AustLit

'I’m a local now. That’s what they tell me, now that I have someone in the ground. I watched my husband, my father, my brother, and my uncle, brace their feet at the grassy edge of the hole as they lowered my mother’s shrouded body in, straps under her neck, her waist, her knees; a corpse in a snug muslin bag, strewn with roses: the human-animal shape of her clear. She wobbled until she hit bottom, until the clay had her. We sent more roses in after her. Scattered soil on the petals, slowly at first. And then we picked up spades and shovelled it in. And now the same curve of earth that holds my home, holds her. When I sit at my desk to write, she is under the same ground that is beneath my feet. When I lie down in my bed at night, there are no human others between me and her, just forest and grass and rock and sky.'  (Introduction)