The Taniwha Beneath.

The taniwha first appeared on the motorway home.

Not beside her.
Not ahead of her.

Beneath her.

Beneath the rhythm of tyres over wet Auckland asphalt.
Beneath the fluorescent blur of service stations and red brake lights stretching endlessly toward the city.
Beneath the women laughing in the back seat.
Beneath the text messages left unanswered.
Beneath the steady competent woman everyone believed her to be.

She spent most of her life holding the stitches of other people together while the taniwha within moved beneath movement.

It was always there.

A slow dark whirlpool beneath the surface of ordinary life.

Most people never noticed it.

They saw:
the nurse,
the mother,
the woman who de-escalated the room,
the friend who drove everyone home safely,
the one who stayed calm when others became sharp-edged and childish.

They mistook steadiness for peace.

The taniwha had never been peaceful.

It listened constantly.

To changes in tone.
To silence between words.
To doors closing too hard.
To the subtle withdrawal in a man’s voice when intimacy became real.
To the shift in a friend’s body as resentment quietly entered the car.

It lived in the undercurrent.

In the almost invisible movements beneath human behaviour.

And because she had spent her life listening for danger beneath language, she often heard things long before other people did.

That was the problem with taniwha.

Sometimes they protected the waters.

Sometimes they poisoned them.

At night, it travelled beside her through the city.
A great unseen shape moving beneath the motorway lanes.
Ancient.
Watchful.
Never fully asleep.

Most nights, she could keep it submerged beneath competence and humour.

Other nights she felt it rise:

in hospital corridors under fluorescent lights,

in the silence after a man stopped messaging,

in the exhaustion of always being the adult in the room,

in the terrible loneliness of understanding everybody while feeling unseen herself.

People spoke about healing as though the goal was to kill the creature.

But she was beginning to suspect the taniwha had kept her alive.

The real question was whether she could ever learn the difference between:
The creature warning her of genuine danger

and the creature simply fearing abandonment again.