Kingfisher by Rebecca Croser

My husband and I have our backs to the sea, fixed as we are on the puzzle. Plywood, 527 pieces, laser-cut with bird whimsies. I let Rob fit the lark and the crane. The goose and the wren. I’ve pocketed the kingfisher. In my fist I worry at it, turning it over and over to scratch my thumbpad on the spike of beak. It is the first time in a week that the caravan is free of children. Lucas is fishing off the pier with a girl too clever for him. Anna and her disciples have been experimenting with shoplifting. Joshua at six is still mine. He’s paddle boarding with next door’s boy and the parents, otherwise we’d be building mermaids on the beach together. Seaweed hair and seashell fins. Now Rob is searching for the last bird. He will roar and haul seat cushions out the door on to the hot grass, rattle all the shoes by the back door, upturn the laundry basket and sweep the sand-riddled floor with a flat palm. And when he is huffing on the lazy-boy near dusk, ostentatiously reading Portnoy’s Complaint for the neighbours’ benefit while I caramelize shallots and turn ribeye on the grill, I will take the piece with its broken beak and click it into its waiting void.

Rebecca Croser is an Australian writer whose work has appeared in Short + Sweet and the Sydney Review of Books. She recently completed a creative writing and literary studies PhD at the University of Melbourne that focused on campus novels and their chronotopes.