There is a thread. A ligature. Time trundles on its axis, and it unravels. A line is a line. She follows behind.
What follows is more than memory. In this mind, along this line, ruin undergoes a restoration. Blue paint slowly reattaches itself to the barn wall. Weeds swallow their seeds, turn green, and sink into the earth.
Walls right themselves against their houses. Roofs unbuckle. Rats leave, possums return. Cracks in the soil close, and branches leap up into trees that seem to suck in colour in a single breath. Wild gardens self-organise, tending themselves towards order. Rust sheds oxygen, becomes metal again. Termites spit up timbers, repair and abandon them, march back along their undergrounds, into dwindling cities.
There are no birds for a long time, and one day there are one or two birds. It’s hard to notice the change. Then suddenly, the birds proliferate.
There are people, coming and going. Tourists. Cameras. The village. Trucks. A boot rights the gate that says reation park, which stands to match its twin. There’s talk, a lot of talk, and not much moving. Gradually, a scent infuses the air; like the birds, it returns so slowly it can hardly be noticed until it is everywhere.
The people come back more abruptly. She sees their cars, travelling by day and loudly, or by night. They cluster at the village, but soon everyone is packing up again, moving back into the old company houses. Furniture is brought in, used to cover prints of its place on floors, the damp stains that reiterate where things go. Covering the mould and the damage. By this time, the smell is unbearable. They cover their faces with their sleeves.
Trucks arrive with diggers on their backs and unload them into the park. Other trucks arrive with fencing, put up around the perimeter. There’s no boundary line between finished and unfinished, there are only places that change.
Wild dogs run into yards, look undecided, enter houses, bark madly.
The dogs are comforted.
Time might stop, but only for a moment.
She’s there again, three times now, at the sea.
Her others ride away, one through the dunes, the other by the road, and she remains. She reaches for her wrist. She’s not a body, nowhere. Everyone is here, watching the place the sea will soon reoccupy. Everyone but her and Ivy. These corpses laid out on the beach, huge and miniature, spread for miles. Shock and terror slowly overwhelm, as does nausea, but they ebb away. The smell subsides a little. The corpses slowly acquire flesh, some of it spat from the mouths of birds, mostly crows, and when the crows have rebuilt their bodies, stitched their skins, restored their gases, then the dead will wake. The people get in their cars and go back to their houses and uncover their faces and sleep. They sleep with innocence and in good faith, and while they sleep the sea remembers its place. It does the right thing. The brine comes rolling in to cover the corpses, and one by one the corpses swell, inhale the water as they should, and swim away a part of it.
Sam sleeps in the room beside them. In silence, Ivy unpacks her bag. She gets into her own bed. In the early hours, Ed climbs in beside her. Short of breath, his heart racing. The strange odour drifts away as they lie together. Sam sleeps on, safe for now. She dreams she is swimming in deep water.