Emily Macdonald

Reg watches the Rotorangi from under the veranda. The poplars dance sideways, a listing line of willowy chorus girls, silver-black against a raw, aching sky. Reg figures he can tell the gale force by watching how far they sidle. Forty to fifty already, and the main force not due to hit until tonight.  

‘Reggie!’ 

The fantail springs onto the handrail beside him. Flecks of peeling paint swirl in the wind. The bird cocks its head to one side then flits into the shelter of flax bushes below, its tail feathers flick open and closed.  

‘REGINALD!’  

What now? Tea? Glasses? Pills? She can wait a little longer. Seems he only just left her. He stands, considering the wind, ignoring his Ma’s shouting when the phone rings, shrill in the dark passage behind him, bringing him inside.

‘Yup?’

‘D’ya need a hand leaving? Time to get the hell out. Real howler coming.’ Murray always talks like it’s decided. ‘What time d’ya want me to come? Can’t leave it too long.’

Reg hesitates. ‘Dunno, not sure we’re gonna go.’

Reg hears Murray draw in breath and holds the phone away from his ear. He knows what’s coming; ‘Don’t wait to consult the bloody oracle. Don’t ask our Ma, just tell her. She can’t be stranded up there. Make up your own bloody mind.’ 

Easy from where you’re standing, thinks Reg. 

Reg knows they joke about him down in the town, Reg the Hedge, the guy whose beer gets warm before he decides when to drink it. The guy who stands because he can’t decide which bar stool to sit on. The guy who stayed because he couldn’t decide when to leave. Reg knows Murray stokes the jokes though to Reg he says, ‘You gotta learn to make up your mind. Someday someone’s life might depend on it.’ 

‘Gotta go. Ma’s calling,’ Reg says and hangs up on Murray.

The fantail hops through the open door, onto the tattered rag rug, grim with age. Reg catches the flick flit of its black and white tail.  

‘Skit you bloody bird.’ He crosses himself and shoos the bird out of the doorway. ‘Don’t go bringing your bad luck in ‘ere.’    

He climbs the narrow stairs, listening to the wind beating the barn door in time with his tread.  

‘REGGIE!’

Shut up woman he thinks, or I’ll fetch that bloody bird right back in.

Ma heaves under her eiderdown, her hands clutch the covers. She fixes him with small screwed up eyes. 

‘About bloody time. What took you so long?’

‘The wind. Hellava storm coming. Maybe we should get out.’   

She laughs; a brittle humourless sound then starts at him. She’s seen more storms than he’s had hot dinners. Only cowards run. A man stays and defends. She’s not shifting. Over her dead body. She gives him her ice stare, like she’s reading his thoughts, daring him to wish it out loud. 

Reg retrieves her glasses from the floor, wipes them on his undershirt. He rubs the windowpane, peers out at the crags and deep gullies.

‘What are you waiting for? Go on, git.’ The old woman expels air from her mouth, a hiss mixed with spit.

Reg weighs up his options. The sheep will be right on the leeward side of top ridge.  He mustered them last week. Well, they moved themselves and Reg didn’t find a reason to change their mind. The barn is a worry. Shearing shed too. Reg heads outside again, hears the tin-ringing clap of corrugated iron lifting. Stay or go? The creek will rise, cutting them off.  He’ll be left out here with bedridden Ma and no help to come for…who knows how long? He thinks – take long enough to decide and a happening still happens – that’s one way to make up his mind. 

Reg stares at the sky. It’s steely and bruised. He glances at the poplars again, bending more acutely, like the dancing girls are drunk, heaving over, feeling crook. He sees the trees and sees his own child’s back, bent over, digging the holes to plant them, thirty years ago. He feels his own heave, his own crook feeling when the old man kicked him for being too slow, for not digging deep enough. He sees his body buried up to his neck, the smell of the dank earth, the feel of the worms, the small creatures creeping.  

‘I’ll teach ya,’ the old man had said. ‘I’ll show you bloody deep enough.’

Reg whistles to Fly and climbs the rugged ridge behind the house, bracing forward. He stares down the valley, studying shapes in the gloom. North Easterly. The rain, maybe an hour off, two at the most. Weird. Yesterday was fine. Crisp, sharp like a good apple and clear with a pricking Southerly, a reminder – winter is coming. 

He sees distant flashes of lightning, jagged punctuations in the sky. He counts, waiting for the rumble of thunder. At twenty, he turns and starts the scramble back down the ridge line.  

The thunder crack startles him, a shot and retort, and Reg skids, losing his footing, slides in the scree, tumbles, fumbling for purchase until he slams his boot against a tussock covered rock and he lies winded, chest mountainous in its rise and fall. Fly barks and whines, hackles rising.  

‘All right boy. I’m ok. All right boy.’ Fly barks and growls over Reg’s head. ‘It’s ok you stupid dog. There’s nothing there. Let’s get outa here, back down.’  

Jeez, he thinks remembering the fantail. On his feet, he crosses himself again, then curses, and spits on the ground. He looks back up at the heavy sky, and then directly down at the homestead. It looks diminutive, fragile, posts as frail as matchsticks, weatherboard to snap, splinter in his hand. He imagines stepping giant-like, flattening it under his boot, hearing the crack and tear of the timbers, grinding it into the ground. Ma and all. 

Battling against the harsh push of the wind Reg creeps down the ridge, leaning back into the slope, placing his feet in solid steps. ‘Easy now,’ he tells himself.  

He eyes the rusty barbed-wire line. One of those jobs he should have got to sooner if he’d been able to decide which advice to follow. The fence is sagging and swaying, loosening fence posts. Too slack to snap, but rocking and humming, whining, in eerie vibration. 

Stay or go, work needs doing. Boarding, battening, nailing down. Reg thinks how decisions are easy when the fallout don’t hurt. When there’s no boot aimed at your head. No lock out, no sneering, ‘you’ll always be a bloody useless shit.’ Murray, well he can decide ‘cause he’s used to good outcomes. ‘Good on ya son,’ Ma would say. ‘Good on ya son’ and she’d clap a hand on Murray’s shoulder, her chosen one. 

The old man’s gestures were ones Reg had to duck or run from, a smashing empty bottle, a ricocheting right hook. 

‘You useless piece of shit. You’ll come to a bad end,’ the old man would yell.

Fly hunkers down under the veranda, ears cocked. He barks when the phone rings again. The phone rings and rings and Fly howls, ears flattened, lifting his muzzle into the wind.  

Reg hammers, tussles with iron panels, slashes of rust red against the granite sky. The first rain falls, heavy drops skate off his oil skin, to puddle mud at his feet. Water drips from the rim of his hat, the wind pulls the toggle tight under his chin.

It’s alright for Murray, with his pretty wife down in the town. Murray likes to tell Reg what to do but he’s not the one out here in all weathers, trying to make ends meet, trying to keep the Ma off his back. Trying to claw back what the old man pissed away.  

Reg plants the ladder on the western side of the shearing shed, feels his foot on the first rung, bounces it into the muddying ground. He climbs slowly, crunched over, nails in his mouth, hammer in his pockets. The wind whips, slaps, and tears. Reg climbs and slides flat over the lip, onto the iron roof. It buckles and quivers, panels rising and falling like waves on an angry red sea. The rain drums, torrents in the grooves, flooding the guttering, hosing to the ground.  

Reg squints at the creek. Bit of time yet. It’s rising, but bit of time yet. He turns back to his task. 

Reg hammers. He hammers more than he needs to. He drives nails into always-do-it-right Murray, greasing up to Ma, hiding behind her hot pans and steely gaze. He hammers the old man, hits him back and hits him back. He hammers. Hammers Ma for shutting her all-seeing eyes.

Reg creeps up from his crouch. He stretches, stands upright, buffeted, blown wild on the roof. He turns his head to the sky, lets the rain pummel and drum, and wetten and wash. He pulls his hat back off his head, feels the string pull, lacerating his neck. He opens his arms wide, and he roars. He roars into the cracking thunderous sky, the whiplashing squall and boom, crack ba-boom, he pulls his head back and he roars, raising a fist to the sky.  

‘Come and get me ya bugger. Give me all you’ve got!’

The rain is sheeting, spraying off the ground when Murray swings his Ute into the yard. Murray shouts up at Reg and points to the creek, but Reg can’t hear him over the wind. He sails on the roof, his black oil skin flying behind him.

Murray runs bent over to the house, then reappears, staggering, the old woman bundled on his shoulder, carried in a fireman’s lift. Her feeble arms slap, her mouth gapes, the raging storm snatches her protests.  

Murray is nosing the Ute into the ford when there’s a bang like a rifle shot, a cracking whip-whine and blast. The stand of poplars explodes, fiery sparks spinning skyward. 

Reg stares at the burning trees, mesmerised by the girls, blazing beautiful with fire. He stares at the sparks igniting the steel of sky. He stares, tracing embers like rubies, bloodied and potent.  

Reg doesn’t see Murray start, brake, and stall, marooning the Ute in the rushing creek water. He doesn’t see Murray try the engine, try the engine in the splutter and swamp.  

He does hear the Ute horn; its sharp note pierces his revery and he turns from the flaming trees to see the vehicle in flood. He imagines he can see the panic on Murray’s face, his jaw working, his movements harried and scrabbling as he tries the engine, tries his door.

Reg chews his lip. He watches the water rising against the doors of the Ute. He lowers himself, unhurried, to sit on the shed roof like he’s settling in. 

The squall and thunder, the slashing rain, the fury of the rushing river blusters all around him, but he becomes still. Reg is thinking, trying to make up his mind.  

The Ute’s lights shine in the storm water, the windscreen wipers flap in a frenzy. Reg smiles, thinking of Ma cursing Murray, telling him he’s a fool, a bloody idiot, a useless piece of shit.

The rain is percussive hard metal on metal. Reg watches the creek surge into angry waves. He buries a hand in his coat and pulls out his tobacco. His hands are red and grimy, but he rolls a tab and sticks it in his mouth. He sucks like he’s smoking though the tobacco is wet, inhales deeply to slow his breathing and turns his eyes back to the creek. He watches in slow fascination as the spit and seething slurry lifts the Ute, spins it, turning and flitting like the fantails feathered tail, light and floating, tilting and turning sideways and backwards, down the ravine.  

Let it happen, thinks Reg. It’s one way to make up his mind. 

This piece was previously published by Bath Short Story Award Anthology 2023

Emily Macdonald was born in England but grew up in New Zealand. She has stories published in anthologies and online journals such as Bull Lit, Fictive Dream, Punk Noir, Gooseberry Pie Lit and The Phare. She has been nominated for Best Microfiction (Raw List) and the Pushcart (Flash Frontier). She was shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story prize in 2025 and the Bath Short Story Award in 2023 and 2024. Her collection of driving related stories, Wheel Spin and Traction, was published in November 2023.
Links to her published writing can be found here: https://www.macdonaldek11.com
Socials: Instagram, Bluesky, X: Facebook