It appeared in the garden one morning, the drought, by then, eleven weeks and counting. He was sitting on the porch, dazed and dreaming of weather, and thinking about the smell of soil after a rain. There was a word for it, something obscure he had learned along the way, but now struggled to recall.

When the thick, drowsy heat and the effort of thinking became too much, he let it go. What use was it anyway, a word like that, on a day such as this? Eight a.m. and the sky already a bleached-out blue that hurt his eyes. Everything shimmering, formless, and melting.

He squinted at the day, the movement there in the undergrowth, some sort of heat-induced hallucination, that was what he thought. Because it moved so slowly through the thick, rippled air; was more shape and shadow, than animal. Its true form only revealing itself when it was mere feet away, almost close enough to touch. A koala.

He blinked then called out: ‘Hey, Clara, come and see this.’

She came out onto the porch and stood behind him and he thought he heard her whisper a small, ‘whoa.’

At the sound of her voice, the koala looked up at them, and he imagined for an instant they understood one another. If it could speak he knew its voice would be tinged with something familiar. Something close to melancholy. The loss, the thing they shared. And he felt the urge to walk towards it, to pick it up and… What? he wondered. Comfort it? Apologise? Put it out of its misery?

Instead, he watched as it pulled itself up to the rim of the water bucket and began to drink.

‘I thought they didn’t need water,’ Clara said.

‘They don’t,’ he replied. ‘Not normally.’

‘It’s not good this, is it?’ Clara asked him.

He smiled at the understatement, but felt no need to reply. The truth of it was there, in the garden, a glimpse of the future he wasn’t ready to face. The ‘not good’, something he preferred to ignore, even as it walked towards him.

The koala drank its fill, then dropped to the ground and walked away. And maybe it was a distortion of the air, or the heat, playing with his mind again, but he thought he heard it say, ‘thanks,’ and was about to say, ‘you’re welcome,’ when the word struck him.

‘Petrichor,’ he said.

Clara looked at him, ‘Sorry, what?’, then turned back to watch the koala, as if she was searching for a connection between the two things now – that longed-for smell, and the animal that had gripped the rim of the bucket and sipped the water, the taste of it already evaporating on its tongue as it disappeared back into the undergrowth.

The whole moment, evaporating like a drop of rain on cracked soil, while they stood there in silence, watching it and doing nothing. Because there was nothing that could be done.

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Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Amsterdam. Her stories have appeared in various literary magazines, including: Folio, Carve, Bare Fiction and The Lonely Crowd. You can find out more over at her website. Read more here: www.jenharvey.net

Photo: David Clode