The strange thing was that there wasn't even any smoke in the air.

All day Brent had been following the news reports live, watching with horror and disbelief and despair as the fires that were incinerating great swathes of Victoria razed towns and forests and farms. He'd been refreshing the browser windows every five minutes, he'd had the radio on and the T.V. on and had racked his brain to think of any of his friends knew anyone out there, outside the safety of the city, and as the day had progressed he'd started thinking twice about how much water he was using, how much electricity: might it be needed elsewhere? And all the while the number at the centre of it all kept rising, leaping by dozens as more towns were engulfed: sixteen, thirty-six . . . eventually eighty-four, ninety-six, more than one-hundred soon, surely. It was the number of people dead.

Everyone knew about Ash Wednesday. This was worse: one weekend so horrifying that it defied naming. And all the time, Brent looked up into the sky, stuck his head out of the window and smelled the air, and there was just the cool, fresh, cloud-puffing wind that had dropped the temperature from its record high the day before.

It was a cold wind; yesterday's had been a hot wind, up until five o'clock when it had suddenly turned, at nine o'clock or so when it started really blowing. And it was still blowing now - and that was bad. Because by the time it started blowing the fires had already started, and the wind carried no rain to speak of with it, and when it met the fires it started carrying the flames instead.

And Brent supposed that it must be blowing the fires away from Melbourne, because here he was in the inner-city and if he hadn't turned on the T.V. that morning he wouldn't even know anything was going on. But now he knew: he could name the towns that were gone, destroyed. He couldn't forget the images of burned-out cars. Their doors were all closed. He tried not to think about it, but there was no avoiding it. Over one-hundred dead now, reports of bodies in cars. They hadn't even started searching the houses yet. What had been houses.

Politicians crying on the T.V. Residents crying. Residents without residences. Property lost. Pets lost. Friends and family lost, waiting to be found, too late. The map of Victoria had always seemed so crowded with towns and villages, hundred of names in one of the country's smallest states. Now Brent moved his mouse over the map on his computer screen, watching the cursor change from an arrow to a clickable hand as it passed over icons of flames. Someone had spent time designing those icons. Someone had decided on the colours, the shape, the size.

Someone had lit the fires. Not all of them, but some of them: someone - who knew how many people? - had lit fires, and fires had killed people. Someone had killed people. Brent didn't even know if he was angry about it: he was appalled. The whole situation unfolding relentlessly as he watched, only eighty kilometres to the north at its nearest, was appalling. Seven-hundred houses lost. All those people without houses to go back to. Where would they all stay? Who'd feed them all? He could donate some money to the Red Cross. He could give blood. At least he could do that much.

An interview with a man, panicking, on the radio. It was all suddenly too much for Brent: he rushed outside, his mind reeling. He breathed deep, trying to calm down, though he didn't know why he should be calm. He shut his eyes and saw again the pictures he'd seen on the news: black trees, red trees, red and black sky.

He opened his eyes again and looked up at the sky above him, safe here in Melbourne: blue sky, white clouds, like a child's painting. Why was the sky so clear here?