On the day his friend departed the earth, a young man, who couldn't have been more than nineteen, walked the streets searching. 

He hadn't thought it through. He figured he might find a house with its lights still on. He thought he could withstand the upchuck whiff of the gingkoes, the passing scent of death, as opposed to its reality. 

Crossing Walcott and Wanneroo was challenging, not due to the emotions involved but because the cars came over the hill like cannonballs. Attempting this intersection on foot was like giving the finger to a bikie, and on that day, he wasn't sure if he'd be better off just taking the hit of a Toyota, Ford, or Subaru. 

He crossed instead because, before he'd departed, the young man's friend had told him a story. He had said that most often there is a hero and a sacrifice, only sometimes it's not clear which is which until the sacrifice occurs. He'd said, ‘It's a crazy idea, hey? Like telling you there's a trapdoor in the floor, only you don't know where it is.' The young man had answered, ‘Can you not talk like this? I hate it when you talk like this.'  

The young man walked on, and in time, he found himself on the street where once he had lived, only it no longer looked the same. The trees were too green, their leaves dancing in the streetlight, and the sky too clear, as though they had forgotten to paint in the clouds. He continued talking to his friend, not as crazy as it sounds, although the answers weren't exactly free-flowing. 

His friend said, ‘You're the hero, and I'm the sacrifice.' He had wanted his friend to say, ‘No, you're the hero, and I'm the sacrifice,' so that his friend's death would not have been in vain. Even then, he was still unsure of what made one a hero. He imagined it was someone who kept going when all else told them to curl foetal and rock back and forth until it was over. 

He kept walking, and he couldn't have been more than a stone's throw from home when a car pulled up alongside and flashed its headlights. The young man didn't look at first. All this talk of heroes, and there was a silver Holden station wagon, not exactly the Batmobile. The window rolled down slowly, hand-cranked by the driver, and a familiar voice called out. 

‘We've been looking for you,' said the man inside the car. ‘Come on, come back to our place, and we'll grab you some dinner.' 

The young man slid into the back seat. He nodded to his friend sitting silently on the passenger side, his face similarly stricken with tears. Then, together, they drove on. A tired dad, two young men, and the space between them left for their dear departed friend. 

Laurie Steed is a Western Australian writer living and working on the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people. He is the author of You Belong Here, Greater City Shadows and the  memoir Love Dad: Confessions of an Anxious Father and the short story collection Greater City Shadows. His fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in Best Australian Stories, Award-Winning Australian Writing and elsewhere.