'The Last Homecoming' by Amanda O'Callaghan

You’re dead. I know that. Tomorrow, I’ll go to your graveside, pull away the winding branches, wipe the moss from your headstone, trace the remnants of our name with a guarded finger. But now, here in the dark, I sense a warm corpse. Feel I might see you, laid out on the road’s peaty edge. Blood, bone, the same long jaw, a good thatch of hair to the last. And your tight heart clicked shut.

I have a question for a dead man. Was it strange to spend a lifetime on this road? Born, just ahead now, where a porch lamp glows for the late flight. Died in the front room, unable to make the stairs. Sad to see your father like this, she wrote, then. After the life he led. Morning will remind me: the damp fields, the same heavy trees, the days folding and unfolding, seamed and cornered like good linen.

At last, the taxi pulls in. There’s the high gate, unchanged in the turning light. A grand entrance for a plain farm. My mother will be inside, attended. Others will weep, but not her. She is not afraid to die. We will all drink whiskey and wait. I will offer the stories of my life in other lands, polished like small, gaudy stones. It’s expected of me. And as we wait, no one will speak of that boy from long ago, shrugging into his swag of youth and hope. No one will betray the mother who pressed banknotes into my hand and turned without another word. Or the father who would not come down from the hill to say goodbye. Who dug his farewell into the cold soil, turning the sod with ancient skill. Burying it.