Ash

She stands in the paddock holding the metal box with her name taped to the outside, McKinnon—to be collected. What should I do? she asks. The box is heavy and she remembers the sharp pain when he stood on her foot, the way he would rest his head on her shoulder so that she felt the clean, curved edge of his jaw.

At night when the wind died down and everything grew quiet she could hear him outside the bedroom window, a steady, rhythmic chewing. Sometimes, unable to sleep, she stood on the dewy lawn as stars wheeled and fell and the world tilted towards morning. His big, white shape helped it along, shoving the darkness aside to make way for the grainy, uncertain dawn.

She tears the tape and lifts the lid. Here? she asks, not wanting to be seen. No, over by the trees. She scoops a handful of coarse coral and, turning her back on the road, the horses and riders, the white paling fence, begins to scatter what the heat has left. Her arm describes an arc, throwing grain to invisible hens or sowing seeds at the base of trees.

She is absorbed in this movement, the sound of him like rain in the grass. She rubs him between her fingers. Pink and apricot, as white as a beach. As if in deference to the occasion it begins to rain, the first rain in the worst drought in living memory. The park is quiet for a Saturday, she says as she returns him to the ground.