Lexicon

needed to analyze his dog. She went into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge.
    She ate cereal. She showered. She padded naked into his bedroom and rifled through his wardrobe. She saw no books. She didn’t know what he did with himself. She started the dishes, and while scrubbing a pot suffered a sudden, appalling flash of perspective. He was waiting for her to leave. That was what the note meant. She dropped the brush and went to look for her clothes.
    • • •
    There was a joke, or puzzle, that went like this: A woman meets a man at her mother’s funeral. They hit it off, but the woman never gets the man’s name, and afterward she can’t find him. A few days later, she murders her sister. You were supposed to figure out why. But if you did, it meant you were a psychopath, because the reason was the woman wanted to meet the man again. Emily thought about this a few times over the next few days, when she found herself fantasizing about staging a medical emergency.
    She finally drove out to his house. It was dark and she got lost on the dusty roads and she almost went home a dozen times. Because it was one thing to sleep with him. It was another to go back. What she was doing felt dangerous. Like sailing off the edge of the world.
    Eventually, she trundled up the long driveway. The house lights were on but she left the engine idling, because she still wasn’t sure she should be here. Or, rather, she knew, but wanted to anyway. The front door opened. He came out, shielding his eyes. When he saw her, he smiled. That decided it. She got out of the car. “Is this a bad time?” She was being polite.
    “Nope,” he said.
    “I thought I’d come see you.”
    “Glad you did.”
    She hung by the car.
    “Come in,” he said, and she did.
    • • •
    Three months later she moved in. She was effectively living there anyway. She suggested it during the credits for an Australian comedy that he loved and she was growing to hate less and less. “I should move in,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t a suggestion. But that was how she meant it. She used persuasion techniques on Harry sometimes, but nothing he couldn’t break. She liked it that way: trying to manipulate him and failing. If she’d had his words, it would have been different. There would have been no challenge at all.
    She cooked for him. She actually cracked eggs and fried them up and carried them to him on a tray. When she lay in the crook of his arm, she felt safe. He took her riding. He had dirt bikes, a garage full of them, and they went bouncing across the countryside. He taught her how to hold a rifle so it didn’t bruise her shoulder, how much to allow for the tug of gravity on a bullet over distance. When the night was clear, they sat on the back porch, drinking and making love as the sun dissolved into earth. Before this, she had only ever viewed the sky as hostile. He made her notice the raw beauty in it, the power in the blasted earth and skeletal trees. How it was all there for a reason. Even the snakes, which Emily would never stop being terrified about—they were everywhere you least expected them, like deadly ropes—she came to see less as belligerent and more as aggressively defensive, like her. She had lived in Broken Hill for two years and never understood it.
    The first time he shot a kangaroo, she cried. She’d known he hunted them, that they were vermin, but the sight of the brown fur in the dust, the oddly human lips peeled back from small teeth, was too much. “They’re pests,” he said. “Eat anything that grows.”
    “Still,” she said.
    He set the rifle against the bike. “You know the story about the kangaroo?”
    “What story?”
    “The blackfellas’ story.” He meant the aboriginals. “There was a girl, Minnawara. She was clever, good with a spear. Eyes that could spot a kookaburra a kilometer away. One day, she stole a sling. The sling was supposed to belong to the whole tribe, but Minnawara hid it in a pouch. When the tribe discovered the sling was missing, they became very angry, and the elder asked Minnawara if she’d taken it. And she said no. So the elder put magic on the ground, and the ground began to get hot. The elder said, ‘Are your feet warm, Minnawara?’ That was the magic. Only someone who lied would feel the heat. She said no, her feet were fine. But soon she couldn’t stand it, so she began to hop from one foot to the other. And then she jumped. The elder said, ‘Why are you jumping,