A girl imagines she could jump.
Despite a window in place,
and four metres of space.
Still, she imagines.
Above her,
the noise is –
Leaking.
Through his head
phones he can hear –
it.
It’s not quite a buzz –
he can hear it even though
it’s not quite a buzz and
He’s wearing his headphones and
it’s leaking.
The girl adjacent wants you to
Please excuse the pun.
As she speaks, the room
cannot find the pun.
Yet,
The room does not exist
but for his eyes,
Thinks a boy as he
lets his hand fall,
between their two chairs.
The man in the corner pulls at his hair
because he is looking at the girl looking
at the window
imagining she could jump.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Swaying gently,
Solidly moored by a vast civilisation of roots below.
Generations of growth and decay,
Growth and decay.
Life goes on for the Eucalypts.
Slivers of bark
Suspended by svelte branches.
Slender limbs macabrely examine their former skin.
An ashen pallor to the trunk,
Smudged shades of grey and green and blue and white
By the brush of Albert Namatjira.
The ghost gum stands tall and straight on this plane and in the next.
For want of water, nurture and relief,
Pines and Firs and Oaks will wither and crumble
Under the golden sun in the red dirt of the Lucky Country.
Far from home.
Something so pale and so spindly
Should succumb to the will of the colonisers.
Nature should bend to man’s will.
And yet in my lifetime and the next, the Eucalypt is well rooted.
Mum doesn’t knock as she enters my room. I wasn’t dreaming. Dreams seem to run away from me, as if I don’t deserve them. My eyes slowly open, blurry at first, but then revealing the comforting surroundings. I don’t want to get up, not for another Wednesday. Mum complains about the clothes on the floor; the contents of my open drawers overflowing like waterfalls after rain. I grumble the same lie I state every morning: “I am awake”. Mum leaves to get dressed but the scenario repeats itself until I’m up. Finally, dressed and ready for school, she drives me to the gates. I know I’m late, Mum knows I’m late, but thankfully she decides not to mention it. She does ask, however, if anything is wrong but I just shrug, knowing exactly what is pressing on my chest.
Two weeks until my creative writing assessment is due… 14 days… Soon to be 13. Love, honour, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice. Important themes to write about. But what do I know about any of them? ‘Explicitly inspired’. What does that even mean? I explicitly don’t want to write this. No wonder I am biting my nails so much.
I have lived in the North Shore all my life, cloistered in the bubble of privilege that my private school and wealthy parents provide. Sacrifice doesn’t feature in my life. I have compassion, honour, pity, pride, and love, but is it enough? No, of course not. I am only 17, I have barely experienced the world. Sure, I have seen poverty on a screen, studied it in geography, felt the brief tug at the heart that is pity, but not the gut-wrenching emotion that makes you short of breath. Does pity even affect your breath?
I could write about love. Even, I think, bullshit some bitter-sweet romantic piece. My love for the ocean, my love for surfing — the love I felt for the boy that influenced me to surf. How every time I duck dive under a wave, the water surrounding me relaxes my brain and fixes my craving for the ocean. How every time I resurface, I feel re-birthed, as if I’m taking my first breath of a new life. The adrenaline high of catching a wave supplies the rush most of my age crave from alcohol. I could write how every time I daydream at school I see the smooth waves, hear the exciting crash of them breaking perfectly over sandbanks, and feel the Australian sun radiating off my skin, relieved only by the cool water. No, my teacher doesn’t want to hear about my love story with the ocean of a boy and how he controls my life through the constant reminder of his face in the waves.
I could write another’s story. I could write about my Oma. Share my grandmother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. How in her hometown, Düsseldorf, she refused to wear her star of David, and was lifted onto an SS officer’s shoulder, displayed at 8-years-old as the perfect young Aryan. How her family escaped Germany to America, her struggles to learn English and fit into a new society, one at war with her homeland. I imagine her as an overwhelmed 13-year-old in an all American high school, studious, shy, determined to become a journalist.
But my memories of Oma are very different.
She sits at her desk, beloved Olivetti typewriter in front of her. Oma’s short silver hair is in its usual neat loose curls, displaying delicate pearl earrings. I sit by the open cedar door of her study, against the wall, just watching her through the fractured sunlight streaming from the window. She collects the paper from the typewriter and precisely folds it, placing it in the bin on top of countless other folded pieces.
At 13, I was able to read some of her work. Articles on American politics and economics, publications on the UN, but none of it was personal. Oma didn’t write her story. All I have are fragments, snippets I overheard from late night conversations around the bridge table with old Jewish friends.
Oma never spoke a word of German to me, to anyone, not wanting to relive the scarring memories of her childhood. Only when she was dying of Parkinson’s disease did she mutter German, her brain not being able to decipher the difference between her new tongue and the language she swore never to speak. She would confuse me for her mother, her Mutti, who had not been able to escape Germany. No, I wouldn’t allow her memory to be entangled in her traumatic past, especially now as she rests. I would not tell her story. She couldn’t even write it herself.
I need inspiration. So, I search through my mother’s drawers. Pulling out old passport photos and family jewellery. Trying on pearl necklaces with matching earrings, basking in the musky smell of the past. An hour later I was still sifting through purses, draping dainty scarfs around my neck, and lying on the carpeted floor flipping through photo albums with bangles jangling on my wrists.
Tucked away in an old leather case, softened from years of touch, I find a pile of aerograms, typed on pale blue tissue. Private conservations written by my Oma to my grandfather when they were dating.
Dear Tom,
Hi – I miss you.
I’m also in a mood – did you know I get into ‘moods’ occasionally? Sort of black things, lasting sometimes a day or more, when I don’t talk and I cry easily – I think I caught the disease in my teens… I’m sick eh?… I shouldn’t write letters when I’m in a mood…
I know that mood. I hear the black figures trapped in my head, whispering criticism into my ears. Sometimes I don’t talk for more than a couple of days, only my bed hearing my sobs as I will it to swallow me. I caught the disease in my teens too. I haven’t had a traumatic experience, but I know of the result. I understand how she felt. I realise the moods we have in common. I know that a part of her will always live inside me.
I shouldn’t write imaginative pieces when I’m in a mood…
I’ve been staring out this window my entire life
I see the same people and hear the same sounds
Blending into one beautiful terrifying shape
Breathing and sweating and crying
Waltzing in time with each beat of the day
The mechanical stream of what is and what isn’t
The blood and the veins of a living picture show
Peering into me as I try to contain it
This window never cracks
Although it may dirty
For months at a time without a polish
Where the figurines have no faces
And the hymns they sing are anguished
Where the sun runs away
And the sky is unfinished
The motions go on
Against better judgement
As I swim into my twentieth year
The window opens
More than ever before
And the beings and trees are angrier
Yet so loving and warm and tender
This window endures
To scold and to liberate
Embracing all grace and imperfection
Beyond the fragile prison of my mind
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
we hold an indifference to each other’s lives,
the tattooist and i.
he held my arm and
he held my gaze and
still, he remained indifferent.
Noah in love
We drove over the speed limit and I thought of religion.
We skipped a song (twice) and I thought of you (twice).
Noah by the sea
moses and i have heard
of seas splitting
like an arrow
down the middle of a party
at the end is –
at the end is a pair of dead rabbits,
two drowned elephants and
brown eyes.
glazed,
like a ham.
Noah in love, part 2
bad poetry is made worse with the overuse of lowercase / denial of uppercase.
Noah in shower
Tonight in the shower I could breathe my own name.
I breathed out first.
n – o.
I held my breath; there, at the pit of my stomach, and
I waited for my brain to play your name
So many times over that it lost all meaning.
Read the companion piece here
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Noah shook her head and sparks leapt off the ends of her hair. I could see them falling from across the room. They fell like fireworks and the cold in the air snuffed them out before they reached her shoes.
The girl speaking with Noah couldn’t see them. She was distracted by something, her mind eating up everything else in the room but Noah. The girl’s friends were gathered around the kitchen, talking to a boy. Her boy. The room held little bundles of people, all of them wishing to be in the next bundle over. But Noah didn’t seem to notice. She was never a good conversationalist. I could recite just about every conversation we’d ever had, they felt so nice, but that doesn’t mean she was good at conversation. She hid this fact by sipping her drink mid-sentence, relishing in the pauses this created. Anything to prolong her train of thought, anything to keep the other person mesmerised by her words. From across the room I could almost see the perspiration on her upper lip as she tried to make her language something magical. She was always too forced; too obvious; too far away from the person opposite. Someone should tell her that.
Still, the room orbited around her nucleus. Still, it seemed like the party was pulsing for her. Sitting by myself, on a fraying couch at the frayed edges, it seemed as if each post-teen, pre-adult, Converse-clad person in the room was a prop to Noah’s play. They greyed in comparison.
Now, the girl was training her eyes towards the boy, purposefully turning ignorant to Noah. She’d catch on soon; when she reached the end of her sentence. She’d catch on. It’s not like she couldn’t read people. I watched as, on cue, she let her last phrase fall out of her mouth. It lay squirming between them on the floor; a gap in the conversation.
The girl looked down, realising what Noah had done. She smiled gratefully at her before running over to her boy. He grinned smugly as she approached, knowing he could pull the girl across the room just by standing in it. And then Noah just stood there next to the fireplace, not even bothering to pretend that she hadn’t been left alone. I watched as her head circled the room, lazily. The sparks lit up slower this time, fizzing out as they fell past her shoulders. Her nonchalance was suffocating. She would only ever notice other people retrospectively, when she was finished with her own thoughts.
—
The first time we met it had been hot; the sky was the kind of heavy that smothered any suggestion of romance or affection and still I had stared at her. Her hair was longer then, down to her waist, and it lit up as she circled through the school yard. She was placed next to me in class. When she looked at me, I felt myself being swallowed up by the wall behind me. The first time she spoke to me, it was to ask how to spell the word ‘disintegrate.’ D-i-s-i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-e, I had replied. Di-sin-te-grate, she had said back, placing emphasis on sin. And then she laughed her strange, hollow laugh and our descent into romance began.
By the time that her love for me had started filtering through the layers of her mind, my love for her had already begun pooling at my feet. It leaked through the doors of her dad’s car as we drove over the speed limit down the highway, and my parents could smell it on me as I sat down to dinner each night. Walking through the city to go to the movies, or to the shops, she would hide our clasped hands behind her back. My heart swelled at our secret. When my desire to share us with the world got too much to bear I would draw the outline of her mother’s dress, of her makeup brushes, of her bed frame. One time, my art teacher stood behind me as I drew.
“Oh Abigail! How wonderfully violent,” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes at another tortured teenager in love. Three months into knowing Noah, I had memorised her moods, the times of day she liked to be alone, the moments before she retreated. I loathed those stretches of retreat, where her eyes glazed over and her mind shut itself off to the world. But I would persist; I stayed watching her and talking to her and touching her until she closed off completely and I could taste my aloneness. That’s what defeated us in the end; what di-sin-te-grated us. My aloneness. Her aloofness.
—
Eight months later and Noah was standing by the fireplace, her phone open to the notes app. I could tell by the way that she was typing and then pausing, typing and then pausing. She was writing a poem. It would go like –
My parents died today
Or so my empty house said.
Mother hanging in the laundry
And Father facedown on the bed.
Or perhaps –
The Wind howled and
roared at the sea and the
Sea roared back.
Later that night, she would sit at the edge of her bed, her hair glowing. She would have her phone on one knee and her notebook on the other, and she would copy the poem down under today’s date. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she didn’t do that anymore. I suppose it didn’t matter where she kept her poems. They weren’t any good now that they weren’t about me.
Read the companion piece here
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
You will love people who don’t love you
Hold friends close and then greet like strangers
Have chatter and laughter and nights all alone
Capricious tuition and shiny ball pens
This chapter begins where your old news ends
Leaving home is for big kids
So take your time
Listen to the lightning and the chaos
Every wonderful sound
There is choice and there is reason
Purpose in all change
Now is the moment
Where the world is more open
To nurse you and to hurt you
To teach you and propel you
Out toward the lights you cannot see
Into the life that has not yet formed
Pesky little eavesdroppers, their red bulbous heads nosing out of the dirt. Pompously round, suspiciously still. Like a snob with a secret.
I want to know the secret. So I’m crushing dried caps into my banana-berry smoothie.
Fly agaric, amanita muscaria, or the fairy toadstool if you don’t know your shrooms. Look for the big red hats with white freckles popping out under pine trees. Even an amateur like me can’t get it wrong.
Now they’re shrivelled and flaky in my fingers. The rotting odour digs down to my stomach, hurling my guts around. I gag and slam on the Nutri Ninja lid. Any second thoughts drown in the whirr of the blender.
***
“The girl treks, unabashed, over the mountain summit,” I murmur like a literary David Attenborough, “empty cup hanging limp in her hand, having slurped her way into imminent abandon.”
My guilty pleasure when I’m alone is self-narration. What else am I supposed to do, while I’m waiting for the yawning to begin: the tell-tale sign of the mushies taking hold. Nausea inches up from my stomach, which shoots me a suspicious glare: This, again?
I stumble along a walking track that is only just visible in the dead leaves. The Canberra bush is a smudge of thick eucalypts. A sign stands by the path: “Warning Poison Baits”. My bowels squirm. Why are these plants so difficult to digest? Mother Nature gifted us with psychedelics, only to chuck in the drawback of neurotic nausea. It’s no coincidence that the poison in fly agaric is the psychoactive component: you’ve got to work for your fun. Cheap thrills, huh? When Centrelink can’t afford you real drugs…
“She focuses only on the next footstep.” I’m breathing hard. Why did I do this? Don’t look back. My head hangs and my eyes droop down my face like a Dali painting. I yawn.
A yawn! Praise the Lord! My body is processing. Another yawn: I march on in victory and gulp down a retch, knowing it will subside soon. The aftertaste of fungi still clings to my tongue.
“She staggers like a public drunk, leaning on scribbly gums for support.” I chuckle at what I must look like. The landscape is coated in an ugly winter grey and it swamps me with its uniformity. The path shivers and shakes into a blur, then disappears into my huge yawn.
Voices crackle ahead of me and my eyelids fly open. People. “She was wholly unprepared to come across her own species,” I whisper.
Two young mothers appear through the trees sporting puffer jackets and leggings. They look disproportionately gigantic on the path, but that’s probably the pelopsia. One woman has a proud baby bump swelling through her lycra. I wipe at my ruffled hair and clutch the jumper trailing off my limbs, my mouth ajar in panicked paranoia.
“Hi.” The expecting woman nods at me on approach. She narrows her eyes. What are you on? She glances at her friend and purses her lips: Is she alright?
I blush. Pity is infinitely worse than disapproval. My facial muscles push into a smile.
“You doing ok?” the other woman says.
I gape and flap my hands. They’re doubting me; I need a reply. Good. Or, good, how about you? Maybe a I’m fine, thanks. How are you going? Enjoy your walk! The possibilities are insurmountable.
“Goo–” I gurgle and look up to face nobody. I whip around and see their ponytails bobbing down the path.
I take a sharp left and bolt from the path. Enough of that civilisation shit. I canter through dry bush, the bumpy ride matching my internal mayhem. It was only two small caps, I shouldn’t be at hallucination level. Nothing pretty, nope, just my vision hopping before my eyes like a game of jump rope. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. The top chunk of my visual field flicks to random images from memory: just now, a flash to a tree trunk I stopped at earlier.
Panting and scrunching my nose, I claw through leafless shrubbery, branches clipping at my dress. Perhaps the running was too much. My organs stir: my brain, my eyeballs, my stomach. Something is shooting from my centre up my throat.
I halt and heave. Berry smoothie spurts from my mouth. I hobble over the earth, eyes shut, a puppet to internal reflexes. I purge up another round of purple water, and another, returning the mushies to the dirt. Each hurl washes me with the relief that it only gets better from here. The tide subsides on my empty tummy.
I open my eyes. Eucalypts encircle me, all muscle and height, warning of their surveillance. “Sorry about the spew,” I cough.
“You’re sorry?” a voice crackles.
I stumble backwards and whip my neck around, but no one is there.
“Down here, halfwit! I didn’t die on my feet only to be puked on by an inebriated human.”
I squint at my vomit between my feet. A white lump lies in the dirt, beneath the puddle of berry water. I nudge it with my boot and dead leaves fall away from the chalky cranium.
“Bones?” I murmur. The skull glares up at me from its eye sockets, grinning from its jaw of neat teeth. Purple sludge drips off the crusty horns. Vertebrae are scattered like stars around it.
“Bones!” the voice screeches. “Is that all you think I am? And who do you think you are, staggering around desecrating graves?”
My eyes boggle. Maybe my self-narration was getting meta, but this didn’t sound like Sir David. The scene shifts a few centimetres and my vision flickers to an image of mushrooms for a millisecond – where did I see that? I push harder to concentrate but my perception is all out of whack.
“At this stage,” I exhale wearily, “the hallucinations are beyond psychedelic. The poison is hijacking the central nervous system.”
The skull lets out a throaty cackle. “Don’t talk poison to me, little girl. You know nothing of poison.”
My knees wobble as I squat at the grave site, glancing around me to check if anyone is watching. “I’d rather think I do,” I hiss as my vision strobes.
“Ha!” it grunts, a purple droplet rolling down its snout. “You don’t know of the piercing pain, the convulsions, the final breath. You don’t know of the agony of having your carcass torn apart by wild dogs. Nor the terror of rats scrabbling and gnawing your bones.” The skull gnashes its brown teeth. “Then to finally rest in peace, only for some tripper to vomit purple grot over your corpse.”
I stare at the decomposing carcass. Hair, blacker and thicker than mine, balloons beneath the bones like a dark cloud. The shadow of the animal that once was: a sheep or goat or deer. The air smells of rot.
It glares at me with its scraped out eyes. “You’re the one I feel sorry for. Don’t you know anything? Look closer, little girl.”
I grab a stick to poke at the matted hair. My face looms over the microcosm as I lean in and unstitch a piece from the dirt. Underneath, a tiny white nub is nosing its way out of the leaf litter. A faint bloom of rouge paints its skin.
“A baby fly agaric,” I say. A fleeting vision comes to me: colonies of baby mushrooms, silky white heads squirming up out of the earth. Their spores sprinkle, their tiny ears open, listening for rain.
I wait for a reply, but the skull is still and silent, smiling wide.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
I was trying to work out what was different about the day. It had been gnawing at me you know – you know that feeling like something’s twitching just outside of your peripherals, twitching on the ground but you can’t quite turn around to see what, or where, or how it started twitching in the first place? Yeah, that feeling had been gnawing at me all day as I walked around, dropping off some stuff at Genevieve’s and stopping by the café. Genevieve and I called it quits about a week ago. It was her idea, mind you, but I still felt bad about it, as if I’d run over her cat or something and had to go up to her front door and tell her about it myself. I still felt bad, even though it was like she had run over my cat. Anyway, maybe that’s the feeling I had that day, although it wasn’t quite so sombre as a dead cat. The twitching felt blunt and grating in the kind of way that melancholia wasn’t.
As I was passing through the city on my way back from Genevieve’s to drop off her things, I was feeling the twitching so strongly that I even turned and looked over my shoulder a couple of times. I know I looked ridiculous, looking around behind me like that. Usually I try to be cool about things, especially in places like the city where there are so many people watching. Anyway, as I was walking, I was trying to figure out where it had come from. There had been nothing unusual about this week, except that it had started with Genevieve and ended without her. I wasn’t all that bothered by it, except for the fact that I felt bad about it.
She wasn’t the sort of person you could write about. She was too unassuming, I suppose. I got a story published once, you know. That almost makes me a writer and a writer can’t be with someone that they can’t write about. I made that rule up, but it just makes sense, I guess. Anyway, by the time I’d started thinking about Genevieve again, I was halfway across George St and on my way to the train station. I walk with quite a determined stride, and I was so caught up in Genevieve and the fact that the twitching hadn’t stopped that I was walking rather too determinedly, and people started looking up from the ground and watching me as I crossed the street, except that I didn’t even notice until I’d finished crossing and then I remembered to slow down and look cool again. People are watchers in the city. They watch and watch until you start to feel your own goddam skin burning up. That was the good thing about Genevieve, I guess. You never felt watched when she was looking at you.
I was halfway down the stairs to Platform 3 by this point, and my hand was twitching against the railings. I wasn’t even thinking really, wasn’t thinking about where I was going or the fact that it was towards the train that led out west, back out towards Genevieve’s place. The linoleum was ripping up underneath my feet as I walked onto the train. That’s what it felt like anyway. It felt like my body was ripping at the train. Like it could tear the whole thing apart. Across the carriage a man kept folding and unfolding his newspaper, folding and unfolding like he was looking for something to distract himself. His suit was pinstriped, but in a sort of obnoxious way, as if he really wanted everyone to know that he was wearing a suit. I was looking real hard at it. I was looking too hard and two seconds too late I realised that I was staring. The man looked at me strangely, like he knew I was the sort to not watch people, but who slipped up every now and again and to kick themselves over it.
The train ride was too long, and by the halfway point I think the man had given up. He hung his newspaper hung limply over his knee. By this point, I was really starting to get into my own head. I kept telling myself, over and over: she won’t be home, she’ll be at work still. Over and over. Because even though I was on the train on the way to her house, I knew that if I saw her I’d start to feel bad about everything. It’s not like I didn’t already feel bad. She’ll be at work. At least that’s what I told myself, over and over. She won’t be home. She’ll be at work. Like watching her move around behind her curtained windows would be like seeing my cat being run over, and then again in reverse. Just to make certain that it was dead. She’ll be at work.
I was sort of tense by then, because the sun was starting to set which meant that maybe she would be home. She wouldn’t be at work. I tried not to think about her as I walked off the platform and onto the street. It’s funny, considering the fact that I’m nearly a writer and all and could hardly bring myself to write about her, I sure did think about her a lot. Her. Genevieve. It’s funny to write her name. It almost shouldn’t exist on paper. She’s too unassuming, I guess.
Anyway, by this point I was so caught up in not thinking about her that I barely even noticed that I was outside her apartment, across the street and to the left a bit. We always used to say goodbye here. She was the sort of girl to walk you to the door when you had to leave, and then walk you down the stairs and all the way across the street. Just to make sure you didn’t have to do it alone. The twitching had eased up. The twitching had eased up although I didn’t notice that until afterwards, because I was too busy noticing that her lights were on, and that they were framing two silhouettes in the window. I recognised Genevieve’s right away. I guess you start knowing people like that once you’ve been around them for long enough. The other silhouette wouldn’t detach itself from Genevieve’s, so I couldn’t make it out. I was really kicking myself now, telling myself that I shouldn’t have come, because I’d known that I’d feel bad if I did, and yet I still had to come and check up on her. As I turned away, I thought I saw her tilt her head towards the street. Maybe I’d imagined it. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Either way, I don’t even own a cat.