Colt sits down with his usual heaviness, spilling beer onto the table. I blot at it with a coaster but it just herds the beer around into little Moses channels. Colt slides the low tide drink at me through the streams and nods over his shoulder. I finish off my beer and raise my eyebrows at him down the length of the glass. He leans over the table, his slender fingers plying unseen pockets, and manifests a cigarette. In conspiracy tones he tells me I should fuck the bartender. I tell him beautiful women make me want to die.
The air is thick with the threat of rain. Shadows wander the streets in the auspices of a vagabond sunrise. The baker’s ritual clogs the alleys with olfactory rolls and damper scones. A depression in the street has become a burrowed slice of haven, clouded with refused takings and the leavings of scavengers. In the last dead end, Junk Struck Larry lay his head, his lip curled in imitation of his body, a freshly milled pout made with an old recipe. A discard ragged wraith haunting a stolen castle, lain in a bed built of goodwill and bad intentions.
She leaves before I decide to ask her to stay. I hear the door click shut and her heels clack away. I lie there with my eyes half closed telling myself I’m still asleep. I pull her pillow close to me and try to paint her in its scent. When she’s asleep I talk about myself. I find things I couldn’t see during the day and lay them end to end at the start of her dreams. I miss her then. She always wakes before I do. I lie there with my eyes half open, hoping she will stay.
Marion liked her life, mostly. A bit anyway. She liked the bits she liked, brief as they were, and put her head down through the rest. Which is about as much as can be said for anyone really. It was comfortable though permanent, in the way that a life will set over time like concrete drying in the sun, a child’s name scratched into the surface with amateur fingers. A baking fate. At night she put herself to bed with a liturgy of crime drama and soft-core prose. She didn’t trust herself with anything as risqué as romance.
Driving along in Colt’s rattly old Valiant which he never fixes but says is a classic, on the way to nowhere for a hide and seek party. We fall into a rhythm of bitumen and telephone poles, the radio gnawing its way through static and garbled golden oldies under Colt’s relentless scanning. I roll the window down and fly my hand in the wind, my hair whipping around my face. I close my eyes and feel the air rushing against my palm, pushing its way through my fingers, chasing the sun as I pitch my hand into the sky.
The girl just shrugs her shoulders, her blank face flickering blue-black in the television glare. A blender whirs and churns under the touch of a middle aged shopping network Barbie doll, its virtues diced into ticker traffic bulletins that flow like river flotsam across the bottom of the screen. The girl stares, unseeing, unmoved by the Barbie’s ministrations. I can see the failures of her life welling up behind her glassy eyes like aquarium lobsters waiting to die. I reach my hand out to her and she whimpers softly, though I’m not even sure she knows I’m there.
They stare at the painting, faded acrylic pushed against bare red brick. A tiny boat in an ocean scene, still within a squall. They follow it, he towards serenity and her into its maw. The threat of storms. Her voice lowered in the light but shedding its own upon the room. He watches her silently with time rimed eyes, propped up in bed as though king of a soiled throne, while she gathers up her clothes and hangs them on her frame. She can feel him tugging at each of the strings of self-consciousness tied to her body.
I nearly got stabbed last night. Is it still a stabbing if they only cut you? The guy standing there, slashing his knife around in the air. I had to throw the bag of weed at him. I run past him while he fumbles with the bag and the knife, nearly breaking my neck on the mess of ethernet cables and pizza boxes living the hall. I pull myself up and run through the lounge screaming, it’s a bust! My deadbeat brother sits there in rigor mortis bong grip, watching me with dead eyes and that sadistic grin of his.
Ambrose lay outside the door, waiting quietly to be let in. He had no idea how long had he been there but it felt like forever. It was so cold outside. The rain was strumming its first few chords against the chill pavement while the wind blew its vicious beats against the windows of the house. There was something coming for him, he could sense it. It made his shoulders tense and the hair on the back of his neck stand up. A lifetime of instinct told him to flee, to hide, to get as far away as possible before it found him. I should run he thought. Something made him stay.
This is a safe place Ambrose thought, I’ll be safe inside. He looked around him at the familiar surroundings. The deck and the banister of the old Queenslander home, the faded couch he’d spent so many summer afternoons on, passing the time in the sun. It all looked so foreign in the dark. He snorted defiantly and tucked his head against his chest.
A flash of lighting over the horizon made him shiver. It wouldn’t be safe out here much longer. He had to get inside. Ambrose knocked gently against the door. Nothing was stirring on the other side. The house was silent. Whimpering softly Ambrose lowered his head again and closed his eyes. It was useless, he wasn’t coming. Ambrose had spent his whole life with the man inside and now here he was, alone in the dark.
Thunder boomed in the distance and Ambrose let loose another whimper. He had to try again, he couldn’t give up now. He rapped again at the door, his limbs shaking with fear and urgency. Desperately, he scratched at the door, forcing himself against it with all his strength. He was almost screaming now, a hopeless howl torn loose from his throat and lost to the wind. The door stood strong against his attack as the thunder clapped mockingly at his efforts. His body shook and his throat ran hoarse with his guttural shouts.
From the depths of the house a light flickered into life. Ambrose ceased his assault and listened hopefully to the soft patter of feet approaching the door. Despite his fear Ambrose could feel a lightness enter him. This was it, any moment now and he would be safe.
Andrew was dreaming of the ocean when the noise woke him. All that banging and bustle on the porch, it had to be Ambrose. He pulled a loose cotton robe around his shoulders and started towards the front door.
‘Every time,’ Andrew muttered to himself. ‘It’s just a damned storm, Brosie. Nothing to be scared of.’ He pushed open the door and looked down at the silhouette of his dog huddled on the porch. ‘Come on, get inside you big wuss,’ he said.
Ambrose unfolded himself slowly from the ground and looked up sheepishly. He trotted past the man and into the hall, his tail wagging happily.
Andrew shut the door behind them. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘You can sleep in my room.’
We go forward by default
it’s not our fault,
simply habits inhibiting,
learnt with time,
ingrained on our unconscious mind.
We sit on cardboard cut out couches
eating dinner from a box,
living in die-cast diorama dreams,
where sometimes feeling feels too hard
and talking about something real
is hard to imagine unless its on TV.
We play games made of electricity,
fused with no spark, sitting in the dark
faces infused with flickering blues
glowing wherever we go.
Communication broken down
into bits and bytes.
Digital rights that shouldn’t be left
to register on an analogue scale.
In an age of scrap and metal
where information falls like hail
and melts more easily
than the machines we control,
we go forward by default.
Once, you held my hand
and smiled.
You took my hand in yours
and said I love you
through your teeth.
You sat with my hand in your lap
and told me what was wrong.
What was wrong with me
happened differently,
at distance,
back turned,
shoulder cold,
eyes cast like iron
filings flung into a lake.
Once, I tied your heart around me
with second hand string
and swam out after you,
choking for all the good it did me.
I took your hand in mine
and tried to save you
from yourself.
You must not please me
Put your heart against me
Because didn’t I see you
In your dreams
Or is it a place
Where I love you
Heart donor
Haven’t we lost this dance before
Using hands that held me as a child
my mother crafted a cup
with soil from the earth,
painted a veneer
with words from my soul,
and presented it without ritual.
Silt bound into substance,
burnished like the truth,
glazed like eyes into the past,
empty like so many promises.
She has beautiful lips this girl,
plump and firm, pale crimson,
if that can be said.
When she smiles
it takes on the air of a spectacle,
a Broadway performance
as they slide gracefully back
revealing the uniform white
light of teeth,
an ensemble cast of joy.
They work in tandem,
lips and teeth, with her eyes,
those deep-set green forests of thought,
so that when she smiles,
when the curtain is raised
and the show commences,
her eyes work the room,
a talented spotlight to attract your attention.
And all the while she never sees you.
She sits on the sand letting the wind play with her hair, waiting for meaning to wash in on the tide. The dusky sun shines its half hearted rays around her feet, too concerned with keeping its head above the horizon to worry about others. Its light has no bite. She digs a soft, slender fingered hand into the sand and imagines its future. Glass, a vase, tall and slim, filled with tulips arranged with delicate precision. She pulls her hand free from the silt. Tiny grains cling to the moisture on her skin like a sandpaper glove. This is what it feels like to be alive she thinks.
As the sun relents, a silver sheen overtakes the waves and coats the beach. A chill sneaks quietly across the sand like the breath of the moon, asking the girl to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. It’s getting late she thinks, I should be getting home. I should be doing something. With a sigh, a perfect pitch to match the moon, she slumps her shoulders and falls back into the sand.
‘No,’ she sighs, ‘I won’t go.’
There’s no need. I make my own rules. My own choices, life. I make my own life.
‘I make my own damn it.’
The moon settles in its arc and looks down passively at the girl. The wind has stopped playing with her hair, finding fancy building banks of sand against her skin instead. Like a shipwrecked relic, the elements do their best to reshape her. Rivulets of sand trickle across her torso and form islands in the folds of her clothes. Grain after grain it marches and mounds against her body. She digs her fingers into the sand and grasps at its embrace.
‘You know me,’ she whispers, ‘because I’m part of you.’
A Few Short Words 