Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

I consider whether I could let thousands of species go extinct in order to save the lives of my three children. If I were to reroute the energy we use for heating the lighthouse I might buy the seeds a little extra time. But the answer is easy, and I don’t think they should have sent a man out here who has kids. That man would never make the choice they want him to.

“One day soon enough, everything is either going to burn, drown, or starve, including us.”

But they didn’t even try to make Fen stick to those rules. She’s just … one of the seals.”

Her hair is long and sun-bleached blond, tangled and salty almost to the point of dreadlocks. Her skin is very tanned and freckled and she seems like a wild animal who has stepped free of a life under water. Maybe Dom doesn’t have much choice in the matter of who and what his daughter is; I can’t imagine it would be easy trying to keep this creature from the sea.

I was not meant to have to do this part alone. The teenage part. I was changing her nappies yesterday, and today I am grappling with the reflection of my failures in her too-wise eyes. I am trying to allow her to grow while simultaneously keeping her from drifting away. I want her to know life, its beauties and its complexities, I want her to take risks and make mistakes and know love as we all should, and yet those things feel too big, they are dwarfing us, she is just a baby and I really need my wife.

Fen feels so much tenderness for this poor battered form. She feels, for the first time in her life, a connection to her own woman-ness—it felt right to gather up this body and try to care for it the way women have been caring for each other since the beginning. It made Fen feel more … herself than she has in a long time. More of the woman she wants to become.

Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are a fool’s weapons.

There is not one without another. His mantra, and how he taught me to garden. The trick is in working out which plants go together and which compete. A patchwork, a collage. Try this here, try that there.

What I miss most is not any of the things I expected. It’s having someone to talk to about our children. The hilarious things they say and do, the insights with which they blow my mind and the ways they change frequently and without mercy. I need her to help me process and deliberate and delight in. I want to laugh with her. To be awestruck with her. I want her to look at me in wonder, acknowledging what profound creations we have made together. What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.

When Orly came along and it was just me, I realized how she’d known. She’d fucking learned. She’d had to, because somebody had to keep the babies alive, and so she bloody well got on with it.

He thinks of his mother. Just her name. He doesn’t have time to conjure anything else. And then, as the enormous body of this creature he loves falls toward him, he thinks it’s not a bad way to go. That actually, it is quite perfect.

“They feel empathy,” Alex says.

And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.

The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be. I am certain I’m not the only one who feels the presences on the wind. All the hungry ghosts of Shearwater Island, come to dance with us on the hill.

To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else.

But I think maybe this is too much for them to be. The breath of a man. The life of him. I think it is too heavy a thing for children to carry.

All day I have been readying myself for this not to work. I think of how we will console the kids. But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.

“And those mum and dad wombats that stick their bums up to save their family, that’s your mum and dad,” I say, and we are both laughing, knowing it’s true.

Maybe that’s what being a parent is. Expanding to be more. Asking of yourself more, for them.

I think I finally understand your words. It’s just a body. They hold on or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.