The birds called noisily that evening, proclaiming their existence as if in need of reassurance. Callie watched the birds up in the tall gum tree. They seemed so far away to her, as she was lying on her back in the back yard of the ramshackle house. Her brown eyes squinted in the fading sunlight, as cicada’s took up a chorus.

“Why haven’t they flown away,” Callie asked, with a note of relaxed inquisitiveness.

“They haven’t realized that we’re here,” Jonathan answered her, as he stared up at the clouds. “It’s because we’re being so still.”

“Are you sure? If I were a bird I would be able to see people on the ground,” Callie ventured, pulling at a piece of browning grass. Her small hands folded it in half and then half again, and again, until the blade of grass had fully been destroyed into small rectangles.

“Perhaps you would,” her brother replied hazily, “but if you were a bird wouldn’t you just want to fly away?”

“Hmm,” Callie murmured quietly. A silence befell the small yard, as both children pondered what it would be like to fly away. In the decaying garden bed, a frog croaked suddenly, but the kangaroos outside the yard kept eating. They, as the birds, were indifferent to the children’s presence. They grazed slowly in the dying light, as if nothing could or had ever gone wrong.

Jonathan yawned lightly, inhaling the earthy smell of the ground he was so close to. There were so many expectations for the twelve year old, and already he was beginning to fell the weight of it on his shoulders. The only time he had to draw away from that world was his time spent in the garden with his sister at the old house on the plain. Their own house was further down the dirt road. They’d have to be leaving soon, Jonathan mused absently, before it got dark.

“I don’t think I’d fly away,” Callie said abruptly, shattering the quiet of the garden.

“Why not,” Jonathan said with a sigh.

“Because I’d never get to see Ma or Dad or anyone,” the little girl reasoned “I wouldn’t be able to go to school anymore.”

“But if you were a bird you wouldn’t need to go to school, and you wouldn’t be worried about seeing Ma or Dad either,”

Callie was shocked “But don’t birds like their parents?”

“Birds don’t work that way. That’s why it’d be good to be one. They just like being in a flock-it doesn’t matter who it is that’s in it,” Jonathan said solemnly.

“That’s not true,” Callie declared with all the dignity that comes with being eight years old, “How can you know that?”

Jonathan wrinkled his nose, unseen by Callie. “I don’t know that for sure Callie,” he said loftily “But I think it is true.”

“Whatever,” she replied shortly.

“But see Cal, if you were a bird, you could just fly off to where ever you like, you could go to the beach, wherever,”

“Oh. That might be alright then,” Callie said quietly. The fading sun was in danger of disappearing completely, and the cicada’s turned their chorus into a ruckus. Sniffing the air for a moment, the kangaroo’s moved on into the scrub. Callie regarded the birds high up in the tree a last time and above them, all the darkening colours of the sky.

“I wouldn’t fly away,” she said finally.

Beside her, lying on the prickly half dead grass Jonathan closed his eyes, blocking out all that was around him. He tried to stop his thoughts but he couldn’t. He opened his eyes.

“I’m going to one day.” He said, slowly standing up. He smiled lopsidedly, and offered Callie a hand.