This time Simi does not fall asleep. Her mind is too troubled to let her, too full of fresh wounds and the guilt of being distanced from them. She forces herself back to the window, to witness what has happened. Leaning over, she locks on to the helicopter’s shadow as it skims above the damage, now highlighting the red gash of a landslide. She feels the tear of it, imagines it ripping down through the soil and boulders, before crushing to a standstill with its skin in its fist, and the earth flayed open behind it. She follows the scar, tracking its length, down, down, down to what had once been a village below.

“Terrible. Terrible.”

Through her headphones she hears the pilot, his words distant, like echoes from her own soul. As he swoops the helicopter lower Simi sees a man try to pull a tree off a pile off bricks. There is a small child sitting on a rock not far behind him. Neither look up, their silent bodies punctuating the ruins. A little further on she sees other adults scattered, digging, searching, desperation in every barehanded movement. And she thinks of Tonderai. Of Tonderai trying to reach his brother. Of Jacobus and Tim with Tonderai. All searching for his family. His village. His relatives. The wives and children. In their houses, brick built and new. All in a valley. Close to a river. Simi hopes that it is not this valley. She hopes that Marybelle’s prayers will keep them safe.

She leans forward, yearning for her looking to help in some miraculous way. But it doesn’t. And she knows it doesn’t. All it does is spool the nightmare on and on, fogging her with hopelessness, as the helicopter thuds away from the river, and on over the hills. But even so she does not look away. She cannot. Deeply anguished, and fogged with pent up fever, she knows the looking is the least she can do.

At last, and gradually, the miles beneath begin to dry out, allowing her some respite from the constant watching, but not from the pain. That is back, whirring between hand and head, tight and constant as the whipping whine of the blades. She tries to sit stone still – no leaning, no looking, nothing that will aggravate anything.

When Katania turns around in her seat, to give her a cheery thumbs up, she is not able to even attempt a response, and realises there is no need, for Katania does not wait for one before turning back to her view. Simi closes her eyes. She tries to steady her breathing, to force her body to relax. She slows each breath deep into her lungs, again and again, loosening the freshest of the images, but others take their place.

There, in the centre of her darkness, is the fire drum, its glow shifting between light and smoke, and beside it is Tonderai, the storyteller. And there are Jacobus and Tim. She sees them in the distance struggling beyond the thumping door. Searching. Searching. Digging through villages. Searching for children. Stepping over bones. Searching for Girl.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023