Kaylee McIntyre
The jar of precious liquid bumps Millie’s hip with every step. For the first twenty kilometres, she had clutched the swaddled vessel to her chest, afraid to trust the integrity of the carry straps. The further she had travelled, the more she slackened her hold. Allowing the bundle to swing by her side enabled the cooler air of the oncoming evening to dry the sweat-drenched fabric at the front of her t-shirt. Her back remains uncomfortably damp beneath her backpack. On her right, the sky is a crescendo of crimson: to her left, an echo of pink. The parched orange earth of the Australian outback crunches under her boots. A light breeze whispers of eucalypt and tea tree.
Millie checks her compass. Two kays back, she passed the humped rock with engraved footsteps heading up and over. In bygone times, those engravings alerted thirsty travellers to a reliable source of water. Long years since, the footsteps lie.
According to her map, Millie’s next landmark is a creek bed three kays ahead. She is over halfway through her leg.
A flock of budgerigars bursts from the red dirt, exploding into the sky in a cacophony of colour and chatter. Millie watches as they swarm overhead and into the west. When they are black specks in the sunset, she pockets the compass and map and resumes her walk, the shrouded vessel weighing heavy across her shoulders.
Some of the elders call this a fool’s errand. Voices much older and wiser than Millie pointed out that not one of the legends agrees on the detail. And what those voices say is true. Perhaps this small measure of water scooped from Lake Argyll way to the north of Millie’s homeland has no rejuvenating properties. Perhaps when this treasured liquid is trickled onto the salt-ravaged earth of a place far to the south called Tammin, no miracle fungus lying dormant within the soil will be activated. No life-giving spores will disperse across the continent; poisoned earth will not become fruitful nor desert turn to crop. But Millie believes there is a chance, and that chance is worth clinging to.
The sky further darkens, day sounds giving way to night. A yellow moon illuminates her steps.
Before setting out, she had quaked in private at the possible dangers this journey entailed; anxious images swirled in her mind of becoming lost in the desert, of snake bite or other injury. The thought of being all alone out here. The worry of possibly arriving at the pick-up point to find it deserted; likewise, the horror of being unable to locate the person to whom she must pass the container at the end of her stage.
She had recognised the twin of all those fears in her mother’s clinging goodbye hug. For those first uncertain hours, she had wished for one of the contraptions her grandmother, before she died, had told her of, in tales handed down from her own grandmother. ‘Aeroplanes’ she called them—hollow metal birds large enough to hold hundreds of people in their bellies and able to travel at astonishing speeds. An ‘aeroplane’ might transport the Argyll water to Tammin in mere hours, rather than dogged weeks on foot. But now that Millie is here, amidst all this vastness, she is awed by the beauty around her, and grateful for every step. Now, her only fears are that this will not work, or that they have left it too late.
She glances up at the stars and tries and fails to imagine a big metal bird flapping its wings above her. Would they travel solo, or in a flock like the budgerigars? As a child, Millie had listened entranced to gran-gran’s stories. But, at seventeen, they are too fantastical for her grown-up mind to comprehend: tales of sprawling permanent residences where—at most—two generations resided, nestled within settlements of millions; stories of flowers cultivated, not for any practical use, but merely because they were pretty to see; and clean, drinkable water flushed away with human waste.
She laughs, and wonders if perhaps this journey, of which she is a tiny part, will change the face of Australia such that her own granddaughter will find tales of Millie’s childhood strange and unfathomable. Maybe in the future, metal birds will once more traverse the sky, and pretty flowers be grown, plucked, and allowed to wilt. Perhaps one day, humans will build enormous shining cities, clouds will regularly bring rain, and footsteps engraved into rock will lead once more to water.
Millie breathes the cool night air and wipes her brow.
No matter the outcome, this journey, with its wildness and hugeness and quietude, will be something to tell her granddaughter.
Above her, constellations glimmer and spin, as Millie walks on, bearing the solid weight of the precious container and the hopefulness of youth.
Kaylee McIntyre (she/her) is an author, actor, and video editor with a degree in film and television and creative writing, and post-graduate studies in theatre. Her flash-fiction and short stories have been published by Night Parrot Press and Voices of the South. She is currently working on an urban fantasy trilogy set in her hometown of Perth/Boorloo, Western Australia.
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