There is a dying.

Hard to say exactly what’s wrong but Divya could feel it when she came up into the hills and lay against their deep heavy sides palm flat hair spread like a blanket of dead leaves. Secretive and slumbering they were, the scrub grey hills, settled into the earth, each atom in its place, comfortable and quiet against the next. They felt the roots searching and reaching beneath their skin, the rain burrowing down between them, light-fingered, inquisitive, the digestive movements of molten innards far below, the tickling of the wind like a insect’s murmur, and they just were as always, but less than before and less all the time now, dwindling somehow.

She climbed the fire trail followed the flattened paths made by roos and wombats scrambled through scree up to the edge of the escarpment high over the valley and sitting on the rocky ribcage of the land heard the air shimmering above the trees the soft high singing of the wind the earth’s grumbling patience the crumbling surrender of forest mulch caress of sky over feathers haste and hunger and the ambition of ants. Heard also the quiet dark underneath boulders set far into the earth, the lazy spreading sunlight, the termites in their proud mounds and the yellow clay nestling about them. Heard the beetles chewing in the fallen bark, butterflies landing on wattle and bluebell, the lace flowers and the drooping gold mingling, the shards and the monoliths, a million voices, a multiphonic competing hum things knowing themselves amid their atomic bonds.

Later at home in the blocky brick house at the end of the row beside the village’s cemetery she felt confined and enclosed touching the walls sensing the uneasiness of sand and clay forced close to hissing within them. Things built, made, had not settled into who they were, buzzed and muttered like a nest disturbed. Worse at the printing shop, the sour sickness of plastic, the anger of electricity trapped and directed, the air suffocating in its stillness. You had to resist to try not to absorb the anxiety of things, you got tired quickly and so she only went two days each week even though they told Mum they would gladly take her on for three if she wanted.

Home at least knew her, a little stretch and buzz of recognition and always, always and even still the lingering smell of Aarav running in the hall banging on the bedroom door bouncing off door frames and windows pulling things out and knocking things over, Aarav curled on his side with covers kicked off in his room dreaming of supermen while she crept in smiling to see this brother of hers so bursting by day and now so sweet and quiet peaceful as a peach. Only now Aarav is asleep still and pale and distant never dreaming and will never wake and play again at least that’s what everyone thinks even Mum though she pretends not to.

In the kitchen now her hands on the table among specks of flour and garlic and sugar Mum’s cooking and memories of Aarav like a thick layer of dust, Aarav eating stolen sugar cubes digging his knife in to make scratches when no one was looking spilling spaghetti sauce like leaked blood insisting cajoling sulking can I this? Can I that? Look at me! Why can’t I? I want! Sly gazing sideways with his creased boy’s eyes Divya made me it wasn’t me it was Divya did it and daring her to deny it because he knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t even if she could. Yes even his wickedness was lovely…used to be.

What are you doing Mum asked pouring a Coke for her not expecting an answer because Divya could not speak at all. She could understand words and the thoughts they sprang from but having been born wrong she couldn’t bring them out into the world somehow, could not write, could not speak, no one knew quite why.

So it wasn’t possible to answer, to explain what exactly she was doing which was wrapping herself in remembering like a blanket like a tent against the grief and if she could tell her mother it would hurt them both, all the signs and scars Aarav had left in them and in this place like a horrible drumbeat beating he’s not here, he’s not here. Anyway knowing that Mum was already torn to breaking by the accident the struggle to believe month by long month since and by Dad, the way he liked to twist them all into shape like welded metal you have to melt before you can use it.

 She turned her head from drinking her Coke and looked at Mum chopping carrots with her knife slip smack and her thoughts like brown dirty water tumbling over rocks, how can I bear it with Aarav like he is no sign not even a twitch a smile a glance to give us hope not since it happened and Mike angry always angry as if it’s my fault and maybe it is too, my punishment for the heavy sins I have committed. And then there’s Divya – what will happen to this girl who isn’t like any daughter I ever expected or wanted, what will happen when I’m not here to take care of her and there’s only Mike, how did I come to have such a child was it something I did was it something I deserved for marrying an Australian man against my parents’ wishes yes perhaps they did say it would end badly. The children shall inherit the sins of the fathers and probably the mothers too and there she is now fingers stroking the pine table as if it’s a pet perhaps we should have got her one but Mike wouldn’t have it…anyway it doesn’t matter nothing else matters without Aarav how can I live how can I go through each day foot after foot hand over hand like climbing an endless cliff to nowhere how can I go on living without my son?

Divya standing took her glass to the sink and washed it, then wound her arms around the mother her cheek against the twisted plait of rough and fraying hair. If she could have, she could have said that it’s only a change from one kind of thing to another like rock to sand tree food to food tree air to water and water to air re-purposed, like the old saucepans Mum used as flower pots. And this thought might have been comforting but wasn’t because Aarav was an important kind of thing and they both loved him as Aarav not as the parts of him that could soon be part of anything or everything.

Your father’ll be home soon said Mum getting up to put the carrots in the spiced stew she was making, on top of the chicken pieces. Set the table for me will you?

Divya set the table quickly and quietly then went to her own room smelling under the easy words the stink of fear wired in and ready. The thoughts leaking out into the room and the cooking, of when he comes it will all start over even though I try not to give him an excuse and I don’t want to go through it again the why didn’t you and that’s why he and it’s your fault Aarav’s like he is now yes your fault and what am I supposed to do in all this don’t I count for anything in this family?  The arguments which tangled themselves in each night’s dreams and waited with their poison truths ready when the mother woke to another day of sorrow.

Of course she knew but it didn’t help that Aarav was not in pain, the pain was all theirs. His darkness was the darkness of far beyond and far below, a restful emptiness. Trapped in that dry breathing shell that neither ate nor spoke nor heard was Aarav and so only the father was furious at fate undeserved, he had a right to a viable, football-kicking son and now look what he had got. And only the mother bereft as if her baby died as it left the womb but still hanging there by its cord not knowing when or whether to cut.

Not the same she, who had seen Aarav at minutes old but already knew him deeply and wholly from a seed blossoming in his mother’s belly curled in the womb stretching his toes in its dark waters listening to the murmur of the outside that yet had nothing to do with him and just beginning to become himself. Already before he first came into the world she had shared his thoughts listened to the heartbeat felt warmth on new skin touched boundaries that after a while defined themselves at the limits of hands and feet stretching out to find them. Already she had promised the promises of sisters to adore to endure to worship and sometimes hate but always love because how could you help it?

 In her own room she took out her sketch book and drew the shapes that came out of her head and fingers but then threw it down because you couldn’t put the feelings down there on white paper the ones about Aarav or about Mum or Dad or even the ones about the mountains dying, not that it was only the mountain no it was everything at least everything here in Whipstick, the forests the grass the soil the rock and the spaces in between and the creatures moving about in them and maybe the people too. Maybe even Divya herself. Could she feel it inside, the fading? She imagined she could. Aarav drifting away and her and Mum with him, leaving Dad raging and oblivious behind.

Because whatever song they were all singing and together, it was growing fainter as if further away and thinner somehow like strained soup.  The last notes of something beautiful, falling to indifference.

Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash