Instinct (Angela Meyer)

My burrow smells like animal shit and typist underarms. There is also the earth. Sigmund greets me with a hiss and I take him from the glass and let him slither around my body. Other creatures peep and flit around the room, or are nestled in grooves. They are all free to come and go except Sig. I couldn’t stand the thought of being without him.

Rani, my housemate, got used to the idea. She has a rabbit, and had a wombat for a time. She’s an animal herself, all rat’s tail and camouflagic layers. She works in a shop selling two-dollar items. We are each in our hovels at night. Sometimes she is with others, I say hello then shy back. Their skin is often bright and smooth, and they smell like leaves.

‘Hi Mum’. Mum wonders about my dreams on the phone, as if I have some. She says she’ll put my stepfather on. I can’t protest, though I want to.

‘Going well in that job, hey?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still got those stupid animals around?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know your sister just bought a new motorbike?’

‘No. That’s cool.’

‘Yeah, and she’s second-in-charge now at the surf shop.’

I remember a pier and a fishing rod. A horrified fish, tail slap, slap, slapping, wet and stinky. A wrong father’s face, proud and bearing down.

A boy can be too sensitive. A boy should fish, and play football, and get into scruffs, and not want to hug anyone. Grey eyebrows stayed permanently down around me. He will always look sideways when I say something. My animal facts are useless. I must be some kind of gay boy. I am too skinny, why don’t I do weights? Sometimes a blow used to come quick if I dared say something. Mum would go and do fifty laps in the pool. I learnt not to speak, but still, it took me a long time to get away.

Mum thought I could be Steve Irwin. But my hands go clammy when too many people look at me. Still, I wish I’d thought about Cairns more. It’s too cold for Sigmund down here in Melbourne.

I reach forward to turn on the computer but jolt back because Sigmund clamps down, hard, into my bicep. The pain is exquisite. The walls heave and press in on us. We are one. He lets go, eventually, and I place his exhausted form back in the glass. Enough excitement for one day. I open my bar fridge and pull out a vial. Already my muscles are beginning to constrict. I can feel the sick at the back of my throat. I extract the antidote, shaking, tap the needle, then find that goodly vein in my right elbow-crook. It’s becoming a bit crusty. I should probably go see about it. I slip the needle in and press, then lie back on my furry covers, and slip into rest.

*

Mrs Graham’s dog, George, ended up dying, after inhaling the Bertelmann window spray. We would offer no compensation. I try to continue reading the other emails but they blur. I stare at the profit chart on the wall, winged curves. It’s hard to not find myself on the wall, in the corner, slithering by the desk of Lola, imagining Sigmund wrapped around her, squeezing her chest so her breasts heave up and pop out, my mouth meeting the nipple, our tails getting lost beneath her skirt. But people freak out when I crawl on the walls.

Instead, I open my browser. I enter the back-end of my blog. I need to put this outside of myself. I begin to write. I hate the consequences. I hate the white walls and the wooden floor. I hate the daily hisssss.

A cavalcade of ants enters the edge of my screen and march across the page. I brush at them with my hand but they’re inside. I open my drawer and find my BertelJuice deodorant. I spray it at the screen and they drop, coating my keyboard like tar. I see little legs kick here and there. I look at the can in my hand and then throw it at Mr Bertelmann’s sliding glass. It bounces. Everyone goes on with their work. How smudged the windows are. I wish it were time for lunch.

*

That night, my dream mixes with musty smells. There is Lola up against a fence, unable to escape the snake tasting the flesh of her thigh. She has no choice but to spread her legs open for me so I too can clamp down.

Then there are whales, and the must becomes fresh. I’m released and yet pulled under the waves, toppling over every time I have a glimpse of the island on the horizon, two green furry lumps like breasts.

I wake and can’t move. I need a whirlwind to come in and pick me up, and pick up the place while it’s at it. I am sick of the smell. Undecided if a burrow is my home. I stare across into the black eyes of Siggy. What’re we doing bud? There are a million things I would rather do – work with one of those kid farms that went around to schools and supermarkets, work at an animal park or zoo, be an exhibit in some alien zoo myself – homosapien.

‘Hi Mum… yeah I’m okay, same old. You?’

She’s just done a few laps in the pool, butterfly.

‘No I’m not doing much exercise, just a bit of walking round the park and that, bit of slithering and climbing too.’

She’s glad. She says she knows a guy from Cairns. He’s coming through town with his circus. She talked to him about me.

‘Really?’

She says she doesn’t like the thought of me all cooped up. She says me and Sig should be on the road. I can feel my stepfather’s eyebrows. He’ll never make a living being a bloody circus freak. She says she’ll give me his number.

I hang out on the roof for a little bit. The budgie makes a perch out of me. When I call the man from Cairns with a trembly voice, I ask, if he needs me, what will I be doing? He says I would look after the animals and my throat constricts so much I have to check Sig hasn’t secretly bit me in a soft spot. He asks my qualifications and I have to tell him truth. I didn’t get into zoology. I’m self-taught. He asks me some things about animals and I answer them all. I ask if he has an elephant and he says that it’s in the room. I tell him to say hello.

I am allowed to bring along my pet snake and pet computer.

*

Quitting is more than difficult. Mr Bertelmann is ‘very disappointed’. He looks at me and sighs the way my stepfather did when the fish wriggled back through my fingers. I feel my neck is too long and my upper lip sweats too much. I have flashes of guilt for not being what he thought I was. I scratch at the inside of my elbow.

On the way out I see Lola. She wears a red dress so tight it almost cuts off her circulation. Her bangles coil around her arm. Run away with me a stupid voice says at the back of my mind. But that is just a dream. No girl like that would just flip a good job and join the circus. That’s for slithery compulsive freaks like me. She says goodbye politely and I wish for her dress to rip and spill those breasts for me, just once. I long for claws. But they stay within. And I walk out, looking back and wondering if it’s a hint of longing in those wet eyes of hers. A creature has never looked at me like that.

*

Animal Cracker is the most widely read traveling circus blog, and the readers have been introduced to Womyn the wombat, Dilly the elephant, Milhouse the monkey, Shamus the donkey, and many others. Sometimes the animals don’t get along, but I learnt their tics and how to mediate. Conflict is always interesting. Sig has to be kept quite separate when he’s in a bitey mood, but then we all do have our bitey moods. Monster is a woman with big fat green tattoos and when she caught me once relaxing on the main tent pole she decided I’d be a natural at the trapeze. But I don’t like too many eyes on me.

Monster says I’ll get over it as she takes me inside her trailer and coaxes the animal out. I press her against the ceiling. She bites. The many eyes on her tattooed skin watch me from different angles. And I don’t mind.

Movement (Julie Thorndyke)

Marguerite was at the gynaecologist’s when the earthquake struck. The nurse was asking about her children, their ages, progress and activities; Marguerite was perched on the end of the examination table; the speculum had just been inserted and the doctor about to take the pap smear. A second later, the table capsized and Marguerite was thrust sideways onto the cold floor. Her cotton robe slid across the polished vinyl surface, leaving her wedged against the doctor’s desk.

The nurse was silent; it was obvious from her misshapen skull and the angle of her broken neck that Sister Ann would never cheer a nervous patient with happy conversation again. She had taken the full force of the heavy beam supporting the roof, which now lay across the surgery, forming an oblique triangle of the once spacious, light-filled room. Dr Kosiak crawled under the fallen beam and felt Sister Ann’s twisted neck for a pulse. Finding none, he snapped off the harsh examination light that had still been burning, spotlighting the nurse’s poor, pale, surprised face.

In the black, airless space, there was silence. At last, Marguerite heard him crawl towards her and crouch beside the desk.

Are you alright, Marguerite?

Yes. Nothing broken. But I still have this lump of metal in me.

Dr Kosiak grunted. He crawled back to the light. Marguerite heard the switch being flicked, but no light came.

The doctor was at her side again. Never mind, I can do this with my eyes closed.

She knew he wasn’t lying—this doctor had looked after her since she first visited these rooms twenty years ago, a naïve young woman, miscarrying her first pregnancy. He had been the one who couldn’t find a heartbeat for that first, unfinished foetus. He had monitored each successive pregnancy and checked the movement of each baby in the womb. He had delivered her sons, a lead player in these significant highs and lows of her life. She felt his chunky fingers pat along the floor and find her left leg. Just lift up a bit…it was awkward, crammed as they were against the faux-timber desk, but in a moment the implement was removed and Marguerite sighed with relief. For once, no awkward moment of eye contact, no wondering where to look. There is no protocol for this, Marguerite considered. Where does one look when a doctor, a dentist, or podiatrist is doing personal things to one’s body? Perhaps these procedures should always take place in the dark.

A moment later the shivering set in.

Are you cold?

No.

You’re in shock.

Dr Kosiak crawled under the beam and groped for his coat which had been hanging on a rack behind the door. He dragged it back and covered Marguerite with it. Her fingers, shaking, grabbed the coarse tweed and pulled it tight around her body.

Now that the light had been extinguished, they could see three pin pricks of light where the window had been.

How long before we are rescued?

It will be a while, I should think. At least we have air.

They sat in silence. Marguerite was still shaking and becoming cold now, but tried to focus on the three points of light forming a little triangle high up to her right.

Marguerite heard him scrabbling around in the dark, the screech of something being dragged over a hard surface. A little crash to the left of her made her jump.

Sorry. The phone’s dead.

Doctor Kosiak crawled back to Marguerite and sat beside her.

You’re still shivering.

He put his arm around her shoulders for warmth.

Don’t worry. We’ll just sit tight til someone comes.

There was a strong smell like burnt rubber but Marguerite tried to ignore the possibility of fire. As her eyes became more and more accustomed to the dark, she could see the crumpled shape of Sister Ann like an abandoned marionette in the corner of the room. Mustn’t cry, she told herself. Think of something else. Like looking at the pictures of green ferny waterfalls on the ceiling whilst in the dentist’s chair. She flexed her legs and clenched her naked buttocks, cold on bare floor. How odd to be sitting like this, undressed, in the dark beside a man not her husband. She rested against the warmth of him. Marguerite could hear the steady intake of his breath, feel the movement of his chest with every exhale. Some women fantasised about their gynaecologists, but she had always thought of Dr Kosiak more as a father figure than a lover. Not that he was that much older than she. The spicy scent of his aftershave seemed to grow stronger in her nostrils. Even now, almost naked beside him… no, it was no use looking for her clothes. They had been left on a chair near the blocked doorway, where Sister Ann lay. Wonder had happened at home? Where were Brian and the boys? Must call…

Peter, (she knew Dr Kosiak’s first name but had never called him by it in twenty years) Peter… is my handbag on the floor? Can you find it? My mobile is in it…perhaps we can …?

Dr Kosiak crawled around in the awkward spaces between fallen rubble and furniture, cursing as a sharp object tore at his trousers and he cracked his head on an open filing cabinet drawer. This it? he asked, pushing a soft leather form into her hands.

This was something she could do with her eyes closed. The phone was in the side pocket, as always. She pressed the buttons and heard the dial tone. It was then the tears began to flow.

Marguerite’s family were fine; their house only slightly damaged. She phoned emergency services.

Do you want to phone your wife? She knew, from past conversations, he was married.

No need, she didn’t survive.

As a siren sounded outside the building, Dr Peter Kosiak stared at the crumpled form of Sister Ann, bowed his head, and wept.

The Biggest Love (Krissy Kneen)

No one could ease the pain he felt, had been feeling for too long now. She raised an eyebrow as he entered the kitchen, held her breath. She could smell the grief off him. Emotional pain like an aura captured by Kirlian photography. He wandered in a fug of it and Girl felt her throat tighten. She would not whine. He always misinterpreted her care for him as hunger. At her most empathetic moments he would open a can of meat and scoop it into her bowl. Sometimes at night he would let her climb onto his bed and curl up beside him. Sometimes he would bury his head in her neck and she could feel his whole body shake with the pain of it.

This had been happening for too long.

He sat in the chair he liked to sit in and she dragged herself closer with her toenails, sidling up along the linoleum till she could rest her chin on his foot. She breathed on his ankle. Each little puff a whispered secret. Your wife is gone. I am here. Your wife is gone. I am here. And as if he had heard and understood he reached down and touched her head and Girl closed her eyes and whined, knowing there was no way she could love something or someone more than this.

*

She had taken to easing her way into the bathroom. When his wife was alive he would shut the door completely. She would sit outside, and even her thigh pressed against the bathroom door would not budge it. Some mornings, on the weekend the wife would join him in the shower and girl would pause between breaths, listening for the little human sounds, the coos and giggles, the grunts. There was of course something not right about it. Her excitement was ludicrous. They were people. Naked, hairless, ridiculous. Once they left the bedroom door open and she crept in and sat by the bed. There was something tender about their little naked bodies entwined that way. Rolling like pups, and the mounting that occurred in the middle of it seemed a mimicry of adult love. The smell of them, hot and acid, off-putting at first, but she got used to it, became almost excited by it at one point, hunkered down onto the carpet and pushed against it in that way that felt best.

Since the death of the wife he had taken to leaving the bathroom door ajar. Girl wondered at first if this was a sign of hope that one day his wife might return from the grave and step into the shower beside him. Or perhaps he knew that Girl was there, her paws protruding onto the damp tiles, little hushed sounds at the back of her throat as she scrambled precious centimetres forward, quietly nosing the door a little wider.  Perhaps her presence was some sort of comfort.

*

The sound of the shower stopped suddenly.  He stepped out onto the bath mat. It was ludicrous.  She looked towards him, the little upward bounce of his penis.

Huge love. An ache.

She watched him stare at his own reflection in the mirror. Lost.  Girl shuffled closer.

Not lost.  He had her.  She knew exactly where they were.  Here.  In their bathroom, with the cold tiles and the fluffy bath mat that his wife had loved.

*

This in the night.

Girl, warm.  Freshly washed, smelling of sweet chemicals that humans seemed to like.  Him, pungent, the stale scotch sweat leaking from his armpits. His pyjamas unwashed for far too long, the yellow stain of his sweat on the back of them. Him with his arm draped around her shoulder.  Him with his face pressed against her collar.  This moment with him.  This shuffling back against him.  This contact, the hardness of him.  He shifted his hips once, twice. She held her breath.  This love.  This huge love. And his sob against her neck.

*

It grew warmer. She shed her winter coat.  He shed his clothes and moved about the house naked.  Staring at his reflection in the dark windows or the silent television screen as if he had discovered a stranger in his own home.  Mild surprise, concern, curiosity.  They lay together in his bed and sometimes it was an easy comfort.  Other times he grew agitated, pushed at her, ordered her to the foot of the bed, regretted his tone and fell on her with apologies.  Girl breathed through it.  She turned her rump towards him. Love, she thought, biggest love.

*

There was nothing to it when it came down to it. It was quick. It was nothing really.  Just a physical representation of the big love.  After it was done, he clung to the nape of her neck with his fists, shaking.  That was the nicest part.  She was reminded of her mother, a vague memory of being carried, the loose skin at her neck held tight, a comfort.

He put a mattress at the foot of the bed.  She understood.  He needed space from it, from her.  She sat up on her haunches and rested her chin on the end of the bed and watched him twitch and clasp his knees to his chest.  Sometimes at night he cried out in his sleep and then she would leap up onto the bed and lie with him.  It was summer, hot, but he had taken to wearing cotton pyjamas that stuck to his skin in damp patches.

“There,” he said, tired, barely awake, but raising his hand to stroke her chest regardless.  “Good Girl, good,  good Girl.”

And then Girl closed her eyes and abandoned herself to love.  The biggest  feeling of love that there ever could be and it almost tore the skin off her back with its ferocity.

* * *

–> You can also find ‘The Biggest love’ in Torpedo’s Greatest Hits.

Snapshots of Strangers (Paddy O’Reilly)

My godfather conned us. He ran off with the family fortune, my brother’s cricket bat, and a small, secret part of my mother’s heart. We heard he had bought a motel in Queensland, but he never contacted my family again.

After Dad had worked fifteen hours a day for ten years and built up enough for us to behave like a normal family again, we decided to take a holiday. Mum suggested Queensland, and from the look on his face I thought Dad was going to simply walk out of the house and never come back, like my godfather once had. From that day, no-one at our place ever mentioned Queensland again. Queensland ceased to exist. Where Queensland should have been on the map, there was a blank. No roads and rivers, no uncharted land. Nothing. Two straight lines where the Northern Territory and New South Wales ended and fell into emptiness.

There was a part of Dad that seemed the same way. Certain words, certain times of day, certain aspects of light and shadow across the backyard fell into him and disappeared, and he would stand silent and empty for a moment or two. Over the years we watched him shrink, like he was evaporating. When I was angry I called him The Dry Man. Even his coffin was light, as if a crackly old stick lay inside. My brother, Gerard, helped to carry it down the church aisle. He said the coffin was so easy to shoulder he cried.

*

A week after the funeral, we go through the thousands of photographs Dad left stacked in boxes in his study. Among our family snapshots of birthday parties and days at the beach are hundreds of photographs of strange people and places. One photo shows the wreck of a car that rolled down a cliff. At the centre of another, shot in a city street in the 1960s, a man holds his hat against the wind as he hurries across the street. Some of the prints are buildings – motels, suburban houses, service stations. And beaches, mountain tops, empty fields. All places we have never been. Mum behaves as though these photographs diminish our family history. Each time she finds one she purses her lips and rips the photo in half.

‘More rubbish,’ she says. ‘As if I need more rubbish in my life. I have absolutely no idea why he put these with our family things.’

My father was an insurance adjuster. He had men followed and photographed carrying heavy objects then sent the photos to the companies that paid their disability money. He measured skid marks at the scene of accidents. He interviewed accounts clerks about their spending patterns and handed cups of tea to women crippled by machinery to see if they could hold them. For some reason he kept all of their photographs with ours, as if these strangers gave his life as much meaning as his own family did. The strangers even crept into our dinner conversations.

‘Dad, what happened to that lady who said she went blind in the accident?’ Gerard asked. Gerard loved Dad’s stories. He thought Dad and Jimmy were spies, like James Bond, fighting for justice and truth. Dad told us that on Saturday night the woman had driven her four children in the family car to the Coburg drive-in for a double Disney feature. Gerard laughed so much he spat out his peas. When I told a couple of the stories to my friend at school she said something I never forgot. She said, ‘Does your Dad hang around in the bushes taking photos of people?’

In one box we find a set of photos of my godfather before he left. Mum says nothing, sets the photos aside in a separate pile and goes on sorting. Gerard and his wife raise their eyebrows.

My godfather, Jimmy Botham, ran off when I was eight. I hadn’t noticed he was gone until my birthday. Every birthday, Jimmy and his lady friend came to tea. She was an air hostess. She was the most glamorous creature I had ever seen. Her toenails were painted hot pink. Her smooth gold hair was coiled in a bun that had no end and no beginning. She would lean down to kiss me happy birthday and hand me a Qantas carry-on bag full of lollies.

‘Where’s Uncle Jimmy? Did he send the lollies?’ I asked Dad as we sat at the table, eating party pies and sausage rolls.

‘Your Uncle Jimmy’s off spending my money,’ Dad said.

My mother handed me a cocktail frankfurt on a toothpick. ‘Your Daddy and Uncle Jimmy aren’t partners anymore. Daddy’s in business on his own now.’

A couple of days later Gerard told me he’d seen Jimmy cuddling Mum in the kitchen one night not long before he left. Dad stood behind Gerard with a trembling hand on his shoulder, then turned and left the room, pulling my brother behind him.

After Jimmy left, Mum carried on with life as if there had never been a Jimmy Botham. It was Dad and his dessication, his disappearing act, that kept reminding me how we had been wronged. Gerard’s story explained Dad’s behaviour. I imagined what it would have been like to see my mother and Jimmy Botham together. I had been robbed and I wished I had caught Jimmy Botham in the act.

*

The death benefit cheque proves Dad knew insurance. Mum invites us around for champagne and crayfish. I’m going to put a down payment on a house. I raise my glass in a toast.

‘No more dodgy landlords!’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Gerard adds.

Gerard and his wife have already chosen the colour of their Mercedes. Mum stands up with a glass of champagne in one hand and a crayfish claw in the other, and announces that after all these years of cooking and cleaning house she’s going to do something she’s always wanted to do. She’s taking a trip.

I know where she’ll go, even though she says she is still thinking about it. The map of Australia has changed completely. Queensland is now marked in scarlet while the rest of the country has faded to grey.

‘You know,’ I say to Mum, ‘I was going to take a trip to Queensland myself, look up my godfather.’

‘Were you?’ she says.

She sits at the kitchen table, making a list of what to take on her trip. She keeps writing, the list getting longer and longer, the wedding ring on her resting hand clacking against the table as her scribbles become fiercer and the table starts to shake.

‘I don’t know why you would do that,’ she says without stopping her list, now at two pages.

I wait. She runs out of paper. She puts down the pen and twists the ring on her finger. I wonder whether Jimmy Botham would even recognise her now with her grey hair and papery skin.

‘I’m going on a holiday,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember inviting you.’

‘Well,’ I answer, stung. ‘I want to meet Jimmy Botham again. I want to tell him what happened when he left.’

‘What? What happened?’ Mum says, leaning back in her chair and staring at me.

‘It’s all right. I don’t blame you.’

I stand up and walk out to my car. As I pass through the lounge room I glance at the chair where Dad used to sit and watch the cricket. I remembered him waving me over, wanting me to kiss him goodbye as I clattered out of the house at night when I was a teenager, the way I sneered at him and kept walking, wobbling off in my stiletto heels and muttering ‘See ya Dry Man’ under my breath.

*

Investigation is in my genes. Jimmy Botham lives in a caretaker’s cottage in a motel in Tully. He drives a 1987 Corolla. He gambles on the horses every week.

‘That’s where our money went,’ I tell Gerard

‘So what? That was twenty years ago. Get over it.’

‘He was supposed to give me moral guidance. He was my godfather!’

Gerard’s wife sits opposite me nodding politely.

‘Christ,’ Gerard says. ‘Now she wants moral guidance. Next thing she’ll be suing for the thousand pounds he took with him.’

‘A thousand pounds? That was the family fortune?’

He rolls his eyes in the direction of his wife.

‘So, what, she thought we were millionaires? That’s why we lived in a weatherboard dump in Oakleigh?’

‘But … ‘ I say.

*

My father had no stubborn streak. A man with a stubborn streak doesn’t let his life ebb away, doesn’t go stiff and dry with regret. It must be my mother who passed on to me this need to forge onwards in the face of scorn, even while suspecting that what I am doing might be foolish. I think about that as I drive toward Tully in my rented car.

Fifty kilometres from Tully the rain starts. The air conditioning has sucked the heat out of the car and I feel a chill when the first fat drops of rain splatter on the windscreen. When I open the window for a smell of the Queensland air, the steamy heat rolls in and hits my face like a sloppy tongue.

By the time I check into my motel and unload my car it is 10:00pm. Dark, still raining, still muggy. A green tree frog squats on the floor of the shower recess. A television prattles in the room next door. Overhead the fan beats the air into moist currents that roil noisily around the room, lifting papers and rattling the venetian blinds. I lie naked on the bed in the dark, trying to sleep. At 1:00am the television next door is turned off.

For a few minutes before I fall asleep I have visions of my father in his hospital bed. We sat around him on upright chairs as his chest bubbled and snickered with the fluid trapped inside it. All that empty space inside him filled up with water and we watched him slowly drown. He woke up once and looked around at us. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Sorry.’

*

The next day I stand under an umbrella up the road from Jimmy Botham’s motel, watching the caretaker’s cottage. The motel is long and flat, like an army hut, and the vacancy sign flicks on and off every three seconds. The low clouds drizzle a fine mist that settles on my leather sandals and slowly seeps through until I begin to slip on the slimy insoles.

I can see into the cottage, set to the east of the motel. The lights are on because the clouds make the day dark. A man and a woman are moving around inside. When I pull my father’s binoculars from my bag I find that the rain has soaked into them too and all I can see is fog. After a while I go back and sit in the rented car with the engine running. The air conditioning cools my sweating body and I doze off.

I wasn’t trying to harass my mother when I booked a ticket to arrive a day earlier than her. I always intended to track down Jimmy Botham. I want to confront him, explain what he did to my father. My father could never have confronted anyone. He was a watcher, a photographer, a man who lurked around the edges of people’s lives quietly noting down details of how they lived. It is my job to tell Jimmy Botham how his actions hollowed out my father, made him into the man who filled himself up with the eceits of other people’s lives and forgot about his own family. Forgot about me.

My mother arrives at midday. I turn off the car engine and peer through the drizzling rain as she stands with the hood of her pink plastic raincoat obscuring her face.

The lights in the cottage are still on, the man and woman still inside. My mother stares at the couple, then she swings around and sets off back the way she came, walking with heavy, uneven steps as though she is carrying something cradled in her arms.

So she didn’t know he was married. I wipe mist from inside the windscreen. All those years she waited and he’s married.

I open the car door and set off toward the caretaker’s cottage. My godfather is a cunning bastard. First he gutted my father, now he’s done it to my mother. I’ll have no-one.

My steps slow as I near the door, but I force myself to keep walking. My knock on the door sounds faints and hollow. I hear someone get up from a chair and walk toward the front door. I can’t remember what Jimmy Botham looks like up close. I wish I had a snapshot.

From inside the door a man’s voice says, ‘Who is it?’ As I open my mouth to answer I try to think of some other name, some other identity I can assume.

‘Hello?’ the man inside the door says. There is a rattle as he undoes the latch and swings open the door.

Before I left Melbourne, Gerard asked what I meant to say to poor old Jimmy Botham.

‘Are you going to blame him for your lack of moral guidance?’ he said. ‘Will that make you feel better about yourself? He took a bit of money as his share of the business. He comforted Mum when Dad was depressed. We should thank him.’

I felt a hitch in my body, as though someone had lifted and dropped me a few centimetres. My teeth jarred. But it was too late. I was committed to action. I refused to be like my spindly depressed father – watching, always watching. And always disappointed.

A white-haired man and a silky terrier stand in front of me at the door of the cottage. Jimmy Botham asks if I want a room. I stand there, mouth open, lips wet with rain, feeling as if I am drowning.

‘We’ve got vacancies,’ he says.

* * *

–> Snapshots of Strangers is a Winner of the Age Short Story Competition

–> Image by Elisa Gonzalez

Resolution 666 (Paul Adkin)

Esteemed Creator of the Universe:

In accord with resolution 666, passed unanimously last November by the Security Council of the United Association of Metaphysical Democracies, also known as GNU (God is Not the Universe), we are issuing this final notice, demanding a complete removal of all weapons of mass destruction in the cosmos to be carried out immediately and unconditionally.

Since November we have received no positive evidence that the dismantling of comets, asteroids, or super-nova has begun at all, and, in addition to this breach, our spy satellites have detected the emergence of five new Black Holes which are in strict noncompliance with the Anti-proliferation of Event Horizon’s treaty.

Likewise, here on earth, scores of thousands of men and women are dying each day from bacilli and cancers, hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, mud slides, snow storms, avalanches, volcanoes etc., all invented by Your perverse and evil nature. Apart from this there are the other more complex weapons of mass destruction You have hurled into our wake: aeroplanes, trains, coaches, ferries and, perhaps the most deadly instrument of all, the common automobile. That these latter “machines” were, as Your own ambassador has argued, created by us and should therefore be eliminated by us, is a cruel lie – for we all know that our own intelligence comes directly from Your Divine Will and nowhere else. Because of this You, and only You, have to answer for all the evil that takes place in this horribly flawed universe.

This is our final ultimatum. Ignore it and You will have to bear the terrible consequences.

And please do not assume that recent sceptical statements from the French: “I think therefore I am” ; the Germans: “God is dead” ; or the Russians: “Everything is permitted”, will save Your skin. We have numerous documents proving Your existence and pointing the blame directly at Yourself. The majority of world powers understand that threats made in the Apocalypse were sincere. You are and always have been mankind’s greatest enemy. Because of that this is our final ultimatum. If, in ten days, You have not eradicated all death and destruction from the universe, we, the only entities in the cosmos with sufficient intelligence to appreciate Your existence, will self-immolate our planet, destroying ourselves, our perception of You, and, in so doing, destroy You as well. You have ten days to decide.

Sincerely Yours,

GNU

The Last Islands in the World (Craig Cormick)

Captain Cook has had another dream. They were cruising northwards, with the engines at half-power, searching for the last island chain pulled up from the ocean by the Great Navigator – that mythical hero of the stories of the islanders, whose path they are following. In the dream Cook knew it was their last chance to find wealth and trade goods for the Company, yet they cruised further and further north without finding the islands, until the seas began to turn cold around them. A chill mist wrapped itself tightly about the ship, and then it began to snow. The ship’s electronic instruments were giving ghost readings and they had to proceed by listening to the plaintive wailing of sea lions, warning them of rocks nearby.

All around them were reefs and whirlpools, which seemed to move and shift. And then, when the fog and the darkness of the north had closed most tightly about them, when Cook was about to give the order to turn back southwards, they came upon a long chain of islands. They were bare wind-swept rocky places and Cook inscribed on his chart they were the last islands in the world.

They cruised past each one in turn, looking for signs of life, until they came to the very last island, a low twin-volcano-shaped rock.

Cook went ashore alone and found a missionary there, clad in a long black frock, standing on the dark beach, waiting for him. He bade the Captain to follow him so he could show him the island’s treasures. He led him into the only building on the island, a small church that seemed to be built from drift-wood. But once inside, Cook saw a long dim corridor, stretching off into darkness, with glassed in cubicles all down one side.

It was like some kind of a museum, he thought. He walked to the first cubicle and looked in. It was a small spartan bedroom. It had a bed and chest of drawers with some religious ornaments on it, and a single chair. He looked at the missionary, his guide, who just smiled at him and then stepped back to allow Cook to look into the next cubicle.

It was just as small. Cramped and simple. And he wondered if it were a room or a cell? This one was clearly a woman’s, he could see, from the lace cloths and hair brushes there. He turned to the missionary again and cocked an eyebrow. The missionary made no movement. Cook looked back and saw a reflection in the glass that looked like a face. Was it his own or the missionary’s? He looked at it closer and saw that it was neither. It was a woman’s face. A dark-skinned woman.

And the closer he stared at her, the more clearly he could make her out. She was middle-aged, with dark frizzy hair and a smile full of white teeth. And she looked straight at him. Cook stepped back a little in amazement.

‘That’s Eve,’ said the missionary. ‘She was one of the first.’

‘The first what?’ asked Cook.

But the missionary didn’t say. He stepped back, inviting Cook to look into the next room. There was another woman there – or the ghost image of a woman – if that’s what these were. She also had dark frizzy hair and a dark face. But she just glared at him. Angrily.

Cook didn’t know why the look in her eyes pained him so much, so he stepped away, walking down the entire corridor, glancing quickly into each room. Or cell. But most were empty, the furniture covered in dust. Some had empty bottles in them. Some had broken furniture. Others had native ornaments cast about on the floor like useless detritus.

‘Where are the people?’ Cook asked.

‘They come and go,’ the missionary said.

‘Where?’ Cook wanted to ask. There were so many things he wanted to ask. But when he turned to the missionary, he saw that he had become a dark-skinned native too, with elaborate tattoos about his face, still dressed in the missionary’s frock.

‘Who are you?’ Cook asked.

‘Do you not know me, Captain Cook?’ he replied.

‘No,’ said Cook. ‘We have never met.’ Then, ‘How do you know me?’

‘From the stories about you.’

‘What stories?’

‘They say that you sailed across the seas of the world, naming all the islands.’

‘Yes,’ says Cook.

‘Even when they had names already,’ the missionary said. ‘And you made people sick and destroyed their beliefs. You impregnated their women and shot the men who opposed you. Then you cast nets over the islands and dragged them up into the cold northern climes, far away from the warm oceans the people had once known. And here they had to live, removed from their gods and customs and their knowledge of the seas, even removed from the warmth of the sun.’

Cook wanted to deny it. Wanted to say that it wasn’t like that at all. He’d never killed people in that way. Never stolen land. He wanted his voyage to be remembered for more than the perpetual coupling with native women. He wanted to say that it was not the truth. But he could not, for he had worked for the Company long enough to know that the truth could be many things.

As could a dream.

He wakes with a start and sits up in the dark of his cabin. The dream is still close about him, and he thinks of going to his desk and writing it down. But then he decides not to. He closes his eyes and let’s it slip away from him. Better it be unwritten and unremembered. There will be others a plenty who will seek to write the meaning of his voyages, he thinks.

The exit (Jasmin Shenstone)

I tell her I like them. Her drawings. I watch her and when she is finished I pick up the paper by the edges and stick blue-tack to the back and press the corners against the wall. I spend days staring at them, wondering what the emphasis on certain areas of the female body could mean, the pencil pressed harder in places. I pose for her, but only once, and we leave the picture in Melbourne. I miss looking at it, and wonder if that makes me egotistical or nostalgic.

We talk about who we like. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Dali. We walk through galleries of contemporary art and leave with a feeling of something missing, as if the art reached out and took something from us instead of giving something to us. We go to an Impressionist exhibition. The paint is heavy with emotion, nothing modern or empty about it. I like mood in a painting, I tell her. Because no one is around we talk however we like, we can sound vague or pompous or intellectual or arrogant. I like art to punch me in the face, she says.

We watch films and talk through them. I am constantly pausing the film and rewinding so we don’t miss anything. It could be integral to the plot, I tell her, with my finger on the button again. We talk about actors and directors, scenes and dialogue. She guesses the endings. She sees the metaphor. I see what I’d like to be doing, what I have wanted to do since my teenage years. I have never grown out of watching too many films and sitting too close to the television and talking too much about a film and remembering too much of the dialogue. I tell her, we need to make a film that means something, that shows something real, it should be about love, but realistic not Hollywood. She agrees. We come up with ideas but we never write them down. We talk as if we have already wrote the script. We say, we should put that in our movie, or, our movie won’t have that in it.

We read books at the same time. Sometimes we share a book. She won’t finish a book that is getting her nowhere. I will read the whole book and hope for the one line that will stand out and last. She likes women writers and I am slightly embarrassed that most of my favourite writers are men, and not only that, they are classically misogynist. But the women on my shelf make up for it, they are powerful, I want to be them.  We don’t go to bookstores with brand new books and shiny covers. We go hunting. We find cheap books with stained pages. It feels better to bend the cover and wonder how many eyes and hands have felt the page. Our nightstand is covered in books, we have to rest our drinks on top of them. We lose track of what we’re reading, bookmarks stick out of almost every book in the house. I try to finish one before I buy another; I almost never do.

I tell her I like her drawings, she tells me she likes my stories. We live together and try to create a world that is beautiful. We don’t know where the beauty comes from. I think it has something to do with the artist. With the possession that takes place and the result. The passion, the pain, the pleasure, the ego, the neurosis, the hunger, the doubt, the arrogance, the awkwardness, the patience, the impatience, the skill, the luck, and the blind faith.

All of it sitting in one person, waiting, craving an exit.

(Drawing by Andrew Andoru)

After the Fire (SJ Finn)

The hut sat untouched, a strange, defiant object against the black landscape. The grass under her feet also. Yes, it was a little parched from the summer sun, but not incinerated like everything else.

Marion looked up, surveyed the flattened buckled roof, the twisted charcoal posts and bricks, the crumpled outdoor furniture. The contrast made her dizzy. She wanted to look away – back at the grass, back at the hut – but she forced herself to stare, instructed herself to remember. Human noises, cooking smells, pot-plants and birdcalls, the feelings the house had held. She conjured them until they formed a painful lump in her chest, until she could sense them thrumming in her: all the years, all the people, all the long hours when she’d been in the house on her own – lonely hours, restless ones – and she wondered why it seemed that the fire had taken those things, things she’d thought had belonged to her, that’d be hers – without having to think – forever.

‘Here Gran.’

Nicholas came out of the hut and stood next to her. He put a cup of tea on the little side-table that folded out from the canvas camp-chair he’d set down for her when they’d arrived.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He lowered himself into the second chair. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I didn’t think it’d be so … still.’

The words felt like a heavy parcel on her lips, a parcel she was handing him.

He frowned quizzically.

‘The fire has taken everything,’ she attempted to explain.

‘Not you, Gran.’ His voice rose in hopeful candescence. ‘We still have you.’

She wanted to tell him how sweet he was but could only manage a pale grin, a small nod and Nicholas didn’t ask for more. He turned back to the crumpled house, looking into the desiccated hillock of refuse with a beleaguered, somewhat unsure expression.

‘I don’t want to miss it,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t think I would. Human lacking, I guess. Stupid sentimentality.’

‘Your hut’s here … exactly as it was when you bought the place.’ Nicholas’s arm shifted in a measured aquiline arc as he swiped at an insect on his shin. ‘And that fly is a sign of life, which I shouldn’t kill!’ He raised his eyebrows, mocking himself.

She turned, considering the hut, her eyes stinging. Was it incomprehension burning at their edges as she took in its narrow hardwood boards, the little shuttered windows, its peaked roof?

‘I bet there are cobwebs in there.’ She turned back to him, to his vivid eyes. He nodded slowly that there were. Then they both turned to watch her son’s vehicle appear over the lip of the driveway.

Nicholas stood, his hand shielding his eyes as he stared intently across the monochrome of the charred remains of her property, the counterpoint of pale translucent sky that held a weak, perhaps even contrite sun not far above the horizon. He was taking his moment as he needed, watching his father with a seriousness that nearly overwhelmed her. When he turned back he bent down, pushing her hair away from her forehead to kiss her there. The care he took, the concentrated way he attended to this, penetrated through the bone of her skull. With her eyes closed, it spread like a tonic into her blood. And when she opened her eyes to follow his large strides across the moonscape of ash and burnt earth, the kiss drilled further and deeper into her.

–> SJ Finn’s novel ‘This Too Shall Pass’ is about to be released by Sleepers Publishing. It will be officially launched by Sophie Cunningham on March 3 at The St Kilda Bowling Club.

–> Aerial shot, February 8, 2009, of burnt out trees outisde Kinglake by William West/AFP/Getty Images.

The Sundowner (David Francis)

I decided there’d be no party for my 50th — instead I’d reflect, I’d go on a silent retreat to the monastery in the mountains above Santa Barbara where I’d often gone to hibernate and write. But when I called, Mount Calvary was full. Brother Will suggested The Immaculate Heart: Center for Spiritual Renewal.

If I couldn’t contemplate among the Episcopal brothers in their monastery atop a ridge with ocean views, I’d be penitent among the nuns in a stucco mansion, snuggled in the Montecito hills.

The Pacific appeared unnaturally calm, glistening out towards where I grew up, 8000 miles across the water. The afternoon air was unseasonably heavy and hot for November, and by the time I turned inland, up San Ysidro Road, a breeze had come up suddenly, eddying dust along the verge. I wound past fancy Montecito homes, asked a gentleman walking a pair of retrievers where The Immaculate Heart might be. He motioned me on to an unmarked gate, framed with flagstone posts, to a driveway that was paved, tracing its way through a park of elms, old stone cottages, a high stone fence. The house loomed square and taupe among the trees; a white-bearded gardener in a broad-brimmed hat raked leaves in slow motion like some Dickensian prop.  Gingerly, I rang the bell.

An un-habited nun appeared and introduced herself as Sister Cresanna. Smiling, she ushered me into the entry hall then shyly pointed to a large dining-room, announcing that dinner would be around seven and that I would sleep upstairs in the Porch Room. She showed me up a wide flight of steps and along an unlit hall to a curtained glass door, a room of windows looking up into the mountains. A floor of pale stones, a desk and narrow bed. Spartan and charming, just as I’d imagined — a place to come and be still, to meditate, even write, gardens to walk in, a book on the bedside table. Why not be a mystic? Why not indeed? It was time to accomplish — in a matter of hours I’d be 50 — and yet I’d come to a place to do nothing.

I lay on the bed and stared out at the hills as they purpled in the direction of Mount Calvary, the retreat house I knew intimately, its aromatic gardens and stone labyrinth, a place I missed when I wasn’t there.

I read half a page of the bedside reading  and then fell deeply asleep. When I woke it was dark and noisy outside, the wind stirred wildly through the eucalyptus. The night air was strangely hot. I sat up to behold a vision of flames roping high in the newly laid darkness, red smoke billowed silently, no sound of a siren.  I ran downstairs in search of nuns, and there they stood with my fellow retreatants, nervously assembled. The fire had been reported.  A  woman called Marta and I stared at the flames rising up in the distance, their plumes like brilliant sails hoisted then flailing. My sense of the world seemed strangely off-kilter, a moon that rose high, eerie and full but occluded by smoke. I pictured Mount Calvary up in the dark foothills and thought of the brothers, Robert and old Brother Will, wondered if they’d had enough warning.

“We should pack our things,” I said to Marta, breaking silence.

In the house, the power had failed. A scurry of footsteps in the dark, nuns lighting candles by torchlight. I got myself upstairs and  passed a doorway where Sister Pauline knelt, her cane on the ground beside her. She prayed to a candlelit Virgin. “It burns away from us?” she whispered, looking up at me. I nodded yes, but I was afraid the wind might switch.

Someone behind me announced that numerous houses were already ablaze and the fire was now up on Los Alturas, a street name I remembered from weaving up from the Mission to Mount Calvary. Hurriedly, I packed my clothes and my makeshift altar, my readings and incense burner, my Native American totems, Reiki symbols embedded in stones, a photo of me as a kid on the farm. I shoved them all in the bag they came in,  then kneeled, wondering if fire was a symbol of God’s presence or just nature, or evil, or if it was all the same. My mind was too busy with thinking to pray as Sister Joanna knocked sharply on the glass of the door, announcing it was time. “When in doubt travel downhill,” she urged.

I struggled down the stairs, threw everything into my ash-dusted Rav and followed my new friend Marta’s Lexus through smoky unlit streets, getting lost and making turns towards the coast. Breathing fast and shallow, but out of danger, I turned off the highway, made my way to the beach near Summerland and parked in the dark . I listened to reports on the  local   radio. “The blaze is being fanned by sundowner winds blowing up to 80 miles per hour.’’  I watched up towards the lurid specs in the far-off night and wondered about the brothers, their gardens and labyrinth, the infinite views from the library windows, the great bronze bell that tolled for matins and evensong, my favourite room with the charcoal drawing of an innocent Mary holding the curious infant, her pale sketched arm disappearing to nothingness. “Fire officials confirm that more than 50 homes have already been destroyed in the celebrity-studded enclave of Montecito.”

I slept fitfully in the car,  the  windows open to the hot night air, the murmur of the radio for company, then awoke to a puce light hinting through the smoke-haze. I turned up the volume and heard: “The wildfire area expanded overnight to more than 1300 acres, destroying the treasured Mount Calvary Monastery and Retreat House which firemen tell us has burned to the ground.” It went on to report that an iron cross in the courtyard and the arch of the entry hall were all that remained. Stunned, I gazed out at an entire region bathed in dove-gray smoke, as I imagined the bookshelves bursting into flames and sconces melting down the walls, and tried to picture the latticed cross still standing amongst the rubble, the archway book-ended by murals.  I stared out as a new day broke eerily about me and I prayed for the survival of my friends, the brothers, for the safety of the sisters I’d left behind. I listened humbly to the quiet lapping of the ocean and realised I’d turned 50. The day Mount Calvary was gone.

Evergrey (Kirk Marshall)

There is a tree; the squirrels know this. You could professionally train a red-kneed bird-eating spider to locate it by scent, but still the bulbous globe of the huntress would emerge the other side of the wood, scattered and baffled. It’s a blue tree, with a congregation of foliage that sounds like the world’s loneliest letters-to-the-editor when the wind swifts by.

I call it Evergrey. There are real facts, like love and summer and Warren Beatty and crimson. These are some things; there are others, too. What I like about Evergrey is that it only attracts real facts. It is the opposite of a person in this way: it possesses no need for the inhalation of fiction.

I remember a girl; she was something. A real fact, a beatific crimson, a summer love. My feet have never been extremities to profess to the transubstantiating prowess of my intellect: I can walk no better nor more impressively than I can remember scents. This girl had a perfume about her, but all I remember from my instances with her is the deliberate story of my feet, which is a terrible vacancy, and I have to wonder what has engineered us all to be so talented at loss? When I was young I would amuse myself by harbouring a belief that each blade of grass was like a blind man aching to caress something real, touch a sole or shoe the way a hand plunges through water to ensnare a fish. I have seen this on television; I know how it is done. This girl was like the grass, which is to say I refused capture or navigated my feet all over her geography.

Bodies retreat beneath spontaneous intimacy: a kiss is a knife, after all, and it severs resentment from a smiting fist. She looked gentle; she wore a red jersey, mine, over naked shoulders. I have always hated algebra, and she threatened to thwart this, my eyes finally recognising the hidden constant. A mathematical smile: I say this because it was incalculable. She claimed to know a tree-herder, someone who reared larch and beechwood, and he was apparently an old man with damp eyes with a riverboat not far from the left bank of Everygrey Lake. There was no such man, and the body of water to which I refer remains anonymous.

An unnamed mirror, black like a comet’s underbelly. She was my Evergrey Lake. I chased her to the tree once. That is to say, I begged her for a kiss and she ran away. Her laughter was a thing to summon. It was a convertible through winter rain. When I transferred my tongue for hers, I came away indebted. Allow me to explain: she seized ownership of my private life, by reaching through the summit of me, beneath the sediment, where the worms trembled and convulsed. She found something approximate to fertile, at least I thought so, because a shoot began budding and coiling within my chest, my own little simulation of the Evergrey tree. There was nothing quite so exact as her hair; now I am equipped the foresight to discern that my observation was only romantic folly. Her hair was no different from decayed coral, but I did not realise this for a long time because my eyes are sensitive to the sun. For all it’s worth, I thought there was no material so lustrous.

When I joined her beneath the pollen-shaggy canopy, my hands would congregate around her jeans: these were blue; her Levis, and not my hands.

I can’t tell you how kinetic a sensation it was to fan my palm over these jeans: it wasn’t that these skin-intimate tubular accessories alluded to the indefatigable plunder of her legs, which shone like the surfaces of night dolphins emerging through surf, but because of what they physically manifested. I wasn’t so intent on the sublime arrangement of the female form which these jeans denied me, but the brazen-blazered blue fabric hugging her pelvis, itself, the same way an ice-cream flavour arouses the ache of hunger because of the tongue navigating its sweet, frozen dome. You want that ice-cream almost as much as you crave that tongue; this is what it was for me to witness the girl gyrating about in her Levis. There is a narratological reference offered by a structuralist theoretician regarding signification, which argues that a pipe and the illustration of the same pipe are different things. When I think of her jeans, and later draw these, I cannot pursue the theoretician’s point: they are exactly the same thing, and this thing is all about sex and not the territory of language. I mean the visceral act, the practice, and not the sociolinguistic theory that assesses it: sex is something that occurs off the page, for words cannot seek to supplement the pleasure with their feeble phonetic preoccupations. I will only say that the girl made my testicles ache. But isn’t this a fact of uneducated love?

Her body was something to draw clichés from the soil like a mouth sucking poison. It was black like a terrible victory, marbled black like the aperture of a gun.

My red jersey collapsed around her shoulders, and she looked significant, glamorous. Vanity provoked me to scale the Evergrey to demonstrate my prowess as both a lover and an athlete. I clambered up the peril-brindled trunk, accelerating over the conifer’s spiny flesh with the brutalised pads of my feet. Some days I recall looking down at the girl and capturing a smile of warm chastisement, and an upwelling of magnificent brown breasts; other days I know this is a mythology which I have grafted onto the memory to retain some retrospective grace.

What I know is that as I ascended the thicket of branches, inhaling purple thistle and vaulting between the Evergrey’s violent intersection of limbs I looked out from my post and viewed the viscid, bright contour of green sky and saw a distant figure escorting ripples in their turbid thousands through the surface of Evergrey Lake. I climbed higher to secure a better post, and squinted through the microcosm of aspidistra-spores describing their lazy ballet around my warring eyes. I visored my brow with a palm, and struggled higher so that my view was unimpeded, installed with a new capacity for geometry, so that I could spy on the silhouette of the swimmer far beyond the base of the Evergrey.

I chewed the inside of my cheek, and hissed to the girl: “There’s someone naked in the lake, away from the other side of the wood. There’s someone fucking naked, I swear.” She rewarded me no response, so I scaled to the tree’s apex, where the branches were so few that the lack of traction seized me in a vertiginous fear. The swimmer looked up at me then, and I knew who it was.

I fell from the Evergrey and sailed into the afternoon, raging through branches that cut me like adultery. I woke to find myself covered in blood, and with a damp-eyed tree-herder angled over me, his mouth tiny with horror, whispering: “I remember you. You were at the lake when that girl died all those years ago?”