The boy comes into the night like he owns it, like he is, in fact, God, and has conjured this up: this crescent moon cutting the sky, this bat tonguing the nectar from the eucalyptus blossom, cocking its head to watch with dark eyes and wrapping a leathery wing around its body. This cool slap of water on skin, this warm scent of dew and grass, this scuttle and creep and pursuit of creatures, the shiver that turns the school of fish in a new direction.
He remembers this place. He remembers stepping out into a morning after night rain, and from everywhere rising the scent of soil opening, of grass reaching down to its roots.
He remembers that morning, when he considered his kingdom. Today, where and what? He remembers placing a bare foot down and, beneath his sole, the ground damp and alive. He remembers the water calling him, and wanting with his whole being to answer that call. He remembers the fence rearing up in front of him and the invitation and reach of its cool bars in his hands, as he shook and pulled.
He remembers the exhilaration of discovering the grip of fingers and leverage of foot and swing of weight that let him, for the first time, hoist himself up and up and up, let him climb out of his world and over those bars, fly over the top of the fence, king of his world.
This time nothing slows him. He moves from air to water without effort, expanding to lap at the edges, becoming liquid, becoming container and contained, containing everything, the fish, the plants, the skating insects, the leaves beginning to rot, the algae, the two human bodies, the ripples around them, the salty taste of their faces, the arch of a neck, the grip of fingers, the breath. He knows these bodies. He remembers them. He remembers the accident of cells colliding, the moments in which everything changes, the instant in which life divides into before and after.
And then she comes into the world like she owns it – like she is, in fact, God and has conjured this up, this world waiting to take her. She pours herself into liquid, she follows the call, she finds the world and embeds herself into it, ecstatic. She splits into two, into four, into eight, into thirty-two. She knows these bodies, wrapped together in the water. She belongs to them.
She is weightless. She is floating. She is at the centre of the universe.