"In all the wind-funnelled anarchy of burning bush, the tidal wave of flame and smoke, Luke had been fearful, yes, but not unnerved. But looking around him now at the charred ground, the blasted earth, the logs leaking smoke, he is gutted. It’s as if not just the land has been singed but his body with it. He stumbles, weeping, through the powdery ash, climbing over the still-warm charcoal of the fallen trunks, and he is back in the delivery room, two years ago, when Anna had given birth to the boy; his tiny, curled-up body with its grey translucent skin, his dark, wine-red lips, the pinkish white of his eyelids, closed to them for all time. This child of their loins, only seven and a half months old, dead in the womb; their dearest boy whose heartbeat had one day stopped, lapsed into silence, with his parents unawares, thinking that all was well, that nature was taking its course and that their lives were going along just fine. In those bleak hours after they had cleaned the sticky blood from Anna’s body and wheeled her into a pale blue hospital room, the hospital counsellor asked them if they wanted to give their child a name, and they nodded, blankly, and said yes, it would be a good idea. But in the numbness of their grief, no name presented itself and thereafter they had come to think of him as ‘the boy’. It seemed so much more intimate than any given name. And now all this grey ash, bringing it all back to him, that other day, the day he thought he had put out of his mind once and for all, a day on the harbour, just the two of them and the skipper of the hired boat, and the boy’s ashes in a tiny ceramic vial, and Anna collapsing onto the deck and he, alone, stepping to the edge of the boat and sprinkling the ashes over the white-tipped waves. It was a cold day, and he had worn the navy ribbed sweater, the one that at the height of the fire he had discarded on the bed, because he could not bear the thought that it might come to any harm, and because it reminded him too much of other damage. But the ember had landed there, and the sweater had burnt anyway, and in its thick smouldering resistance it had most likely saved the house."
what a shit fest