During last lockdown, Mr Dan Hagan submitted a piece of writing 'On Fear' to the Jacaranda Writing Competition which was open to all students and teachers from around Australia. It was recently announced that he won First Place in the Flash Fiction - Teacher category and will be published in the forthcoming Jacaranda English 7 textbook. Congratulations, Dan!

On Fear

By Dan Hagan

They came as the temperature fell, as the wind rose and the winter rains began. They came with the fear. They came for the fear.

It started even before the schools were closed. We were watching more, noticing more, taking note. Is he coughing into his sleeve or his hand? How often does she touch her face?

I was walking to the park with dad to kick the footy. This was early on, before the schools closed, when no-one was feeling normal but everyone was still pretending to. Dad ran into his mate, Jeff. Normally it’s handshakes and backslapping with those two. But they stopped short, stood apart, hesitated. They ended up doing a sort-of-jokey-sort-of-not elbow bump. But before that, around that, there was the fear. In the tree above us, I glanced up, were red eyes.

Everyone went out less, everyone crossed the street to avoid passing each other on the footpath. Mr Sanders from next door, the Chan twins, the old lady from number 17, everyone looked at everyone else with suspicion. Everyone was afraid. And there are creatures that feed on fear.

On the day mum knocked back an offer of coffee with Aunty June, sort-of-jokey-sort-of-not, the clouds were lower, darker, the air colder, the rain more persistent, and there was something in the front yard, between my window and the fence. I was on the computer, trying to do Maths in between bouts of Shock Troops V, and I saw it in the corner of my eye. It was shaggy, it was huffing deeply and staring at me. I didn’t turn to get a better look. I just pulled down the blind with a shaking hand and tried to get on with my work.

A week late, maybe two weeks – time had gotten weirdly slow with the days grey and dark and the incessant muffling rain, I snuck off to the park to muck around with Grace. We met up, hugged defiantly, and ducked under the council’s out-of-bounds tape to show we weren’t afraid. But then we looked at the monkey bars and the stair rails and the climbing holds and every surface that so many nose-wiping germ-smearing coughed-into hands had touched and we were afraid. We didn’t stay. We said an awkward goodbye. On my way home, I heard a deep and distant, slow crunching thudding, like something very big striding past.

We sat at our desks, we goofed around online, we watched TV, ate too many snacks, did enough work to keep our teachers off our backs. We worked at feeling okay. But we weren’t.

Mum and dad shopped less often. If we ran out of peanut butter, we ate jam. When they did go to the supermarket, they kept it all in the carport and wouldn’t bring anything in until each item had been wiped over with soapy water. Then they washed the clothes they’d shopped in and had to shower again before they could relax. Dad had an aunt who’d done that, but he used to laugh about it and we never went there for lunch because her plates smelled like bleach.

The fear grew thick in the air, inside and out. It was in our clothes and hair. If a delivery driver came, we greeted him through the wire door and waited until he left before going out for the package. And then we wiped down the package, and the doorbell and front gate latch and anything else he might have touched. And they came to feed on it all, their heavy feet, their deep wet breath, their red eyes, their paws. They sat outside the windows, ducked under the eaves, and frightened the dogs to stillness. And we stayed in, shut the blinds, tried not to notice, tried not to see or hear or feel their presence.

They came in closer, as we shrank back. They leaned in on us, hovered over us. They leant on the guttering and it creaked and snapped. And bigger ones came. Heavier, slower, older things moved in their sleep and detected our fear and slowly stretched and rose and lumbered toward us.

On the day I turned off my computer and mum and dad stayed in their room and we all went back to bed, the sky was almost black at midday. Then the wind that had been whipping the trees shrank back and even the rain eased off. And the oldest one, the thing that had retreated furthest into the deeps, eased itself from the roots of the world and rose to feed.

The earth creaked and shuddered as the thing began to move, and the wind shrieked again as the thing began to gorge itself as it leant over the city, taking clawfuls of fear into its insatiable maw and for every bite of fear it took we offered more.

And then I looked outside.

I didn’t even know her name, just “the old lady from number 17”. She was outside. I saw her through wide eyes, through a gap in the blinds. I heard her yelp. So I shakily got out of bed and stared out. She was on the footpath, she was holding her ankle. But she was deep under the thing’s immense shadow, she was lost among its tentacles, her hair was curling in the gusts of its warm breath. But she was struggling to stand, unsteady on her walking stick, about to topple over.

I opened my bedroom door and stepped in to the hall. I went to the front door and I opened it.

The path was clear of the thing’s tentacles. The air was clear of its suffocating breath. The rain had stopped and in the dark grey sky there were patches of blue. And the old lady from number 17 looked up at me and smiled. She reached out her hand. I stepped outside.

And then she sneezed.

And I leapt back inside and slammed the door.

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