+++
author = "Steffen Blake"
title = "The Brush"
date = "2021-09-03"
+++

It beckoned to us like moths to flame. It was there, past the country dusted roads and asphalt, in the depths of the weed ridden, stump infested, downtrodden paths, that we found ourselves. No parents and their lawful domain to keep us down here. Looking back on it, I feel like it was the beating summer sun overhead that truly made us crave the sanctity of the bush, though. The heat was intoxicating, driving us mad with its delirious heat. The dust from the fields left us with a thirst that could only be quenched by the hues of beer bottles rested in quack-grass, catching and painting the brush at our backs in tomato and peach.

But it was on such a night, one more dust ridden and parched than any we had the misfortune of enduring before, that something happened. In my circle of friends, we would never be able to agree on exactly what transpired that night. It started in the afternoon, when the parched tongues of me and my best friends led us to our favourite home away from home. As luck would have it, we had attracted the company of a handful of the opposite sex. And so it was that the evening began.

It started at dusk. We had all consumed our fair share of the bitter, and the shadows had begun to meld together and lengthen. As darkness crept up our backs, I couldn't help but feel a slight off put by this particular night's ambiance. I hadn't drunk as much as my friends, and definitely not as much as the ladies, so I remember many details they all seem to have forgotten.

The first thing that caught my attention was the smell. A bitter, acrid taste in the air that hung like damp sickness on the skin. It made me uncomfortable at first, but as the night dragged on and our laughing quieted to whispers in the dark, I couldn't shake the smothered sensation the smell imparted on me. It made my stomach lurch and my eyes water. It was then that I brought it up, nudging one of my friends in the side with my elbow until I got his attention.

Do you smell that?” I asked, gesturing to the air around me, “It smells terrible, like something dead or rotten, I can't stand it,” The smell had become so thick in the air that I couldn't hold it in anymore. I doubled over and started retching. I managed to get up and stumble haphazardly away from our homely fire and expel the contents of my stomach all over a patch of brambles and weeds. I wiped my mouth and got off my knees. The smell had faded, and as I stumbled my way back to the group they had already shrugged off my antics as the result of our recent ingestion of alcohol.

Maybe I was just drunk, or maybe it was just swamp gas. It didn't take long for the thought to leave my mind. The darkness had begun to truly settle in on us and our little back country home though. We had found some logs and rocks and pulled them up around the campfire, and one of my friends had brought along his guitar, freshly strung and ready for a maiden voyage. What better place but here? Nothing soothes the soul like soft bluegrass tunes where only our ears were around to hear it.

As he began to tune his guitar though, I finally realized what had been bothering me so much this entire day. I raised my hands up and shushed the entire group, “Everyone, shut up for a second, I'm trying to listen for something!” They stared at me in a mix of confusion and drunken stupor, but they were quiet too. With one hand cocked to the side of my head, I strained as hard as I could to hear. As the seconds rolled by, my breathing started to slow and my heart began to beat frantically, “Do you hear that, listen!”

Everyone stared around the camp area, dazed and listening intently, “We don't hear anything man, you're crazy,” one of my friends replied as he moved to begin returning the guitar at his fingertips. His words were less slurred, as like me he had drunk very little this night, obviously with the intention of playing the guitar.

“No, that's my point!” I replied, starting to panic a bit. At that time I probably looked, and sounded, crazy, but I knew something was very, very wrong, “I can't hear anything at all! No birds, no animals, no bugs, nothing! We've been sitting here for hours and I haven't heard a single sound of wildlife all night!” My friends blinked and stared at me even longer, before stopping their movements to listen for a while longer.

One of the girls drunkenly spoke up, “No way, we've been here all day. It's probably just because of the fire. Animals don't like smoke...” She smiled at me and took another long swig from her flask around her neck, “I'm sure we just didn't notice it earlier, we were being pretty loud.”

But now everyone was quietly paying attention, and it was true. Not a single sound could be heard. The dead silence hung in the air, only offset by the crackling and spitting of the fire at our feet. And that's when it came back. That bitter, disgusting taste. It smelt like cleaning chemicals, acrid and sweet. Or maybe dead flowers? It was hard to put a word to it, but everyone noticed it this time.

“What's that disgusting smell?” one of the girls cried out, pinching her nose. It came in suddenly, one moment the air had been normal, filled with the scent of burnt wood and alcohol. But in a single moment it was all washed away, replaced with the dense and heavy bitter smell. One of my friends stood up quickly, dropping his green glass bottle from his hand. It bounced off the rock he had been sitting on, clattering to the ground and rolling across the grass.

He stumbled a few steps and angrily demanded, “What the hell is going on here, is this some stupid prank?” We calmed him down, and we began to assure each other it was probably swamp gas or maybe something in the logs that was burning and being released. Maybe just a patch of dead wood or something that smelt bad. That made the most sense.

One of the girls, Emily, stood up and staggered away from her spot, “I'm going to be sick,” she croaked, before half crawling, half stumbling away into the darkness. A few moments later another of the girls stood up and wordlessly walked away to follow Emily. We all silently watched the procession. A few minutes later we could hear Emily in the distance, crying out and croaking gibberish, followed by the wet splatter of what we assumed to be the results of her profuse drinking. I grimaced in disgust, remembering my own vomiting that had occurred an hour earlier. The taste of stomach acid still lingered in my mouth, and no amount of drink could wash that away. I resolved then to brush my teeth as soon as I got back home.

“Man, I bet Emily's friend is going to have a great time cleaning her up later, yeah?” My one friend spoke up, hoping to break the awkward silence.

The girls met his joke with blank, level stares, before one spoke up, “Um, she's not Emily's friend, we thought she had ridden with you guys. I've known Emily for six years and I have never met that girl before.”

The two other guys turned their wide eyed stares at me, and I shrugged, “She definitely wasn't with us, my car can only seat four, and one of the seats was taken up with the six packs,” I thought for a moment, “I guess she came in her own car then, to hang out with us. Word spreads.”

One of the girls shook her head, “No that's impossible, when we got here there was only your guys' car parked at the start of the path, and we met that girl on the way here in the bush.”
	
It was then that Emily's cries and retching, which had just been coming to a crescendo, that she cried out once more, before abruptly cutting short. This was followed by a final, loudest of all, wet smack. The group of us five turned our wide eyed gazes to stare down the path that the two girls had just left on. The bitter taste had faded, and only silence remained.

“Jesus fuck...” Were the only words I could muster up. It felt like hours ticked by, all five of us refusing to move. We didn't talk, move, we barely even breathed. And yet time ticked by and not a sound came from the path.

Eventually, I mustered up the strength to stand up, shaken legged and barely capable of coherent thought. I called out once into the dark, “Emily, are you okay over there? Hello?” Nothing answered me. I held my hand out to one of my friends. Wordlessly he placed the flashlight he had brought with him into my shaking hand.

“Don't you fucking do it!” Hissed one of the girls. I discarded her statement, and half confident, half scared shitless, I flicked the flashlight on and pointed it down the path. All that was revealed consisted of dirt, rocks, and brush. No Emily in sight, but I was sure she had wandered farther down the path. I trudged forward, flashlight in hand. As I held my breath, I felt a hand tap me on the back.

“Jesus christ!” I cried out, whirling on my feet. It was Justin. Guitar left behind, he smiled at me sheepishly, before his smile thinned into a grimace.

He nodded down the path, “I'm going to come with you,” He whispered softly to me. I nodded back to him, before we continued. I would like to say we found something. Emily, or Emily's body, or blood or guts or anything. But we didn't. We didn't find anything that night, despite our searching.

About half an hour into our search we returned to the campsite, exhausted. I paused, and stared up at the sky. The gentle sounds of owls in the distance and insects buzzing about us had returned as if they had never left. It was then, as I stood up and smelled the acrid bitter taste fill the air again, that I realized we wouldn't be finding Emily. I gave a sidelong shaken glance towards Justin, and he nodded back to me with dead set eyes. We left the beer behind, and only took a minute to kick dirt over the fire.

After that, we ran down the path as fast as we possibly could. I remember one of the girls was crying, and more so I recall her collapsing halfway down the path. It was then that Justin had begun cursing profusely, picking her up and half led, half drug her behind him. We burst breathlessly out onto the freeway, where our cars sat sullenly by the ditch. I discarded all thoughts for the law and piled everyone into my car, before backing out onto the road in what could only be described as a one point turn. As I slammed my foot down on the gas pedal, I resolved to never return to this place ever again.
