Everyone seems calm, content. Perhaps they think the same about me. Maybe we are all very good at hiding our thoughts.

I brush his jacket. It is blue felt. The brush is too long for my hand, but I don’t pause, I don’t complain. It is a way of being close to him.

My aunty slicks his hair back, the way he has always worn it. The comb is thin toothed, with a wire handle, and leaves lines in his hair with its passing. My breathing adjusts, drawing deeply of the lavender scent of the unguent she has rubbed into his scalp. It is only in its absence that I notice the smell of sour water that had been haunting the room.

He was shaved already. That was a job for the men, with the long blade and the strap. Still, my mother pinks his cheeks with a slap and a rub of cologne, and his lips rise in a smile. I pause, startled at the fact of his reaction. My aunty gently pushes my hand to resume its motion, and I stop staring.

The flesh of his face is soft – I can see the indents as my mother’s fingers gently press it – but at her caress, I picture an old wooden globe being polished. Oil is rubbed deep to bring out the grain and preserve it from cracking. I notice that the continents are not quite in the right place. Fading lines assert nations and states of which I know nothing. Amber hues give the illusion of warmth.

Does no one remember?

Grandfather shifts in his armchair. Mum responds by stroking his arm. He stares straight ahead, only closing his eyes when aunty teases at his Scottish eyebrows. He is not immune to such tricks of age: the chameleon shift of colours; hair fleeing from the pate, only to emerge from earholes and nostrils; and the ossification of the mind. Were we to shake his head, to grab those overlarge ears and toll him like a bell, I am sure we would hear a hard nut roll about in there, dulled just a bit by the coarse fibres extruding from its wizened skin. He would not allow us to do that of course. But neither would he have allowed us to groom him like this, I am certain. Not before.

It is not our place to notice the room, but why does the wallpaper hang loose in irregular strips? Why has the plasterboard been allowed to give way in places, so the night finds its way in? I do not remember it being like this. He is permitted a blanket, but we have only our day-to-day clothes against the cold. It is not a cold that can be shifted by shivering. It is fundamental. The ache of it is an armour, thickening my bones, strengthening me.

My presence is often overlooked, and I gain advantage by it, learning what otherwise I could not. I heard among the boys that they (whom?) had pulled him from the river, (roaring he was), miles downstream, whereupon he had extruded gallons of dark water.

Nonsense. Him, caught like a fish? He would have splintered the hull before they had him on board. He would have torn through and dragged them all to the bottom. He is still; not passive. He is ironbark; he is carved oak, his immobility a reflection of his density. Would you have him move? Would you have that head shift, and those eyes catch you in their gaze? Would you risk him rising?

I learned the deeper story, not for common consumption. The men walked barefoot where the tide retreats, at first ankle finally knee-deep in sodden clay, far, far away. Their trousers were burned afterwards, good for nothing and stinking. They reached a spot they knew beforehand, and rescued him from the sucking mud, pulling him out at great risk after titanic struggle, like a buried treasure. And they lay in the filth for an hour after, spent, preparing for the return journey on which they must carry him. It is hard to picture the mechanics of it. Did they use ropes? If they hauled him out, pulling like donkeys, how did they find a place amongst the clay to hold fast, to bear them? If they used simple machines, like levers or winches, did they haul the pieces with them and assemble them there? And having finished, exhausted, did they abandon their tools?

Neither story explains why he was there, or how they knew where to be. Neither answers my basic question.

We cleaned him and massaged his gums, a delicate intrusion. If he bit down, he could hold forever. Would they cut clean my fingers to pull me away? Or would I have to move them back and forth, until the bones gave, and the skin split? One could not stand like that forever. All of his teeth are still there. Unwilled, my tongue probes a gap between my own. I have fallen short. If my mouth held an ocean, could I induce a coral to bud there, to fill the hole with pretty pink polyps? But how could it be tamed, so that it did not colonise the whole of me, so that I did not overflow with the reaching shards, so they did not break through my skin and protrude haphazardly from my mouth? Sharks lose teeth all the time and they are replaced, internal machinery pushing reinforcements forth again and again so that the rows are never left unfilled. Could there be a man like that, never stopping?

They say he has spoken, but it was not to me. My mother bends and kisses his forehead and smooths the twill shirt covering his chest. It is not plain flesh beneath there. From the sound of the fabric against his skin, I imagine ridges, a corrugated landscape of hardened dust, thrown up by centuries of howling winds. What if beneath he is carved like a totem, faces and talons gouged into his skin? What if we were insects with jewels as facets of our exoskeletons, burnished and indelible, lasting beyond our lives? What if skin grew over our imperfections, nacre-like, so that as we aged, we developed the lustre of pearls?

My mind invents a race of people who have convinced themselves that they are the dead. They emerge only at night and go about the expected business of dead folk. Their terror at discovering the death of one of their own. They poke at him with a stick, but he does not react. They have avoided nothing, only life. Still, perhaps it worked for that one fellow, who never knew what happened to him. Perhaps the others can forget about him if they try hard enough. How to return to such an ignorant innocence? Has everyone here forgotten? I think these things as I brush.

We go about our tasks. We ignore the exposed beams of the room, the peeking through sky. There is no light above us. There is no electricity here. No stars. Candle stubs meld with the rotting window frames. When did they burn? Who left them here? The same person who shit in the corner?

What comes after this? There is a door. Is it to be used? Despite his gravity, will he rise? Will he shuffle into the room where the others wait? Shall he adopt the pose of an old man, hunched and slow? There will be no creak of hinges, no straining of wood, no hint of iron at work. Or shall we gather behind his chair and push? Flowing like glass, we will appear to be a statue.

Everyone will be calm, content.

Do you not remember? Do none of you recall that we put him into the ground? Wound in a shroud, encased in a coffin, he was lost to us and we lowered him down into the earth. My grandfather dead, and I wept, we all did. No more would he sit in that chair, smoke that pipe, be warmed by that fire. The fish he liked, his brushes, his bed, his books, his Sunday roast, all unattached, all flung into a farther orbit. His sons his wife my mother her sister our family, we buried him and we grieved.

How is it we are subdued at his return? Why are we not elated by some anti-grief? What is this muted contra-mourning?

Do we fear we will lose him again? Does that mellow our response? Did we expect this bounty? Can it all be undone, by a look, a word, the wrong question? Speaking up, would I pull a thread loose, and see him unravel and taken from us?

Does no one else remember? Does no one else pass the cemetery, and wonder?

Thoughts and questions nag me. What is that they are not saying? Is this the way it’s going to be forever?

David Stevens lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and those of his children who have not yet figured out the locks. He is the author of more than two dozen published stories which have appeared among other places in Crossed Genres, sein und werden, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Pseudopod, Cafe Irreal, and most recently in Sci Phi Journal and Penumbric.