Speech of Stones
an excerpt

She raises her head and looks out, across the road to the line of shops, then back down towards the end of town. He follows her gaze. There are two crows on the road down there, sleek black blips on the bitumen. One is worrying the flattened smear of fur and pink flesh that might have been a rabbit or a rat. The other gazes wisely ahead, its feathers ruffling round its neck. The silos stand tall and grey against a sky almost white with high haze and the heat. The grass down there is a golden wheat yellow; the only green is a patch of blackberry beside the siding. On the siding, a row of federation-red ceramic pots hold dusty geraniums with scarlet flowers. The geraniums stand stiff in the heat, unbending. The antique glass of the station house windows glint a blank opal gaze back at him. As they watch, a white sedan approaches along the road, past the silos, pushing heat shimmer before it as it comes. They both watch it as it goes by, the smooth metal thrumming of its tyres on the road, over the speed limit, hurrying out of the quiet town. -If they'd been coughing then, or sneezed they'd have missed it altogether, Jonah says, into the sudden quiet after the car's passing.