The road curves like a question mark through the dark forest. Sonya Sanders squints into the beam of her headlights. A shape sprawls on the bitumen up ahead. She’s here in response to a report of a dead koala. Now she thinks, heart sinking, that she’s found it.

She knows she’ll have to step right up to the body, lay her hands on it, and check for a newly orphaned joey in the still-warm pouch.

As she slows, the body reveals itself: a sodden bathmat. Sonya exhales. She shares a rueful laugh with her colleague in the other seat.

But the night is far from over. There will be kangaroos – four of them tonight alone, each hit by a cars on separate roads. There will be the weight of what cannot be saved. This job, this life she has chosen, is threaded with quiet grief.

Some days she is better at holding it than others.

Read the full story in Splinter Journal, Issue 2. Purchase your copy here.