All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

‘Because sadness is the truest emotion,’ Greta says. ‘Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realise that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?’

‘The day sky. Be wary of the things it tells you. The day sky is an illusion. It’s a trick. You believe it’s so blue and so real you can touch it, but the truth is, Molly, the day sky is just more of me. More black. And the black goes on forever.’

‘To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.’

He said that gold can’t be trusted. He said we all got the gold disease and it rots our hearts. It poisons us. He said it changes who we are, how we behave.’

‘What if we’re the treasure?’ she asks. She looks back up at the sky. ‘I’d try to hide us, too. That sky is the lid of a treasure chest. That sky is a blanket. Or a cloak.’ Molly turns to Yukio, who struggles to understand the girl. ‘We are treasure buried by the sky,’ Molly says.

‘Fathers should always play the Liebesträume for their daughters.’

Love is a hidden treasure, too, he thinks. You meet the one the universe forged in the fire just for you and they bury their love deep inside you but sometimes you don’t even know it’s inside you until it’s ripped out of you, until it’s dug up out of you like pure gold dug out of earth. The hole remains. The hole is never filled and your blood and your soul and your joy and your life leak out of that hole, until you are empty. Until you are a ghost.