Now he stuffed one of these envelopes into an inside pocket of a soft-lined rain jacket that he took from a hook on the wall. He thought of building a bonfire and burning the sheets, the smell of her death, his mother’s clothes, the boots. He knew it was only his anger that wanted to destroy any trace of what he would never have again. “Come,” he said to Zuko. His brother stood up at the kitchen table. “I don’t know when we’ll be back,” Ash said, as though the younger boy’s eyes had asked. “Maybe never.”
Zuko followed him on bare feet. Ash locked the door with a single key that he placed in his jeans pocket. The surrounding trees bent gently in deference to his decision. They hadn’t gone a few metres beyond the gate when Zuko swung his body low and let out a cry of resistance. Anybody who didn’t know him would have taken it for a protest against being beaten and worse, by his brother. Ash tried to hold on, but it was useless. If Zuko didn’t want to go, there was no making him. Gently, Ash lowered the boy to the ground. “What?” he asked, exasperated. “What?”
Zuko continued to cry, the sound interspersed with an utterance that might have meant “no” to anyone who knew him well. “Nah nah nah!” The boy backtracked to the door of the house and beat the wood with his fist. “Nahnahnahnah!” Ash lowered the green bag and reached into his pocket. The hope his chest contained sank into the pit of his stomach. He walked to the door and put the key into the lock. The key turned; the door opened. Zuko lurched into the house. His eyes cast frantically over the kitchen. He dropped to the floor and scanned the surface beneath the stove and the makeshift shelves.
They found it eventually, under their mother’s bed, its eyes still wide, expectant. The yellow body was fading from being rubbed with his fingers. The plastic seahorse nestled in Zuko’s palm, and the boy’s fingers closed around it. He grinned, the tears still fresh on his cheeks.
“Can we go now?” Ash asked.
Zuko gazed down at the treasured companion in his hand. Both boy and seahorse smiled. Miraculously, Zuko’s feet obeyed his brother.
Outside, Ash locked the door a second time. Above them the trees moved against a white-grey sky. Ash slung the bag over one shoulder and took Zuko’s hand. It was not for the safety or comfort of the child, but to keep himself from crying.
1.
They walked a long time, close to the edge of the world. Years later, Ash remembered Zuko’s face the way it was, as though he still slept two inches away, the only time the boy was ever still. He watched him, and loved him, without also wanting to make him into something else. In time to come, Ash would search the landscape of his memory and Zuko was still there on the dust-ochre earth, clicking his tongue and flicking his fingers into the air, whirling around as though the only thing he wanted was to become the wind.
2.
They followed the road that drew away from the town. Ash’s boots drummed a determined crunch on the gravel, repetitive, rhythmic steps that Zuko counted as he walked. The sound kept their pace, measuring the morning. Zuko focused on the footsteps. The distance between each step remained exact, emitting no sound as negative space, predictable and consistent. Footsteps, like stars and circles and a pattern of sticks and stones, had the potential to be infinite if something didn’t occur to stop them. There was the predictability of potential infinity. So reliable. Nothing other than what it was.
Ash carried the green bag on his back. The clouds in the sky held no such pattern nor predictability. Clouds tumbled like bedclothes with neither order nor purpose for themselves when the night was over. Ash’s free hand kept a firm grip on Zuko’s. Zuko understood it prevented his impulse to run back. It kept their motion forward, despite what his body might want. The craving was to watch the sharp pine needles fall from his hands for hours behind the house, or for some other activity that could satisfy his need for the whole space of potential infinity.
Zuko had no knowledge of what was in front of them. A pigeon chortled a hollow, hooting sound from deep within the base of its throat. Gravel crunched. Trees held the boys on a single track, guarding the road on either side. His bare feet were practised at navigating the endless small stones with ease. He counted them beneath his calloused soles. He matched his steps with Ash’s stride, but the rhythm fell out too soon because his legs were shorter, his feet more feeling, and he lost the balance between their movements. A quiet discomfort grew in his chest.
As the morning warmed, the sound of birds penetrated the air, stabbing-pitched tweets, unpredictable and random. He wrenched his hand from his brother’s and covered his ears to protect his brain. He heard Ash’s voice and his fast-talking, but the words were indecipherable. He had no idea what they meant.
A cold jab sliced through his foot. There was no pain. Instead a thick sensation of bile passed through his gut. He took his palms from his ears and shook his head. When it failed to work the first time, he kept up the motion that put the nausea in the background, and gave him something to focus on. Ash kept up the rhythmic crunch beside him, looking ahead. Where are we going? Zuko wanted to ask, but he had no words to say it with. Why have we left my mother in the ground? When will we go back?
Slowly the clouds melted from the sky, and left an endless hole of blue. The cold on the underside of his foot grew. He couldn’t look down. The sick feeling pulled him forward and he was afraid he would fall. Suddenly Ash grabbed hold of his hands.
“Zuko, your foot!” Ash yanked him onto the side of the road where soft tufts of grass grew together to create a resting place. He sat and took Zuko’s heel in his lap. The knapsack rustled. Ash extracted the water bottle from the bag and poured water over the wound to clean it. Then he put the bottle to his lips and drank in two guilty swallows. “Here,” he said, and handed the bottle over. “Have some. We’ll fill it up at the bend, before the road leaves the river.”
Zuko drank. The water seemed only to fuel the sick feeling inside him, to swell the sack of nausea that weighted his stomach and head. He stopped drinking. Ash took the bottle back and screwed on the lid. He leaned over Zuko’s foot. “There’s glass in here,” he said. “I’m going to pull it out with my nails. It’ll be sore. Hold on.”
Zuko’s brain isolated the word “sore”, and rolled it around in his mind. He tried to figure out what that was. He only knew his foot was cold and his head was thick and he couldn’t look at the cut or the blood that continued to seep from it, though Ash had tried to wash it away with the water. Something plucked his skin, like a string or a harp or a bow or a chicken’s feather. The cold intensified, and then faded. “We’ll find you a pair of boots,” Ash said. “You can’t go the whole way without proper shoes. And you’ll have to wear something on your feet when we get there.”
There remained a picture so clear it might have been a photograph in Zuko’s memory. It had been four years. Now he thought of the man smiling and the man not smiling. He thought of the man with his arm around his mother, and how the top of his head had looked when he’d held Zuko up high above him and bounced him in the air with giant hands. A searing ripped through Zuko as though it was sound. Ash’s elbow angled into him as he tore a shred of cloth from the bottom of his shirt, and bound Zuko’s foot with it. Zuko laughed into the air. If he squinted his eyes and held his head at a certain angle, his toes seemed to have separated from the rest of his body.
3.
They reached the main road two hours later. On the way, a vehicle stopped. A man put his head out the window of the cab of a truck supporting a canopy filled with chickens. Ash recognised him as the owner of the