The Sky So Heavy by Claire Zorn Read Free Book Online

the dodgiest washing-up job of all time, but I didn’t want to waste water that could be drunk. I woke Max to help wipe up, something which would normally cause a fair amount of pre-teen wrath, but this time didn’t get much response. He silently trudged into the kitchen and began wiping the dishes. His fingers were bone white. Max doesn’t have the kind of surface area to volume ratio that lends itself to heat retention. (Thank you biology class.) He never did. When we used to go to swimming lessons he would last a maximum of twenty minutes in the water before the instructors started to worry about public liability and let him get out.
    He told me quietly that he was really cold.
    ‘How many layers you got on?’ I asked him.
    ‘Five. Can hardly move.’
    ‘I’m sorry, dude . . . It’ll be over soon.’
    ‘You don’t know that.’
    ‘No. I don’t . . . but . . .’
    He put down the tea towel and looked up at me. ‘What’s going to happen, Fin?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘It’s really cold. We have to light the fire.’
    ‘We don’t have any dry wood.’
    ‘We have to find some. Have to try and dry it out. Fin, I’m really cold.’
    Where the hell was I going to find dry firewood? The furniture? After we’d done the washing-up I told Max to stay inside and find some newspaper. I went out the front door, put the tracksuit pants and hoodie on over my clothes and nudged my feet into my sneakers without touching them.
    Dad kept the firewood stacked down the side of the house, against the wall, under the eaves. He used to keep it covered with a heavy tarp, but we hadn’t been near the pile that winter. I had actually noticed the tarp lying on the ground once when I was putting the bins out and hadn’t even bothered to put it back on. Surely someone, somewhere, was getting a laugh out of that.
    The logs were piled to about waist height. Wedges of turpentine: the kind of thick stringy bark that flints away and gets wedged under your fingernails. I brushed the ice off them and lifted the logs from the pile one by one. I dropped them each by my feet where they landed with a dull thud. I thought maybe the ones right at the bottom of the pile would be the driest and I was right. With heavy lugs of the axe I split them into smaller wedges. Then I carried all the wood, dry and damp, up to the porch. I took off my shoes, hoodie and tracksuit pants and took each damp piece of wood in, stacking them against the kitchen wall. It took an age. When I was done I gathered up the smaller dry pieces and took them into the living room.
    Max had found a few old newspapers in the garage. We scrunched the sheets into balls and stuffed them into the fireplace. I made a little tepee over the top with the thinnest strips of wood, my substitute for kindling. Max lit a match and threw it in. The newspaper caught fire and the room lit up with the sudden glow. Max and I watched the fire intently as it devoured the newspaper and flames shot and rumbled up the chimney. The tongues of flame lapped and curled around the shards of wood. I waited until the fire built before carefully placing a larger log inside. We didn’t breathe, waiting to see if the wood would catch. Finally, just as the fire ran out of kindling and started to die away, the turpentine bark flared and a long thin flame quivered and reached up. Max and I exhaled. We rocked back onto our bums and hugged our knees, gazing at the flame.
    The knock at the door startled us, like a teacher shouting from the front of the classroom when you didn’t know you were doing anything wrong. Max and I looked at each other. The knock sounded again. Dad wouldn’t knock. I got to my feet and went to the door, Max at my heels. I looked through the peephole: cops – one guy and one girl. Hot worry rushed thick and black through me. I swallowed and opened the door. The girl beamed at me.
    ‘Hi there, I’m Constable Lund, this is Senior Constable Palmer. We’re just doing a whip around the