When she opens the door I swoop in and lift her in my arms. She clasps her hands at the back of my neck and crosses her legs around my waist, her buttocks resting against my hips. Our momentum carries us into the hall. As the door closes behind us her back hits the wall. She barks in my ear and I dig my hand into her hair. The touch of her lips to my neck writes braille desires on my skin. I feel her body against mine, hard under the fabric of her shirt. I can smell strawberries.
She moves so softly I don’t know she’s there until she slips her hand into mine. ‘Come on,’ she says, and leads me towards the cab rank. I let myself go with her. I don’t want to be alone and I don’t want to be around people. There’s something empty about her that makes this feel like getting both. It’s wrong, but it’s easy.
In the back of the cab she takes my hand again. She’s telling me about her night and all her friend’s problems. I listen dutifully, detached. The way she talks about them I can tell she thinks we’re perfect. It feels like her hand is getting tighter the longer she talks, like cranking a vice. There’s no air in the cab. I wind down the window and press my face into the breeze.
Of course we sleep together, but I can’t switch off. I don’t feel anything, my thoughts override my senses. Afterwards she slides across the gap between us and lays her head against my chest. ‘How long have we been doing this?’ She asks.
Fucking? I say.
She slaps my thigh playfully. ‘I mean all of this.’
I’ve been doing this my whole life, but I know that’s not what she means, so I grunt. She goes quiet. I can hear her breathing in and out in a sharp little staccato that punctures the silence around us.
I tell her I know, trying to stop her saying what she wants to.
She lifts her head up, startled, and raises an inquisitive eyebrow at me. ‘How do you know what I want to say, huh?’
I tell her that she’s most transparent person I know, that I can read it on her.
She throws her head back down on my chest with a little huff. ‘Well, I want to say it,’ she says. ‘I need-’
I tell her she doesn’t.
I push her away and slide to the edge of the bed. She looks so small, when I look back at her, lying crumpled in the sheets, wearing only a look of sad resilience. She catches my eye snorts defiantly. ‘I don’t care. I love you and I want to say it.’
I tell her she shouldn’t be in love with me, that it was never what I wanted. I don’t realize I’m shouting until I see the look on her face. She’s fragile, but somehow I’m the one who starts crying.
I shouldn’t, but I stay the night. I have strange dreams.
When the morning light pries my eyes open I try to sneak out, but she stirs as I’m halfway through the door.
‘I want to talk about this,’ she whispers.
I know you do, I say, closing the door.
The first time I died I was sixteen and learning to drive. I was getting good too. I tell myself now in the middle of the night that it wasn’t my fault and it’s probably true, though I’m not sure I believe it. I don’t remember much, just dad eternally dialing at the radio presets as though they might start broadcasting new stations if he came around one more time, and mum chattering in the back with one eye in the rearview mirror and the other on the neighbours lawn. I remember waking up and knowing things were different.
I take the pamphlet from her and let the spiel go over my head. There’s a scar crossing her nose like a spectacle bridge, I want to run my thumb over it when she smiles. I rest my eyes on her lips and ride the cadences spilling from them, rollercoaster consonants powered by enthusiasm. Her voice feels like melted butter smells. She stops when I take her hand and put the pamphlet there. Even in the shadows her fingers are warm. When she retreats, there’s an apology in her movements that doesn’t show in her eyes, so I smile.
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.
A Few Short Words 