The Sounds of Then

A crack of lightning flashes, paused in time as it illuminates the endless horizon until it's finally swallowed by the ocean below. 

Kylie sits silently on the patio, tears stream from her eyes as she breathes in the humidity in huffed, muffled breaths. She stares out to sea, her face emotionless except for the streaks of mascara tracing her cheeks. 

She watches the lightning crack in the distance, unaffected by the booming thunder that follows.

She sits alone in silence. The voices of people she never knew rumble in her mind. Yet their faces are familiar. Images burnt into her memory. The memories occasionally interrupted by the clap of thunder. The faces of a previous time, generations before her own. The songs of those people. 

The sounds of Then. 

She lets out a hollow, dry laugh as the thunder bounces off brick veneer behind her. The people in her memories, they will never understand the idea of credit and debt. To be trapped in a room, surrounded by silent hardiflex while the walls close in. But loss, helplessness. That they understand. She can see the sorrow in their faces. She can feel it. Their shared mourning. They might not recognise the texture or smells of suburbia. But the crashing of the night time swell, the heavy days. That is passed on through time. Through generations.

She stares west, towards the oncoming storm, the heat haze distorting the horizon. Another crack of lightning flashes, this time, it does not vanish. It hovers above the ocean, a frozen ember in the sky.

A glowing face forms in the distance above the raging sea. The image burnt in her eyes. In the distance she sees him. The boom of thunder roars and bounces off the brick veneer again, but this time the hum of suburbia is silenced. The face in the distance, the face crackled like a flame in the wind, pieces of it vanishing into the night before reforming. Eyes burned like embers, locked onto hers.

“They came” the voice said, carrying centuries of sorrow on the wind.

“They came. The men with the guns.”

The voice rushed towards her from across the sea, the wind flinging her hair behind her. 

“They came with guns. To the land of dreaming.”

Kylie’s eyes now widen. The glowing face above the sea stares at her. The crackle of a time that once was, a time nearly forgotten speaks to her. Only her. 

“With their guns. They took the sun from our sky, the warmth from our hands. They left us in the cold and called it progress.”

She doesn’t understand. Is this a dream? A hallucination? She doesn’t understand what the flashing, crackling face over the ocean is telling her. 

“The girl and the child and the mother.”

She remains static and speechless. 

“The father tried hard, but the men with the guns killed the son and the child and the mother.”

Tears strew from her eyes. This wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare. The face over the sea was visibly distressed. Kylie’s heart felt as if it were being torn from her chest, bursting into a thousand shattered pieces. 

“The passage of time, the time of our people, destroyed by their ships and white sails.”

The face over the ocean started to fade and pulse. As the light dimmed she could see the face clearer, that of an elderly man. His face worn down by weather and time. The words rang out, their booms and howling gusts of wind dying down, growing quiet. Kylie stood in silence. 

‘Our people’. The words raced through her mind. ‘White sails’. ‘Our people’. She began to shake, from her feet to her ears. ‘The time of our people’. Emotions overcame her. Like a rushing wave she was unable to tame. ‘Destroyed by them’. Her problems. Financial. Material. They no longer mattered as they once had. 

“Look to the sun, when the sun shines its rays. The dawn it will come and our people will rise in the morning. Our people will rise. Our people are one.”

She watches as the face drops, the chin of the elderly man’s head touching the now still water. The intense glow and sparks gone, now calm and dim. The face visible, no longer shielded by the bright, yellow light. 

“Don’t let this be the end of our people.”

I won’t! The words screamed through her head but she stayed silent. She stood from her chair, Her face still stained by the running mascara. 

“Is this the end? Don't let this be the end. Of our people.”

She watched the face drop further and sink into the calm sea. As the final strand of hair had sunk beneath the surface, the hum of suburbia returned. The waves roared to life crashing on the sun starved shores. The crack of lightning had grown closer and the thunder even more deafening than before. ‘The end of our people’. The words had overtaken her. Rain began to pour on the tin roof above, like sledge hammers falling all around her. But the words remained clear. 

She steps off the patio and onto the wet grass, the rain lashing at her skin. The storm is overbearing, deafening. But inside, she feels something shift. A clarity. The words of the ancestor, “Don’t let this be the end of our people,” reverberate within her, and for the first time in a long time, she feels something stronger than sorrow.

She breathes deeply, closing her eyes.

This storm is nothing compared to the storms her people have endured.

The weight of debt, of bills, of survival in a system that was never meant for her, those things are real, but so is this.

The voice. The vision. The connection to those who came before. She is more than this moment, more than the struggle.

The earth beneath her is solid, just as it was for her ancestors. The water falling from the sky, the roar of the waves, it’s the same water that nourished her people for thousands of years. The wind that carries their voices still whispers.

She looks down at her feet, sinking into the wet soil, and a realization settles over her. She is standing where they once stood. The elders, their songs, their language. Their country. Her country. That crackling face above the ocean had reminded her of places she’d never been before… places her ancestors walked, places where their spirits still linger. She had never been to all those places. But through them. Through the elders. Through him. She had. She had spent a lifetime there.

She lifts her chin, letting the rain wash the mascara from her face. Her grandmother once told her a song. The old song, the one she barely remembered. She hums it now, softly at first, then louder. It carries through the night, past the waves, past the storm. She is not alone. She has never been alone, they were never gone.

She understands now. The sounds of then. 

This will not be the end of her people.

She remembers.