Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong

birthday dinner.’ Her voice echoed around the small room.
    ‘Saul? Why Saul?’
    ‘Can I ask him?’
    There was a pause. ‘Yeah. Sure.’ Julia walked away from the door.
    The bathwater was a reddish colour from the rusted water tank. As Allie dried herself she bent her knees to look between her legs. The blood would come soon, it should have come already. All the other girls in her class had started menstruating. She had seen her mother’s blood, those mornings Mae woke and clattered down the stairs to the outside toilet, cupping her hands between her legs, leaving a dark stain blooming on the white sheet. And she had watched her mother throwing bloody pads into the incinerator, grey smoke threading through the branches of the big tree in the backyard. It was Allie’s job to poke the pads with a stick until they were just powdery ashes.
    Every day she looked for the blood between her legs and sometimes slid a finger inside herself, like she had seen her mother do. ‘Just checking if it’s started,’ her mother used to say. Allie whispered her mother’s words, ‘Oh, nothing yet,’ as she wrapped a towel around herself.

chapter nine
    Julia was squatting on the verandah, sorting through her stacks of black plastic pots when Petal called from halfway up the driveway, ‘There’s a wallaby been hit, Julia. You’d better deal with it.’
    Julia stood up slowly. She knew what to expect, a wide-eyed terrified animal, its useless legs scrabbling to get away. She walked to the shed and picked her rifle off the wall and two bullets from the box on the bench. ‘How far up the road is it?’
    Petal dropped a plastic bag of avocados onto the grass. ‘You can have some of these if you like. It’s right at the bottom of your driveway. I’ll come back with you.’
    The pale gravel road was bright with blood. The wallaby’s lower half was contorted, its muscular back legs twisted the wrong way. As they approached, it grunted and frantically turned its narrow furry chest back and forth.
    ‘Who hit it?’ Allie had silently appeared at Julia’s side, her bare feet muddy and dress wet.
    ‘I don’t know. Someone who didn’t have the decency to stop.’ Julia shifted the gun to her right hand and took a step towards the animal. It slumped down onto the road, its brown eyes following her every move. Its breath came in short panicked blasts and blood glistened on soft flared nostrils.
    Then Allie was on her knees beside the wallaby, her small fingers tracing the length of the thick black tail. She stroked the wallaby’s furry flank, dark with blood and silvery with droplets of light rain.
    ‘I need to put it out of its misery Allie. You’ll have to move back.’
    ‘We can look after it.’
    ‘Its back is broken. And probably its pelvis. See,’ Julia pointed.
    ‘Oh. So we’ll kill it.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Julia waited while Allie fingered the sticky blood where it soaked into the gravel. She suddenly saw that Allie was like her. More like her than Mae, who could never cope with dying animals or a cow birthing gone wrong.
    Even as Julia loaded the rifle and stepped forward, the wallaby’s body relaxed and the life passed from its eyes. A rush of urine diluted the blood spreading on the road.
    Petal lit a cigarette. ‘At least it had company as it died.’
    Julia turned to her, surprised at the vehemence in her voice. ‘You think we were a comfort to it, Petal? It’s a wild animal. It died absolutely terrified. It would have been better off if we left it to die on its own.’
    Petal shrugged and started up the driveway.
    ‘Feel it,’ said Allie, her hand on its bloated belly. ‘It’s still warm. It’s dead but still warm.’
    Julia squatted beside her niece and touched the soft pale fur of its belly. She wished she had come by herself and killed it straight away. It would be all over by now, the body already tossed into the bushes beside the road. She ran her fingers through the fur and found the fleshy pouch