Vertigo

Your first snake. Now you can call yourself a local.

she had bent so low, had been so close, had somehow entered into the snake’s zone

Since she returned from the city he eludes her; she sees him nowhere, and this is making her unhinged. The world is spinning away from her. Something is dying, something is leaching away from them; some once vivid hue in the inner landscape of her consciousness is beginning to fade.

Quietly, she has resolved to give it another year in Garra Nalla.

Damn Luke, damn his stupid ideas. All he has succeeded in doing is creating a situation where she doesn’t feel at home anywhere.

In the weeks that follow it gets hotter, and drier, and still the winds blow.

In the city the weather is just a backdrop to your day, a painted canvas against which you enact the plot of your life. In the country the weather isthe plot.

There, coiled in a perfect whorl, is a black snake with a long, pointed head. And she is frozen.

‘This is getting on my nerves,’ she says to Luke. ‘Do you realise that bloody wind has howled around here for forty-one days without a break?

The drought is one thing, the hectoring wind is another.