Chapter 4 — The Emu in the Sky

Next holidays, Molly was back at the coast, and Sosta’s house was louder than usual when she arrived. Sosta’s cousins had already taken over the backyard, and someone was playing music from a speaker balanced on the edge of the deck. The smell of food drifted through the open doors.

The adults talked over each other, but it wasn’t like the kids at Molly’s school. Stories overlapped and circled back on themselves. Nobody seemed too worried about finishing sentences before starting others.

At one point Molly told Sosta’s dad that her Grandad had started telling her a story about one water. His eyebrows went up.

“One water!” he said. “My nonna used to tell that one.” He shook his head, smiling at something far away. “Hers had a donkey in it, though.”

Later, when the sun had gone down and the sky had grown dark, Molly and Sosta stood staring up at the stars with Sosta’s uncle.

“What do you reckon,” Sosta’s uncle said.

He pointed upward and began tracing a line with his finger.

“See that?” he asked.

Molly tried to follow his gesturing hand, and at first she could only see stars.

“Try not to look at the stars,” Sosta’s uncle explained. “Try to see the shape between them.”

Slowly a shape appeared. It wasn’t made from stars the way constellations usually were. It was a dark space between them.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. Molly nodded. “That’s the Emu.”

“The Emu in the Sky,” Sosta said quietly beside her.

Once Molly saw it she couldn’t unsee it. The long body stretched across the sky, its head reaching toward the horizon.

“How did people know to look there?” she asked without looking away. Sosta and her uncle glanced at each other.

“They watched,” he said.

“For a long time,” said Sosta.

Sosta’s uncle retold the story of how the Emu moves across the sky, how its position tells people when it’s time for things to happen on the land.

“When the Emu stands tall, the eggs are ready,” he said. Sosta’s mum had come to stand with them.

“People use the sky to remember,” she said, her hands on Sosta’s shoulders. “It tells us stories and helps us carry everything we know.”

The group slowly drifted back toward the house. Molly stayed behind for a moment longer, looking up. The dark shape stretched across the sky exactly where it had been before anyone pointed it out. The pattern had not appeared when someone explained it. It had always been there. All that changed was that she could finally see it.

* * *

That night at Grandad’s, Molly couldn’t sleep for thinking about the Emu. She padded out to where Grandad was reading in his chair.

“What happened to Nin?”

Grandad put his book face-down on his knee.

“Nin,” he said, “started at the mouth of the river, where an old fisherman sat with one fish beside him.

“’Only one?’ said Nin.

“’One’s plenty,’ said the fisherman.”

“Hey,” said Molly, sitting up. “That’s what you say.”

“Where do you think I got it?” said Grandad, and would say no more about it.

“Nin asked the fisherman where the river ended and the sea began. He leaned over and scooped a handful of water. ’Taste,’ he said. It was salty. So he walked her twenty paces upstream and scooped again. Sweet. Then he walked her back to the middle and scooped a third time, and it was both, and neither, and the fisherman was grinning.

“’The edge was just here this morning,’ he said. ’But the tide came in and moved it. It’ll be somewhere else by supper. You’ve missed it, I’m afraid. You keep missing it by a moment.’”

“So the edge moves?” said Molly.

“Wouldn’t hold still for a second,” said Grandad. “So Nin turned that feather over in her pocket and thought: if the bottom of the river won’t stay put, maybe the top will. And off she went upstream.”

“And then what?”

“And then,” said Grandad, picking his book back up, “you went to bed.”