overdraft. They wanted a pound of my flesh. They already had my digs and its chattels. I'd lost my job as a stevedore for thieving. Other than selling my arse to other blokes I could see no other choice but the gold fields and a lucky strike.
I enjoyed too much the don't give a shit narcotic malaise. I lolled about in its unknowable bliss. The nebulous fug that filled my head. It had started as nothing, a step up from grog. Now it was family. My dark uncle. On this stingey ribbon of water, on Potkoorok creek I foretold my own hot and bothered demise. It would be slow. The edge taken off by my last skerricks of opiate. The blow flys would find me first. Then the magpies and crows. Then the wild dogs. Then the worms. It was a rare, morbid joy to give in. It was my gift to myself to give up.
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