She didn’t want to go home and that’s why she found it. If she’d gone home through the newly dark roads, washing her feet in streetlight pools, she would have found her mother in the kitchen making dinner looking scared. Matt would have come home and the screen door would have slammed hard and his tool bag would have crashed down on the kitchen bench. They would have flinched, her mother and her, waiting, but everything would have been normal.
She was the kind of girl who liked to dig with a stick in the dirt though. She liked to upturn things, searching for treasure: rocks, old bottles and silvery wine cask bladders, toothbrushes, coins, the carcasses of handbags. These strange things were swept up and snagged at the riverbend and left to dry once the water was gone. A wallet emptied out and brittle. Parts of a saddle. A belt buckle with the insignia of the silver mine.
She knew all the creek’s white rock, all its blond grass and bleached trees. She knew the sun going down, the galahs screeching, rising and settling, rising and settling in the trees. She sat with her feet dipped in the waterhole and watched the night approach. The waterhole was a small deep pool of water that never dried up. It remained there even after the river flooded and then dried out to its normal self; a skin of stones and silt cracked into a million scales.
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