The Animals in That Country

by Laura Jean McKay

Her serpent’s eye trained on me now, her regard for me simple: if I feed her, she might not try to eat my arm. Animals are straight up like that. It’s people you have to watch out for.

‘The disease is very high in morbidity and very low in mortality. Infected humans appear able to communicate (encode) and translate (decode) previously unrecognisable non-verbal communications via major senses such as sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound with nonhuman animals. Zooflu is also referred to as “talking animal disease”.’

Her voice isn’t made of words either. She’s speaking in odours, echoes, noises with random meanings popping out of them.

bet it’s one of those damned places they put kidnapped kids back in the day. I’ve seen the photos. Big old tin-roofed house for a hundred beds. My grandmum — a whole bushel of nutty Jesus — used to have paid work on one, running the laundry. She’d talk about those station days like they were the best thing on this earth: married to the herder, all those blackfellas working for her big white arse.

‘I’m going to get her away from her idiot parents long enough to tell her that she can live two ways — the animal way and the people way.’

He says it without feeling, but I lean toward him anyway. These god-men: cheap magicians with psychobabble wands.