Caravellum

The rain was mid-sentence when I realised it was speaking to me. The breaks in the pattern of drops upon my akubra formed a silhouette of words, felt more than heard.
“Sorry?” I asked. Bess watched me as I waited in the basin of the once-river, water slaking its dried banks as it ran in rivulets that drained into the cracked earth. After several minutes, the absence-of-speech returned.
“We are lost and hope for you to help us.” I focused to decipher the splash of puddles pooling in the folds of my jacket.
“Where were you heading?” I sat on the bough of a felled tree to wait, its broken bark coloured dark with the moisture. Bess padded beneath the shade of a gum snag and shook the water from her grey coat.
“We flowed through a river filled with life here once. We wish to find it.”
I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure if it could see that, or understand what it meant.
“Hasn’t been a river here for years. Was all rerouted upstream.” I felt the rain upon my outstretched finger, tracing a direction back up the hillside.
“But I wouldn’t head that way if I were you.” I said. Minutes passed. More words did not come yet the rain stayed still.
“All just coolant for the big box now. Zero life in those waters; just heat and filth.”
The word was a short one, and took several tries to capture.
“Why?”
I answered honestly.
“I don’t know.”
There was a longer wait. The clouds grew darker, the rain fell heavier, and the words came in a crackle.
“You should leave this place.”
I looked at Bess as she hobbled on her old legs to a stand, a life of zooming through this bush behind her.
“How long do we have?”
“We will wait.”

No sooner were Bess and I packed into the ute and zigzagging down the gravel road did the lightning strike and the thunder silence the sound of the blast. The lick of flame and smoke carried above the trees, arcing in the rear-mirror, but even that was soon drowned by the rain. Those heavy drops beat down upon the breached steel box, shearing its panels, squelching its wires from the sodden ground and lifting it all down the hillside in a river reclaimed.

After the townsfolk returned from the evac-centre and picked up the pieces from the flood, the suits and the turtlenecks and the hardhats returned. The river was dammed once more – a thicker wall and a harder box at its head – and things were forgotten. But I’ll hold onto the terror I felt racing those beautifully raging waves, and I’ll keep praying for the mercy of the rain.