‘Can you feel it, Mum?’ she whispers. ‘We’re on top now, Mum. Can you feel it? We’re floating. We’re on top!’ And seen from the daylight blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, through the smoke and the earth debris, they are mother and daughter, flat on their backs and hand in hand, waiting for war to stop falling from the sky.
‘We’re on top, Mum,’ she whispers. ‘We’re on top, Mum. We’re on top, Mum.’
BLOOD FLOWERS BLOOMING
Black ants. From so high up in the sky, through the flat glass canopy window of a top-speeding Zero, all those scrambling soldiers and citizens of Darwin, Australia, look like black ants to Yukio Miki of old town Sakai. Helpless black ants zipping in and out of concrete buildings like the organised-chaos lines of the black carpenter ants he’d stare at as a boy. He would rest his chin on his knee by a pile of firewood near his family’s backyard incinerator and watch the lines of carpenter ants butt heads trying to figure out how they were going to make use of such a large plunder of wood. Yukio would run his boyhood fingers along the entry holes to the tunnel networks the ants had chewed inside the fire logs and he’d wonder how creatures so seemingly disordered could create something so smooth and artful. And he would marvel for a full hour at the relentless industry of those carpenter ants and then his heart would hurt when his father, Oshiro, would grip two logs filled with a whole microscopic civilisation of black ants, a whole world built by toil, and toss them so casually into the incinerator. The heat of that stone box. The flames from it. The fire. All that yellow and red.
Everything inside his cockpit is hot and rattling now. Too much noise up here. Greased metal and unprotected mechanical controls: rattling cowl-flap controls, fuel-tank selectors, hydraulic system controls, buzzing electric switchboxes, landing-gear controls. Jammed in hard inside the cramped flying machine, part of the awe-inspiring and awful arrow of thirty-six agile red-sun fighters now nose-diving through the air towards central Darwin, Yukio thinks of his late grandfather, Saburo Miki, a strange and thoughtful man, who once told Yukio the riddle of the blood flower. ‘The blood flower blooms only when provoked,’ Saburo Miki said. ‘The blood flower blooms on battlefields.’
All that flame, Yukio tells himself. And he remembers Pearl Harbor. How he kept firing and firing and hoping those American warship cannons would fire back and a direct hit would end it all for him and he would be at peace because he could then stop firing, end it all with his honour intact. All that burning, he tells himself. All that yellow and red turning to black down there. Down there where Darwin is being incinerated. Just like all those Japanese carpenter ants. All that work those people down there put into their little city by the sea, all set alight by Yukio and his brothers. The blood flowers are blooming across Darwin. The pattern of bombs dropped by the Nakajima B5Ns. Bloom. Bloom. Bloom.
Yukio’s left hand reaches for the gunsight fixed between his two 7.7-millimetre machine guns. The Zeroes will strafe a series of military installations. The Zeroes will fire at anything in their way and they will shoot those black ants in the back and in the front and in the side, and those black ants will not fire back because they’re not ready to.
The low-flying Zeroes on his left and right release their terrifying strafing fire and the machine-gun rounds thump through concrete and dirt and human flesh. But Yukio Miki can’t bring himself to pull his trigger. He cannot fire on all those fleeing carpenter ants. And if he cannot fire in this moment, if he cannot serve his brothers as he vowed, then he is a coward and he is an enemy of his brothers and the enemy must be vanquished.
He reaches his right hand out to grip the photograph of Nara. He pulls it from the ball of gum above his fuel gauge and he slides the photograph carefully into the breast pocket of his shirt beneath his puffy flight jacket. And he knows now what he must do, and so he searches through his glass canopy window for a building tall enough to fly directly into at the Zero’s top speed of five hundred kilometres per hour, but all the buildings of Darwin have been incinerated. Then he pulls back hard left on his flight stick and the Zero suddenly veers away from the formation in an arcing left turn that makes no sense to his brothers on the wings beside him.
But Yukio needs to fly away from here. He needs to leave the blood flowers blooming. He needs to find the sky again. And then he needs to find a mountain.
THE BONE PILLOW
Molly wakes. She hears the distant sound of the air raid siren in town. Her head is on its side and her eyes are adjusting to the image of her own left hand resting on the ribcage of her mother’s skeleton. Her fingers brush the worn and damp fabric still pressed to her mother’s chest bones. She needs to look inside. There are answers inside.
Molly raises her head, rests her weight on her elbow. She stares at the square of fabric and it might as well be a curtain, the kind of curtain one pulls back on theatre stages or sideshow alleys to reveal great wonders never before seen. She closes
