ABSTRACT
The fresh green lawn sprouting at the edges of the shiny mass was an odd contradiction. Radiant heat from the fire had liquefied an object made of alloyed metal and the hardened lump still lay where it had melted, the burnt gardens it flowed through now transformed into an ash-stinking swamp by the fickle Victorian weather. Exactly what it had been nobody quite knew. Perhaps the lawnmower, maybe a bicycle, could have been the spare wheel of the car. Whatever it was, the blob laying in the damp grass was a grizzly souvenir of the 2009 Black Saturday fires. But at least the house was still standing. Further along the road, someone had photographed an array of oddments scavenged from the ruins of their home. The most striking was a pottery head made by the teenaged son of the family. The glazed face had melted in the flames and re-set with new features; somewhere in the fire storm, pieces of broken glass had spookily settled in the previously empty ceramic eye-sockets. The monster acquired new eyeballs, while the house succumbed to the flames.
