The Seventh Day by Joy Dettman Read Free Book Online

beneath it, is another of red and white squares. I shake this one, certain it will fall apart in my hands, but the fabric is good. It is good. I find more of them, one of aged yellow and one of green with many flowers of many colours upon it. Quickly I gather them, and the brown blanket which, when shaken free, becomes a hooded cloak I have not seen before.
    Learn to cover yourself, Lenny had said. His words sent me here. So I will cover myself with what I have found.
    My feet still beside the meat freezer while I focus the light beam on a black stain. Surely it is glue spilled from the adhesive gun. But trapped within it is the imprint of a shoe and there is no such shoe worn on Morgan land. Our boots leave a pattern of bars in the dust and my sandals leave behind no mark at all.
    I stoop, scratch at the shoe print with a fingernail. Glue is immovable. I have tried often enough to move it from my window. This is not glue. I spit on the black flakes collected beneath my nail and rub the colour on my palm.
    And it is blood! Dried blood.
    Who leaned beside this freezer? Who left his footprint, his handprints for me to find? My light beam searches the walls, the floor. Then there is no more time to ask questions nor to chase answers for my light disturbs a black rat.
    Granny did not fear the rats. She said once that she killed them, ate them, and they kept her alive. I fear them and do not wish to eat them. Fast then I run up the swaying stairs, my arms loaded.
    It is late afternoon when I shake the much-flowered garment free of its sharp folds. A strange colourful thing, made with stitching so small, Granny’s reelthreads and needles could not do such work, but it is a silly thing which has a front and no back. I like its large flowers well, and its many colours, so I play with it, and with the red and white thing, which is of similar construction. All four of these garments have a front but no back! Some time passes before I find the correct pathway into the flowered one, which has wide bands that reach across my shoulders, and long ties that wrap the half-dress at my waist. The breast section is wide, covering well the space in my overall. I try the brown cloak then and it reaches my ankles. Strange fastenings? They are of holes on the one side of it and wooden discs on the other that I must thread through the holes, but it covers me and has a hood to hide away my flaming hair. I think it will be very good for when the searchers fly, and I think Lenny will be pleased with it, though its heat is too much for today; also it holds a strange odour. I remove it, press my nose to the fabric, breathing in the odour. So familiar it is, yet I can not find the place of its memory. Surely Granny had worn it. I hang it behind the door then walk from my room to the mirror that lives inside a tall cabinet near the top of the stairs.
    Granny once told me she smashed every mirror in the house when she returned from the city. She did not smash this one. It is small, and shows only small parts of me. I twist and turn before it, I bend and peer at the imp of my reflection. Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes do not smile. I think she sees the flowers, of pink and yellow and blue. I think she wears a sad smile, but I like the imp’s eyes, which are green as the pumpkin leaves.
    Pride comes before a fall, girl.
    â€˜You are in the graveyard, Granny,’ I say to her as I walk away from the mirror. She follows me downstairs to the kitchen, and when I open a plasti-can of fruitjell and stand eating it, she is leaning over my shoulder for I swear I feel the spray of her spittle on the back of my neck.
    She was born in this house, as was her father, and her father’s grandfather, and even old Aaron Morgan before them. Granny once told me that he was alive in the time of the Great Ending, which was long, long ago, that he had lived for one hundred and five years, had lived to walk with her and hold her infant hand, though he had not