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GRACE
Written by David Richer
The driving-lights covered in bugs weren't much better than the high-beams, and Grace
was going crook at the shire for not painting a new white line down the middle of the
bitumen track she was driving on; a pot-hole ridden, skinny black road to nowhere. Then
the fuel gauge went. Damn it she thought! Only nine miles out of town and the needle had
dropped to zero. Why do you have to play up tonight? She yelled at the dodgy fuel gauge.
Grace knew she should have filled up with fuel before leaving for home. The last thing
she wanted was to run out, but somehow tonight was different. Grace was trying to figure
out why she found herself driving home not knowing whether she would make it or not. If
she did get stuck, Grace could sleep in the car and get a lift back into town on the
school bus in the morning, but she hated the idea of being stuck this far out of town on
her own. She was cursing herself for not getting fuel when she remembered the reason.
When Grace had pulled into the service station after work, the queue at the pump, and
the extra cars in the café car-park, reminded her that the town was getting busy again.
As she got closer to the pump, Grace noticed she could separate the silhouettes in the
café from each other; each took on the unique shape of its owner. Mesmerised by their
movements against the setting sun shining through the glass walls, the café aglow in the
surrounding sunset, she sat watching, enchanted by the way the black shapes were
interacting with each other.
She imagined who was who and what they were saying, until she saw the silhouette that
sat down by the window: its black arm lifting its black cup, to its black head. She had
seen that shape before, familiar yet somehow different, but where? The longer she waited
in the queue, slowly getting closer to the pump, and closer to the café, the more
nervous she felt; the black silhouette was giving her the creeps. For some reason she
was having a panic attack and was doing everything she could to stay calm. Finally the
tension she was feeling, the fear, got the better of her and she pulled out of the
queue. She was furious now for doing it, but she’d felt trapped; she’d had to get out of
there. Grace was convinced the silhouette was of a man. Its movements had looked rigid,
like he was wearing a stiff coat. He took his hat off. His head was square looking; flat
on top like the army-cut she'd seen on parade a thousand times before. That's what it
was, that's why she’d panicked. It was the silhouette in the window.
The chill night seemed aphotic, dampness made everything icy, and as she looked in the
rear view mirror to see if the back window was un-fogging, she saw a flash of light in
the distance. At first it looked like the moonlight shining off Emmett’s hay shed;
Grace's ten mile mark, but as she turned back to the road, the blackness reminded her it
was one of the darkest nights she could remember. And it couldn’t be moonlight: it must
be headlights.
She slammed on the brakes. Whiteness suddenly before her, a reflection, brilliant in the
headlights. Grace thought it had the same shape as the silhouette in the café. Her world
had contracted to this single thing. As she got closer she thought she would crash into
it. Instinctively she jammed her foot harder on the brakes, with her hands clutching the
steering-wheel. She cowered down behind them as the car skidded to a halt. Grace looked
up and saw the whiteness was a patch on one of Emmett’s milking cows. The cow was fully
black with a white patch on its flank, and the way it was standing, with its rear toward
her, the patch seemed to have the same shape as the silhouette from the café, but the
sun it shone from was black; blacker than the night, and Grace thought she must be going
mad.
The cow turned, and its unblinking eye flashed huge in the headlights, it reminded Grace
of the movie earlier that evening: there was a scene that stopped the audience dead.
When Addanc grabbed the girl in the playground and pushed the skinning-knife into her
eye, he said, "Do you want your eyes cut out?"
Just then, someone was in front of the projector and the shadow cast onto the screen had
that same profile, the same rigid movements as the one Grace had seen in the cafe. And
when Addanc said: "Do you want your eyes cut out?" it looked like the shadow was holding
the knife to the girl’s eye.
The atmosphere in the theatre went cold and the movie never recovered; Grace too, was
unusually glad to leave. It was picking time, and after working all day in the sun, some
of the fruit-pickers had washed off their thirst at the hotel before going to the movie.
Grace had been working as the projectionist for the past two years, and never had she
heard silence overcome a rowdy audience so fast.
When she got going again, Grace was relieved to see in the rear-view mirror that the
light had gone. She didn't like meeting strangers in the bush and if she ran out of
fuel, the way she felt, she would have hid until whatever it was went past. When the
needle came up on the fuel gauge, Grace thought slamming on the brakes must have done
something good; thank God, she thought.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, until she arrived home.
Grace kicked off her shoes and hung a handful of shaking keys onto the hook in the
entrance hall, and as she did she saw her mother sitting in the kitchen. The cup in her
hand was shaking more than Grace. She rushed to her mother.
‘Mum, what's wrong?’ she pleaded.
‘It's Robbie,’ Grace's mother whispered, looking down, watching a tear land in her glass
of port. She knew what the next question from Grace would be, but she didn’t know how to
answer it ... We had a visit from the army? The Casualty assistance Officer?
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