The Burial by Courtney Collins

next to the fire. He moved in beside her. She took his hand and rolled onto her side with her back to him and held his hand against her chest. Sleep now , she said. But neither of them slept. He lay awake for some time breathing into her hair. Eventually, he forced himself to close his eyes, only with the hope of dreaming of her, of finding something that would flow from dreaming into life. And then it did.
    In the morning she would not meet his eyes.
    We cannot ever speak of this , she said.
    My lips are sealed.
    I mean it, Jack Brown. This can never happen again.
    As you wish.
    Do you know what Fitz would do to you? And you can guess what he would do to me. Our feelings cannot be worth both of our lives, Jack Brown. We will bury them. Right here.
    He knew her words were true. There was only danger between them.

NORTH AND WEST the inland climate gave rise to black and white cypress and tumbledown gums of ironbark. Jessie looked down from the high ridge. Around her were deep cliff-lined gorges, giant ramparts and then more canyons, more rock. There was wilderness as far as she could see. It did not end.
    She had been riding for a week.
    She had stepped Houdini up and over the ridges and escarpments, felt the weather change, the air dampening her skin. Ledge to ledge were animals she had only seen before as fleeing creatures—rock wallaby, quoll. Here, they did not flee. They were as still as rocks as they watched her.
    She and Houdini wound further up the mountain, crossing granite bands, observing that their ledges curved like cupping hands and contained clear pools of water from which she and Houdini drank. When she reached a large saddle of the range she dismounted and led him through. Sweeping over them was an arch of granite boulders and walking through she felt a reverence such as she had never felt.
    She navigated her way by the sun, and where the forest grew so dense that it would not let the light in there were plants on the ground that turned their heads to face the sun’s direction.
    At night, she took her cue from those same plants and her limbs relaxed and her head turned down against her own chest and she slept an exhausted sleep, and when the sun rose again she travelled with the compass of the shadow of the mountain.
    Her peace did not last.
    She was leading Houdini over a high ridgeline when her remorse caught up with her suddenly. In front of her a spectacular basalt scarp revealed the stretched necks and seismic heads of mother, father and child, the same faces Jack Brown had first pointed out to her from a far, far distance. It pained her to see them and feel that he should be beside her and that between them there could have been a child, his or even Fitz’s. And there was no escaping it, not the longing nor its looming and ancient reminder, its head lifted up against the sky.
    She rode or walked or scraped along, leading Houdini, sometimes Houdini leading her. It was as if her eyes had turned in, seeking some clue, something that in the spit and struggle of living she had missed as to how things could have been different.
    Her sleep was taken up with nightmares of Fitz, so day and night she was ricocheting off the walls of her past and the feeling was like prison and now the prison was herself. She pushed herself and Houdini up more treacherous slopes. Houdini stepped dutifully behind her, though he was slipping more and more often. She had no appetite but was reminded to graze when he did, feeding on fern fronds that grew between the exposed roots of trees. Still, she was growing ragged.
    When she found herself kneeling against a slope and surrounded by sharp-edged rocks it seemed to her that if she had spewed out her insides that was how they would look.

THE FIRST TIME Jack Brown rode into Fitz’s forest was the first time he saw my mother.
    Jack Brown had ridden his horse along the southbound track as the letter from Fitz instructed. The track had wound through an open paddock and