Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

me, 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.

but she can see that, little by little, the island is killing them.

But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.

She doesn’t feel safe with me, or maybe it’s that she has no expectation of me keeping her safe, of my ability to recognize danger, which is my only job as her father.

“I know this ocean, trust me,” with such confidence, and because the selfish, ugly part of me wants to, I do.

And I have killed a man and left his body in the sun to be picked at. I have shown him to children, and altered the way they see the world. I am a tunnel, wind screaming through me. And into this empty space comes a mad thought, unbidden. They have killed him. My husband.

Then again if we didn’t have anything to hide there wouldn’t be an issue with it, I suppose. It feels like a game of chicken with her. One of us will have to break first and admit we know that something is wrong, that one of us is lying. Or that we both are.

But there were eucalypts, three of them. My favorite trees on the land. They were a fraction too close to the house, but I couldn’t cut them down for that. I loved them too much.

I have made my love for him weak, designed it to be so, that it should be easier to cut myself free of.

I want to feel something else, I want to reach for a shadow of the love Dom has inside him, wish to know if I am capable of it.

Is this how you feel after being swept in on a current? Will you change shape and put down roots? Or carry on in search of somewhere better?

To share a life with someone but to never share the truth of that life, to never express how that life is damaged. Surely it was his right to know this wound in me, since it was bound, at some point, to become a wound in us? I’d simply worked so hard to leave it behind that I couldn’t bear to bring it forward again, not even to speak it aloud.

I loved him, and he drowned while I was meant to be watching him. That’s what I dream of.

He plants things but sometimes I glimpse that tiny seed of nastiness within. It appears only in brief flashes, the lightning outside and then gone, hidden behind the charm, the friendliness, the laughter—but it is there. His selfishness. An ego so fragile, he takes hits to it poorly. Which is why I don’t think we’ll survive what I’ve done.

As I drift off, I am locking doors, building firmer barricades. But he wakes me in the early morning with a soft question, the sound of which could almost be a dream. “Could there be an after for the five of us?”

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.

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.

I thought she chose that boat and that life of danger, but really the flood chose it for her, it was this crumbling world. And there will be more floods. More children swept under. But they will not be my children.

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

She deserves to have her wishes respected. She deserves to have the person who loves her most in the world listen to her. So I tell them to save the baby, to cut him out, and I tell them not to kill her in the process,

The banksia’s seeds, which take a long time to mature, are held within a hard, woody capsule that has two valves. These valves will open to release the seeds only in extremely high temperatures, like those you get in a bushfire.

It is really fucking sad that it should take loss to know the precise quality of love.

“People find a way to survive no matter what, we’ll figure out the food, we always do, but the plants won’t, they will go, and so will the animals that need those plants, so we have to help them.”

That the seeds he would choose to save are the strange and the unlikely. The species we don’t need, the ones we don’t want, cannot eat. That Orly would choose these because no one else would.

It is so clear to me, suddenly. This isn’t my wife. It is not Claire and it never has been. Claire is a woman so complex and so profoundly loving that she gave her life for her child’s. This creature is my own monstrousness and nothing more.

will not be a prisoner of this choice any longer. I will love my son expansively, and I will feel no guilt for it. I will miss my wife, always. And I will be free of you.

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

It was strange to me that I should think of her at the end, after years of trying to convince myself I hated her. Untrue of course, but armor against the way she blamed me, the way she couldn’t stand to look at me. I have been so angry with her—even after she died I have held on to that anger and it has made me fearful—but being a parent is complex and it is altering and being the parent of a lost child is something no human should have to contend with. I forgive the distance she imposed between us to try to survive. I think instead of the love she had for us in the beginning, and of my sisters and our boat.

I think of Raff and Fen and Orly. I have spent my life loving other people’s children. There is no safety in this. But what is the use of safety if it deprives you of everything else? I feel immense grief, thinking of the time I spent resenting this little boy and wishing I could have been anywhere else. I should have been treasuring every precious second with him, with them all, instead of wishing those seconds away.

There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it. He’s not going to take the punching bag with him when they leave.