The Missing Engine

"The hardest thing to explain is an absence. People understand wanting the wrong thing. They don't know what to do with wanting nothing at all."

The light came slowly on Sunday mornings.

Not the sharp intrusion of weekday alarms or the restless half-sleep of Saturday, when the absence of structure made waking feel like a failure of ambition. Sunday light was different. It filtered through the gap in my curtains with a kind of hesitance, as if the day itself wasn't entirely convinced it needed to begin. Grey-gold and tentative, spreading across the ceiling in gradual degrees while the house held its particular Sabbath hush.

I lay there for a while, watching the light move. My phone said 6:47, which meant I'd woken before my alarm again — a habit my body had developed somewhere in the past year, as if some internal mechanism had decided that consciousness should always arrive with time to spare. Time for what, I'd never quite determined. Thinking, mostly. The kind of aimless mental wandering that happened in the space between sleep and purpose.

Millie was a warm weight against my feet, curled at the end of the bed in defiance of the dog bed Mum had bought that still sat pristine and rejected in the corner of the laundry. She'd been doing this since we’d brought her home— claiming territory on my bed like it was her ancestral right, her soft snores providing a kind of white noise that had become part of how I slept. I'd stopped trying to move her. Some battles weren't worth the effort, and besides, there was something comforting about the pressure of her against my ankles. Evidence of another heartbeat in the room.

My arm ached.

Not badly — not the sharp, insistent throb of Thursday night, when Stephen Groves had cleaned and dressed the wound and told me I was lucky the eagle's talons hadn't gone deeper. Just a dull awareness now, a reminder that the flesh beneath the fresh bandage I'd applied last night was still knitting itself back together. The body's quiet work of repair, happening whether I paid attention to it or not.

I flexed my fingers experimentally, watching them move in the grey morning light. Everything still worked. The scratches on my forearm were healing cleanly, according to the mirror's verdict when I'd changed the dressing. Another week and they'd be nothing but fading pink lines, eventually white, eventually invisible beneath whatever hair grew back over the scar tissue.

Margaret had called yesterday afternoon to check on me. I'd heard Mum answer the phone in the kitchen, her voice shifting into that particular register she used for people she respected but didn't entirely know how to categorise. Wildlife rehabilitation volunteers occupied a strange space in Mum's mental taxonomy — admirable, certainly, doing important work, but also slightly outside the usual frameworks she used to understand the world. Not church people. Not family. Not neighbours in the traditional sense. Just... other. People who existed in the parts of my life she couldn't quite reach.

"She sounds lovely," Mum had said afterward, handing me the phone so Margaret could speak to me directly. The word lovely had carried a weight I couldn't quite parse. Approval, maybe. Or the careful neutrality of someone reserving judgment.

Margaret had wanted to know how my arm was healing, whether I'd been keeping it clean, whether I needed anything. She'd also mentioned — casually, almost as an afterthought — that the wedge-tailed eagle was recovering well. Eating on its own now. The wing would need more time, but the prognosis was good. "Thanks to you," she'd said, and I'd felt something complicated move through my chest. Pride, maybe. Or just the quiet satisfaction of knowing that a creature I'd helped save was still breathing, still fighting, still working its way back toward the sky.

At the Haven, I knew what I was for. The work was clear, the purpose tangible — injured animals that needed care, ecosystems that needed protecting, a role I could fill without second-guessing whether I was filling it correctly.

Church was different.

The thought of it settled into my stomach with its usual weight.

Not dread, exactly. I'd been going to church my whole life — Primary, Sunday School, Young Men's, and now the amorphous category of young single adult that nobody quite knew what to do with. The rhythms were ingrained so deeply they'd become invisible, the way you stopped noticing the pattern of your own breathing. Wake up. Get dressed. Pile into the car. Sit in the same pew you'd sat in for years. Sing hymns you'd sung since before you could read the words. Listen to talks that circled the same themes in slightly different configurations. Take the sacrament. Feel whatever you were supposed to feel, or perform feeling it convincingly enough that nobody asked questions.

It wasn't that I didn't believe. That was the complicated part. The faith was still there, somewhere beneath the surface — or at least the shape of it was, the outline where belief was supposed to fit. I'd felt the Spirit, or thought I had. Moments in testimony meetings, in quiet prayer, in the particular hush that descended during the sacrament when everyone's heads were bowed and you could almost convince yourself that something larger than yourself was listening.

But lately — the past year, maybe longer — the fit had grown less comfortable. Like a jumper you'd worn so long you'd stopped noticing it was too small, until one day you raised your arms and realised it was cutting into your armpits.

I pushed the thought away and sat up, disturbing Millie, who lifted her head to regard me with the mild reproach of a creature whose sleep had been unnecessarily interrupted. Her black and white markings were striking even in the grey morning light — the white blaze down her face, the white chest and collar, the four white socks that made her look perpetually ready for formal occasions. She watched me with that intense, intelligent gaze characteristic of Border Collies, processing and assessing even in her drowsy state.

She'd been mine for just over a year now. Sometimes it felt longer — as if the months of patient rebuilding had stretched time itself, each small victory weighted with more significance than the calendar suggested. The cowering, traumatised dog I'd brought home from the Lonsdale shelter had become this: a companion who followed me through the house, who greeted me with cautious enthusiasm, who had learned that hands could offer comfort instead of pain.

"Sorry, girl," I murmured, reaching down to scratch behind her ears. She leaned into my hand with the trust she'd rebuilt piece by piece, and something in my chest eased slightly. "Go back to sleep. I'll let you out in a bit."

She huffed once — acknowledgment or complaint, impossible to tell — and lowered her head back to her paws.

The bathroom was cold.

Winter mornings in Adelaide didn't freeze the way they did in other places — no ice on the windows, no breath visible in the air — but the tiles had a way of holding the night's chill long after the sun had risen. I stood on the bath mat and waited for the shower to heat up, watching steam begin to curl from behind the glass, feeling the cold seep through my socks into the soles of my feet.

The mirror above the sink was already starting to fog at the edges. I wiped a clear patch with my palm and regarded myself in the partial circle that remained.

Twenty-one years old. Brown hair that needed cutting, falling across my forehead in a way Mum would probably comment on if she noticed. Brown eyes that everyone said looked like Dad's, though I'd never been able to see the resemblance myself. A face that was neither handsome nor plain — just a face, the kind you'd pass on the street without remembering.

I turned my head slightly, examining the angle of my jaw, the shadow of stubble I'd need to deal with before church. The face in the mirror looked tired. Not exhausted — just carrying the particular weariness of someone who'd been thinking too much and sleeping too little.

You should be interested in someone by now.

The thought arrived uninvited, the way it had been arriving for months. A quiet voice that sounded like no one in particular and everyone at once — Mum's careful questions about my social life, the ward's unspoken expectations, the cultural current that assumed all young men my age were either paired off or actively seeking to be.

I was neither.

The shower was hot now, steam filling the small room, softening the edges of everything. I stripped off my sleep clothes — the old Adelaide Zoo t-shirt I'd worn since Year 10, the track pants with the fraying drawstring — and stepped under the water.

The heat was immediate and absolute, driving out the cold, loosening muscles I hadn't realised were tight. I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed, letting the water run over my head and down my back, not thinking about anything. Just being a body. Warm, present, requiring nothing more than the simple maintenance of existence.

My arm stung briefly when the water hit the bandage, then subsided. I'd need to change the dressing again after this, let the wounds breathe before covering them back up. The small ritual of wound care that had become part of my routine since Thursday night.

I washed my hair with the cheap shampoo that lived on the shower shelf — the family-sized bottle Mum bought in bulk because it was practical, never mind that it smelled vaguely of artificial coconut and left everything feeling slightly stripped. Soaped my body. Rinsed. Stood under the water a little longer than necessary, watching it swirl down the drain, postponing the moment when I'd have to step back into the cold and continue with the day.

Megan Ashworth.

Her name surfaced unbidden, attached to the memory of Wednesday night. The cordial she'd brought me, her hand steady as she'd held out the plastic cup. The way she'd leaned against the wall beside me, creating the careful geometry of proximity that I'd learned to recognise even when I couldn't quite interpret it. The warmth in her voice when she'd suggested we talk properly sometime.

She was kind. Genuinely kind, in a way that didn't seem performed or calculated. Smart, too — the nursing stories she'd told had been funny and self-aware, the observations of someone who paid attention to the world and found it interesting rather than merely tolerable. By every metric I'd been raised to value, she was exactly the kind of person I should be interested in.

So why aren't you?

I turned off the water and stood in the sudden silence, steam rising from my skin, the question hanging in the air with no answer attached to it.

It wasn't that I found her unattractive. When I looked at her — really looked, in the deliberate way I'd trained myself to observe things — I could see what others saw. The dark hair, the intelligent eyes, the way her smile transformed her whole face when something genuinely amused her. She was attractive. Objectively, undeniably.

But the observation remained exactly that: an observation. Clinical. Detached. The same way I might note that a particular bird had striking plumage or that a sunset was arranged in aesthetically pleasing colours. I could appreciate without wanting. Could see without feeling the pull that everyone else seemed to experience so naturally.

I'd wondered, for a while, if it meant something else. If the absence of interest in women indicated a presence of interest elsewhere. But when I'd turned that particular lens inward, searching for evidence, I'd found the same emptiness. The boys at church, at university, in the endless stream of faces I passed every day — none of them sparked anything either. No flutter in my chest, no urge to look longer, no fantasies that arrived unbidden in quiet moments.

Just... nothing.

The realisation should probably have been more distressing than it was. I'd read enough, overheard enough, absorbed enough of the world's assumptions to know that being twenty-one and completely uninterested in romance was considered aberrant. Something to be explained, diagnosed, fixed. People my age were supposed to be consumed by it — the wanting, the pursuing, the elaborate dance of attraction and courtship that seemed to structure everyone else's inner life.

I stepped out of the shower and reached for my towel.

Maybe it would come later. Maybe I was just a late bloomer, the way some plants didn't flower until their second or third season. Maybe the right person hadn't appeared yet, and when they did, all the machinery that seemed to be missing would suddenly engage.

Or maybe this was just how I was built. A car without that particular engine, moving through the world by different means.

I dried myself carefully, avoiding the bandaged section of my arm, and wrapped the towel around my waist. The mirror had fogged completely now, my reflection erased, which felt appropriate somehow.

The house was stirring by the time I returned to my room.

I could hear Charles's door opening across the hall — the particular percussion of it, enthusiastic and imprecise, hitting the wall with enough force to announce his presence to anyone who might have missed it.

I pulled on underwear, then stood before my wardrobe with the kind of focused attention the task deserved.

Sunday clothes existed in their own category. Not the worn comfort of everyday wear, not the specific functionality of gym clothes or hiking gear. Sunday clothes were about presentation — about appearing before God and congregation alike in a form that communicated respect, seriousness, proper intention. The white shirt was non-negotiable. Mum had ironed it last night, hanging it on the back of my door so the creases would set properly. Dark slacks. Polished shoes. And the tie.

Always the tie.

I'd accumulated maybe a dozen of them over the years, mostly gifts from relatives who'd run out of other ideas. They hung in a row on the inside of my wardrobe door, arranged by colour in a gradient I'd established sometime in high school and never bothered to change. Reds and oranges at one end, sliding through yellows and greens to blues and purples at the other. A spectrum of respectability, each one carrying its own history of Sunday mornings and special occasions.

I pulled out three candidates and held them against my chest, examining the effect in the mirror that hung on the back of my wardrobe door.

The burgundy was safe — deep enough to suggest seriousness, traditional enough to avoid comment. I'd worn it maybe a hundred times, to the point where it had become almost invisible. Just part of the uniform.

The forest green was newer, a Christmas gift from Lisa that I'd only worn twice. It looked good — she'd always had an eye for colours that worked with skin tones — but something about it felt too deliberate. Too noticeable. Like I was trying to make a statement I hadn't actually decided to make.

The navy, though.

I held it up, letting the light catch the fine white pinstripe that ran through the fabric at regular intervals. It was understated. Classic. The kind of tie that said nothing beyond I am wearing a tie, which was exactly what I wanted it to say.

And yet.

I thought about Megan, about the way she'd said I'll see you Sunday with that slight lift in her voice. About the conversations we might have in the foyer between meetings, the small talk that was really reconnaissance, each of us trying to determine if the other was worth the risk of deeper investment.

If I wore the navy tie, would she read something into it? Would she think I'd chosen it deliberately, with her in mind?

The thought was absurd. People didn't analyse each other's tie choices. That wasn't how human interaction worked.

But I found myself hesitating anyway, the tie suspended between my fingers, the decision suddenly weighted with implications I hadn't asked for.

This is ridiculous.

I put the burgundy and forest green back on their hooks and draped the navy over my arm. It was just a tie. A piece of fabric designed to go around my neck and make me look presentable. Whatever meaning anyone attached to it existed entirely in their own heads, and I couldn't be responsible for the interpretations of others.

The shirt went on first, buttons fastening with quick fingers. Then the slacks, the belt I'd had since I was eighteen, the socks that Mum insisted on buying in bulk packs from Target because apparently I couldn't be trusted to maintain my own sock supply.

The tie was last.

I stood before the mirror and looped the navy fabric around my collar. The knot came together with movements my hands knew better than my brain did. Over, under, through, pull. The full Windsor I'd learned in Young Men's, standing in a circle with other teenage boys while Brother Patterson walked us through the steps with the patient repetition of someone who'd done this many times before.

A man should know how to tie a proper knot, he'd said. It's a small thing, but small things matter. They add up to the person you become.

I'd thought about that often in the years since. The accumulation of small things. The way a life was built not from grand gestures but from countless tiny decisions, each one barely noticeable in isolation but collectively forming the shape of who you were.

The knot sat slightly crooked. I tugged at it, adjusting the angle, watching my reflection make the same movements in reverse. The mirror was too small to show me the full effect — just my face and shoulders, the collar of the shirt, the tie settling into place against my chest.

Better light. That's what I needed. The full-length mirror in the hallway, where the morning sun came through the window and you could see yourself properly.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, checked the time — 7:23, plenty of room before we needed to leave — and headed for the door.

The hallway was brighter than my room, the overhead light supplemented by the grey morning filtering through the open doors of rooms along its length. My footsteps were quiet on the tiles, the runner absorbing some of the sound as I made my way toward the front of the house.

Charles's music was louder out here, bleeding through his closed door in rhythmic pulses I could feel more than hear. Something with bass and electronic beats — his current phase, which had replaced last year's phase (pop-punk) and would presumably be replaced by next year's phase (something none of us could predict). He cycled through musical identities the way other people cycled through fashion trends, each one held with absolute conviction until the moment it was abandoned.

The full-length mirror hung near the front door, positioned to catch the best natural light from the entryway window. I'd used it for exactly this purpose a hundred times — checking the line of a shirt, the break of trousers over shoes, the overall impression I'd be presenting to the world before stepping outside.

I stopped in front of it and examined myself properly for the first time.

The tie was still slightly off. Not dramatically — most people wouldn't notice — but I could see it. A fraction of a degree's rotation to the left, the dimple beneath the knot not quite centred. I reached up to adjust it, fingers working the silk with careful pressure.

That's when Charles exploded into the hallway.

There was no other word for it. His door didn't open so much as burst, propelled by whatever excess of energy had accumulated during his morning preparations. He emerged in a state of spectacular dishevelment — shirt untucked and wrinkled, buttons misaligned so badly that one side hung a full inch lower than the other, hair standing in defiant tufts that laughed in the face of any comb or brush.

One sock. He was wearing one sock. The left foot. The right remained bare, pale against the carpet.

He spotted me immediately, his trajectory adjusting mid-stride to bring him into my orbit. Something lit up in his expression — that particular gleam he got when an opportunity for entertainment presented itself.

"Trying to impress someone at church, Jerome?"

The words landed with the precision of a dart thrown by someone who'd been practicing. His voice carried just enough volume to reach inconveniently far down the hallway, should any other family members happen to be listening.

I felt the heat rise to my face before I could stop it.

It was automatic — a physiological response I'd never learned to control. The blood rushing to my cheeks, the sudden warmth spreading across my skin, the visible evidence of some internal reaction I couldn't name and didn't want to examine.

Charles's grin widened. He'd found the button, and he was pressing it.

"What?" The word came out defensive, which only made things worse. "I'm just — it's Sunday. We wear ties on Sunday."

"Yeah, but you're actually trying." He leaned against the wall with the exaggerated casualness of a teenager who'd learned that posture was a form of commentary. "Like, you've been standing there adjusting it for ages. I could hear you breathing through my music."

"Your music is approximately loud enough to hear from space. I'm surprised you could hear anything."

"Deflection." He pointed at me, triumphant. "Classic deflection. That's what you do when you don't want to answer a question."

"You didn't ask a question. You made an accusation."

"Same thing."

"It really isn't."

"So who is she?"

The directness of it caught me off guard. I'd expected more circling, more innuendo, the gradual escalation that was Charles's usual approach to extracting information. Instead, he'd gone straight for the target, his eyes bright with the particular curiosity of a younger brother who sensed weakness.

"There's no one."

"Right. Sure. That's why you're blushing like you've been caught doing something."

"I'm not —" I stopped, aware that protesting would only fuel his conviction. The flush on my cheeks was undeniable, a betrayal of my own biology. "It's warm in here. Mum's had the heating on."

"It's literally freezing." Charles gestured at his own bare foot, as if this proved something. "I'm half-hypothermic and you're over here sweating because you're nervous about seeing someone."

"I'm not nervous. I'm not sweating. And I'm not trying to impress anyone." Each denial came out more firmly than the last, which probably made them all sound less convincing. "I'm wearing a tie because it's Sunday and that's what we do. That's it. End of story."

Charles studied me with the unsettling perceptiveness that occasionally surfaced beneath his chaos. For all his theatrical energy, he wasn't stupid. He noticed things. Filed them away. Used them at moments exactly like this one.

"You know what I think?"

"I genuinely don't care what you think."

"I think there's someone at church you're hoping to see. And I think you don't want to talk about it because you're —" He paused, searching for the right word, landing on one with visible satisfaction. "— emotionally constipated."

"Emotionally constipated."

"It's a thing. I read about it."

"You read about emotional constipation."

"On the internet. It's when you have feelings but you won't let them out because you're scared or embarrassed or whatever." He shrugged, pleased with himself. "Classic Jerome behaviour, honestly."

I wanted to argue. Wanted to explain that the absence of romantic interest wasn't emotional constipation but something else entirely — something I didn't have words for, something that existed in a space between the categories everyone else seemed to find so obvious. But that would require having the conversation, and I wasn't having that conversation. Not here. Not with Charles. Not standing in the hallway in my Sunday clothes with the smell of breakfast starting to drift from the kitchen.

"I'm not —"

"Boys."

Mum's voice cut through, the single word carrying the particular weight of maternal authority that could silence rooms without raising its volume. She stood in the doorway that led to the kitchen, her apron slightly askew, spatula in one hand like a sceptre.

"Let your brother be, Charles." Her gaze moved between us, assessing the situation with the practiced eye of someone who'd been managing sibling dynamics for decades. "It's important for all of us to look our best for the Lord."

Charles rolled his eyes with such theatrical commitment that I was surprised he didn't strain something. "Yes, Mother. I shall endeavour not to disgrace the family crest with mismatched socks and rakish charm."

"Too late on the socks." Mum's voice was brisk, but I caught the twitch at the corner of her mouth. "Try looking under your bed. Or possibly in the washing machine, where you last abandoned them on Tuesday after I specifically asked you to put them in the laundry basket."

He groaned — a sound that seemed to originate somewhere near the floor and travel upward through his entire body — and retreated toward his room, muttering about the impossibility of privacy in a house governed by psychic mothers.

His door closed. The music resumed. The hallway returned to something approaching quiet.

Mum hadn't moved. She was watching me now, her expression softer than it had been a moment ago. Something in her eyes that I couldn't quite read — concern, maybe. Or the particular knowing that mothers carried, the accumulated observation of twenty-one years of watching me navigate the world.

"The tie looks nice," she said. "The blue suits you."

"Thanks."

"You've got it just right."

She didn't say anything else. Didn't ask about who I might be hoping to see, didn't probe the flush that had probably faded from my cheeks by now. Just offered the small affirmation and retreated back toward the kitchen, leaving me alone with my reflection and the lingering echo of Charles's question.

Trying to impress someone at church, Jerome?

The answer was no. The honest answer was no. There was no one to impress, no face I was hoping to see, no flutter of anticipation at the thought of shared glances across the chapel.

But the blush had been real. The defensiveness had been real. And standing here now, looking at myself in the mirror — the navy tie finally straight, the white shirt crisp, the overall impression of someone making an effort — I couldn't quite explain what the effort was for.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the embarrassment wasn't about being caught wanting something, but about being caught not wanting anything at all.

I gave my reflection one last look, tugged the tie a final centimetre to the left, and headed toward the smell of pancakes.