Mangroves - takahē

Elliotte eyed the trees through the kitchen window, flecks of ash scoring the glass. The morning was long, not that they weren’t all long. And as she stared at the knotted forms of the trees, she switched her mind off to the lukewarm water that rushed out of the tap, hit her hands and filled the sink with a pshh.

When she had first moved here with Mark, she had loved the sight of those mangroves. A mushrooming canopy that dappled the slick mud and crooked roots with a thousand shafts of shifting light. They were swollen, heavy, full of life. Branches crowded out of the water; a dash of blue, a false horizon in which the cerulean of the bay stitched the mangroves to the opposing headland, a coherent movement of colour that made her cheeks flush red. The way those shadows danced, moved, sung—the play of sea birds through the branches—was mesmerising.

But now, they had taken on a whole new meaning. The image had lost its vividness of colour, as if she were looking at an old photograph, its edges frayed and curled. Such was the effect of the mangroves: her mind was left combing over every branch, every bough, every nook. Did the mangroves hold within them an ancient truth that explained to her what Mark had written? Her mind flooded with the thought of the yellow kayak wading out there in the waters beyond.

Elliotte yanked her hands back, hissing. The water was scalding hot now, the steam of which rose up from the sink, obscuring her view. She was thankful for this, as she nursed her hands under cold water. The pain brought her mind back. She began to think about the day ahead. Another day of packing. Another day of throwing out old things. Another day of checking updates on her phone, of monitoring the fires up and down the coast.

Steeling herself for this day of doing, Elliotte recalled their first morning here. They had come in off the Princess Highway, taking the old farming routes that had, only in the past two decades, been paved, out past dairy stations and rustic colonials on pylons, through floodplains and fields of fully-grown corn—all the way out, through the wind-tunnel of blue gums to Currawong Beach, a point of coastline that jagged into the Pacific. It was a place, Mark told her, where humpbacks often breached, where dolphins could be seen frolicking from the beach, where you could find fairy penguins bumbling about on the rocks of the headlands. Elliotte had not been sure whether to believe Mark; such was his propensity for romance, he spoke vividly about his childhood there with his aunt, about the bay and estuary that lay to one side of the point.

She remembered being nervous, worried that the place wouldn’t suit her—that they might come apart in that moment. The closest she had come to the country was a music festival. She was not built for nature. She was built for art galleries, for huge portraitures.

That morning, a mean south-westerly rolled in off the coast, tinging the air with a salty Pacific cool, as they passed a row of dusty shops, the entire extent of town. As they turned up onto the road that led to the point, Elliotte looked at Mark, hoping to sense a similar apprehension in him. But Mark was smiling, humming along to the radio. Again, Elliotte reminded herself that the move made sense. A writer and a painter; a romantic prospect but not exactly a financial one. This was their best bet of getting ahead.

On the back veranda of the old fibro, the two of them looked down across the plane of mangroves. The morning sun glinted through their entangled asymmetry. Shadows moved like water across the mud. Elliotte no longer felt far away as Mark gripped her hand.

It’s ours. All ours, he said.

Yes, she replied, her mind racing with the possibilities of it all. She could imagine them spending their lives here. The two children they would have—one boy and one girl. They would learn to surf and fish. They would buy a boat. If the world went belly up, the world went belly up.

Elliotte ticked away the hours in the garage or their bedroom, trying to make the process of moving as mechanical as possible. In this way, her mind did not wander to the mangroves, to the knot of blue water. To thoughts of the book or the yellow kayak. No, she had to keep her mind on the task at hand—and even then, it was better not to think about what she was packing. If she let her mind register every item, she’d find herself spiralling. What was the worth of a shirt she had never seen him wear? What was the value of his underwear now?

Her plan was simple: put everything into boxes. Make the hard decisions when she found herself at the next place. Not that any of this felt particularly close, this other life. There was still the matter of selling the house. Mark’s aunt had left them with a sizeable mortgage, one that Elliotte couldn’t manage on her own. Besides, she did not want to. If it were up to her, she would have been out of that place right away. But the town was small. The house had sat on the market, untouched, for almost 7 months. The few out of towners who had come in to inspect it had been scared off. Of course, what they knew wasn’t everything, but it was enough to convince them the place was off.

Elliotte shoed away these thoughts as she separated out objects, packing the boxes with efficiency and precision, before sealing the boxes up with masking tape and jotting down their contents. Occasionally she paused, glanced at her phone. On the Fires Near Me app, animations of fires blinked in bush far off. Their headland was clear.

A few days earlier the Rural Fire Service had gone door to door. From the window, she watched the truck pull up in her front yard, watched the young bloke climb out, heard his boots crunch across the gravel. She knew they were going to tell her to leave. She knew that if she left, she would only have to come back to finish the job; it had happened several times before. It was better if she just got it done. She had made a habit of letting the doorbell ring out. That day was no different.

In the first year they had been happy, or at least she had thought. He had begun work on his novel. She had begun work on a new series of paintings. His first book had sold well; there was some buzz about his second. She was a rising star in the Sydney art scene; there was speculation of a solo exhibition in New York. According to him, this was their time.

Despite herself, she began to believe him. He set up an office, while she a studio. As she painted furiously, she could hear him typing away. She began to notice how the typing affected her paintings. They were livelier than ever—each image carried the ghost of itself as if the images were caught in triple exposure. Bright landscapes populated the frame. There was a curiosity and hunger in the paintings. She began to experiment with new materials: raw earth, clay, sand, shards of basalt—even mud from the mangroves. The works had a textuality that they hadn’t before. Her agent was elated.

While Mark admired her paintings, he refused to let her see his writing, insisting it was still a work in progress. In this sense, whatever he was writing became a secret, a running joke that she indulged. Lying next to him post-sex, she accused him of writing smut, to which he replied, smiling, that all great masterpieces defy good taste—or something equally ridiculous. Laughter brought their bodies closer together.

Their free time was spent descending the headlands, diving into the deep blue, holding back the waves with their backs, relaxing on the sand where he often recited to her poems from whatever collection he happened to be reading. He interpreted the line-breaks with great insight and naturally knew how to apply drama to a good line. He could hollow her out with a devastating conclusion. This was something she loved about him, the way he affected other people. The way he held them, even if, in a way, she felt they did not hold him. He was restless, never satisfied, always hungry for more. Sometimes when he spoke, she felt as if he were speaking to some distant vision of her. A self that she could never quite catch up to.

An empty box in her hands, Elliotte paused at the door of her studio, thinking for a moment that she should go in there and begin the process of packing up her art.

In the past, art had been therapy to her. She had tried this in the wake of what had happened. She had tried to paint, just as her therapist had recommended. But she had found the paintings just as useless as the sessions. They allowed her to dwell. Let the blackness well up inside of her. All her paintings then were of poorly lit rooms, huddled and moody figures that defied definition. Where people once described her paintings as vibrant, embodied, she began to see that her work was simply saccharine. A simulacrum of happiness. A fraud. How could he do this to her? This question was forthright in the paintings. The layers of dark paint revealed her hand.

In the kitchen, Elliotte began wrapping the delicate crockery in old newspaper. She knew the day was getting away from her. How strange that the hours dragged on, and yet when she looked up how the day was already gone. Light danced through the windows, curled on the ground. She looked at the clock as she thought once again about the fires. Was it just her imagination or was there a faint tinge of smoke in the air? She wanted to check the app again, but when she went to look at her phone she realised it wasn’t in her pocket. She checked the benches, the cupboards, the jacket she had been wearing that morning.

Searching, she recalled how he was constantly losing his things. Blaming her when he found himself flustered, insisting she must have put his phone or wallet or keys somewhere else. At the start of their relationship, she had laughed this off, even made fun of him, the laughter seeming to soothe him, to slow his temper enough for him to concede that she was right and he was wrong. But over that year living in the house, she had begun to resent those accusations. Why was it always her fault? Her responses became cagey, defensive. He deflected responsibility. Why was she always so angry at him? What was wrong with her?

Of course, he had always been moody, prone to sudden bouts of extreme seriousness in which he would demand her immediate seriousness in response. She had for so long thought this was a part of his charm. There was something alluring about his fickleness; his capacity to move between emotions and topics so quickly. The performance man, embodying it all. She suspected this is what made him such a good writer. But there was no point denying that living with him had been challenging. She often wondered whether he had always been this irritable or whether the house had done something to him.

It took Elliotte over an hour to find her phone, and when she did it was inside one of the sealed boxes in the garage. Walking back into the kitchen, a series of message alerts went off, reminding Elliotte of how poor the reception in the garage was, how she had turned off the WIFI that morning and packed the router away.

Unlocking her phone, she saw that she had several missed calls and messages. She opened one of them. It was an alert from the Royal Fire Service telling her to seek shelter. She blinked at the message. Only hours earlier, things had been fine. Sure, the wind was up, but the satellite images showed the fires were far off.

She went to the front window and saw for the first time a grey cloud rising up over neighbouring properties, the street hazy with smoke. Her heart leapt into her throat as she cursed herself for being so stupid. A siren wailed in the distance.

Days earlier, after the fire service had come knocking, she had packed an overnight bag just in case. It was waiting on the passenger’s seat of her car. Climbing in, her eyes took in a static shower of black leaves raining from the sky, the shimmering of a thousand fireflies. Embers. Elliotte only made it to the end of her driveway, when she saw the fire itself, whipping across rooftops, consuming everything in its path. Within minutes the sky had turned dark, the day transformed into night.

Elliotte ran back towards the house as a gale of heat made her spine tighten. Her letterbox was already alight. An asphyxiated bird had dropped from the sky. She couldn’t possibly drive out in that. Slamming into the house, she leant against the inside of her front door, yearning for the city, the simple clustered suburbia of her youth. She didn’t even know the names of her neighbours here. There was nowhere for her to go.

Elliotte raced into the kitchen, remembering what she had read about preparing buckets of water. She flicked on the tap. Realising that she needed to call triple 0, she pulled out her phone, punched the number. The line was dead. Fuck. Water filled the bucket as she felt a hotness on her cheek. A carcinogenic odour like a burnt out spark plug hit her nostrils. She looked up. The ceiling was blinding with flame. Bits of burning plaster began to fall all around her. The roar.

Elliotte ran to the backdoor and out into the yard. Everywhere smoke and flash. The pitch of roof, fully engulfed. The fire was ribboning through the long grass, chasing her. Strings of sweat stung her eyes. She ran towards the mangroves, everything in her body screaming yes and no simultaneously. There was the image of the kayak, yellow, alien against the water mixing with the morning when the tide was low and she had found him tangled in the roots of the mangroves, his body so grey and bloated that at first, she had not recognised him. Had thought that he was perhaps a seal, a large snapper or a river dolphin.

Elliotte yanked open the gate and scrambled through the mud and roots, their crooked fingers stabbing the soles of her feet. The branches of mangroves reared up in front of her; she could hardly see through all that smoke. Her mind flashed back to the book. It was the last image he had written, exactly this. A woman alone in the house. A woman trying to survive.

When she looked back, she saw that the first line of mangroves was on fire. Their branches flailed like sparks, like fox tales. Elliotte ran, came to the water’s edge. To the sudden drop where the roots tangled into the water. All around her the mangroves were shrieking, burning, ablaze.

The hot whoosh of the water as she plunged in. The swirling memories of him rushing through her like oxygen bubbles in blood. The coroner had determined it was accidental, but Elliotte knew better. He was not stupid. He had spent his summers here with his aunt. He knew how to swim. His life was a story. He was always writing himself into existence. This was merely writing himself out of it.

As she sank deeper and deeper into the water, her mind collected the scattered pieces of the days after. The book she had found in his office, the one that described a woman living alone in a house. She had only been able to read 3 pages, but in those 3 pages she saw herself. A woman processing her grief. A town that was not hers. A partner who had killed himself. In each passage, each sentence, she tried to locate him but found only a stranger. His cruelty felt so alien. She thought again on how she had set fire to the book. Hadn’t she dreamed of seeing the house, her art, burning as well?

Elliotte reeled away from her memories as her feet hit the bottom. Her mouth the first thing to break the skin of the water. She blinked in the mangroves: red fractures against the dull sheen of the smoke. The water was almost at boiling point. She couldn’t breathe. Wanted to scream, when the image of the yellow kayak passed by the corner of her eye. She twisted, saw at first the stern, the hull. The right angle of the seat and the nose of the bow as the kayak slowly spun across the water, coming to rest in the direction of the opposing headland. Elliotte knew what she had to do. She kicked against the roots and began to swim.

Tim Loveday is a writer & poet from so-called Australia. He has won the 2022 and 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards, the 2025 Calanthe Poetry Prize and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award and 2024 Montreal Poetry Prize.