The pōwhiri at Tākou Marae ends with no one
dancing. No speeches. Just silence where the
tītī call used to be.
Kaitiaki leaves the marae in a car with rusted
fenders, heading inland toward the old farm. The
road cracks beneath her tyres like dried earth.
Trees lean too close now — not just shading, but
watching.
She finds the gate gone. Not broken. Erased. The
wire fence vanishes midswing, as if swallowed by
the ground. Her boots sink slightly on the soil —
not mud, but something older, softer. The air
tastes of iron and wet stone.
Her father’s dog, Kōkako, doesn’t bark. It
stares from the doorway, ears flat, eyes dark as
river rock. Then it turns and walks into the
house. The door closes behind it without a sound.
Inside, photos are missing from the walls. Not
ripped. Gone. As though the paper dissolved. The
kitchen clock stopped at 3:17 — the same time
her brother vanished ten years ago. She
remembers him saying, “It’s not the war that’s
killing us,” before he stepped into the mist
beyond the orchard.
She searches for proof — a letter, a journal —
but every page she turns feels wrong. Words blur.
Names shift. Her own name trembles on the page,
then rewrites itself as Tāmoko.
She finds his coat in the attic. Still warm.
Still holding the scent of cedar and kauri resin.
And under it, a carved bone whistle — a child’s
toy from when they were small. When she picks it
up, she hears a voice: “You don’t belong here.”
No one spoke.
But the forest does.
At dawn, the creek runs backwards. Water climbs
the banks, dragging fallen branches like corpses.
She follows it to the clearing where the old
stone circle stands — halfburied, grown through
with flax and ivy.
There, a man kneels. Not her brother. But
someone who looks like him. His face is smudged
with ash, his hands stained green. He wears the
red jersey of the local rugby team — the one her
father died wearing during a match two weeks
after the last flood.
He lifts his head. His eyes are open, but they
see nothing.
She steps forward.
The ground gives way beneath her feet. Not soil.
A mouth. A breath. A pulling.
She falls. Not down. Into.
And when she lands, she’s not in the bush.
She’s in the house.
Her father sits at the table, alive. Smiling.
He says nothing.
But she knows what he’ll say — the thing she’d
buried so long.
She has to choose: stay and be forgotten again,
or return and lose him forever.
She opens her mouth.
No sound comes out.
The room hums. The walls breathe.
Then the light fails completely.
The next morning, the house is empty. The car is
gone. The fields are overgrown with ferns that
didn’t grow there last week.
No one sees her.
No one remembers her.
But the whistle rests in the hollow of a tree
root, singing faintly in the wind.
