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No single mistake was fatal on its own, so no one person could be blamed. The errors and misjudgements were each small, understandable, and evenly distributed.
It was Catherine’s doctor who’d predicted that after two late births, the third was unlikely to be premature.
It was her husband who’d checked the morning wildfire reports and confirmed their home was safe, but been in a business meeting when news broke that an unpredicted diablo wind had changed the blaze’s course.
It was her technophobe mother who’d left her own cellphone in her car, then knocked Catherine’s charger out while tidying, so that the battery drained and her husband’s warning calls from the city went unheard.
It was Catherine who’d dismissed the first mild contractions as cramp, drawing on memories of her previous induced and agonising births.
A few minor missteps, that was all, right into the snapping jaws of disaster.
When her waters broke, Catherine understood her mistake. The baby was coming a month early.
Rushing through the front door to go to the car, her mother froze, as if someone had paused a movie. They both stared at the black smoke pluming on the horizon, where the only road from the cottage led.
After a brief, frantic discussion they decided to drive. Maybe the smoke wasn’t near the road, perhaps that was a trick of the wind.
Her mother’s cellphone was where she’d left it, still charged and flashing missed calls. As her mother drove, Catherine called her husband back, fingers fumbling, but after a long silence in her ear she checked the display and saw no signal. She surrendered to the panic clawing at her throat.
That earnest young man who’d visited last year to talk about wildfire preparedness had said cellphone towers were fireproofed to withstand all but the fiercest blazes. What else had he said? Why couldn’t she remember?
They were cresting the hill overlooking the next valley when they saw the fire, vastly wider than the road it had swallowed whole. It was a glowering orange wall: angry, hungry, racing. Even from a distance, its heat pushed through the windshield glass.
They u-turned, her mother babbling that help would come, everything would be okay. Catherine didn’t talk at all. She needed to think, be sharp, but then a contraction scattered her thoughts like pins in a bowling alley.
Back inside the cottage, her mother scurried, closing windows and doors. Catherine lay on her back on a rug by the bay windows and looked to the skies. Last year, she’d seen news footage of helicopters rescuing people from fires somewhere nearby. They’d be coming now. They were not on their own. Nobody was alone in the 21st century, not with all their technology, all their devices.
The next contraction came with teeth and in pain’s red flare, Catherine didn’t argue when her mother asked her for the fourth time to please – please, please – take painkillers. Catherine didn’t know how safe they were for her or the baby, but if the pain went away she’d be able to think. Not thinking seemed the most dangerous thing possible right now.
A new contraction attacked – rows of teeth this time, like a shark – and Catherine’s brain curled into a protective ball. She gripped her mother’s hand, surprised by its boniness.
The contraction retreated, the oxys kicked in, and Catherine’s mind calmed and cohered enough for clear thoughts to march through. Thank God the other kids’ school was far away. Her husband would have alerted the authorities. Help was coming.
A tendril of black smoke drifted by the window, finger-shaped, as if pointing the way for a terrible, huge beast to follow.
She could feel how close the baby was. Not now, she thought. We’re not ready.
A memory floated into her mind, something a friend once said. He’d been talking about growing up with abuse, his struggles to leave it behind. “If a baby’s born in a house on fire, it thinks the whole world is on fire,” he’d said, quoting something. “But it’s not true.”
But what if it was true? Not just for her baby. For all of them, all the babies born into a world slowly catching fire. The babies delivered into murderous heatwaves in India, remorseless floods in Libya, devouring blazes in Australia. For the first time, those people weren’t faraway abstractions on half-watched news items. She felt connected to them, one vast family scattered over continents.
Then something shifted inside her and this pain was savage enough to rip through the oxy haze and the baby was coming and all thoughts returned to the brute here, the brute now.
Help will come, Catherine told herself again, even as a smoke twilight fell over the house and she couldn’t see the sky any more.
About Jaime Gill
Jaime Gill is a British-born writer living (mostly) in Cambodia. His fiction and journalism have been published by Litro, The Guardian, BBC, Literally Stories, In Parentheses, and Scribes. He consults for non-profits across Asia while working on a novel, script, and far too many stories, several of which have been long/shortlisted for awards by titles such as The Masters Review, the Bridport Prize and the Plaza Prizes. Read more at www.jaimegill.com or find him at www.twitter.com/jaimegill or www.instagramcom/mrjaimegill.
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