Best Australian Yarn: Sleep in the Salt by Matthew Newson

What they called “the lake” was nothing more than a dry, flat plain of salt residue, becoming drier and flatter with each summer that passed.There were dunes and bushes surrounding it, where thrill seekers rode dirt bikes and arts students shot short films. A few animals lived around the plain – the odd snake hiding in the brush, an occasional kangaroo in search of water during the warmer months, and an abundance of flies seemingly year-round.Further out from the salt and the dunes and the bush were the roads. Surrounding it on all three sides, they had been constructed to form a triangle around the salt flats, connecting two suburbs that were otherwise separated by the lake.At the centre of the triangle, entranced by the glaring reflection of the sun upon the white ground, James stood atop the dunes. He thought back to the bus.It had pulled to one side of the long, straight road that cut alongside the salt flats. The driver called out, telling the passengers they had broken down. Calls of anger and confusion echoed down the vehicle from people unwilling to either wait for another bus or walk the rest of the way. They died down quickly when the driver opened the doors and the more subdued passengers filed off. Most of the commuters began walking the kilometre or so towards the train station, where they would catch a connecting bus, or ride the rails up into the city. James stayed at the bus stop, staring out at the flats.He had seen something from the bus, just before they pulled over, out on the lake.He had seen someone.The teenager pulled on his red baseball cap, angling the brim so that it blocked out the rising sun without covering his eyes, and started walking towards the dunes.“Ay, mate,” the bus driver called, looking out at James from his comfortable, air-conditioned seat. “Shouldn’t ya be headin’ to school?”James ignored him and kept walking towards the fence.He was curious about the lone wanderer out on the sand. Metal signs decorated the thin wire fence that separated the asphalt from the sand, declaring trespassing a prosecutable offence.It felt like they had been there forever, but James remembered when they hadn’t been – as early as last summer. Before that little boy had gone missing.He stood at the fence, trying to peer over the dunes and out towards the salt. Towards the stranger he had seen.“James.”The voice came to him on the wind. He thought about looking around – maybe one of his friends had been on the bus as well? – but kept staring ahead. He knew, somehow he knew, where that voice had come from.The lake is calling me home.James furrowed his eyebrows. He hadn’t thought that – the statement had arrived fully formed in his head, from outside it.Ignoring the questions in his mind the way only an overconfident teenager can, he hurled his bag over the fence and slipped his fingers into the holes of the mesh. James braced his left foot against one of the holes and, with a tight, claw-like grip, pulled his weight off the ground. He brought his right foot up and slid the toe into another of the holes in the fence.Rinse and repeat. Before long, James was on the lake.The outskirts, at least. The sand at his feet didn’t give way to salt just yet – the dunes stood in the way of that, a silent barrier holding the salt flats at bay.He could still hear the bus driver, yelling at him, telling him to stop if he knew what was good for him, asking if he wanted to go missing like that Peterson boy.The Peterson boy.James had forgotten his name. The boy, who had been watching his father’s drone fly over the dunes. The father, who had turned his back for just a minute (or so he swore). The single shoe, the only trace of the child left.They assumed he had fallen into a sinkhole, lurking somewhere beneath the white ground, and sectioned off the whole lake until they could find evidence it was safe.The lake doesn’t like that. The lake needs us.The lake needs to eat.“Where did that come from?” James wondered aloud. He was climbing up and over the dunes, the sand creeping into the cheap, black trainers he wore to school, burrowing in through the holes in his socks and coming to rest between his toes like a cancer.James reached the top and covered his eyes immediately. The salt was laid out before him, spreading further than he had imagined, white crystals reaching out to the horizon. The sun reflected off the ground, throwing more heat back up towards James than he expected.Aside from randomly strewn, dying bushes cutting up through holes in the lake, there was no life out there.James saw the figure he had spotted from the bus.It was a boy – at least, James thought so. It was hard to make out features. But he wore a boy’s school uniform, with shorts and a cap and......James squinted, stretching his neck forward to look closer, beads of sweat running down the back of it......Only one shoe.“Hey! Hey!” James ran forward, tripping in the soft sand of the dune and rolling forwards and down, forwards and down until he hit the bottom and kept rolling onto the salt and it cut open his skin and dug itself in and it burned in the wounds and his blood was on fire and –– James came to an abrupt stop at the boy’s feet.How did I roll that far? He wondered. The boy had been off in the distance, and James had not been rolling for that long.“Hey, are you the Peterson kid?” he asked, brushing the salt from his clothes and bare skin, wincing as he pushed it further into his cuts.The boy didn’t respond.“Hey, help me up here,” he said, looking up at the boy. “I asked if you’re the –”The boy was salt.James blinked slowly and looked again.He wasn’t covered in salt. There wasn’t salt on his face. The boy – the thing – in front of James, looking down at him, the sun rising behind it, becoming a halo around its head, was made entirely of salt.James backed away, wordlessly. Still on the ground, he pushed his hands against the salt of the ground and shuffled backwards. His grazed palms pushed against the salt, which burned its way under his skin.The boy approached slowly but surely, closing the gap between James and itself.The teenager kept pushing himself backwards, the skin of his palms splitting and tearing, red streaks marking his path back across the lake.James’ arm gave way, and he fell onto his elbow, the shock rippling through his shoulder into the rest of his body.The boy reached him, arm outstretched. It rested its hand across James’ mouth, blocking his throat and nose.The ground beneath James gave way and he felt himself sinking, the lake swallowing its latest meal.He tried to scream, but his lungs had turned to salt. --- Katie lifted her head from the bus window. The rattling vibrations were starting to give her a headache that she didn’t need this early in the day.She pulled her coat off her legs and over her shoulders to fight the cold.It was mid-July, mid-winter, and although the temperature never dropped as low here as her native Glasgow, the chill on the bus was still nearly unbearable.They were cruising down the road that connected her suburb to another, the bus packed full of students from various different schools. The bus would pull up at the train station and they would splinter, all going their separate ways, friends saying goodbye until their freedom returned in the afternoon.Katie sat alone on one of the seats along the side of the bus, right in the middle of the vehicle. She heard all of the gossip and banter echoing around her, catching snippets of stories about people she did not know and never would.She wished she could sleep.A refraction of light to her left caught Katie’s attention, and she looked out of the window at the salt flats. The lazy winter sun was making its way up the sky, bearing a harsher shine than in summer.There was somebody standing on the salt lake.It was far away, and she couldn’t see much of them – just a figure in a red baseball cap.The bus driver swore, cutting through the conversations like a hot knife. The passengers fell silent, hearing the spluttering cough of the engine as it died.The driver pulled lazily into the emergency lane, opening the doors as the bus came to a halt.“We’ve broken down. Everybody off – you can wait for the next one or walk to the station, but you can’t stay here.”Katie followed the rest of them off the bus, pulling her coat on as soon as she had the space to do so. She thought about the person she had seen, alone on the lake.What were they doing out there? Should she tell someone? The bus driver, maybe?Or...A thought came to her, and she knew what she should do.Katie turned towards the fence, listening to the lake as it called her home.