1.

Joseph makes it through to tomorrow. Tomorrow is now—little does anyone know. The rest of the city is chewed by dreams, docile, forgiving of time’s tics. Joseph’s brow beads sweat. He feels the first winds of Wednesday.

It’s a morning of insect rain, bugs rising in a living filter, summed up by nothing more than a change in horizon colour. Joseph watches the flat rooftops run out below him, like animals fleeing the city centre. The moon hangs, hopeful, fingernail thin, in the corner of the sky.

Joseph steadies himself against the corner of the roof: all devil knees and gargoyle haunches. He is a monster. He lives inside his head; he feeds like a vampire on recollections. He imagines, as insect-pink spreads a cloud above the rooftops, that this is the world ending. He aches to know everything is ending. Beyond his shoulder, the river is a traitor. It accepts the day’s welcome; it begins moving, like a chest filling with breath. Joseph realises, heavily, there is still more time. His head grows with the moments still to come—empty and blank, useless as a brother’s promise.

*

The table is made of rings—a thousand glasses abandoned, slammed down, slid and spun around. Gwyn hugs Sofie hard to his face, feeling her hipbone squeeze against his cheek. She laughs. She’s talking to someone, but her fingers twist behind Gwyn’s ear and play at the corner of his mouth. Gwyn watches the table. In the dark, in the noise, its surface begins to glow.

When their night is over, when the doors burst open and they stumble out, the sky has shaken itself awake above them.

Gwyn says, Welcome to whenever.

Sofie looks up; her hair gives out wings. How long…?

Gwyn looks around. His neck is circled with cold. I don’t know when this is.

Sofie forces Gwyn’s gaze to her face. Were we away that long?

I don’t know, he says. The street is long and grey and stretches out in both directions. Gwyn waits for the sound of a car, or a bird, or a church bell, as if this will rejuvenate his memory.

Can we go now? Sofie looks too pale in her green dress. In the shadows of the night before, in the haste of a hurried redressing, she has put her head through the armhole. She looks helpless.

Gwyn thinks, We are throwing away our time.

*

The weight of whiskey tumbles in Iris’s stomach. It curls and curdles inside her: it claws her swollen walls. Her torpor has fed itself through another night, gorging denial. She reels her face in; she draws an unconvincing smile. She has all the time left in her life.

On the television, a silence fills the screen - a star-spangled static. The swarm of dots dance up against her eyes. She lets her mind dissolve in their warmth, happy memories receding. There is space now only for of sadness, a dark patch ragged with anger. She longs for her family, spread like scattered seeds: above, below, within the earth. In a reflection she sees herself, mouth mirror-cracked with grief. Behind her, a scarf hangs on a clothes hook, swinging like the legs of a defeated spirit. It freezes her, this image, deep inside.

2.

Edward follows the river, although it takes him longer. His arms wrap so tightly around his chest he imagines they meet behind his back. The wind juts out like an awkward table edge; it is free to disobey the air in this nothing time, somewhere between night and morning.

He pulls his lips taut around his teeth, fastening strong muscle pegs. The taste of salt draws against him like a creature taking refuge from the cold. To Edward’s right, the river sparkles with improbable miracles. To his left, his son walks beside him. His son’s calves are too big for his green gumboots; the skin is pinched pink.

Edward does not acknowledge the creature at his side. They utter no words from the front door to the factory. Every day now, the same. The river is their conversation, flowing timelessly, near.

*

The moving clouds fracture at last. Sunlight breaks through like a held breath expelled. The brothers watch a patch of light as it roves the hills: a rambling, random shimmer.

Gwyn speaks from a low branch, perched near Joseph’s shoulder. It’ll never happen, he says, Not while I’m here.

Joseph looks at the ground. Even with hair grown long across his neck, he knows he is visible: as brown and veined as a dried leaf. His voice is dry and prickly. They don’t want me here any more.

Gwyn puts his hand on his younger brother’s head, his smooth fingers moving like water through Joseph’s thatchy hair. If you’re going, he says, I’m coming with you.

Do you promise?

Of course I promise.

The sunlight finds them then—tree-dweller and leaf-skin both—giving pause for welcome warmth. They look up, and the sky admits them briefly to its heavenly view: a pure blue secret beyond the cottonwool clouds. Joseph wishes time would rest a moment in his hands. He wishes he could feel its shape as he bends it into happiness.

*

Joseph wakes, to a night sea-blue by a pregnant moon. Underneath his sheets his palms itch, but when he looks, when he rucks up the blankets, there is no brown hair sprouting. He gathers such horrors from Gwyn’s storybooks: a paper treasure-trove beneath his brother’s bed. Werewolves, hunchbacks, accursed princes—Joseph hoards their splintered lives. He yearns to know how they ruptured, so easily, from humanity.

He walks across his night-time room. He ducks his head beneath a wooden beam and twists his neck to crack the bones aching deep in his back. He works, lifting crates, with his father, from the early morning until the dusk. He must pretend to be older, even though he feels so young.

Joseph walks silently to the landing, and gingerly lowers his body against the railings of the first floor. His parents and brother are in the living room below him: three heads floating in the dark.

His mother sobs. Gwyn sits beside her, features made of statue stone. Joseph’s father watches them: face wracked, arms aloft with passion and pity: a prize-fighter who can’t land the final blow.

*

Gwyn’s hands burn with excitement. Sofie walks towards him—to meet just him—at the beginning of the pier. He wonders if they will kiss today, down by the rock pools, like the older kids do. His family is at the amusement arcade, which means he and Sofie can escape them easily.

She wears a green dress. She says, I lost one of my earrings.

\Where did you lose it?

If I knew that, I would have found it.

I suppose so.

Let’s go to the arcade

Don’t you want to go down to the rock pools?

Sofie scrunches up her face. You can, but I want to see the hall of mirrors.

Gwyn relents. They start walking, but even before they get to the entrance, Gwyn hears a familiar cry of pain. He watches ripples in the crowd, and waits for Joseph’s wailing voice to reach him. Above the heads of startled families he spots his brother: a giant face, an overgrown vegetable: howling, brandishing a stuffed animal above his head. He’s won, thinks Gwyn, he’s happy. As faces recoil around him, Joseph waves to his brother. Sofie sees him.

Who’s that? she asks. Her voice sounds strung up from a highwire, too scared to come down. Her pretty musk-tipped fingers fumble at Gwyn’s shirtsleeve. Do you know him?

She is urgent, thinks Gwyn. She is beautiful. He glances at his brother’s face: wrinkled and balloon-round, slackened mouth grinning foolishly. He sighs. I don’t know, Gwyn says quietly. I don’t know who that is.

*

Iris has not expected it to look like this. Her husband, and their son, walking away down the front path, as ever a Wednesday morning, hands in pockets, breath steam-clouding in the morning dark. It is the same scene she watches every morning. She had thought, this time, it would be tragically different: she imagined a thick fog descending on the sleeping city, low and solemn, drawing over like a doctor’s blanket. She imagined the river turning black with grief. She imagined Joseph looking back at her, face decreased by a childish smile.

Gwyn sits motionless on the sofa, his body bent over, hands tightly clenched. In his frozen face, Iris cannot sense emotion.

Is everything alright? she asks him, her words accepted silently by the walls of the living room.

It’s today, says Gwyn, isn’t it.

Iris bites her lip. She looks at the coat rack by the door. Joseph has forgotten his scarf. What do you mean? She tries to keep her voice from breaking.

Gwyn lowers his head and speaks into his fingers. He’s only nine years old. He’s got so much time.

*

As the day ends, as the human chains are fed from factory doors, Edward lingers. He pulls his coat up around his ears. All day his mind has been a door left ajar: awful thoughts slipping in unnoticed, pleasant memories leaving without a sound. He has performed the usual tasks, stretched the usual muscles, but he hasn’t felt a thing. His hiking pack strains on his back. Inside are two rusting dumb-weights, stolen from the storage room. Tied to each is a length of new rigging rope, fastened securely to the shoulder straps of the pack. Almost betrayal, thinks Edward; too crude a route for such an eternal action.

Joseph returns from the washroom shed, face shrunken like an old man’s in the cold. Usually, Edward makes his son walk home in his overalls because he refuses to get changed with the other men. Today, he has afforded Joseph the privilege of privacy, long after the factory’s last bell. Joseph is smiling. His father’s rare favour has allowed him to wear his favourite duffel coat—usually left behind—buttoned to the chin, fingers wriggling worm friendly from either sleeve. He has removed his gumboots too, and wears ragged sandals strapped loosely to his bare feet.

Ready to go, he says. The floodlights above the supply yard switch off, and Joseph’s eyes are left to sparkle green in the dim.

I need you to carry my pack, says Edward. I’m too tired.

Without a word, Joseph takes the pack and places it on his shoulders. He holds his arms out straight while his father ties the straps around his chest. Edward begins drawing the buckles up, one by one, until they are all one notch too tight. By the last buckle, his hands shake uncontrollably. A match-strike of heat burns behind his eyes.

Make sure it’s on tight, Joseph, he quietly says.

*

Gwyn runs the life from himself, breath spinning raggedly inside his chest. He can still hear the frantic crash of the front door, left shuddering in its frame by his angry hand. The wind hurtles against him, swept up from the dark river, battering him sideways.

His mother confessed to him minutes before. After a day of persistent questioning, she had broken down, and with red-rimmed eyes, confirmed his worst fears. Gwyn had thought Joseph would go to a hospital—a country place—after Christmas, somewhere he could visit and stay over like a holiday, until he got better. The truth was an inevitable product, borne of a thousand silences: night-swallowed words and thoughts left to putrefy. It chills Gwyn to the pit of his stomach, worse than any winter cold.

Gwyn knows his father will never leave the river, the only path he ever takes. Gwyn’s eyes shudder-focus as he runs; he searches for catchments, jetties and bridges—any landmarks in the waning light. He is almost past before he sees it. A bridge: a dark arch weaning menace from its shadows. Edward and Joseph sit on the bridge’s concrete lip. In silhouette, the son is the father and the father is the son. Gwyn tries to shout, but the air steals his weakened breath.

A small movement: Joseph falls from the bridge. His body drops through the dark and into the water, swallowed whole by its secrecy. Gwyn cries out at the awful anonymity; there is no splash, no strangled final words: just a fluid envelope, silently sealed.

3.

It is almost natural, Iris is told. A boy who suffered so much was always going to be happier somewhere else—in a different world, in a different way. Perhaps, they say, it is better to never know. It is the endless acknowledgement that drives her indoors: a procession of street-met commiseration from faces known and unknown, nodding and smiling as if they knew her. As if they knew Joseph. As if they knew the dark hearts that beat beneath a family’s skin.

*

Gwyn finds his father first. In Joseph’s old bedroom: as first as an angel, then as reality, Edward appears in the air. His body dances slow-sad pirouettes, puppet-strung from a single thread of rigging rope. The wooden beam creaks like a rolling ship; it has struggled with his weight, but held firm. Edward’s feet are bare. Below, on the ground—beneath the death-drop of air—is a pair of green gumboots.

*

Barely has the sun time to settle before the cemetery has to welcome life again. Edward’s headstone is placed beside Joseph’s empty grave. Iris weeps cold rivers. Gwyn clings to Sofie’s fingers through the pocket of his coat. In his head, he knows his father was a waste laid to rest. Where Joseph went, Gwyn had promised to follow.

4.

Joseph has made it through to tomorrow. His head breaks the water of another day. Tomorrow is now, little does anyone know. Not his mother, scraping her life through the house below. Not his brother, a living shell, playing out his hours.

The fingernail moon remains stuck to the sky, refusing to yield to a fresh-born sun. Time goes on.