It’s September, and she’s driven down from the city to the rental. She knows something strange had taken up residence in her. It’s something she’s known a long time, but the silence gives her no peace. She takes walks along the slopes that drop to the sea, trying to enjoy the sight of cormorants on gillnetting stakes, then heads home to drink tea. The idyllic surroundings provide no relief. On the far side of the stubble field and the wood, the fairground draws her eye. There’s a special light over there. The wind raises dust from the field; everyone left the site back in June. The grounds lie there awaiting next year’s fair, and such emptiness calls for something.

I must have been sick, she thinks. The thought occurs to her now and then, even though it was a case of love, just not the love she’d been promised as a child. Back then, she’d imagined that love was just like running through a sprinkler. It tickled, you laughed and felt silly and beautiful at the same time. You were charming and adorable and wove flowers in the wire mesh of the rabbit hutch and won praise for it. No matter what you did, the chosen one would think you were amazing. The happiness was as sweet as peppermint, and it endured. You were extraordinarily dear, and it was the other person’s job to make sure everything ended well by not being able to resist the sweetness.

But what she’d been through as an adult belonged to another world entirely. If it wasn’t reluctant, then it was dramatic, and in the end the drama became encysted in her. Kept hidden from the world’s light, it wreaked havoc, and at some point she convinced herself that it was because he needed love​ 51that she had such a great store of it. Yet for him it was merely a flirtation, a matter of discharge, nothing more, she understood that now, and it was actually risky of him. A spark and a merciless drought can set a continent ablaze. He ought to know that. Just take Australia, where civil defense crews wait on tenterhooks in choppers with fat water tanks slung beneath their bellies, anxious and virile, always ready to fly out and stop the craziness from spreading, and now here she stands.