The tractor coughs to life on the gravel track,
engine groaning like a man waking from a long
sleep. Dust blooms behind it, thick as old grief.
Outside the window, the sky splits into layers
of grey and gold—the kind of light that makes
the hills look like they’re holding their breath.
Inside the house, the floorboards shift
underfoot, not from wind, but because something
below is breathing. The walls remember: the way
the ceiling cracked after the fire, how the oven
door opened once without being touched. A milk
jug sits on the bench, full, though no one has
filled it since the drought.
She doesn’t speak. She stops at the kitchen
table where her father used to carve names into
the wood—her name, her mother’s, and one she
never knew: Ko te pō kua rere. Not a name. A
warning.
The power goes out. Not a flicker. A plunge.
Then the radio crackles: static resolving into a
voice speaking te reo Māori, not over the
airwaves, but from the wall itself. It says
nothing. Just repeats the same phrase: He tēnei
waiata, he kāinga e kore e hoki. This song, this
home, will never return.
She finds the deed tucked in the back of a
cupboard—mortgaged to the Crown, sealed with a
red stamp that wasn’t there last week. Her
father’s signature is still wet. But he died in
’65.
That night, the rain comes sideways. The roof
leaks not in drops, but in slow, steady pulses—
like footsteps marching up the rafters. She sees
movement in the mirror: her reflection turns
away before she does.
At dawn, the porch steps are gone. The earth has
swallowed them whole. She stands barefoot on the
edge, and the ground answers—not with soil, but
with a sound: a low, deep hum, like the world
remembering what it forgot.
She walks back to the road. The house does not
follow. But when she looks over her shoulder,
the windows are open, and someone inside is
singing—soft, familiar, the lullaby her mother
used to sing when the storms came.
The song ends. The house falls silent.
She never returns. But the next morning, the
local paper prints a photo of the farm: empty,
overgrown, a fence collapsed into the hillside.
Underneath, a note from the land registry:
Property cleared. No heirs found.
And beneath that, a handwritten line in pencil:
They didn’t leave. They were never here.
