Tenderness
When it flooded people would come from all around the district to see the valley full of quiet brown water. We strangers to one another, lived on the top of the ridge, with its five houses, an old pub and two street lights. People wondered why any of us were there, why such a grand hotel, surrounded by sprawling queenslanders with elaborate gables and six paned windows lined a road that swept down into a valley in the middle of nowhere. There was a time long before mine, when we were the town before the town up and left and moved to higher ground across the river. There’d been more houses but over time all but ours had collapsed, their concrete slabs freely and my guess permanently snuffed out by the lush tropical vegetation. No one was coming back out here. They might stop at the pub for lunch or a beer garden band on a Sunday afternoon but that was the extent of it. Because of the floods mostly. The rain was so heavy some ...