The best thing about a green light is the purity of it. No more pretending. No more polite detours. I smile at her, honest as rain. Then I put my hand on the chipper’s switch and flick it with my knuckle because theatrics are cheap and I prefer them that way.
The engine coughs, clears its throat, finds its voice. It’s always the same: a gurgle, a snarl, a growl, a steady full-body hum that climbs until it fills the space behind your eyes and moves in.
New boy’s noise changes pitch. He kicks once, twice, more frantic now. He finds purchase on the tarp. It slides. This is the trouble with safety precautions – they make such lovely shrouds.
“Please,” he says to Doctor Callaway.
“Don’t be dramatic,” I tell him, and push.
The first contact is always clumsy. People don’t go into chippers like you think. They fold wrong; they catch; they are knobbly with a thousand inconvenient design flaws. He jams on the lip and the teeth chatter against his belt. I adjust. I’ve always been good at problem-solving when there’s incentive. He screams, but screaming has never been proof of life; it only means air found a way out.
“Kayla,” Doctor Callaway says, but she isn’t stopping me. She has stopped a little way off and turned her face a fraction as if that makes her innocent.
It doesn’t. We all know it. Even him.
“Grip the wrists,” I say to her, thoughtful, as if we’re sharing a recipe. “It’s faster.”
“I’m not helping you,” she says, and takes one clean step closer and braces the heel of her sensible shoe against the bottom rung of the frame.
“Of course you aren’t,” I say, and shove harder.
It takes him in fully this time. The machine swallows and the sound becomes everything. Bones don’t scream, but they complain. There is a spray; it mists, fine as perfume, and I close my eyes and let it freckle my cheeks. The roses will love this. The hydrangea will be indecisive. The lavender will pretend it doesn’t notice and then surprise us all. The belt snaps a beat too late to be helpful. The machine snarls and then settles like a dog that has been told it is good and believes it.
He stops making noise before the machine does. That is always the case. I keep my hand on his belt until it slips out of my fingers with a respectful yank. Next there is the inevitable thump and grind of the last of him, stubborn and unsentimental.
Then there is silence.
Not true silence, of course. The distant sea. The fence. My breath in my nose. The slow, steady rush of blood that has decided a direction and set off with purpose.
“Unfortunate,” Doctor Callaway says.
“Predictable,” I say.
She looks at me as if we have just finished a test we both passed and both failed and the grade is irrelevant because the class was designed to be impossible. Her blouse has one small red dot on the collar. It looks like punctuation. She doesn’t look down.
“You’ve set us back weeks,” she says finally.
“Or moved us forward,” I say, wiping my cheek with the pad of my thumb and admiring the smear before rubbing it into the dirt on my forearm. “Depends on your data set.”
The gate clatters. The other orderly bolts in, half-panicked, wholly useless, and two more staff behind him, white-faced and winded like they ran the last fifty metres because they didn’t know what else to do. Someone’s keyring jingles. Someone says my name like a curse, like a prayer. I don’t turn. I’m watching Doctor Callaway.
“It’s under control,” she says to them without looking away from me. Her voice is precise. It fills the space where orders live. “Stand down.”
“Doctor—” the gate orderly begins, eyes on the spray, the machine, the dark smear spreading under the chute.
She lifts one hand. He stops. They always do when someone with certainty tells them to. It’s the easiest trick in the world.
“Remove what’s left,” she says, as if we’re talking about compost. “Seal the garden. Log the incident. There’ll be an inquiry. There’s always an inquiry.” The pen is back in her hand and I wonder when she picked it up. “Kayla…”
“Yes?”
“You’ll need a shower.”
“And a manicure,” I say. My nails are half moons packed with earth and something that isn’t. “Do we have a colour called ‘remorse’?”
“If we did,” she says, and this time the corner of her mouth acknowledges being alive, “you wouldn’t suit it.”
I laugh. It sounds good in the open air. The bee comes back to the rosemary, unbothered. A seagull screams and thinks it’s elegant. The sun pulls its weight for once. The hydrangeas shiver.
