It was the wind that did it, and that Liam hadn’t had a moment alone for as long as he could remember.

He was helping his child wee by the roadside when the night wind came up. The wind turned the poplar trees to silver above them and his daughter giggled as a gust knocked them sideways.

Liam looked upward. The leaves of the poplars were flipping and mooning them with their luminous undersides. The wind snuck into his mouth, cleaning and drying places that were previously wet and unconsidered, the insides of his cheeks, the gums above his molars.

Over Carine’s head, he could see the horizon and the stars and the fat yellow moon. It was far, so enticingly far. He needed to go.

His fingers tingled at the empty space when he released her small limbs.

With a few hesitating moments to consult his memory, Liam crafted an amber dome around the car to keep Carine and her older brother safe. He thanked his past self for choosing the Protective Shapes elective in college. Then, he stepped over the ditch, over the fence, over the whole paddock.

Looking back to check, he could see the interior light of the car holding the glow around the children, warm and still. But this, outside, this was cold and ecstatic.

Taking long paces, Liam climbed the ridge above the road, striding two yards, five yards, twenty, then a hundred yards with each step, until he was at the top. He stood and panted and let the wind find the places where his clothes had come loose. Goosebumps spread across his torso like the drops from a rainstorm moving over a lake.

He tilted his face back, a dish for moonlight. The dish filled with a wild shining, the brightness and space he needed. He stayed like that for as long as he could, until his neck ached.

Full now, he looked down, his gaze lapping up the lights of distant towns and the beetling of cars through the dark. He held his fingers up to his eyes to squish the cars between them, tasting the colors of their lights as they scurried. Red lights leaving were strawberry; white lights coming were peppermint. He was merciful; he let them go, flinging his arms back.

But his gaze always returned to the amber bubble below. It was stirring; things inside squirmed. Not just any things: people. Not just any people: his children. His own relentless children were there, squirming.

“Just wait,” Liam muttered down to them, and the wind garbled the vowels. “Just a few more minutes.”

He wanted to make some durable token of the moonlight and wind, something he could carry with him to sustain him in the long afternoons, to remind him of the wild as he sang lullabies and ate the crusts left over from half-wanted sandwiches. Maybe even to transport him for a few seconds to a mountaintop or sea cliff.

Liam focused on the gleaming white trunks of the snow gums, which made a kind of giant lattice around him. He wove the trunks into his sight until their shapes were burned into his gaze, their pale curves overlaid on everything he saw. Part of him, now. Then, he massaged the sight into a form, extruding it into something that he could carry, or wear. Almost there. . . .

But those children, that squirming sphere. Already he stumbled down the slope, his feet moving without his permission. Had he been too long? What harm might they be coming to, before he could come to them? The slope the car was on, the gear shifter that he’d seen his son Pax touching, just the other day. Oh god, the packet of paracetamol in the glove box! Their own teeth and nails, their tempers.

All too soon, Liam was back at the car, the wild snow gum slopes left behind. The wind dropped off now, as tame as the breeze made by the fan he put in their bedroom on hot nights.

He looked through the translucent surface of the dome. The children were happy and safe, oblivious. He was relieved, and disappointed. He could have stayed away longer. Could have made the talisman. But there they were, Carine and Pax, poking the dome from inside and bouncing off it, like an enclosed trampoline.

They looked up, hopeful, as if he might be bringing them a snack. By reflex he glanced down at his hands, half expecting to see a plate of watermelon or a bowl of crackers.

There was no food. But there was something. He held a pair of sunglasses, pale blue with snowflakes and tiny rhinestones, something Carine would beg him to buy for her. But these were not child size. They were adult size. They were his. He had made them.

Liam laughed and made the slicing motion needed to dissolve the dome. He brushed some crumbs off the driver’s seat and sat down, putting the glasses in the glovebox next to the painkillers. Then, with a last glance at the sky above the ridgeline, he started the car.

Merri Andrew is a writer who lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra, Australia. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons, Luna Station Quarterly, Corporeal, Five on the Fifth, Daikaijuzine and Antipodean SF. Merri enjoys baking, naps, and watching praying mantises. You can read more of her work at www.merriandrew.com and find her on BlueSky or Mastodon.