Simi angles her head against the window as she tries to look back and up towards the lodge. She sees most of it still standing, walls complete, but everywhere it is compromised by debris and broken trees. She tries to tip her head a little further to catch a last glimpse of her own room, but the bulk of her hairwrap, and protests from her neck, pull her back to the verandah’s torn roof, and the stubborn stand of the billiard room.

She wonders again who will pay for the repairs, and briefly wishes she could see into the future, then changes her mind.

I would never have come in the first place if I’d known.

She leans the top of her head against the window and closes her eyes. The heavy plod of sleep tugs at her, drifts her away. Then the rotor blades change their pitch, and her eyes flick open again. She struggles to hold them wide, but they droop, floppy as sunhats, and she lets herself doze in their shade, deeper and deeper. Next time it is the quickening speed of the tiny vibrations in the window that wake her, as the whole craft starts to hum, reaching for lift. She looks up. This is it. She places her good hand flat on the window, fingers splayed in farewell, and tries to memorise each of the windrushed faces outside. Then they are gone, pushed backwards by the acceleration of the bunker-flooded golf course below.

Simi drops her hand back into her lap and turns away from the window, wiping her tears. She knows, and understands, but still cannot quite believe, that Marybelle, bright as a never dimming bulb, is gone.

The pilot’s voice floats into Simi’s headset.

“I’m going to take you as low as possible for as long as possible so we can get a good assessment of the damage.”

Simi straightens her back, and tries to see down between Katania and the pilot to the world limping beneath them, but the effort curdles her stomach. She leans back, hoping that the sensation will pass. Slowly it does.

“That’s the tea factory below us now.”

She peers down and sees the jagged edges of a large roof, fractured as a jigsaw, with bits of machinery sticking through at odd angles. Fencing lies around it, tangled in fallen trees, and littered here and there with bits of roof and the occasional car. They fly on beyond the factory, above their own shadow, darting black beneath them, as they follow a washed away road down towards a brown and angry river. On one bank, half a bridge, its end ripped, sticks out towards its other half on the opposite bank, where a small group of people stands beside a lone blue truck.

Simi watches them for as long as the turmoil in her body will let her, then she leans back, suddenly overwhelmed by the fallen trees, and wounded buildings, by the sight of those trapped and waiting, and by her own sadness.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023