Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to reprint p.

vi excerpt from ‘love

is more thicker than forget’. Copyright 1939, © 1967, 1991 by the Trustees for the
E.E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited
by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

P. 4 excerpt from Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement

Hurd, © Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1947.

First published in 2019

Copyright © Amanda Niehaus 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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 prologue

Elise picks her way through the bush where the scrub rises up at the
end of the trapline, towards a small peninsula made of high rock.
After setting the last of the small-mammal traps, she will take her
daughter from the carrier on her back and set her on her lap and
gaze from the cliffbrink over the ocean, the blue-green gulf, placid
and deadly. She will tell her child a story, as she does each afternoon
around this time—about the seabirds that wheel over the crystalline
water, or the quolls that scamper through the forest at dusk, or Dan.
The world is not as quiet as it used to be. There is no real quiet
anymore, but a constant chatter of words, not-words; the flow of
sentences with no true meaning but which convey, in the process,
everything there is to say. The kick of feet against her back as she walks.
Fingers tangled in her hair. To have the weight behind is strange, Elise
thinks, how mass shifts around the body, internal to external, and
how the body adjusts to these changes, remembers what was there
before. How impermanent the human form, its scars growing fainter
with time. Like the new pink stretch marks on her abdomen, already
paling, or the chafe on her hip where the carrier rubbed in those first
days, before the skin grew over, smooth and shiny.

vii

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 part one

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 chapter 1

They’re on a street called Boundary when the rain hits, flops onto
the car with a cold, hard tapping that reminds him of fish, a shoal
of hard-­­bodied fish throwing themselves against the metal shell of
the car. Headlights double through the windscreen. The wipers pulse
and cannot clear the slick of water, rush of water, it’s too much at
once, he can hardly breathe.
Breathe.
He eases the car to the side of the road, into a small gravel patch
overhung by a low, green tree. Rolls down his window and sucks in
the air. Gasps it into his lungs like a trout. Out of water.
There, a park, wide and green, a park without cover. How odd,
he thinks, that there is no shade. Nothing to protect the people or
the picnic table or the barbecue or the swings or the climbing frame
from the harsh Queensland sun. Storm.
There, a party, balloons and table decorations, bags of lollies and
colourful boxes, a white-­iced cake. Children are shrieking, crying,
laughing, running. Just get in the car! someone shouts, muffled
by rain.

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

No one, it seems, has prepared for this.

He doesn’t want to be here with all these children, growing-­up
children. But he doesn’t want to go home, either. The house will be
damp and empty. A cottage built for workmen or families, young
happy families.
Dan would like to have his son in his arms, to hold to his chest,
skin on skin, like it’s supposed to be. He would like a cosy chair, worn
and deep, a blanket; a place to warm him back to life. But his son
is far away now, farther even than before, when he was inside her
body. Gone.
The smack of the rain is a hollow, erratic sound. Dan reaches
across and puts his hand on her leg, but she does not move. Elise,
long-­limbed and ghostly in a tidy black dress. Her head is swivelled
towards the window beside her so that all he can see of her are her
fine pale arms, hands in lap, strawberry hair pulled back into a low,
smooth knot. She is facing the outside, but does not seem to be
looking out.
He wonders if she’s cold. What she’s thinking.
‘I think the book was good,’ he says to her. He had read Goodnight
Moon to the small white coffin, placed it on top before it was lowered.
What else was there to say, but
Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.
He’d hoped the landscape might have made it easier, the cemetery
full of jacarandas and great, top-­sprawling eucalypts that surely had
koalas in them, though he hadn’t seen any. He’d hoped it might hurt
less with all the fine-­faced wallabies clustered at the property’s edge,
tipping down into the long grass and upright again, forepaws tucked
close against their chests.

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 the breeding season

But, no. It was stupid to think any of it would help.

The box made everything worse. Dan was set apart from his child
by a winding drive out of the city, and a volume of dirt and turf and
flowers. But it was the box he hated. The coffin that would never dis­
integrate, not in a hundred years, that would keep his boy apart from
all the beautiful, terrible wildness in the world. He’d rather he was
ashes. He would have liked to imagine William as a tree or a marsupial,
atoms or cells bounding across the open spaces.
But he didn’t get to make that choice.
He stares at her neck, wills her to speak.
‘Where are we,’ she says, after a few moments. Her voice is flat. It
isn’t a question. He can’t tell if she really wants to know, but it doesn’t
matter anyway. He has no answer.

When the rain pauses, he guides them back onto the road, but the
too-­early dusk and the unfamiliar streets disorient him, and without
her to navigate, he gets lost. They’ve lived in this city for two or three
years now, long years in which he can’t get his bearing east or west,
north or south, for the river that snakes up the middle. He has the
sense he’s driving in a wide undulating circle, Mount Coot-­tha at
the centre. A cemetery on every side.
He drives and drives, and she doesn’t move.
But he gets them home, and into the house, where he pulls off her
flats and her dress and guides her into the bedsheets in her under-
wear. It’s only April, but he tugs the winter quilt from the top shelf
of the wardrobe and drapes it over the lump of her body. It occurs
to him that she might need to change her pad, but she is so still and

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

quiet that he doesn’t want to move her. She’s like something in a

museum, a mechanised doll, a sculpture of a human.
One of his uncle’s artworks.
Somehow she has slipped beyond blood and discomfort, beyond
her body even. He envies her emptiness. Resents it. Because in his
own body, every ache or stab or itch is amplified. A blister on his heel,
rash on his chest. Something pulses at the back of his eyes.
Though it’s dinnertime, he’s not hungry. He changes into flannel
pants and a t-­shirt, pours a glass of single malt and takes it into the
spare room to work.
The spare room. Not-­spare. Spare again.
The cot now disassembled in the corner.
Dan sits at his desk and does not look at the cot or the pile of wash-
cloths and blankets and onesies on the floor beside it. He’s avoided
this room since he tore the cot apart. Avoided as much as he can.
The low rumble of thunder.
They used to make love when the storms came, he and Elise—
curtains open, doors wide, the cool breath of rain pouring into the
room and over the bed and into their skin.
Skin, he thinks. Singular.
They used to slide into one body and move it together through a
dark world, brush the thorns off like flies.
Now, on his own, the thorns stick.
Like the art above his desk, where so much skin is pinned up like
a crime scene. Not Elise’s skin or his or the baby’s (too soft)—this is
art with a capital A. Dismembered bodies clipped from magazines,
printed, sketched. Women, mostly, or parts of women. The images
sicken him, like a car crash, a murder-­suicide. But he can’t stop looking.

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 the breeding season

Art.
Made by his uncle, a man who barely needs a name to be known,
a man Dan has never met.
Dan leans over his desk and pulls the man’s photo off the wall:
Berlin Warne. He is tall and muscular, bald, clean-­shaven, thick-­faced
in a sort of Bruce Willis way but with heavy eyebrows and sixties-­style
glasses with black frames that wing out to either side. His mother’s
brother. They share the same eyes.
Though he carries the same last name, Dan sees little of himself
in the man. He has inherited his unknown father’s face. A softer,
academic sort of jawline that’s better with a beard.
In the picture, his uncle stands in profile in a well-­lit warehouse,
bank of windows at the top, and holds a brush up to a canvas that’s as
big as Dan’s patio. He has no clothes on. His body is lean and strong
and, though he is at least fifty in the photo and grey-­hair-­chested, he
stands with a careless certainty that draws the eye. He is a man who
inhabits his own skin, and does it well.
Dan sets the photo down and opens a drawer, pulls out a small
notebook but does not write. This is not his journal; these are not
his words but his uncle’s. The paper is creamy and thick. The letters
and line drawings and splashes of watercolour give him nothing—no
feeling for the man, or his Art, or his life. They are unintelligible. Dan
can’t separate fact from fiction, can’t find the threads of the man’s
story to pull on. Something’s missing.
It’s me, Dan thinks, and slams the journal back into the drawer.
It’s my art.
Ghostwriting was a mistake. The more he works on this other
man’s book, the more Dan loses his own ideas, stories, craft—whatever

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

he was before. He imagines seeing himself from across the room,

a photo on someone else’s wall. How limp and pallid he would look
in comparison with his uncle, his own body and words too fleshy and
yet, at the same time, full of nothing.

The bed sinks with the weight of the tray, but Elise doesn’t open her
eyes or turn or sit. He’s used the nice ceramics—pebbly bottoms
and smooth, cream-­glazed tops—but the food itself is plain. Lightly
buttered penne, ginger biscuits. A cup of tea.
Not so different from what she ate when she had morning sickness.
Morning.
Mourning.
It’s wrong, he thinks, that the words should sound the same.
Attach themselves to her body like this, his body. He would like to
compare scars, open them up again.
‘Do you think,’ he starts, but does not go on.
In his mind, they’re the same—the two kinds of sickness. His grief
is a nausea that doesn’t subside; there’s no point asking her to explain
it to him. They are two ends of the same leech, feeding on a wound.
Moving apart incrementally as they swell up with blood.
He coughs gently. ‘You have to drink something,’ he says. She is
on her side, facing away. He tucks her lank hair behind her ear. Her
cheek is freckled and dry. He strengthens his voice. ‘Sit up.’
At this, an order, she pulls herself into a half-­lean on her elbow,
shuffles up against the pillows. The tea has cooled just enough that
it won’t burn her, but he blows on it anyway. Chamomile. The smell
reminds him of old ladies, grandmothers. Wrinkled, salt-­softened.

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 the breeding season

She makes no move to raise her arms, so he puts the thin-­rimmed

cup to her parted lips and wets them, more and more, until she drinks.
Then he pulls the covers back from her body. Her legskin is warm, but
the tiny hairs prickle at the open air. Her belly slumps through her
cotton nightdress, and the sight of it startles him,
again,
again he’s forgotten that it would not—like the child—simply
disappear. Or maybe he never knew. Maybe these are things that
people try not to know, because, then, what’s the point?
‘Come on,’ he says, and he looks away from her belly, swings her
feet to the floor, pulls her to standing.
She’s bled through the pad in her underwear, through her clothes
and the sheets, a dark stain that’s probably soaked the mattress, that
he’ll clean when she’s in the shower. Under the covers, she smelled of
nothing, and now, moving, she’s thick with wet and clot, meaty but
not unpleasant. A new element of herself.
He guides her to the bathroom, pulls off her clothes, uparm,
downleg, holds the sharp point of her elbow as she steps foot by foot
into the stream of hot water. Her compliance is strange, discomfiting.
She wears her pain on her skin, uncovered,
and because he loves her, he absorbs it.

Later, in the darkness, the phone rings. At first, he loses himself,

can’t place where he is, only that streetlights shimmer through the
window, the curtains open, that this is a place with curtains. He is in
the recliner beside his desk. He knocks his phone onto the floor as he
tries to answer it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but a smooth low voice interrupts him.

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

A woman. ‘Daniel Warne.’ She pours his name into his ear.
And though he has never spoken to her before, Dan knows immedi­
ately who it is. This is Hannah Wallace, his uncle’s muse, the subject
of the artist’s breakout work.
‘I hope I haven’t woken you,’ she says. ‘Your editor said to call.’ Her
words are slightly slurred, as though she’s been drinking.
Has she been drinking? Dan wonders. Does it matter?
His body feels suddenly cumbersome, extraneous, and he isn’t
sure whether to get out of the chair or not. He pulls it upright, leans
forward, lets the wooden floor shock his soles with cold.
She goes on. ‘Joan. It was a while ago, I’ve been slow. But she said
we should talk.’
In the corner, the cot pieces loom, clownish, as if the thing has
re-­formed in the darkness.
Hannah Wallace laughs, a deep throaty sound that reverberates
through his phone
jaw
tongue.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ve shocked you.’
‘A little,’ he says. She doesn’t know, couldn’t know, about the baby.
Surely.
‘I’m yours. Ask me anything,’ she says.
For a moment, Dan cannot think. This whole thing, like a dream.
He should ask her to call back. He wonders if Elise can hear him
through the wall—if to talk to this woman, to think about work, is to
cheat on their sadness.
But he has been waiting for Hannah Wallace, and now she is here.
‘All right,’ he says slowly. ‘There’s something missing.’

10

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 the breeding season

A flutter of laughter, surprised. ‘Is there?’ she replies.

‘I can’t get at why he does it,’ says Dan. ‘The art. His motivations,
what drives him.’
‘That, I’m afraid, you’ll have to figure out for yourself. But it’s
complicated. He’s complicated. Maybe the complexity is what you’re
supposed to see. Maybe it doesn’t really matter why he does it.’
‘No,’ says Dan. ‘It matters to me.’
‘Why? Is it your story you’re telling?’ She says it softly. ‘Trust me,
I know how hard it is to be part of something like this, put your
head and heart and guts all in, and in the end it’s his, right? Wrong.
It’s never just his. It’s never just yours. It’s always a mix, always up to
whoever sees or reads it or shits on it. You’ve got to let that go.’
‘I see why Joan wanted us to talk.’
‘I’ve always been good at getting people off the ledge.’
‘Was Berlin ever up there?’
‘What, on the ledge?’ Dan hears the smile in her voice. ‘He’s not like
that. His thing is to push everyone else out there, see what happens.’
‘That’s why it’s so crowded out here.’
‘Provocation is his favourite kind of art.’
‘So you’re okay with this? Talking about everything?’
‘What you call “everything” is my body. Open me up.’
Dan pictures her then as the image Berlin made of her: legs spread
apart, a crease of rounded flesh where her thighs meet her groin, or
her pubis, or her genitals, where her lips splay apart; her finger lazily
taps the nib of clitoris there.
He has, of course, seen her.
Seen not-­her.
She is there, on the wall behind his desk.

11

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

‘I don’t know what to ask you,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I need
you to tell me.’
‘Let me tell you a story, then. See what you make of it. Do you
like stories, Daniel Warne?’ Her voice is like chocolate, he thinks;
like better whisky than he’s ever tasted. He feels his skin might break
open, cicada-­like.
‘Yes,’ he says. But he is nervous.
‘Good. I’m going to start with once upon a time, because all good
stories do. Once upon a time, there was a girl, because all good stories
start with girls. Virgins, even better. A girl who can’t stop touching
herself because she’s burning up and the only way to cool back down is
to come again and again and again.’ Her voice is loose and breathy. Dan
imagines her fingers on her vulva. Wet. Is she doing this on purpose?
Hannah goes on. ‘It feels so good,’ she says. ‘But what she does is
wrong, everyone says so. This girl can be anything she wants, she
is queenly, imperial, has the brightest future if she takes it in her hands,
if she frees her hands up for taking it. But she loves her body, her
smooth beautiful body. Why should she have to give up anything? Why
can’t she have it all? Why can’t she love her body and more?
‘But no one listens because she’s young, and probably blonde, too,
because they almost always are in the stories. Hair the colour of flax.
And when she persists, they give her a present to keep her occupied.
A spindle. An impossible task. Her hands become calloused by the
fibres and the threads, her shoulders hunch, and when a little man
walks by and sees her there, he is inclined to help her, maybe even
love her, because aren’t these stories always about love? Or deception?
Or both?’
She stops then. Trails off.

12

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 the breeding season

After a moment, Dan says, ‘That’s you. That’s you in the story,
isn’t it?’
‘I’m glad I called,’ says Hannah Wallace. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight,’ says Dan, and the line clicks into silence.
After, his head spins, he’s jittery, can’t sleep. He slips into the
bedroom and takes a valium from his bedside drawer, downs it with
an old glass of water. Elise doesn’t move, is sleeping or pretending to.
He watches her for a moment in the faint light from the street. Her
hand on his pillow.
Maybe in this moment he could crawl into that space and set her
hand on his cheek and everything would go back to the way it was
before. He could transport them away from this place, back to LA, his
tiny apartment, or San Francisco, the bigger one they shared.
Elise, near the end of her PhD, cross-­legged on the unmade bed,
shirt too big and hanging off one shoulder. Photocopies of research
papers flurried all around her like feathers, ticker tape. Let her look
up, and see him, and grin.
‘You will never guess what I just read,’ she’d say, waving a handful
of papers at him. ‘This paper is killing me! Did you know that human
males have wider and longer penises than any other ape?’
‘So you won’t leave me for a gorilla? That’s a relief.’
‘Well, not for his penis anyway. Gorillas have nice long, thick
fingers . . .’
‘You’re disgusting,’ he’d say, and laugh. ‘And I love you for it.’
‘Ah, but there’s more. Come here, let me show you.’ That look in
her eye.
She’d clear a space for him in the mess beside her. Slip her hand
inside his pants. ‘This part here, this little rim at the top is called the

13

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

coronal ridge.’ Trace it with her fingertip. ‘And do you know what they
think it does?’
‘Show me.’
That smile.
‘I’ll show you something,’ she’d say, ‘in a moment. Be patient. I’m
teaching here.’ Clear her throat, swing her leg across to straddle him.
‘Now, as I was saying, the coronal ridge is very good at semen displace-
ment. Which means that, if I’ve been a naughty girl, and had sex just
now with several other men, your penis can remove ninety percent of
the semen inside me—provided you thrust deeply enough.’
Of course, everything she’d read was about sex.
‘Well. Isn’t that a sexy proposition.’
‘Oh yes. Sexy and functional. You see, it catches here, the semen,
on this part here.’ She demonstrates, this time, with her tongue.
Dan shakes off the memory, and watches her sleep. He cannot
transport them away from this place. He’s afraid he never will, that
she is bound to a box in the dirt and will not, cannot leave it.

Back in his office, the too-spare room, Dan digs around in the bottom
desk drawer for a cassette. Chapter 4 it is labelled in black marker.
Who uses tapes, in this day and age? He slides it into the little tape
deck—the one he bought on eBay—and lies back on the bed to listen
to his uncle ramble into the darkness:

My cousin was a professor, a great scientist—chemist, made paint

for houses, buildings, that kind of—so I had good genes, very
good genes from the start, was very smart. You know if you grow

14

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 the breeding season

up in Missouri in the seventies and then, okay, I was smart and

they would say, if I grew up in New York, they’d say I was one of
the smartest people anywhere in the world, okay, but in Missouri
in the seventies, eighties, you try to be anything. Went to Chicago,
full scholarship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a good
student, great, one of the best, went there, did this, painted, you
know I still have to tell this again and again, people don’t believe
it, don’t get I started from nothing, really. My cousin, a professor,
he explained the power to me many, many years ago, the power of
people like me. So it really bothers me to have to tell my creden-
tials because you look at what’s going on, and he was right, who
would’ve thought, but in the seventies to have nothing, turn up
in Chicago, New York, with nothing, I would’ve said guys, look,
I’m just here to do the work, it’s not about the power, I’m just the
artist, right? The. Artist. Just God.’

And Berlin Warne laughs, a deep, crackling sound like chip

packets.

15

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 chapter 2

After the baby stopped moving (living) and she birthed him and held
him and buried him, and she comes home from the funeral to the
drab house they’d prepared (but not for this), she thinks she might
never leave her bed again, might turn off her bodylights and will
herself to rot into the sheets, stain them with her shape, her fluids,
her lack. If only, she thinks, if only she were strong enough for that
kind of willing.
The blood keeps coming, so much of it blotted up and thrown
away, and the excess sickens her because this blood was his, was
meant for him, and now he’s gone, and everything leaks out of her,
drop by clot. She lets it. Deserves it. Maybe, she imagines, she will
bleed it all out, desiccate and disappear from inside herself, empty.
Her nightstand is empty.
The windowsill, empty.
The bed is a queen, quilt grey, everything shades of grey and white,
and though the blanket is soft and heavy and presses her into place,
it’s not big enough for the bed itself, or for her in it. This, she cannot
reconcile: that queen does not fit queen. That only a king is big enough

16

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 the breeding season

to cover the bed and then some, curl into, no matter the angle of the
body. She wants to be satisfied with what she has, wants this life to be
enough, but it’s not, can never be, now that he’s gone from it.
She doesn’t want to eat.
Or speak.
The rain rushes trickle hollow drop down the corner gutter
pipe, and she loses time, loses herself in a pool of threadbare sheets,
entombed in dim light, warmed (yes) by the quilt but surrounded by
water that runs over, drowning everything.
Sometimes, she imagines the ceiling is a heron, and it readies
to strike.
But the ceiling is not a heron,
It’s Eggshell. She chose the colour.

He’s a good man, funny and kind, but he doesn’t understand. Day
after day, he comes into the dim bedroom and slides apart the
curtains and the glass half-­door to let the outside in, and the rain-
drop tip gollops off the leaf-­thick tree beyond. Elise breathes the
damp air into her bones, too musty and green, terrible and chloro-
phyllous. She would like to sleep for a hundred years, close her eyes
to the creep of the vines, the passing of time, wake up amnesic, and
he will not let her.
He brings her tea on a white and birch tray, green tea for the anti-
oxidants, or chamomile, and miso soup with floating green flakes
in it. He pulls her to sitting against the headboard, holds the cup to
her lips like a ceramic breast until she takes it into her mouth and
swallows. Her belly slops, loose, when she lies on her side.

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

When he comes into the room, she closes her eyes to him, wishes
him away, and sometimes, as though he has heard her thoughts,
he goes. But she is careful not to wish him dead. She made that
mistake once.
She was so young, then, and didn’t think—wished her father
dead and her mother died too, and though she’s now a biologist,
rational and deductive, she connects the wish to the coming true.
Even if she hadn’t really meant it.
It was a roo, they told her later, a large male grey, and it had
bounced off the front of the ’82 Commodore and through the wind-
screen and was out the back window even before the car hit the tree.
Elise, nine at the time, tucked into the back seat and not-­watching,
remembered so little. Only the thump of impact and the smoosh of
her body against the seat ahead and onto the floor and the sensation
that a large, furry bird was moving through the centre of the car,
tail flowing out behind it. Time pushed the bird past so slowly, but
she could not reach it with her small hand, could not pat its smooth
feathers before it was gone.
He was going too fast, they told her later, and she knew he always
went too fast, her father, too loud, and even in death he dragged her
mother behind him.

Sometimes Dan sleeps next to her, and his damp gap mouth hangs
open, whisky-­thick, and she gets up out of bed and walks through
the dark house, listening. The rain does not stop, but in the space
between droplets she hears the shriek of her mother, of her baby
boy—all the cries he never made—and she knows them each for

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what they are. Knows them in her body, these far-­off sounds. They
are some kind of home. They set her nerves to fire.
And when she returns to the bed, she imagines that Dan is her
mother or her grown-­up boy, and she nestles her head into his arm
between the hard of his shoulder and the ridge of his chest, which is
not soft as her mother’s was. Her mother’s beautiful, satisfying body,
with its curvesmooth breasts and pillowy belly that Elise could jiggle
under her hand.
His body is lean. As her boy’s might have been.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She feels the waves of her voice vibrate into
Dan’s ribs, hears herself as the baby would have. She really is sorry
for where they are now, what has happened to them, for wanting
her mother, her child. It’s not enough to say it like this, she knows,
Dan unhearing. But maybe his body will hear, will remember.
Her mother would have understood. Understand.
The smell of her warm and den-­like, the smell of a mother but
also a family, just the two of them.
They could be everything, she thinks,
(or thought)
and she doesn’t understand how a person could need more than
this one other person in the world, this inside gone outside person
she knew better than anyone else.
Her mother.
William.
But she says nothing. For weeks, she says nothing, so loudly. Closes
her eyes against the grey sheets in the white room in the too-­green
world and tries to burst open, tries to atomise herself into the dank
air. Already she’s nothing but fragments.
*

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

Then, one day in May, in a rain break, everything changes.

Elise is alone in the room, in the bed, sitting up, arms wrapped,
forehead on knees seeking darkness. Her pallid blonde hair hangs
over her shoulders, messy dreads tickling the pink marks on her hips
and, naked, she hears it: the heavy, hard thunk from behind the linen
curtain; an abrupt, violent sort of sound. Her body braces for impact,
and shattering glass, and a long startled scream. A heavy boot.
She listens. No sense of time, or day. In her chest, her heart thumps.
Under the floorboards, the washer spins with a restless whirr.
She crawls across the bed, across Dan’s side (empty), her legs weak
and sore from lack of use, and slides onto her knees on the carpet.
Pulls the quilt over her shoulders and, turtled in this way, she opens
the curtain a fraction, peeks into the brightness.
There, a bird.
It does not move.
The creature lies on its right side, left eye staring blankly upwards
to the patio awning, short bill, drab brown plumage. Elise catches in
her own ribcage. A sparrow. She senses that this moment has already
happened, again and again through time, that maybe this bird (same
bird) has marked each stage of her life. And each time, she held it
too carelessly.
She slides the door open and picks it up, holds it in her hand, leans
it back inside the room with her, and slides the door shut against the
day. The squeak of hangers on the curtain rail, she has disturbed a
flock of shirts, and they swing and sway above her.
The sparrow reminds her of the tundra. A cacophony in the air,
the lake, the grass, the cree-­e and wa-­a-­ack and peepeep—and water
everywhere, snow melting across the compact tundra soil, tipping

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 the breeding season

into ponds the size of playing fields and into thigh-­deep holes
beneath the dwarf shrubs. She hasn’t thought of Alaska in so long,
but here it is, in her hand and her mind, carried into the room with
this dead little bird.
She was twenty-­six then. A lifetime ago. A master’s in ecology,
the breeding of little birds, and a summer in lamb’s wool and khaki.
Hulking binoculars around her neck, hands in fingerless gloves.
Incessant mosquitoes. Sandpipers.
The male sandpipers had come first, rust-­browed and leggy,
before the big lake had even cleared of ice. They migrated north from
wintering beaches in the Bay Area, or Baja, or Texas, to stake their
claims over pieces of earth that looked much the same to Elise, even
when she crouched. She saw loons and cranes and eider ducks, terns
and snipes and small moulting foxes, but she would never see the
place as they did.
Within a week, the females arrived. They wintered further south,
in Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, and with bodies as light
as fifteen paperclips, they flew all that way. She caught them all in
fine mist nets, clipped blue and white and green plastic rings around
their legs; noted pair bonds and territories, clutch sizes; marked nests
in the sedge with flagged stakes; and waited for eggs.
Waited for the chicks to come.
The Alaskan summer was cool, and there was no running water in
the shed where the scientists lived. There were only the birds and the
birding men and her. Sometimes, she bathed in the sauna with one of
them, a ruddy turnstone guy, hot steam sweat on her then-­smooth skin,
slick with loneliness, long-­light nights. He wasn’t her type but he had a
thick, seeking penis and a keenness for poems, and reading aloud.

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

She was so needy, then.

And after a while, they came. The eggs appeared, small and
brownspecked and arranged in each nest like clover leaves, point
to point, wide edges out, tucked against bareskin brood patches for
warmth. Each egg a fifth, or a quarter, the mass of the female herself,
pushed out singly, one day apart.
Elise ached for everything to happen—the hatching of chicks, her
own success. She couldn’t then fathom how little control she had
over any of it, her ambition so ungainly. Each bird, nest, egg, was only
a speck on the limitless tundra, unseeable even from the floatplane
that brought their supplies.
She was so stupid, then, to believe in beautiful things.
Sometimes, she heard them talking, the ruddy turnstone man
and the other, and the tips of their words bit her like the mosquitoes
did, their tiny bloodbodies smearing down her pant leg and in her
boot tops. Laughter swallowed when she entered the room.
Sometimes, she squatted in her crotch-­high boots and closed her
eyes and listened to the birds, the buzz, the words,
and in that space, the silence came, a shock, all at once, every voice
silent but one. The jaegers. Elegant, ghost-­throated jaegers, gull-­sized
and streamer-­tailed, painfully graceful in the air, like a waltz. Their
squeaky, child-­like calls belying the danger.
They learned her markings and found the nests, stole the eggs,
and swallowed them whole. Frantic, Elise made cages out of old
mesh wire to protect the nests, her hands bleeding as she pulled apart
spools of it, clipped and tied it, caught her skin on pin-­sharp ends.
The mesh was wide enough for sandpiper bodies, too narrow for
jaegers. She protected all the nests left in her site—thirty-­seven in
total—and hoped it would be enough.

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 the breeding season

‘Relax,’ he’d say, the ruddy turnstone guy, and mark a trail down
her breast belly pubis vulva with his tongue, and she shivered with it,
uncertain if she could.
The sandpiper hatchlings were dappledowned and cottonball soft,
and they burst out like popcorn all across her study site, dashed
one­
twothreefour out of their nests, out of their motherfather’s
warmth, out of the cages she made for them. And the jaegers sat on
the wire tops and waited.

Now, dead bird in her hand, Elise is not where she wants to be.
Leaning in towards forty, building towards something (not the right
thing), right here on the floor, quilt hanging off her belly-­flop body,
dead bird in her hand. Dead sparrow. Dead baby. Nothing like it’s
supposed to be. She’s done the hard work, a master’s, a PhD, the
research positions and, now, still on a fucking contract. Five years at
a time.
She wants so much to stay here in Queensland, where she came
from, where she’ll die, where a part of her already did. She wants
someone to tell her she’s outstanding, and visionary, and essential,
and make a space for her. The space she has worked so hard for. And
deserves.
William was not a mistake.
The thought stabs into whatever she might have begun to think,
and disappears.
Elise imagines Iowa, her aunt’s dinner table, canned peas and
mashed potatoes and some kind of meat, overdone. Melamine plates
with brown and yellow flowers. Hand in hand, a cousin to each side,

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 A M A N DA NIEH AUS

heads bowed, the place all God and noise and lace like a dusting of
snow. And yet, somehow comfortable. Nourishing.
All these things she wants at once, and can’t seem to get a grip on.
She feels she might set a fire. Through her palmskin, through the
bird, through her gut gush blood. Fire in her mouth, sharp teeth,
tongue.
She’s not hungry,
(but)
the darkthoughts are strong.
And she knows that she has to consume this creature, as she had
to consume her boy, her William, when they set him (no, his body)
in her arms, and she held him (not him) with teeth and tongue and
breasts and heart and skin and so much want it nearly killed her,
a want that could only be filled by him, by his tiny body, but also what
he was and might have been to her, been to them, become. And she
saw then that the bird—William—was empty, as empty as she was,
and what is the sum of two empties? Can you fill one with the other?
Of course, she didn’t eat William like an animal, though a part of
her needed to take him back, make him hers again in the way he was
meant to be. She’d leaned her head down against him. She holds the
bird to her face, and it does not move. The child was not warm. She
is cold. The sheets and the carpet have abraded her legs, chafed her,
and she craves water, a bath where she might be able to do it all again,
make it right, push him out into a warm wet world not so abrupt or
shocking and he might persist in it. Another world. Where she might
keep him alive, and together in the water, still connected, she’d hold
him for the first time (not like this) and feed him two ways at once
and he would cry the mewling wail of newborn and she would cry

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 the breeding season

because she had seen the alternative in a dream, just a dream that was
never just a dream but this awful bubbling barrenness that no one
could breach or salve or share.
She holds the bird to her lips, but,
then,
doesn’t bite it.
She could, if she wanted, slip its fine skull into her mouth and
detach it, so easily, she could. But what difference would that make?
Its head flops against her chin, broke-­necked and miserable. She’s
tired of dying.
She’s tired of waiting.
Something new surges up in her, fierce and red, and she readies to
throw it into the world.

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