Homecoming
SAVANNAH WATSON
The tall eucalypts lining the street first give way to sporadic houses, barely visible through the downpour. Soon, the scattered buildings give way to the old town. It sprawls just as I remember, with its double-wide gravel road and three-room mining cottages lining the street to the ocean. I could have stayed in the city, had I wanted to. It might make more sense with the burial.
At first, I chose not to fly over at all. But three nights ago, I heard a whisper. Deep in my dreams, her voice. I woke, sweating through silk-sheets. Opening my laptop in the darkness. Booking a trip: two ways, three days.
BOOKING CONFIRMED. ENJOY YOUR STAY!
Now, my hire-car rattles over gravel, through the town of my childhood. Pulling into the driveway of my parent’s house, I park behind their camper van and step from the car, slamming the door behind me and waving a hand at my mother. She’s standing with her forehead pressed against the glass, waving back with a sad smile. I pass through the yellow glow cast through the window of the living room behind her.
'It’s just so, so tragic. Is everything organised?' My mother’s hushed words attempt kindness as she opens the door. I kick off sodden leather loafers, peeling my socks off like a second skin.
My father’s words do not. 'So, do you know the guy who did it? I saw something crazy on the news.'
‘How can you be so fucking dense?’ I want to respond.
'What did I tell you about believing everything you read?' I say instead.
I go through the motions. I talk about work, about school, about family and friends. I’m chastised for taking so long to visit. I’m embraced in a warm hug, and handed a moth-eaten nightdress, and plant my feet in the same pale-green tub my mother washed me in as a newborn.
The tepid water doesn’t rinse away the pain, and dinner is no better. I push roast vegetables around my plate with a fork until they’re cold and tuck the peas under potatoes like I did as a child. I ignore the hard-hitting questions and simple ones alike.
Emptying my plate, I tread up the hallway. My room is just as I remember, with its striped lavender walls and permanent marker scribbles, posters of teen heartthrobs and instant-film pictures strung up on ribbon. I look over the photos and laugh, loud. Then, I pluck the memories from where they hang. I know someone who can keep them forever.
I’d imagined sleep would evade me tonight, just as it has done for a week. But at some point, I must, as I wake at the back door to the garden. I stare into the dark, then move into the yard.
Because I hear her again. Calling my name on the wind, howling — and I don’t feel new here. Not like I had at the funeral-home under false firelight and static, filing through papers and picking words for a speech. No, here in this nightdress and out in the rain, I’m a ghost. Skin soaked to the bone; I’m something well-loved and worn. A haunting that belongs.
There’s a chorus of laughter at my feet. The nine-year-old version of myself calls out to her closest friend as they run between my legs. The wraith-children zigzag through the late-winter rains as if the skies above are wide and blue. They don’t see me, the children, as I wait here in the dark; even if I feel them brush against my sodden skirt as they scurry past on bare feet, plucking the carpet of spirit spring-daisies that have sprung up about the yard. Together, they giggle. They fall into fits of laughter, and grab at full-fruit bellies, and weave the phantom flower-stems into phantom flower-crowns.
'I’ll love you forever!' my best friend says to child-me.
'You, too,' I respond aloud to the rain.
Arms linked at the elbow, they skip through the garden, turning up stones to find hidden beetles. Collecting them in woven baskets, fascinated by the slick-oil shine of their shells.
I don’t let myself lose them as I float through the garden. Just past the back-fence, the twelve-year-old version of myself sits beside her best friend with her feet hanging over the edge of a sun-warm boulder; with one shoe dangling loose, and the other lost to the rust-red dog in the creek below.
The wraith-children laugh at the burrs in his coat, laugh at the cobwebs from poking his nose into the home-holes of bandicoots, long emptied by the summer’s drought. Shorts tugged off, they wade into what’s left of the water, snapping dry low-hanging branches to splash one-another. Unworried and unaware, they lie on their backs in the dirt at the shore, plucking fat orange loquats from the stray fruit-tree at the water’s edge. When the dog barks through me, I look to the fence line for the wooden-bone cross.
BELOVED REX: THE BEST BOY.
Metallic tangs my lips from chewed cheeks. Blood, rust-red like the dog. Blood, like the red-wine Eucharist. I look down at my feet. Red clay-mud swallows my toes. I look up, and the children are gone, dog with them. They have disappeared back into the summer-day shrubs and the night.
Thunder smacks above me. A shock of bright-white and glare.
'I hate him!' The voice of my best friend at sixteen carries on the wind. I search for her spectre in the present.
'You’ve broken up like, fifteen times,' the voice of sixteen-year-old me returns.
'I wish I knew,' I respond to no-one. 'I could have stopped this.'
Where are they? Present-me slogs up the small hill through clay-mud to the voices, past the tumbledown fence and ghost-wildflowers, back to my mother’s garden. Toes snagging, I fall to my knees in the wet dirt, cursing in the garden of my childhood home. I think about the wraith-children; I think about tomorrow’s burial. I close my eyes and push the thought away. If the tears come now, they won’t stop.
'You couldn’t have done anything,' my best friend’s voice sounds too-real; it sounds just like it had in our friend’s living-room last week.
'How do you know?' Present-me shouts into the sheet of rain pelting the empty yard. 'If I’d done something—'
'Don’t think about it like that.'
DON’T THINK ABOUT IT LIKE THAT.
Her voice echoes, and the rain lightens. In the dim-flicker of the backyard light, I see it, hiding in the corner of the red-brick patio in the overgrown shrubs. In the melancholy blue of the night, a hint of familiar pink-peeling paint — the flaking turret of a small, ceramic castle.
I crawl over the bricks to reach forward, threading my fingers into tangled vines. The fairy-home was a creation of a springtime long-gone, long-hidden by nature’s strangulation. Cobwebs cling to its facade, but I don’t dare to brush them away.
'You remembered the rules,' my best friend’s voice at nine-years-old.
'Of course,' I laugh to no-one. 'No moving spider’s webs. No moving the home. No telling anyone of the fairy-home secret. No wishing away tomorrow, and no wishing for harm.'
I let the sound of the rain take over my voice and cradle the dirt-covered statuette. Though I don’t speak the rules again, I taste them on my lips. I repeat them in my mind, like a script. No wishing away tomorrow, and no wishing for harm.
But since I heard the news, I’ve wanted nothing more. I look down at my knees, where the instant-film photos scatter on the paving, flecked with the red clay-mud of the creek.
How did they get there? A costume-party. Swimming school. Dance concert. School ball. I stack them in my palm; I pull off the kiln-made roof. Inside, past the scabby exterior, the gritty, hardened clay hides a trove of childhood treasures. A wishbone. A coin from an adventure overseas. Pale-pink shells. And a book-pressed four-leaf clover.
'The only one we ever found,' my voice doesn’t break from a whisper.
'Surprised it’s still around?' My best friend’s voice at twelve.
'I kept this in my bedside table until—'
'Until you moved,' my best friend’s voice is faraway.
I look at the ring on my finger, formed from a curled vintage fork. Long ago, I offered the clover to the fairy-house, and in return, I took the ring.
'The cost of a wish is a transferred treasure,' I say through a smile.
Then, I take the clover — but I don’t return the ring. Instead, I leave the photos, close my eyes, and make a wish.
'Better there, where you can find them,' she says. 'When you’re ready.'
'Will I ever see you, again?'
‘I’m unsure.’
‘I’d like to.’
'Maybe one day.' Then, her voice is drowned out by the roar of the skies as angels cry.
If tomorrow is the burial, tonight is goodbye.
Savannah Watson (she/her/hers) is a mother and full-time dreamer who lives in Boorloo (Perth). She most often writes speculative science fiction best described as gritty; and doesn’t shy away from exploring the darker aspects of humanity, whether it be through aliens, dystopia, or something that makes the reader ask, ‘Is it even science fiction?’
