There’s a lot of talk about how terrible the weather will be this summer, hot and windy, they say.

Hundreds of pictures of the last bad summer are still on your phone, saved in an album named ‘fires’ and sometimes you can’t help looking for that one picture of the crowd on the beach with the horse, the sky behind them and the sand around them and even the sea in front of them glowing some part of the spectrum of the colour orange. They were waiting for boats, for rescue.

As always, you wonder what happened to that horse.

Author: Annette Higgs is a writer living in Sydney, Australia. She has lived, worked and studied in Sydney, London and Italy, and holds a Doctor of Arts from Sydney University. Her novel On a Bright Hillside in Paradise won the 2022 Penguin Literary Prize and was published by Penguin in 2023.