My relatives took most of the afternoon to mutter awkward platitudes and drive off, dusty plumes jetting them down the valley toward city and comfort. When the sun slunk over the horizon, it left me alone with my little girl's grave.

It had been dug just down from the porch, where Bella once played with her toys in the shade of the willow. The tree hunched over the grave, sharing my grief as the twilight changed shifts with the moon.

The richness of damp earth reached my nose. The backhoe operator had lost his way coming out from town, so the grave had not yet been filled. It still lay as it had during the funeral. Wide strips of fake too-green grass edged the chrome frame that had lowered the coffin. In the dim light, the grave gaped like a doorway into the ground.

I stood in the night. A possum scratched across the roof of the house.

When I'd reached the hospital, hammering heart insisting on a mistake, my mind painted a picture of this moment. In it, I stood shaking my fist at God and declaring proof of his nonexistence. Now I had new eyes. How could this life be all there was? How could science’s wisdom claim my girl was only a meaningless replicator of DNA?

Bella would have started school next year. She wanted to be a dancer—hell, she was already, everyone said that. How could all that bubbling life and potential just go nowhere, cease to exist because a delivery driver loved booze more than responsibility?

I felt I had to say something but couldn’t find the words. What farewell could I say, to the one who should have eventually buried me? I stood silent, jaw working like a toothless old man, until I heard the sliding.

A slow leafy slssh cut the air like someone dragging branches up a path. When I realised it came from the ground, my fists turned to marble. My Bella's grave would not be defiled by a clumsy possum.

I ran to find a light. I'd reached the porch when I identified the noise: the sound of wreaths sliding off the coffin lid.

A little candle-white figure stood beside the grave. A girl.

My grief curdled to rage at the sick joke, but then she stepped forward. Nobody could duplicate that walk. It was distracted, almost bored, like she wandered a toyless shop while waiting for me to stop talking to grownups.

My girl … with red Shirley Temple curls and the flower girl dress from her uncle's wedding.

"Bell-bell?" I choked. She didn't answer, just kept moving toward me in that listless gait.

I felt torn in half. My body surged forward to my princess, yet away from this nightmare of her. Fear won out—my nerves had taken enough that day—and I fled back through the front door.

The light inside blinded me. I reached the end of the hall before stumbling to the lino. The death and the funeral compounded inside me, and reality had boiled over. I only opened my eyes once I’d convinced myself I had been hallucinating.

At the other end of the hall, Bella stepped into the light.

It had been a closed casket funeral. The left side of her forehead looked like a crumpled cardboard box, ringed with tomato-broken skin. Her face was flecked with windscreen glass cuts, and her right arm swung as if it had an extra joint in the forearm.

"Oh, sweetie."

Her eyes were open but not bright. That part, at least, didn't strike me as strange. I'd seen her sleepwalk before—and walk she did, right up the hall toward me.

The pulling from two directions came again, the desire for one more cuddle grating against untarnished memories. Did I want to remember her touch as cold dough?

Did I have a choice?

Three feet from me, she turned and dissolved into the dark maw of her room. I clasped my hands to stop them from shaking.

Bella emerged. Her dead right hand dragged her blankie, the blanket with the stars. Her left grasped Fluffy Fish, the worn toy I had been too embarrassed to give to the funeral director. She glided back down the hall toward the fake green grass of home.

The lid thumped shut as I reached the grave. The waiting dirt lay beside it like a great brown breast, and I threw myself onto it.

I opened my mouth, and this time the words poured forth in a torrent as they had every night for four years. With salt-striped cheeks, I told Bella the story of the three little pigs. I recited Mother Goose in a cracking voice. I spoke of Goldilocks, and Rapunzel, and Cinderella until my eyes ran dry. When my voice dried to a rasp, I told my Bella I loved her very, very much and bid her sleep well.

As I walked from the grave my thoughts turned to the day to come. In moments, I was back beneath the willow, shovel in hand.

No noisy machine would disturb the sleep of my Bella. I thrust the shovel into the mound of soil … and began to tuck my little girl in.