How awesome, in spite of heat and fire, to be so fast on his bike! A car overtook him, then pulled to the side of the road. A window wound down, a head stuck out.

‘Hey! You from around here?’

Caleb dismounted, wheeling his bike closer. Wind whipped all words from his mouth. A sandy-haired man in an unbuttoned shirt waved an iPhone. ‘I’ve got no reception! How can I get to Brunton?’

Caleb gave directions, pointing and telling the man where to turn right.

‘Will my phone work there?’

‘I doubt it.’

Caleb rode the rest of the way home and threw his bike on the gravel outside the door. He stomped through the house and yard to the creek, big boots flattening dead, dry grass, desperation stretching before him like an incendiary device. How often he’d needed to run away as a little boy, his feet stamp stamp stamping. Mum made him wear shoes. He remembered rebelling by taking them off, though his soles burned, toughened to the thickness of scars around his heels.

He knew why he was here. He unlaced his boots, hopping, fingers twisting through the knots, skintight through the arches of his feet. Pebbles, prickles, sharp twists of broken twigs dug into him, stung like shattered glass. Pain to take pain away, to appease the guilt creature. He’d given birth to it, yet still it chewed on his intestines and swelled and burst from his heart. But guilt wasn’t inside him, it was walking ahead, stamping through the dry grass, a dragon breathing fire. Dangerous. Uncontrollable.

Fire had always fascinated him. Its vivid colours: red, orange, yellow, the hot blue centre of a candle flame. The sweet smell of winter’s fireplaces. Oils cracking through dry timber, like distant applause. This creature was as destructive as Caleb. Like the dry heat that licked away his sweat, these tongues might sweep away his guilt.

A shadow sniffed around the abandoned hut like the ghostly fossicker who’d sought a fortune here, not so long ago. Was that smoke Caleb smelled, already? He paused to look back at the house that Gran gave him because she didn’t know what monster lurked inside him, what a monster he’d become. His bedroom window looked back over the yard. If fire swept through from here, that part of the house would ignite first. He’d lose everything he deserved to lose. Only the skeleton of the house would be left, and the tangled mess of the car Caleb never should have tried to drive. Skeletal, all those things would lose their voices. Nothing would remain to tell what he had done. Only these tongues of fire, whispering his secrets while they burned themselves out.