The creek on her brother John’s farm was quieter than most, the water a trickle. Worms wriggled in the mud, leaving relief prints of their movements.
Olivia’s niece and nephew came screaming up behind her, fighting over the fishing pole. Their father, already a bottle into his night’s drinking, walked behind them, calling, ‘Watch out for the creeky ladies. Those nasty wet ladies will get you if you don’t watch out.’ His voice creaked, like an old rusty door.
Olivia and the children exchanged glances. ‘He always calls them that,’ her nephew said.
‘We know they’re the Quaking Women.’
‘And how do you know if they’ve been nearby?’
‘If you’re ever by a creek and see sticks crossed, you’ll know they’ve been there. You might see drag marks. That’s them when they’re tired.’
Olivia nodded at them. They loved the horror story of the Quaking Women and would make her tell it every time. They were the only ones who really listened.
‘Tell us,’ her nephew said.
‘The Quaking Women rest in creeks around Australia. Sometimes they might poke their noses out of the water but mostly they hold their breath for a long, long time.
‘Doesn’t matter where they drown. The dead bodies’ll swim to a creek, rest in the mud down the bottom. They’ll try to make it out to sea. That’s what mermaids are. Quaking Women who’ve made it to sea. They’re sad and full of loss. If you listen in a shell you’ll hear the soft sigh of the mermaids wishing they were back in the creek.
‘They come out of the mud all clean. Big round faces, shiny cheeks. High cheekbones sticking out shiny and red right under their eyes.’
Her nephew paddled at the water’s edge. She pulled him back. ‘Never swim in a place you can’t see the bottom. Concrete walls are best. When it’s cold, they live down the bottom, grasping at your toes.’
‘Tell us what they’re looking for,’ her niece said. She loved a mystery, was always deep into a fat crime novel although she was only nine.
‘They’re looking for the people they loved. It makes them angry, because they’re lost and lonely. So angry they shake and quiver. And they’re cold. Even in the shimmering Australian heat, when mirages of water dapple the long dark highways, they shiver with cold. They are looking for families a hundred years dead, or children long grown.’
‘What did they say to you?’ her nephew asked. This was the best bit.
‘“Bring me my baby boy,” one screamed. “Bring me my little William.” Then she came at me with her long, rubbery fingers like eels, and they were so long they tangled in my hair and that’s why I have a bald spot.’
She pulled back her hair to show them; the children screamed, as they always did, and ran to their father’s arms.
There, they quivered and shook, then they settled by the water’s edge with John to catch some fish. In the quiet, Olivia thought she could hear the women whispering, as she sometimes did. Sometimes she’d whisper back. Words like, ‘I’m sorry to inform you, but your little William passed away in 1952 due to a heart attack.’
Olivia stood back from the water’s edge, watching them, thinking of the quaking women and the time her father and she had been almost drowned by them, twenty-one years earlier.
Olivia had watched her father pack his bags for a month away. ‘Take me. I’m bored here.’
‘Go on,’ her mother said. ‘You two are like peas in a pod. Smart, observant and dry around the humour gills. You’ll get on well on a long trip like this.’
Tucker shook his head. ‘She’s too young.’
‘She’s eighteen. And she loves the bush.’
Olivia said, ‘Especially after the rain, when it all feels possible. When life feels livable.’
‘Life isn’t livable otherwise?’ Tucker asked, looking at her. ‘All right. You pack. Not too much, though. We’re not going on some fancy dancing holiday. We’re renaming creeks. I’m not promising excitement.’
The old colonial creek names no longer made any sense (Five Miles from where? Dinner for whom?) and there was little interest in using the traditional names, although Tucker had suggested this would be the easiest, cheapest and best option. Instead, he would survey the land and rename the creeks for the current topography.
Tucker and Olivia stopped at every creek within a hundred kilometres radius, meeting the rare person along the banks. They took photos, made sketches, and chatted to the locals in the nearby towns. Everyone was proud of their creek. Tucker would ask about the yabbies, or how deep the water got, or how often it dried up. The locals loved to talk and the history they gave helped him develop the nomenclature.
The creeks were very high. There had been rain, more than average, and the roads were hard to travel in some places. They camped out or spent the night in cheap motels, and they called home every couple of days. Her siblings cursed her for her luck; you always get taken out, they said. It’s always you who gets the luck.
That’s because I’m a good person, she told them.
The creeks gave off a steady hum. Pink noise. Each one slightly different and Olivia wondered if you recorded them, would they make music?
It was at Dinner Creek they saw footprints in the muddy bank. Toes spread wide, someone who always went bare foot. Olivia placed her own feet over the prints; this person was much larger than she was. Heavy. She looked up and saw a woman ankle deep in the water with her hair slicked back, her clothing sodden. She seemed weighted down. Her head was bowed.
Olivia, stunned for a moment, stepped forward to help. ‘Are you okay?’ she said. The woman shivered and quaked, although the day was scorching hot. Her whole body quivered; her face, her arms, her thighs.
The woman walked towards Olivia slowly. ‘Dad!’ Olivia called softly. ‘Are you seeing this?’ He’d been setting up the stove to make a cup of tea, but he came around beside her.
‘Where’d she come from?’ he asked.
Olivia reached out to the woman. ‘Are you okay?’ she said again. The woman lifted her head then and Olivia saw that she had not been okay for some time. ‘What?’ Olivia said. ‘What happened?’
The woman’s skin was green, mottled. Her eyes may once have been blue but now were white, bleached by the sun or damaged by water. Her fingernails were short and cracked, as if she’d been clawing her way along the creek bed, which was lined with tiny stones and sand. She shivered and quaked.
Olivia stepped back.
Another woman emerged from the water, and Olivia turned. This woman moved like crashing water and grabbed her, a cold, hard hand on her shoulder, and pulled her close. She screamed in Olivia’s ear, ‘Where is my husband, where is he? Where is Alan Barnett?’
The other woman screamed, ‘Give me back my baby. You stole my baby. Where is my Gloria Rose Milton?’
Another woman rose out of the creek, her hair slicked back out of her eyes, streaming down her back.
Four of them, a fifth behind, a sixth. All of them screaming names at Olivia as if she were the record taker. Where is my little William, my William Tollis?
Olivia wrenched herself away from the women, turned and ran. She heard a gurgle behind her and saw that Tucker’s feet were glugged in the mud and that he’d fallen to his knees. He dragged himself forward, like the women had, by his fingertips. One scraped her fingernails down his left arm, drawing blood. He managed to get himself away from them and the women fell back, sank into the high water. Tucker pulled himself to Olivia and collapsed at her feet. She tugged at his hair.
‘Let’s get to the truck. Come on. They’re back in the water now but let’s get to the truck.’
Her voice sounded echoey in her head, as if her ears were blocked. Tucker nodded. He said loudly, ‘Jesus Christ, what were they?’
They ran to the truck, Olivia fiddling for the keys. It was unlocked; they’d gotten into that habit, and she started the engine before either of them had their seatbelts on. They left the camp stove behind.
The hum of the motor was a comfort, but seemed very low. ‘God, I hope the truck’s all right,’ she said.
She backed up the dirt road, turned around, and drove until they were ten kilometres or so away.
She pulled into a rest area, and they sat, the truck still humming, for a minute.
‘I need the toilet,’ Tucker said, and he threw open the door. He was shaking, his whole body taken with it. His words bounced in her head; she wondered if this was how a migraine began.
Her head rang as if there was broken glass inside it.
‘I’ve got that too,’ Tucker said when he came back and saw her with her hands cupping her ears. His hands held aloft, wet from washing them with tank water. ‘It’s like bells going off in my head.’ He was still shaking.
‘Those women,’ she said.
Neither of them could drive. The shakes had started in Olivia, too, and the ringing in her head made it hard to think. Tucker tried to be the father, take control, look after her, but in the end they had to call her mother and brother to come and collect them.
Olivia rode in the truck with John, who was not annoyed at being dragged away from his life because Olivia never asked for help and neither did her father.
He gave her the picnic rug out of the boot. It was dirty, muddy and there were bits of dried food and spilled tea from the meals Olivia and Tucker had shared on it, but it was warm. She shivered uncontrollably for the first hour of the trip, then it was just her hands that shook. They would always shake; Tucker would always have that all-over body shake.
They spoke about the quaking women, John asking confused questions that she couldn’t answer. ‘So where did they go then? Where did they come from?’ She scrabbled for paper but all she could find were their maps so she wrote the names she remembered them screaming at her around the edges in a purple texta she found under the seat.
There were no name changes of the creeks of Australia.
The air chilled and Olivia realised the family was walking back up to the house, leaving her alone by the creek. In the creek. She’d wandered in, so lost in thought, and her feet were stuck in the mud.
It felt good; soft and cool. She thought she didn’t mind the water, the gentle lapping against her shins, but then she felt fingers grab her toes and she screamed, panicked, tipped backwards and landed in the water.
Her family didn’t come back for her, but neither did the Quaking Women emerge. She pulled herself up and walked, dripping, to the house, enjoying the silence.
No one noticed as she walked in. No one banged on the bathroom door for her to hurry for dinner. When she emerged, the meal was done, and she was left to scrape left-overs out of the pot.
She heard her brother on the phone. ‘It’s your turn. I’ve had her for a week,’ and wondered which sibling he was talking to. She thought she’d been helping. Watching the kids, making the breakfast. But she knew as well that most families have their ways and don’t like them to be interrupted.
Her siblings all had strong marriages. Olivia didn’t envy them. The confinement of it, always having to think of others; she hated the idea. She didn’t want to love anyone with that intensity. There were the nightmares, too. She didn’t want to inflict them on anybody and she knew how she sounded at night. Lovers had told her so. It wasn’t water she dreamt about, but the dry creek bed, imprinted with the faces of those women. She woke up dry in the throat, choking.
She didn’t think anyone should have to hear that.
She ate her dinner watching the news. Drownings were on the rise; nobody could explain why. Children taken, fathers. Husbands. Bones spat out, perhaps, when they weren’t the right ones. On the news they blamed crocodiles; only the bones are found. Every one of them much loved. Greatly missed. Much adored in the community.
On the news, there was footage of the creeks of Australia. The tragedy of it made the commentators screech. Olivia thought she could see bobbing heads in the water. Muddy women looking for the banks to climb out. She worked on her map, marking down the drownings.
‘If you go see the Quaking Women, can I come too?’ Her nephew, in his pyjamas. He picked at the lint on her jumper as he spoke.
‘You can’t come. I’ve heard of them dragging a wild piglet into the water. Thing squealed like a newborn and its mother too, but she got dragged under. I heard you could see her trotter marks, dragging against the pull.’
Her hands shook as she reached for garlic bread. Her siblings had always pitied her the shakes, and their children did, too. The children didn’t mind being around her; they said she vibrated. It made her skin seem loose around her flesh, made her hair frizz out. Made her voice quaver when she spoke, as if she were sick or scared.
‘You should come and stay with me a while,’ Tucker said. Olivia guessed that John had called him and asked him for this favour. Tucker’s voice was far too loud; he over-compensated for the tinnitus in both of them. ‘Come and be peaceful with me. We’ll play some Scrabble and the only words allowed are creek names.’
‘It’s okay, Dad. I want to move on, anyway. There are things that need to be done.’
‘I know what you want to do, and no. I say no.’
‘Dad.’
‘I say no.’
‘Dad, the drownings. There are more of them. More losses by the week, by the day. I need to do this. I think the creeks are full. That’s why loved ones are drowning. They are full and those women are busting out. I think they are coming out of all the creeks in Australia. If it’s muddy they’ll drag themselves by their fingers. But if there’s water, even a centimetre, they can swim. That’s why they quake. They’re not used to walking. They’re used to swimming. Their legs shake and quake. They can’t support themselves properly.’
‘Let them shake.’
‘I want to tell them, though. William Tollis. He was seventy-five years old and in jail half his life. Not a good man. He had not done a good thing in all his seventy-five years and I wonder, is it ’cause his mama died? How would he have been if his mother was alive? If she’d been there for him?’
‘I know this. I wrote it all down, remember?’
He’d written what she’d told him to; the names, the details, the voices from her head.
Sometimes there was rhythm to the clamour, and sometimes she thought she could discern words. ‘Oh, my love, my love,’ over and over. On repeat.
Sometimes the tinnitus was like a child screaming in her ear. Other times, a wake-up alarm went off, non-stop, no matter how many times she pushed the button. Blark blark blark blark until she snarled.
Her father said it sounded like a tea kettle whistle so he always felt like a cuppa.
It drove Olivia’s mother mad when she was alive. ‘My God,’ she’d say. ‘You drink more tea than any man I know.’ He tried to explain why but it made no sense to anybody except Olivia.
The ringing in her ears only quietened when she was by the creeks. As fearful as she was of seeing the women, although she hadn’t since, only the quiet rush of water could calm the tinnitus. At dusk, the creeks of Australia were quiet. Olivia liked to walk along the banks then, allowing the susurration of the water to lull her into imagining there were no drownings, no quaking women.
She’d made a living of it; her knowledge of the systems and the impact of environmental changes on the creeks was unsurpassed. She flowed like water, travelling the creeks of Australia, looking for the women, following leads.
‘Find my dear daughter. Find my dear daughter, Flora Jane Styles, she’s a disaster without me.’ That’s what they’d say. She studied the creeks to confront her fear. The very antithesis of the way Tucker lived in his arid home.
He always boiled his water. ‘It’s bad enough the fish do their business in it. But those women. Geez, those women.’
He sat in his office on top of a hill and wrote vicious novels about people he’d known.
‘I don’t think they still piss, Dad. They’re long, long dead.’
He sighed. I know that. He had handed in his recommendations for the creek names (all rejected) then quit to be a writer. His wife supported him as she always had, though she hated what he wrote. ‘I thought you were a nice man,’ she teased him, waving his novel in his face. ‘This is nasty. No one will speak to us any more.’ But that was not something which bothered either of them. He wrote about abandonment, loss, ghosts, terrible people with undeserving lives. He wrote about the Quaking Women.
Olivia still shook hard when she was tired, or sick, or nervous. She had to balance her elbow on her knee to hold the phone as her father talked. His panic, his terror of her going near the creeks, made the palsy worse. She pictured him in his small room, fussily managing his books and papers. There would be the very powerful smell of aftershave, also the smell of starch. He was a very clean man. Fastidious, her mother always said, her highest compliment for a man. Women, if they were anything less, were slovenly. She wondered what her mother would have made of the Quaking Women, their faces clean but the rest of them muddy and dishevelled.
Olivia shuddered. ‘You stole my baby,’ one of them had screamed in her ear. ‘You stole my Alison Gray.’
‘You stole my husband,’ another had snarled, though she was eighty at the very least, her breasts hanging to her waist, and Olivia thought, lady, I never wanted to run off with my grandfather and I wouldn’t go near your old man. ‘Joseph Carter, Joe Carter, Joe Carter.’ All these names written around the map. She had a list of women, too, drowned or never found.
‘What’s going to happen, Olivia? If the quaking women are lifted beyond the banks?’
‘You’re safe there.’
‘But what about the rest of them? Whole country shaking like leaves. We need to get to higher ground. Higher! Much higher!’ She could hear him walking around the house; packing his things, she thought. Running to nowhere.
‘That’s why I want to go to them. I can tell them about their loved ones, Dad. I can answer their questions and then they might go away. You’ve always said they were looking for love; this might help them.’
‘Oh, they’re filled with love. Just like me.’
She stood by the bookcase, running her fingers over the books her father had written. She pulled out The Women of the Creeks of Australia, self-published, read by no one, nicknamed The Creeky Women by the rest of the family. They’d produced an audiobook; her father reading with his lovely, clear voice.
He and Olivia worked together to track as many as they could. Finding out about their lives, where they’d died, who they’d left behind.
They talked about how awful it was to be one of these women. Such grief, such loss, such fury. Such a desperate love for what was lost. Neither of them wanted to feel that way. Tucker was always a loving man but he became more so; he didn’t want to lose any of them, and if he did, he wanted no regrets. No thoughts of not enough.
Olivia packed her things; it took ten minutes.
‘You’re off, are you?’ John said. She thought he seemed sad, momentarily. She knew he would be happy to see her again in a few months.
‘The water is calling,’ she said, in a deep voice, hoping to make him laugh. Instead, he reached into the cupboard for a tin of tea. She’d given it to him two Christmases ago.
‘Been meaning to give you this. We really don’t drink it and it seems a waste.’
She drove for eight hours the first day, loving the solitude, listening to the audiobook of their research. Listening to classical music, or listening to nothing but the wind flap past in the window.
She called her father when she arrived at a motel, because she’d promised to.
She could hear his favourite music playing in the background. The only music he listened to. Brandenburg Concerto 1. He’d listened to it ever since someone told him it was a counterbalance to tinnitus.
‘So you going to stop there?’ Tucker asked.
‘No, Dad. I’ve been tracking it. Seriously, these drownings, I think they are converging. I think the women are converging, and I’m going to reach them.’
‘Tell me exactly where you are.’
‘You don’t need to come. I’ll be all right.’ She had the twenty-four hour news on and she took note of every drowning on her map. She listened to local radio as well, the outpourings, the much-missed, how will we live without him mewlings of the left-behind.
‘Why can’t you be sensible like Ellen? Settle down, stay away from the water.’ Ellen, her sister in Broken Hill.
‘Because of what we saw, Dad. What happened to us. No one else but you understands it. The women. I can hear them hissing. Can’t you?’
He began to cry. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say it.’
‘It’s the truth. The women are coming but we’re ready this time. I’m taking your book, and I’m taking your reading.’
‘They won’t be there. You haven’t seen them in all these years.’
‘I think they swim like rare fish. You only see them by pure chance. But if you come, I’ll show you my map.’
A day later, her father joined her.
Tucker muttered under his breath, a rhythmic reading. Olivia found it calming to the ear and wished they could drive forever.
He tired, though, and his head nodded to his chest. She put in the CD of his book. The sound of his voice made her sleepy, taking her back to all those nights he’d read to her and the others, the stories he made up on the spot to shock them and their mother.
‘Lucy Barnett, drowned, 1927. Left behind her husband Alan Barnett, who was a good man. Fireman. Didn’t save a life but might as well have.
‘Rosaline Milton, drowned, 1912. Tried to drown her tiny Gloria Rose Milton but they pulled the baby out of her arms. Gloria Rose married and had eight children.’
On and on, his beautiful voice.
He nodded. ‘That’ll send them away.’
Olivia was tuned into the police reports and they heard it: boy drowned, five years old, drag marks on the creek bank, croc, they think, first in these parts, first of many, be careful near water. Much-loved, they said. As if a child could be anything but.
They drove to the creek beyond that one; it was close. Driving as fast as they safely could, wanting to flow faster than the water, than the women.
Tucker shivered in the truck, his foot on the pedal.
‘I think we’re ahead of them now. We must be.’
‘The water runs sluggish here. Look at it! All snagged and polluted. That’ll slow them.’
Tucker backed down the muddy road, knowing he wanted a quick getaway ready.
Olivia started the audiobook from the beginning. ‘Every story has tragedy and loss, laughter and love. These are some of those my daughter and I found in our search for answers.’
It was a comfort, hearing about the women. She thought of them as friends; her only friends.
They climbed out of the car, leaving the doors wide open.
He walked down and watched her, holding onto the trunk of a tree. ‘My bowels are shaking,’ he said.
‘Stay in the truck, Dad.’
‘You think I’d ever forgive myself? Never. Never have, never will.’
He pulled out two folding chairs and they sat with a thermos of coffee, listening to the audiobook: Joanne Gray, drowned, 1972. Divorced mother of one. Daughter Alison sent to care of the grandparents and not heard of since. Seely Carter, drowned, 1891. Husband Joseph Carter never stopped looking for her body, never found it and watching the water for bumps.
She stood at the water’s edge calling all the names she knows. Seely Carter, Joanne Gray, Rosaline Wilson, Lucy Barnett. Martha Tollis. She could picture them more clearly than she could picture her own family.
‘Did we hear anything last time?’
Tucker shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. That’s why we were so taken by surprise.’
It started to rain. Tucker pulled open a golf umbrella (Drink Fosters) and they curled up in their chairs, waiting.
Olivia laughed. ‘This is insane. Making us sit here in the rain.’
‘We’ve got to give it a go. You’re right. It might stop all the drownings, who knows? And it might stop the ringing. I can’t bear it any longer.’
At that moment she adored her father more than she ever had before.
The pink noise of the rain calmed them both, but it drowned out the audio from the car.
‘I’ll get the portable,’ Tucker said. He squelched through the mud to the car and came back with the player blaring. He nodded at Olivia and walked to the water’s edge. He danced there, a little jig, his feet catching in the mud and sucking up. Olivia laughed at him, stood up to join him, but he held his hand up to stop her.
‘They don’t want to know, you know. They’ve lost so much.’
‘Dad, they’re the ones who are lost. They’re the missing ones. They just don’t know it.’
The surface of the water rippled.
Tucker shook so hard he wept. ‘We can’t do this. Take me home. Take me away from here.’
She drove him to the local motel, told the owner where she was camping out.
‘You be careful there,’ he said. Behind him, the wall was covered with family photos. ‘Waters rise fast and harsh around here. Floods are rising. Banks are lowering. And you just can’t trust them. We’ve had a lot of drownings. So much sorrow we’ve had in this town.’ His wife came with a cup of tea; she kissed him on the cheek and patted his shoulder.
In the bar, a drunk called out to passersby, ‘Fuck youse all, fuck youse,’ and the owner said, ‘It’s never men like him, is it? Never the ones no one will miss. Makes you believe in the devil.’
It felt even crazier to be standing by herself by the creek. She held the CD player up and thought, ‘This is the stupidest, stupidest stupidest…’ There was nothing, nothing but the hum of the creek, the sound of her father talking.
She gave up and went to bed.
Olivia heard the hum of a car. A ute; country limousine.
The motel owner pulled up, climbed out slowly. Rubbed his chin, his mouth. She was muddy, her hair blown into a wild frizz, her hands dirty.
‘How’s it going?’ he said.
‘Yeah, good. Water’s high, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, yeah … listen, I’ve got some bad news.’
Her father. She knew it was her father.
‘He’s, ahhh, he’s passed on.’
She felt her knees quaking, her whole body shaking. He walked to her and helped her to a fold out chair. Sat in the other.
‘Look, ahhh, we don’t know exactly. But we think he wanted to go. So that’s all right, isn’t it?’ he said, wanting her to agree, to make it okay.
‘He killed himself?’ Olivia’s first thought was, He’s left me alone with the memory. I’m the only one who knows now. She felt more annoyed than sad, and the sound of his voice, coming from the CD player, made her angry.
She picked up the player and walked to the edge.
‘Don’t you go too far,’ he said. ‘The banks are soft. You’ll fall in.’
The ripples lifted and she thought she could hear a buzzing. It’s just me. It’s always just me.
‘Jeez, what’s that, a fish? That’s a big one,’ he said, but it wasn’t, she knew it wasn’t, this was no place for fish, every last local had told her that and he knew it too.
A hand rose out of the water and she stumbled forward, wanting to grab it.
‘Careful, there,’ he said, and he ran down, reached out for her to help.
The women rose, three of them.
They opened their mouths and wailed. Find him, find him. Olivia turned up the CD player (Julia Styles and her daughter Flora Jane Styles, bad baby boy William Tollis) and the quaking women shook but didn’t seem to listen.
Then a globe rose, and another, heads, muddy dark heads of women rising from the water.
Their hair streamed, their mouths were open and the noise that came from them had Olivia throw her hands to her ears.
‘Where is my daughter? Where is Pamela Jessup?’
The women, seven now, eight, quaked and quivered, their breasts shaking like jelly, their hands unsteady. They walked towards the motel owner. Olivia could see his head tilt back as if a wave of air hit him. His feet stuck and the women were on him, screaming in his ear and tearing at him.
Olivia ran forward to try to reach him, but then they came for her, clawing their way up the river bank towards her.
‘Gloria Rose Milton, lived to forty-seven, died in a fire saving her own daughter. Joseph Carter, never re-married, took in orphans, robbed on the street at eighty-two, banged on the head, remembers nothing.’
Olivia sang the stories, called them as loud as she could, but they grabbed at her, hissing, liar, liar, liar. They didn’t let the motel owner go; dragged him down deeper into the mud than she would have thought physically possible.
She screamed, ‘Don’t take this man! He’s not yours. He’s got loved ones, don’t hurt them.’
They didn’t listen, couldn’t understand, no matter how loudly she screamed. They screamed so loudly in her ear that she felt a pop and a trickle and intense pain, as if someone had forced a knitting needle into her ear drum. The hotel owner rose to the surface and they dragged him down again. He was loose, floppy, and she saw his eyes roll back in their sockets. He shook as if suffering a fit. She fought her way through the women, the rocks, the sludgy water but he was sucked down, gone.
She threw herself after him, terrified of the women, but it was as if she wasn’t there. They had no interest in her. She dived under over and over again but saw nothing, not even his boots.
The CD wasn’t working. The women weren’t listening. She thought, It’s in me. All the stories, all of what happened.
She could hear nothing; not even a buzzing any more. She thought, Why didn’t they take me? And when she realised what it was she sat down in the mud.
They only took those who were loved.
They didn’t take her.
She was not loved. With her father dead, she was no longer loved.
She hadn’t known that. Her niece and nephew? Not even them?
She dived under, her mouth filling with muddy water, her ears, her eyes gritty with it, but she could see no sign of the motel owner or the Quaking Women. All that remained were the drag marks.
She sat in the mud, reciting her father’s book, telling them. As the water rose she dug her fingers into the bed roots. She heard nothing, only her own voice in her head and the memory of the beat of the creek.
‘Quake and tremble at the word of the Lord’.
George Fox, Quakers founder.
Inspiration: There is a record of the word Quaker 1647: a sect of women came from beyond the sea, called Quakers, ‘and these swell and shiver and shake.’