There are no working clocks left in Shoalwrest. On the seventh day after the last person leaves, you go around with a hammer and smash all those ticking glass interfaces in hopes that the retreat of the estuary shoreline will stop. By now, the cars and kookaburras have all left, and even Sapphie has stopped coming back to visit. You don’t think you’ve heard your own name in months.
The edge of the estuary ebbs away continually from the shacks, the water curling in on itself as if it were shrinking until the point of collapse. The old canoes in there dry out completely, even underneath the seats. There is a thin green film of algae on the water, starting from where it leaves the sandbank – it infects the surface of the shrinking estuary in uneven splotches. For hours, you sit cleaning the crusted remnants of sea emerald pasted along the keel of Old Millie’s fishing boat. It’s the only one left that hasn’t rotted through the bilge.
***
When you were little, you measured the passing of time by the changes in the estuary. Shoals of pink salmon churned upstream in a glistening flurry—that was summer. During the autumn, bar-tailed godwits fled in mottled brown flocks, leaving the oysters and yellowfish bream spawn buried in the stagnant water for the coldest months. You’d spend long evenings helping your mum shuck oysters, wedging and twisting the knife at the hinge of the shell, just as she’d taught you. Brackish water ran down your hands, and when she wasn’t watching, you’d lick the salt from your palms.
In spring, thin darts of salmon alevin raced back downstream in short bursts, flickering through the sediment. You would grab them by the handful while Aunt Lola wrangled a silver mulloway from the water, soon to be gutted and fried for the Sunday evening banquet in the middle of town.
It was there you first learnt of life and death: a single, fluttering body cupped in your hands, watching as its small gills flared back and forth. Its cold scales grew warm in your hands and its pulsing orange pouch grew still. Only at sunset did you realise it had died, and buried it with a mournful service by the hydrangea bush.
***
Sparse bush encircles the estuary. The river feeding into the water is on the far west side, to the left of the shacks. On the days you wake up early, while the sun isn’t too bright and the mosquitoes are yet to emerge from their pupae, you pack a small bag with food, drinking water, a shovel, and some empty jars that Sapphie left. It’s usually midday by the time you make it to the river mouth, and you eat by its diminishing trickle.
Pressed against the silt are small pellets of phosphorus fertiliser, crushed into fine white powder and scattered along the riverbank. Mrs Qiu, from a few towns upriver, did the dead-end drive into Shoalwrest a few months ago, to warn of their arrival. Something about delegations from the Commercial Farmer’s Association, sweeping through the properties with broad scythes of cash and promises of investments. You couldn’t think on that scale.
Here is what you know: this is where the algal bloom started. Beneath the soil, runoff and waste creep their way towards the water from kilometres away—you’ve never seen it, but Sapphie has explained it to you, the same way she explained time dilation and black holes. While she drove around to neighbouring towns, meetings with association executives, and protests further towards the city, you did what you do now. You try to fill the jars with as many pellets as you can, as if you could peel back the virulent greenness from the surface of the estuary through them and find Shoalwrest, caught in temporal stasis, kept safe beneath the water.
***
Here is where you had your first kiss twice—at the inlet, on the river’s western bank. The first, fake one was Danny, when you were bored and didn’t have much else to do, washing the taste from your mouth as soon as he left. The first real one was Sapphie, knee-deep in the water, back before any mention of conglomerates or phosphorus around Shoalwrest. A line of seagrass marked the spot, buried into the sediment by some migratory species of flathead. You sat with her afterwards, flicking mud and sand off your legs, salt crystallising on your skin.
You went back there when the retreat began. The seagrass had become a sunken brown mess of decayed cellulose. Now it has disappeared entirely, leaving a small hollow where the roots used to be.
***
As the months pass and the estuary shrinks, you are too tired to marvel at how far the shoreline falls anymore. If you do not remember how big it used to be, it’s easy to attune your mind to its shrinkage. Think smaller thoughts. Dream less. On some nights you think the hours are falling backwards, towards the beginning of space and time, it is so quiet now. No drunken choruses scattering out from the town centre on Sundays. No yellow light from the neighbouring houses, filtering through linen curtains to wallow, side by side, with the watery reflection of the moon.
At those times, you drag Old Millie’s boat out to the edge of the estuary and sit in the ancient darkness. The boat wobbles with the slightest movement, and the night with it—both are old fish, tired of thrashing against the drag of the fisherman’s net.
Maybe you are too. Maybe you are tired of being pulled upstream, against the current of how you want things to be. Maybe, instead, you exist in a space where clocks tick backwards, and in real time, the estuary would be growing once again. You’re not sure how the physics of it would work, but you do know that Sapphie would have nodded her head, said sure, you could be right. She would have waited with you outside, just the two of you, to watch the stars spin back into antiquity.
***
When the water began to leave, Sapphie went with it. She was the first, before the families started to pack their ten-year-old cots and cast-iron pots into their dusty open-back utes. They called you crazy when you told them you planned to stay, even as they left behind the gardens their parents had grown, the houses their parents’ parents had built.
There had been weeks in summer, towards the end of the departures, when the quiet drumming of car engines in Shoalwrest was almost constant. You had let it form a kind of undercurrent to the patterns of your life – rising at first light, helping Aunt Lola drag in the trawls, more meagre each time, steaming flathead for the monthly markets, even as the crowds thinned out to a trickle. You remember how the sound of the last ute gave way to the whir of clocks when Aunt Lola drove out of Shoalwrest. Now, only the silence grows thicker.
***
You wake one morning to find the water has dropped back five metres from where the boat you slept in is. You stand by its edge, the houses a two minute walk away. Even in the few seconds you wait there, the estuary shrinks noticeably. What used to be a gradual fluctuation has turned into a steady and unstoppable curling inwards on itself, a liquid collapse into its own body. The estuary surface shrivels beneath the wind, and on impulse, you reach down to try smooth it out again. Water and bits of drying algae coat your fingers in a thin film.
You scan along the horizon for the approximate centre of the estuary—it looks four hours or so out by boat. Your mother used to take you out there, on mild spring afternoons when the sun warms the shallows in fractals of bright blue and green. All the fish you knew, and all the ones she would patiently teach you to name, swam in thick swarms through the churning mud like it was some sort of private ocean. Even now, with the retreat, you guess that the middle is only a few metres below the skyline.
A saltwater trickle runs by your mouth as you shield your face from the sun. You can’t tell if it’s sweat, or the residue on your fingers. You squint out into the estuary. At your feet, currents of water whirl inwards from the shoreline. Is there something buried there, swallowing all the water so quickly? A loose vortex, in a gaping hole below the estuary, or a singularity, where towns and families and people collapse inwards on themselves?
You will find it. You will return things to the way they should be. You return to your house, pack the essentials—enough supplies for a fifty kilometre one-way trip, your oyster knife, a few empty glass jars. Who knows what you’ll find on the way. It is midday and the sky is cloudless when you begin to follow the retreat, the water’s inward pulse as fast as your footsteps.
***
Even after she left this town, Sapphie returned from time to time to visit you. She never had much love for life here—during the last time, she’d told you that Shoalwrest had an endorheic estuary as a physical manifestation of its metaphorical position as a life-terminal. You’d never quite understood what she meant, but you’d never had the chance to ask her to explain.
Every time she returned and asked you to come with her, you felt that she was betraying you in some way. She must have felt the same each time you refused. This place made up too much of you, and gave too little back to her. At some point, she stopped asking. Then, she stopped returning.
You have since realised that she probably thought you wanted to move to the city with someone else. You don’t think she understood that you would stay in Shoalwrest—you don’t think it was something she could understand.
***
On day two, you wake before dawn. The estuary has fallen even further back, and the shacks along the old coastline are held in a ghostly gathering. You are alone in a vast stretch of brown sludge, green algal film and coarse lumps of yellow sand.
The retreat leaves the corpses of bloated fish behind, admist the sediment. You squint at one set of bones—you’d know their dragonfly-thin shape as well as any other thing you’ve buried. You wonder how the alevin could have gotten here, when the hydrangea bush in your garden is so far away, before you remember how the town is shrinking in on itself. It must be doing strange things to the land as well. There are oysters scattered along the ground, their shells collapsed by a gaping hole shot into the carbonate, just above the hinge. Their undersides are plastered with dying phytoplankton.
At night, the wind whips sharply around the empty estuary, and each time it sweeps seaward, more of the scent of seawater leaves with it. Your water’s running out, but it shouldn’t be long until you reach the centre. Luckily for you, you won’t need to return. Once Shoalwrest stops collapsing in on itself, the waters will sweep out from wherever they have been disappearing into, and float you back to shore.
If you can find the singularity, things will fix themselves. Time will return when the water returns. Aunt Lola will drag in her silver trawls to the shacks at sunset. The godwits will make their rounds again. Sapphie will be back.
You do not sleep for two days. Time holds still at night, but you travel through it. You do not think about how the water is ebbing away in front of you, so fast that it outpaces you. Instead, you think about what you will say to everyone once everything returns to normal. You’ll tell Old Millie that you’ve been taking good care of her boat, and that it’s served you well. You’ll tell your mother that the oyster season this year hasn’t been as good as it used to, but you’re still shucking them the way she taught you—you should have picked one up along the way to show her, but that’s alright. You can find one on the way back. The ground’s littered with them.
You’ll tell Sapphie that it’s not that you didn’t, or don’t, love her. It’s just that you didn’t know how the two of you could survive anywhere else. She’ll understand, and when you return to the rivermouth on the west bank the next morning, or any morning after, there will still be seagrass growing.
On the fourth dawn, the water in your bottles runs out. You shake the last drop onto a dark spot of sand before you realise: this is the centre. Here, the retreat has ended. There is no murky estuary water around you in any direction—just a desert of waste and decay. The ripples in the silt do not move. Your skin feels too tight and too still, but you’re here, gazing at the singularity. It’s only a single mark, a lot less glorious than you expected, but the birth and death of all the things you’ve ever known must not need to announce its presence much.
You kneel by the spot, alone in an empty wasteland. All of the past is just beneath your body – you only have to find it, to wrench it back.
You cup your hands. They are cracked and tanned in the blaring sun, but you can almost feel the slippery coolness of water that will sink back into them. You stare at the centre.
You dig.