I was thinking of feet of clay and the way the soil on our farm which was red clay and also heavy black soil would clump on my father’s workboots anytime it was wet, though it was usually dry, drought-stricken land. I am thinking of feet of clay, and the feeling of clay which is stickier and heavier than you might believe and the way it clumps and will not come off. I was thinking about the flood we had, the hundred-year flood that first year we moved to the farm with the heavy black soil and the red clay, and the way my father in his silences could not stop the water from rising and rising but pulled the kitchen wire door shut and pulled on his boots where the clay had dried and stuck. I am thinking about how my father bent down and picked up those boots and placed them on the wooden slatted bench on the verandah and then lifted his right socked foot up onto the bench and put one boot on, and put that booted foot down and lifted his left socked foot and put the second boot on, and how it was an operation, an operation which took a while, and all the while we would sit inside at the kitchen table and we would be quieter than usual, we would be waiting for him to go, we would shift in our cheap wooden chairs and wait to hear our father’s heavy footfall move off the verandah and away into the farm. I was thinking of the flood, the suddenness and inexorability of the water, the way the water flowed down the Lachlan river and its tributaries, the way my father shifted the sheep and the cattle to higher ground as the water claimed the lower black soils and then the higher red clay where the spindly cypress pine grew. I am thinking of the vulnerability of that whole dead-looking land, the way it sank under the water, silently and passively, the way the road disappeared and we could no longer get from one end of the farm to another and livestock were stranded and hungry, and fences and sheep were swept away, and a mob of cows, a whole mob walked in single file down the railway line, regally, and stopped a freight train in its tracks. I am thinking of the clay stuck to the shoe, tenaciously, and of a local boy who told me a local saying: stick with it in the dry and it will stick to you in the wet and the dry laugh he gave, like something stuck in the throat. I am thinking of the urge to flee, the way I did not belong there in that place where you had to roll with it, roll under the dry of it and the flood of it, the heat, the heartaches and the silences, and how everything got stuck on the skin, and how I didn’t know it then but it was stuck on my skin for good.

Catherine Deery lives in Bendigo, on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Her flash fiction has been published in Barren Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, and the Bath Flash Fiction Award.