A Charm of Powerful Trouble by Joanne Horniman

as she was now, that surprised her.
    But she often surprised herself now with new sensations and feelings. Her life in the house was all sensation and image, rich and heady. Here, she was so different from the Emma who lived with her mother and Beth that she could forget about who she was, and be simply a bundle of nerve endings.
    She grew used to the sound of Em's radio coming from the kitchen in the early mornings, which she blocked out with the tinny sound of her own transistor through the earplugs. There were songs that were played over and over that Emma liked: ‘Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadows? Or was it ‘lover' ? Emma couldn't tell.
    Aunt Em knew things. There were words for everything that surrounded her ancient crumbling house. Birds that came to the garden were spangled drongoes or rainbow bee-eaters or fire-tail finches or striated pardalotes . Trees were tamarinds or quandongs or red kamalas . When Emma murmured that they all sounded exotic, Aunt Em's eyes grew bright with amusement. ‘They're not at all exotic,’ she said. ‘They belong here. It's the roses that are exotic.’
    The black phone on the wall rang twice while Emma was staymg there: her mother and Beth, ringing to see how she was. She stood and listened to their distant voices as she stared up the dim reaches of the staircase.

    It was summer, and it rained - sometimes a foggy mist crept down from the hills in the morning, sometimes there was an evening torrent preceded by thunder and lightning. Emma stood on the verandah when it stormed, watching the lightning shoot down to earth, loving it. And there was the humidity, always, that coated your skin with a slick of sweat. She went outside on damp nights, and wandered around the yard, listening to the sound of cicadas and watching for fireflies, whose pulsing trails she followed into the trees. She followed the moon too, watching it move around between the trees; sometimes it caught in the branches, and then broke free and escaped high into the sky. Each night she watched as, little by little, it waxed or waned. On still nights she thought she could hear the sound of the sea, which Em said was just over the hills. It was a gentle swooshing sound like blood moving through veins.
    One night late, Emma stood in the garden and watched as Em poured her evening drink of Hospital brandy (the brand with medicinal overtones), standing at the kitchen table. She sipped it slowly and with enjoyment. Emma saw the scene as a picture: the kitchen window was the frame, the darkness was a border that set off the tableau inside the house. In the daytime, the house was dark, and the light outside contrasted starkly, but at night it was the opposite, and that was why she went out there, to drink it all in and marvel at the difference. Woman In Kitchen, Night, 1960s would be the title of the picture, had Emma ever painted it.
    Her nights were never sweeter. She lay on her bed with the sheet kicked off, wrapped in the soft darkness, veiled by a mosquito net, aware of the relief of night air flowing over her skin, and of Aunt Em asleep in her own bed, lyng as straight as a board. The house towered above her, mysterious and hidden, but the small part that she and Em inhabited sang with their small daily pleasures.

    One afternoon she came upon Flora and Stella bathing in the creek. She called out to them and sat down on the bank to watch. They had lathered themselves with soap, their hair as well, and were splashing and laughing and tickling each other. Flora suddenly caught Stella up in her arms, and stood there cradling her, waist-deep in water, gazing into her eyes. Then just as suddenly she kissed her on the forehead and released her back into the water; Stella submerged and came up gasping like a fish, water streaming over her face, her hair slicked back. Emma remembered the picture of Em with her mother, taken all those years ago, and she thought, nothing lasts . She was