Emily M-H’s Reviews > Wild Dark Shore > Status Update

They save everyone they can. And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the entrances of the burrows to block the fire and the ash from coming down. And their bums get burned, and sometimes they die, but they protect the others.

Wombats have a thing they do in fires. They take their families underground, into their burrows. They have tunnels under the earth, and they go down there to take shelter, but they don't just take their families, they also take other animals down there.

Time passes and Fen enjoys these fantasies. They give her something to do. She would be bored without them. Never, in any of her wildest imaginings, does she think anything will happen between them. And, if she is honest with herself, never has she wanted anything to happen. The fun of the crush is that it exists in her mind. That it is her secret. And that she is safe from it.

I don't tell him it's not his job to carry his family. It is his job, because he has decided it is. I understand this maybe better than anyone. I think of the things I decided to carry, and how I had to make myself strong enough to do so, and then I think of my mum again. She was very loving in the beginning, but grief severs things.

"As we do this part," I say, "we put all our gratitude into it. We put every good feeling into the metal, and we think about the creatures on this island and how much their lives matter." They move forward, eager in a way I wasn't expecting, and I'm glad for the long bright evenings because soon we have built something new.

I thought he understood me. I thought he accepted the vulnerability I battled to show him, I thought we were closer for it, but instead of comprehending the complexity of how I felt-and the difficulty of contradictory feelings-he judged me, misunderstood me, and is now using it against me.

I have made my love for him weak, designed it to be so, that it should be easier to cut myself free of.

"I'm fine," I repeat, meeting her eyes. She is scared. I see this fear in her face whenever she looks at me: she has never known me like this. To Liv I have always been rock solid, the most reliable thing she has ever known. I made myself this way, for her and for our sister Jay. I had to carry them. And now I am unraveled and she's frightened and I don't know how to tie my pieces back together.