The Nowhere Child. Christian White

to be out of the dark than she ought to have.

      They continued up the channel.

      ‘I have to spend the summer with Dad in California,’ Shelley said after a few minutes of comfortable silence. ‘Why he chose to move so far away is beyond me, and he only wants me out there to get at Mom. It’s like, ever since the divorce they’ve been in this long, long war. But they’re the generals; I’m the only one fighting down in the trenches.’

      ‘Mm. You’re kind of lucky though,’ Emma said. ‘Obviously it sucks your parents are divorced, but at least that’s sort of proactive. Their marriage didn’t work so they ended it. It’s smart.’

      Shelley baulked. ‘That’s like telling a paraplegic they’re lucky ’cause they get to sit down all day.’

      ‘My parents’ marriage has been dying slowly for the past two years and neither of them will put it out of its misery. Wouldn’t you rather have your parents separate but happy instead of together and miserable?’

      ‘Ah, but you forgot about separate and miserable,’ Shelley said, laughing. ‘I didn’t know your parents fought a lot.’

      ‘They don’t. That’s part of the problem. If they fought, maybe they’d sort some shit out. Instead it’s like they never finish a sentence. There’s a dot-dot-dot at the end of everything they say to each other, never a period.’

      ‘Ellipsis,’ Shelley said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘That little dot-dot-dot at the end of a sentence. It’s called an ellipsis.’

      Emma rolled her eyes.

      ‘Anyway, maybe you’re right,’ Shelley said. ‘Maybe they should get a divorce.’

      A nagging sadness fell over Emma then. If her parents really did split then her father would remarry – she knew that. He’d loosen his grip on church ties even further, find happiness and talk bitterly about his fundie ex-wife. But what would become of her mother? Without Jack Went to act as a spiritual buoy, she’d sink deeper and deeper into the Church of the Light Within. Eventually the woman Emma knew might fade away completely.

      ‘Feeling anything yet?’ Emma asked.

      ‘Nuh-uh.’

      About a quarter-mile into the woods they came across the gristmill, a dilapidated structure surrounded by scrub oak. The sun had dipped behind it, creating a rectangular silhouette reaching out of the earth, like a corpse rising from the grave.

      Up until a few years ago the gristmill was still running. Of course even then it made more money from the gift shop and the working tours than it did selling flour and cornmeal.

      Emma came here with her mother once. Her dad was visiting his cousins in Coleman and had taken Stu along with him for a boys’ day out. Her mother had put it to Emma to decide how to spend their day together, and she had suggested the mill.

      Back then, a wide paved road cut a path in from the highway, wooded on both sides. The road crossed a rattling suspension bridge over a shallow, spring-fed creek. She remembered rolling down her window as they drove over it, sticking her head all the way out to listen to the creek babble below them.

      Once inside the mill, they had marvelled at the big pulleys and spinning belts, pounding and churning grain into cornmeal and flour. When the tour was over her mother had bought her a Coke from the visitor centre and they had walked to the south side of the mill to sit in the picnic area.

      They had sat in silence, Emma remembered now. It wasn’t an awkward silence, but an organic one.

      The gristmill was no longer the sort of place mothers took their daughters to marvel at pulleys and drink Coke in the grass. An economic downturn – Emma knew the words but had only a vague understanding of what they meant – dried up the mill’s funding and what had once been a popular historic attraction soon fell into disrepair. The pulleys stopped pulling, the belts stopped spinning and the windows grew thick with dust. The east wall shifted loose, getting a little closer to collapse with each strong gust of wind.

      Shelley shoved the door open and Emma followed her into the mill. It was mostly dark aside from slivers of light falling in through smudged yellow windows. The sour smell of mould hung in the air. Water damage had brought down part of the second floor, exposing a jagged cross-section of wooden beams and twisted metal rods.

      The interior wall of the mill was covered with names, scribbled on with different-coloured pens and markers. Emma recognised some of them: politicians and pop stars, and Rich Witherford, a colossal asshole from Manson High. Other names she didn’t recognise: Summer DeRoche, Jonathon Asquith, Chris Dignum, Sophie Lane, Angie Sperling-Bruch. All Emma knew was someone wanted them dead.

      That was how the urban legend went: write the name of your enemy on the wall of the gristmill and within twenty-four hours that person will die.

      It was an easy legend to disprove; as far as she knew not a single one of the people named on the wall had died – at least not within the allotted twenty-four hour time period. But she doubted that was the point. Writing down the name of your enemy felt weirdly therapeutic. She had written a few names there herself.

      She found Henry Micket’s name scribbled onto the wood in her own handwriting. Henry was the beautiful track champion at Manson High who Emma had made the mistake of being in love with for a year and a half. He hadn’t wronged her in any serious way – in fact she doubted he knew who she was beyond a vaguely familiar face in the halls – but he had broken her heart when he started dating Cindy Kites, another beautiful track champion.

      She had written Henry’s name on the wall in the heat of devastation and come back later to strike it out with a fat blue magic marker. What remained now was Henry Micket.

      It had felt good to write his name down and even better to strike it out. A few strokes of a marker had represented anger, then forgiveness. Seeking once again to express her anger, and perhaps even forgive, she was tempted to write another name on the wall now.

      Just for the therapy of it, she told herself. But if that were true, why were her hands now trembling?

      ‘I’ve gotta pee,’ Shelley said, disappearing back out the front door.

      While she waited, Emma climbed a flight of groaning stairs to the second floor. Every surface she passed was covered in dust. Remnants from the early-afternoon shower trickled through the dozen or so holes in the ceiling, leaving puddles of dirty brown water on the landing.

      She cleared a space with her feet, sat cross-legged on the floor and lit a cigarette.

      As her vision slowly adjusted to the dark, she noticed a long trail of carpenter ants marching across the wide wooden floorboards and down through a hole below the window, presumably heading toward a nest inside the rotting walls. The trail navigated around broken glass and debris, a used condom – ew – and, at its narrowest point, veered dangerously close to a cobweb. Although Emma couldn’t see it, she imagined a fat black spider with gnarly yellow eyes waiting in the shadows.

      She stood up suddenly, shaking her head in disbelief. She had to do something about the ants. She set about moving the obstacles that were blocking their path. She kicked away the debris. She found a heavy metal rod and used it to flick away the condom and destroy the cobweb, sending the unseen and wholly imagined spider fleeing into one of the deep cracks between the floorboards.

      Emma chewed her lip and waited for her good Samaritan act to pay off.

      ‘What the fuck,’ she hissed. ‘No.’

      The trail had dispersed and was coming apart in places. The ants were disorientated without the broken glass, used condom and cobweb to guide their way. She had removed their landmarks and now their path was lost.

      It hurt more than it should have, more than it had the right to, and Emma was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to cry. No, she wanted to heave and sob.

      Dull