Homing by Henrietta Rose-Innes

again. “Just a big stone box. Nothing special.”
    The woman appraised her, knife poised. “You’re here alone? Because, if you wanted to join us for supper …? There’s plenty.”
    “Oh, that’s sweet.” Daniela smiled formally. “But I’m okay, really.”
    As she left the room, the woman’s smile dug into her back like a pebble. Daniela had spoken more coldly than she should have. But she knew how strangers observed her on these solitary trips: sometimes with pity, and sometimes with unseemly curiosity. Sniffing her for scandal. Often, men would try to pick her up.
    One day, she thought, I might say yes. It was the first time this had occurred to her. It seemed a remote idea, one to put away for the future; but not impossible. These weekends away were such ruptures, such odd holidays from the close embrace in which she lived with Thom. She wasn’t quite sure who she was, in these rented rooms, so far from the city and from home. She might do anything.
    Something brought her out of sleep, into a room grown incomprehensibly dark and with no one beside her. She was afraid to raise her hands from her body or to lift her head; a breath above her face, she sensed the grit, the coldness, the weight of stones packed tight …
    She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, staring into the dark. Then she put on her thin shoes and a woollen jersey over her pyjamas and went outside.
    The path was a white stain in the moonlight. She walked along it to the ridge. It was a ruthlessly clear night, pure black and silver. At the side of the trap, she knelt. In between the heaped stones there were chinks of dark. But the blackness was full and breathing, and she knew that something was in there. Just like she always knew when Thom was home, before she’d put her key in the lock.
    She put her palm against the stone. It had lost every speck of sunlight it had gathered in the day, drawn down into the well of earth. She could feel the ground draining her body’s warmth too. She gripped a corner block.
    The stone moved unexpectedly, sliding out sideways with a hollow, grinding sound. A black breach, an exit. And a rush of relief, as if something had been held inside, like breath. She felt the wisp of a feline spirit wafting past her hands, through the broken gap in the stones and up into the roofless night.
    But after a suspended second the structure could not hold: the end of the trap collapsed with an icy clatter. The moon spilled light deep inside, where moonlight had not been for years – perhaps for centuries. Daniela bent to pick up a piece of fallen rock, about the size of a brick but much heavier. She thought for a moment of taking it home with her, a keepsake; but the idea of putting a piece of this small death-house inside her own gave her a feeling of inside-outness, and she let the slab drop to the ground.
    She walked a few paces further up the ridge and tried for cellphone reception. Then she listened to Thom’s staticky non-messages, one after the other, trying to discern the quality of his stillness.
    She drove back to town early the next morning. The long lines of the country folded up again around the car, enclosing a landscape that grew ever closer, denser, more intricately patterned. Daniela’s attention moved from the horizon and fastened itself on the dashboard, the multiplying lanes of the highway, the buildings forming up in ranks on either side. By the time she took the turn-off to home, the transformation was complete: the city rose thickly around her, stained, signed and tracked, cutting off any longer view. In one of its million niches lay Thom.
    She was weary by the time she got to the underground parking. In the mirrored elevator, she saw that her face was sunburnt, with clownish whiteness around the eyes where her sunglasses had sat. The lift was rapid and faintly perfumed: it was an exclusive apartment block.
    After she’d opened the door to the flat, she stood completely still for a moment, to