There is a stag in my living room: a wooden compass point, a reminder of prayers answered, a north star to hope.  It looks up, perhaps at a patch of blue, an echo of impossible sky in a day full of death and one miracle.  And it looks up, perhaps into eyes full of impossible kindness, and another.  Two miracles.  Decades apart.

Five times in my childhood I thought that I would die.  Only once did I want to live.  Only one time.  The other four times, I was wise enough to know that death would be a mercy.  It is harder to die when you know you want to live, that brand of death is hard. 

This day was hard.

It was hot, summer.  I was going to die in the afternoon.  My mother told me this.  The screen door was dirty, the outside dog was inside.  She did not kiss me goodbye.  And I didn’t care because I had forgotten what her kiss felt like. 

Most people do not know when or how they will die.  It did not ever have to be explained to me.  I always knew my when and how.  And I knew my why.  I was going to die because I am my father’s daughter.  And because he made regrettable choices.  Home was not a safe place and that was his choice.  He chose to harm me over and over, again his choice.  And this day we stayed home.  To save the house.  This day we were all trapped – not just me. 

His choice.

Hell is an abuse filled life lived alone.  This day hell was also smoke and flame ringed around a house.  Unrelenting.  Neither gave mercy. 

I was 14.  

I had big dreams.  Told I was too dumb, too stupid, too everything, I was going to ace every science test, and escape.  I was going to become myself.  I had big dreams balanced on the prick of a pin.  A crushed child, sad, my hope was shredded but at 14 it was still there.  Just.  Later, all that hope was smashed out of me.

But this day, at 14, I held a wet hessian sack.  My father threw it at me, carelessly.  He didn’t know that I wanted to live.

Wind, flaming bark, branches all out of the sky – my school uniform ruined because we built the house too close to the trees.  Designed as a wind break it ended as a bomb. 

Tiny flames around my feet, breeding like rabbits as I stamped them out.  My father strode into smoke.  I watched his back disappear, and my eyes leaked relief.  Then guilt, because I wanted him gone.  Not dead, not injured.  Just gone.  Judas, I was. 

Flecks of ash were in my ears, my eyes stung.  Two, then three sides of the house hugged by flaming arms.  The road was cut, full of terrified cattle.  The damp handkerchief didn’t stop the smell of them burn. 

My brother sat in the car, not understanding the cut road, or choosing not to.  I dissociated - by 14 I was good at it.  So, I did not understand his terror.  Only that we were going to die, that knowledge now remote. 

The fourth line of fire came down from the hill.  Straight out of the bible.  The hill was tall, far away I always thought.  But really it was small and too close.  I didn’t know much about religion but somewhere in the bible an army marched down a hill, and today it was dressed in red.  Impenetrable.  No gaps.  I believed in an angry God.  And I wondered whose sins we would die for – my father for what he was doing, me for doing what he wanted, or my mother for standing back?  My brother didn’t factor in, simply an innocent extension of our mother. 

The sky was black, my mother’s arm just visible in the smoke.  She had a garden hose. 

I stood, two, maybe three metres away.  My mother was correct, she had not lied.  We would not save the house, nor our lives.

I knew God did not listen to trash like me, so my prayer was thrown faithlessly into the fire.  There was nowhere to go, nothing to do.  I watched the flames.

And lived.  

Because the wind changed.  I was the first to see it, the only one to look up. 

The shift was subtle, far up.  Visible only by a tiny movement in the smoke.  I saw a tiny patch of blue.  A circle with smoky edges – only there for an instant.  Blink-fast gone.  A tiny bit of hope.  It was the last bit I had in my childhood, and it was an impossible blue. 

A pause.  The army of flame walked backwards.  Or tried to, the ground already black.  They took a long time to die.

I learnt a lot that day:  that gum trees explode.  That brothers can shatter.  And that birthday candle prayer-wishes are not strong enough – but God sometimes answers big flame prayers. 

Decades on, and hope.  Another miracle. 

Perhaps the answer to another prayer.  Hope is in the care and kindness of a woman who I thought would throw me away.  That was expected - I am used to being trash.  A hopeless case, I never expected kindness, nor that she would stay, but she has.  She gave me a stag, and she stays. 

Her eyes see hope when I don’t.  Her eyes are kind.

Two miracles, decades apart.

Stags with their eyes in the sky remind me of hope and miracles.

Originally written June, 2019