Flesh and Blood by Jackie French

that had held our sandwiches and coffee. The fresh air felt cool on our faces. ‘Come on.’
    ‘But we can’t just leave him,’ I said stupidly.
    ‘They’ll mourn in their own way,’ said Neil gently, Neil who had grown up with Animals, unlike me in my sterile City creche. ‘We’re just in their way now.’
    He began to walk up the ridge without looking back. I followed him reluctantly. ‘It seems wrong somehow, though. Not to have a ceremony of some sort.’
    ‘A memorial jazz concert? He liked jazz. Used to come to most of the concerts. None of the mares did. No, love, we did what we could.’
    ‘But just leaving the body there …’
    ‘It won’t be there for long.’
    ‘You mean they’ll bury it?’
    ‘I mean that crows will get to it, and goannas and flies and a hundred other things. It will be bones in a month or so and finally even those will go back to soil.’
    We walked in silence. Then I said, ‘It almost sounds like you want to become soil one day too.’
    ‘Bury me under an apple tree,’ said Neil lightly.
    You could see our house from here, its stone pale pink and blue and the hard bright gleam of quartz. Neil took my hand. We walked down to the creek, then up through the dappled tree trunks to the garden.
    It was good to be home, good to have a shower and wash off the scent of fur and dust and death. Good to eat buttered toast and boiled eggs in the quiet kitchen and sleep till the sun was high.
    Neil Linked a call to Elaine, to tell her what had happened. I pottered in the garden, weeding, tying up a straggly rose, then picked vegetables for dinner.
    Days never seem quite right when you’ve slept through part of them. We monitored the Nets again and found nothing more remarkable than a recipe for pickled crabapples and a story about a transvestite rooster that may or may not have been true.
    ‘I’ll cook,’ said Neil.
    I smiled. It was one of his more lovable characteristics, pretending that one night I might say, ‘No, I’ll do it,’ and actually come up with something edible apart from toast and jam, providing someone else had made the jam and the bread and cut off the bits I burnt.
    He made a stir-fry of chicken (the freezer was full of middle-aged chickens, from the utopia’s annual chook cull a month before) and the veg I’d picked, broccoli and burdock, some rather stringy celery and some of the plenitude of carrots I grew mostly for the Wombat.
    We ate in the kitchen, with music on Realtime instead of Link. I would have loved to Link our minds too — not to ponder anything or for any deep exchange, just for the merging of emotions. The taste of the dinner: too salty? No? Good. The feel of the earlynight breeze from the window. But overall a simple consciousness of each other. There is no way I can explain it. If you’re Forest then you’ve felt it; if you’re a Tree you never will.
    But until Neil felt comfortable with MindLink there was no point trying, especially after last night as our minds would have unconscious undertones of death that would be exaggerated when they met each other.
    Not that Neil would know that things like that happened. Not yet, and maybe never.
    The music changed to something heavy. I glanced at Neil. He understood music; to me it was mostly noise, though pleasant enough in the background.
    ‘Turn it off if you like,’ he said, when there was a noise at the door.
    ‘Elaine?’ I said.
    ‘Sounded more like a scratch than a knock,’ said Neil. ‘Probably the Wombat.’
    The Wombat seemed to have no sense of time. If he came while we were still up, most times he’d come inside, perch uncomfortably on the lowest chair and exchange a sentence or two, then amble outside to his carrots, his social duty done.
    ‘I’ll get it,’ I said. The Wombat had been my first friend here, when I had been too emotionally drained to accept friendship from any human. I mostly left the door ajar for the Wombat when we were home — his hands could never cope