Peace

Content Notice

This story contains references to domestic violence

The woman’s long plaintive face next to the dog’s long plaintive face in its wire muzzle was like a mean joke. Sally tried not to think that, but failed.

She looked across the worn coffee table at Ana and the tall grey dog standing at her shoulder.

“I’m sorry. You can’t have a dog staying here with you in the refuge. Especially one as big as a greyhound.”

There was a bright silver streak in Ana’s long black hair as well, mirroring the shiny grey stripe that ran down the dog’s snout.

“I just need some time to recharge,” Ana said. “It would be better if he stayed with me.”

“What’s his name?” Sally asked, delaying the conflict.

The woman’s face brightened.

“Peace,” she said.

She traced a pattern on the dog’s flank. Sally thought it looked deliberate, not random, a triangle shape with curls at the corners, repeated twice, three times. Afterwards, the dog raised his long snout to look at her, and she… did she? Yes, she nodded at him. So odd. But not more odd than a dozen things that Sally had seen this week alone.

Discreetly, Sally scanned the dog for signs of physical abuse. She couldn’t see anything. Not on the woman either, but she knew not to assume. She took a sip of her half-cold coffee, unconsciously twisting the pink quartz crystal hanging on a silver chain around her neck, then letting it spin back into place.

It was impossible to bend the rules to have the dog there. The next operational meeting would be hell, even longer than usual. The new manager had already given Sally a warning after she let a resident’s mum bring her support cat to visit at the refuge. And there was that girl, Chloe, who had moved in last week and was still on edge, jumping at shadows. Imagine this tall hound looming in the hallway at night.

Peace watched calmly, raising his nose slightly in its metal cage to sniff the onion and meat smells coming from the kitchen. “Later,” Ana murmured.

“I know some foster carers who might take him until you find a place,” Sally said.

Ana turned her head and looked towards the window. Sally knew she was thinking about giving up and going home. She had seen it so many times. And who could blame them. Ana herself had told Sally her husband had a powerful hold on her. Powerful, she’d said, twice, burning a look into Sally’s eyes.

Now, Sally’s eyes followed Ana’s gaze to the backyard, the gum trees with their flayed skins, lit up flesh red in the late sun.

“Stupid,” Ana hissed. “I should have thought of this.”

“No, no! It was hard enough…You did well!”

Sally’s reassurance sounded shallow to her own ears and she cursed herself for getting drawn into the trap of praise and blame. Her words drifted out into the room and hung there, artificially sweet as toilet freshener.

Ana put her hands on the arms of the chair and began to rise. Sally sat up and reached quickly across the table, then withdrew, not wanting to scare her. This was the part where she had to remind Ana about consequences.

“If you go back now you will have wasted all your planning. And it might be worse than before.”

Ana’s placid face hardened for a moment, but she seemed to quickly swallow any resentment. Sally, irritated and sympathetic, wished Ana could feel free to get properly angry, even if it was at her.

They both looked away again, out the window. Sally tried to make it a calm kind of looking, to dispel the sense that they had been arguing. Just then a mynah bird flew straight at the window, Peace flinched, and Ana quickly lifted a hand, fingers curled into an odd shape. The bird suddenly braked with outstretched wings to make a steep arc upwards before perching on the gutter of the shed. Peace lifted his long, caged head to follow the bird’s flight.

How strange, Sally thought. It was almost as if Ana had deflected the bird to safety. But that was ridiculous. The question now was this dog. Sally straightened the intake forms on the table and glanced up inquiringly at Ana.

Ana looked drained. She put her hand back on the dog’s shoulder, and nodded to Sally.

Sally made the phone call.

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They drove, Ana and Peace in the back of Sally’s old grey sedan. Sally looked in the rear-vision mirror to find Ana’s face, which was turned to one side, watching the passing fields and suburbs.

Sally realised with a jolt that they were travelling close to Ana’s house. Damn! Too late. Ana’s face swivelled around in the direction of her suburb, and her hand gripped the seat.

Stupid! Sally jabbed the insult at herself, then winced when she realised it was an echo of Ana’s earlier self-recrimination. She reminded herself: It wasn’t Ana’s fault they had to be so careful, and it wasn’t hers either. Out of Ana’s sight, she lifted a middle finger in the general direction of Ana’s house. It did make her feel a little better.

A storm rose up quickly, one of those dense, malicious rain events that seemed to come out of nowhere. Sally’s window seals were no good, and she waited for the sideways rain to start seeping in. Soon it did. Lightning flashed against the charcoal sky and ear-splitting thunder followed it. Ana pushed herself further down in her seat, below the window level, and Peace crawled onto the floor, whining.

An exit was coming up, and Sally was tempted to pull off and stop, but instead she prayed to her old Corolla and accelerated towards the distant sunset as rain started to flow down the inside of her window.

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It was night when they got to Penny and Gough’s. From the dark, a lit veranda loomed up, cluttered with shoes, boxes, plants and dog toys. An old border collie, grey in the face, staggered to his feet and let out some high, quavering barks. Peace sat up.

A woman with a pink face opened the door wearing a sarong, greeted Sally happily and smiled at being introduced to Ana and Peace. Gough hollered a hello from a back room.

Peace held his head low and wagged his tail slowly, deferring to the other dogs gathered on the veranda, despite his size.

They went inside to the kitchen, where Penny was baking. As she bent over to check something in the oven, her sarong gaped open and Sally looked away. Penny rose, face shining, and placed a hot tin containing a loaf of bread on the bench.

Peace was letting a kelpie-cross sniff him, politely holding his tail to one side.

“Peace can stay with us, Ana. He won’t be lonely.” Penny took her oven mitts off and pushed her hair back from her sweaty forehead.

“Thank you,” Ana said. “It’s just for tonight.”

Penny and Sally didn’t look at each other. They didn’t acknowledge their many shared memories of stays that started out “just for tonight” and became much longer.

Penny was distracted, and without thinking she reached for the tin with her bare hand, the oven mitts discarded on the bench. Sally yelped a warning, but Penny’s hand was moving too fast.

Just before her hand touched the burning hot tin, though, it slid off the bench and landed upright on the floor. Peace calmly stepped back to let Penny pick it up with the oven mitt.

How lucky to avoid a burn! Sally thought, wondering how it fell.

There was a little tremor of confused chatter before they moved the moment on with laughter and exclamations. But Sally noticed that Ana did not laugh, and had quietly moved to sit at the dining table, back straight, hands holding the side of the seat to brace herself upright.

Penny busied herself pouring cups of tea and passed the plate of biscuits. She and Sally chatted about the dogs, and Peace moved to place himself beside Ana’s right shoulder, the same position he’d taken at the refuge.

Ana asked quietly, bluntly but without malice, “And you, Penny, do you have children?”

The biscuit-plate paused, then continued its transit.

“No, no… just a lot of dogs, and Gough.”

Ana spoke again. “I have a son. Tol. I sent him away.”

Her dark coarse hair with streaks of grey stood out around her face; her smooth pale skin showed dark circles of tiredness around her eyes. The cup of tea sat in front of her, untouched, getting cold and growing in awkwardness with each moment. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed it.

Sally took an ostentatious sip from her own cup, forcing herself to refrain from smacking her lips and saying “ah” afterwards. I really must let things be, she thought, even if they’re awkward.

There was a silence and the night noises pressed in. A rhythmic squeak-squeak came from the veranda as one of the dogs chewed on a toy. After a while, Peace flopped down to lie next to Ana, a lean grey curve like a comma beside an incomprehensible word.

Ana didn’t cry as they departed. Nor did Peace resist. Ana kneeled before the dog, on both knees, her back straight. Peace sat up, bringing their heads to the same level. Ana removed the muzzle and dropped it, rubbing the sides of Peace’s snout, whispering to him before putting the muzzle back on. Penny held Peace’s collar, but he did not try to follow as they left.

---

They drove back on a different route. The roads were wet and shining under the moonlight and streetlights. The rainstorms had passed. Now they were pulling up at the refuge, an anonymous brick suburban house with security screens and an intercom.

The sensor light flicked on, flooding into the car. Ana sat up, looking about, disoriented. Then the memory returned, and her face set hard. She gathered her coat and bag and joined Sally at the door. The fluorescent light inside hurt their eyes and the carpet had a mean look.

Sally had the overnight shift, and was already tired, so after showing Ana to her room she lay down on the couch in the office area and closed her eyes. Just for a minute.

Something woke her, moments or hours later; Sally couldn’t tell. Bright moonlight pressed its way into every window, across the kitchen, in slices across the hall. Sally tiptoed, listening to the quiet house, the women sleeping, the occasional shift of a mattress, a sigh or a snore.

Ana’s door was slightly open and Sally couldn’t resist peeking. The curtains had been pulled wide to let the moonlight in. Sally could see that the big gumtree in the backyard was rimmed in silver now, and through the opened window she could hear the stiff leaves ticking and fluttering in the light wind. Fresh, after-storm air filtered in.

Ana was sitting upright on the edge of the bed with her back to the door, facing the window. Her hands rested open beside her, and light pooled in the hollows of her palms. The moonlight picked out strands of white on her head, which seemed to draw the light in and concentrate it in a kind of halo.

An imperceptible draft must have come through then, because the door closed with a soft bang, and Sally was left wondering in the hall.

Wasn’t she exhausted? Sally thought. Or was she too anxious to sleep? Either way, Sally knew better than to intrude, and she went back to rest on the couch. She couldn’t get back to sleep so she made herself a peppermint tea and listened to the gentle whoosh of gum leaves in the wind.

She must have fallen asleep again because a few hours later a giant thunderclap woke her. They were in another storm. Over the sounds of the storm Sally could hear a faint stinging sound like sharp metal against metal. It seemed to be coming from Ana’s room. From further off, there was a distant howling, coming closer.

Opening Ana’s door quietly, she was ready for something strange. Weird and disconcerting things were a feature of her work. Menacing messages, hiding, covering tracks, reading significance in the smallest signs. Buried horrors that returned with no warning. But what she saw now was another kind of strangeness: a void where the ceiling of the room should be, a vicious twisting wind sucking the curtains upwards into a spiral, the moon, which had come closer than it should, showing in detail its craters, ridges and hollows, so close Sally felt she could touch them, and two figures fighting in front of it. Fighting, twenty metres above her head.

So that’s where the whispering-metal-clanging was coming from. Sally gripped the door frame and gritted her teeth. She mustn’t let this wake the other women. They’d been through enough. Overcoming her fear and disorientation, she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The noise got louder in her ears.

Sally saw a swirling of shadows, which took human-like forms quicker than the eye could fix on before dissolving back into the maelstrom. Within this chaos, she could just make out a silver streak: Ana. She was pinned, in a collapsing spiral. Now she was darting away and stabbing back. A clash of steel, sharp enough to pull the enamel from Sally’s teeth, was followed by an angry thunderclap that shook the house and weakened the streetlights.

The other shape was bigger, with a refracting blue core that pulsed and grew with every successful strike. Ana was hanging onto its back now, thrown here and there but tenaciously clinging and stabbing. The blue dimmed and then came back, enraged, burning. A great limb reached out and plucked Ana off, pulling her in towards its glowing heart.

The far-off howling got closer. Loping across the sky, a slender shape leapt to form a silhouette in front of the moon: Peace. He grew massively as the moonlight caught him, and by the time he reached the refuge he was as big as the house itself. The open muzzle hung off to his side, tiny by comparison as if it was a pendant, and his huge mouth, always so meek, was open and snarling.

Peace’s mouth closed around the big figure’s neck and shook, and shook, and shook, and with each shake the blue light grew weaker, and the figure got smaller, until it was just a morsel of fluff, just a white rabbit. Against all her judgement and wisdom, Sally felt sorry for it. It looked small now but remember what it – what he – had done. He had imprisoned Ana and tried to bend her to his will.

The rabbit was weak and soon to die, held still by the hound’s mouth and paws. One more shake and it would be over.

Ana turned her pale face down, catching sight of Sally at the door, holding her gaze. Ana was grave and deliberate. She nodded at Peace and he gave one last vicious shake. A rabbit-shaped waft of smoke hovered in the air for a moment, before the wind rose up again, shaking the eucalyptus leaves and dispersing the last traces of the fight.

Ana breathed out in relief as Peace, regular-sized now, dropped to the ground outside the open window. He politely kept his whole body outside, except for his long snout, but he sat as close as he could to Ana, on the right-hand side as always.

“My apologies,” Ana said. “That was a little more disruptive than I had hoped.”

The ceiling re-solidified, quietly and without fuss. The curtains floated down, together with a few of the large glossy gum leaves that had been ripped loose in the fight.

“Is it … are you … alright now?” Sally stammered.

“Yes,” said Ana, and the silver streak in her hair shone stronger in the moonlight.

“Thank you. I just needed some time to recharge.”

By some miracle, the other women had not woken. Sally breathed in the quiet that enveloped the whole house, and then slowly, shakily, breathed out.

Ana was calling someone. She held the phone to her head.

“Tol. You can come home now.”

A pause, a breath.

“Yes, we will make a new home. Yes, soon.”

From the other side of the window there was the unmistakeable sound of a large dog flopping to the ground, huffing, his tail beating twice, wearily, and letting out a big sigh. As long as they were gone before the refuge coordinator arrived for the meeting tomorrow. Sally felt sure they would be.

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