writings

the winter is unfamiliar to him, a creeping cold that gets inside so that nothing is warm anymore. he is a cold, lonely boy. an outer skin of ice begins to form around him. we watch as it swallows him slowly, beginning at his hands and feet. a frozen boy without love. the ice makes cracks where his joints move, it is ugly.

one night a girl made of fire comes so close he begins to melt. the feeling makes him think of love, love like a softly burning fire. he keeps his love quiet but lets himself melt, letting the water drip off his fingers and nose and knees. her warmth is so real he touches it deeply until it melts past the ice to his skin. the patches where his skin shows through look like islands, and these islands surrounded by ice begin to grow and grow until all his skin is warm again. he is a boy who is warm and with love in his heart. they hold each other tightly in a pool of water and fall asleep.

when he wakes the ice is beginning again. crawling up his ankles and wrists. he is alone. the boy wanders and wanders through the dark house, up flights of steps and into doors with broken handles. she is gone. the ice wanders with him, over him. he searches until the sun goes down and the ice has covered his eyes so that he cannot see properly. but then a beautiful warmth fills the room and she is there. melting him again, tenderly tracing the uncovered skin, kissing his hair. ‘will you love me?’ he asks as she kisses his mouth dry. ‘i’m afraid i love someone else’ she smiles. he pretends not to hear but then she is gone and he is alone and he knows she is not. 

the ice grows back thicker, colder each time. it is hard to breathe and move and the way he misses her makes him afraid. he doesn’t want to love a girl who loves another but still he waits, bearing the cold because he knows each day it will be gone again. she lays with him and holds his hands, carefully watching his face. ‘why did you do this? you are already warm and you are just making me colder each day.’ he says. she holds behind his neck and says ‘because you are special.’ she walks outside with him and she shows him the places she went to school and her grandmother’s house. then she leaves to be with her real love.

he runs far away, passing by the girl and her own boy’s love engraved into tree trunks and in love letters in the wind. he sees them kissing on the street and laughing in the snow. he closes his eyes and he sees the red of her. he spits, leave me alone, but only so quietly he can hear. because he knows he will come back. he will let her melt him and pretend to love him because it is all he has. and so on it goes. a violent affair. one night her red reflects in the water at his feet like blood. he thinks, she is killing me.

 he runs away, closing his eyes so tightly no light can pass through. eventually he opens them and gets used to being the frozen boy. he lives alone in a house by a tall, naked tree. then one day, skipping stones on the frozen lake he meets a girl with golden hair. she stands beside him and holds his frozen hand. ‘hello’ she whispers. her name is sommer.

my child is fluttering beneath my heart. a tiny butterfly with delicate wings. i feel like my stomach is a sleepy world, where everything is warm and everything trembles with the gentle rock of a mother’s heartbeat. he is only tiny and he cannot hear yet, but i sing to him. lullabies inspired by the way i imagine him. a blonde baby with a swollen bottom lip and round eyes. a boy that will grow freckles, long ringlet hair and an imagination. my boy.

i was a handsome girl. i would have been five, maybe six when my momma cut my long, red hair all off. i’d wanted to grow it to my toes and wear it in plaits so that one day a charming boy would come and i could hang it out the window and he could rescue me. but my momma didn’t want me rescued, she lifted it all up above my head in a fist and attacked it with the scizzors. i remember the sharp cutting sounds and then my hair floating softly and silently through the air, more dancing than death. i thought it looked like snow falling so i held out my tongue. my mother saw and smacked my head so that my teeth clamped down on my tongue and i tasted my blood like the taste of forks. it swelled around my mouth and dripped into my lap. and now i remember the sounds she made, a painful breath of hate followed by a sigh of love. my poor mother. the blood pooled in my mouth and my hair fell unevenly between my shoulders and ears for the next three days.

we all pretend we have freedom. sitting quietly on the train, wearing clothes in the summer heat, waiting in lines, marrying, replying to a ‘how are you?’ from a stranger with a variant of ‘good, thanks’ and maybe a line about the weather. 

but real freedom, the freedom that only truly exists to the mentally incapable who are too lost in their own worlds to be caged by ours, will always rush through our hands like sea and sand. 

he holds my hand as i walk the streets with my eyes closed. the cars thunder on beside us, the sun keeps on with the heat on my face, and the wind still yawns in my ears. 

from here, close eyed and with my fingers in his fingers, i can see.

we were so young and naive the year we almost died. we grew our hair long and we both regretted not disappearing that summer. that magnificent summer where the world was perfect and we knew nothing but love.

you would drive me in your father’s car (which was as beaten up as your mother but made music come alive) along picnic bay. the sun was so angry it made the roads look wet in the distance. the trees shied from it, bowing down towards the earth. we were on our way to your parents holiday house on the hill. it was a nice place where we’d often take hits in the pool and drown without sinking below the water. it was small but the windows were big and the light flooded the place. the bed was in the living room below a netted canopy to keep the bugs away. the first time you showed it to me all i wanted to do was fuck you in there, below the canopy. and i did. it was spectacular.

 in the beginning moments were all the different colours of the universe, stars were coming together in sticky clusters of dripping light and we were on top of it all. tracing each other’s lips and eyelids and being naked together. poking at the strings under our skin, pouring in liquid gold and feeling the bliss fill us. it was like we were made of the dust that hangs in the air lit by sun. glittering and everywhere at once. 

we’d kiss for stretches of time, with our fingers and our bodies. we’d gotten high off drugs before but getting high off love was something else. i saw the way you watched me, with your eyes big like they could swallow me up, like you never wanted to stop watching me. you told me you wanted to get married and have children and love me through the days my skin wrinkles and my hair falls out. i held my belly and imagined a little us and it made me happy. really happy like i’d never felt. this warm contentness like being a child and falling asleep with a belly full of hot chocolate in the winter. we hit up and talked about it all, made it real in our heads and wanted to live forever. 

one night we decided to have a party. we invited all our friends from the city and they came to us in the ferry. lots of pretty girls and pretty boys. all of us sleepless teenagers. we sat along the beach and lit a bonfire. it was alive. i danced. i let my fingers and arms make shapes in shadow on the shore. the night was warm so i took off my shirt and danced in my bra- you hated it but i didn’t have the faintest idea. the boys smiled and sang and i was swimming through the air. look at me i said to you, i am beautiful like you are and like everything. but you didn’t catch my eye and so i lay down by you, curled around you on the sand. do you love me? i said. and you nodded toward the sea. i didn’t say sea, i said me, i said but you didn’t find it funny. i felt too good to care so i pulled my fingers over the sand and felt every grain. you walked away into the water, away from me.

there is a boy, drunk on the bus, he must be 9, possibly 10, long limbed with a shaved head and large eyes. ADHD, one woman murmurs in denial. but i am so close i can smell it on his breath. his eyes are bright and blue like a cloudless sky. he stands in the aisle, dancing awkwardly to a beat the bus creates by hitting bumps and curves in the road. he shouts out wordlessly and falls and falls. come here, i say softly and so he does, a small child upon my breasts, amongst my arms and soothing voice. quiet now, shh darling. he is frightened rabbit and i hold him tight so that nothing will get to him. settle.

people slump against seat side, asleep as the night spills in through the windows. we are alone up here, below the stars and above the clouds. we are quiet up here, letting the engine speak for us long and slow. she says ‘flyyyyyyyyyyyy’ and we fly above the world. we’re running from the sun, all of us. diving into shadowed cloud and holding our eyes shut. 

i sit swallowing the wine in the air, to drunk myself to sleep because i am not yet old enough. the sleepy night sinks into the plane. i feel lit. we’re ugly floating heads in the sky, lit from above. reading our words from paper  books and blinking, breathing, watching people on five inch screens sell their faces. 

the sun is far behind, running from us too. i am never close enough to hear what the sun says as she flies. she is too firey to let us near. maybe that’s why we all run.

we’re so misplaced all the way up here. you don’t feel it until you close your eyes and tell yourself how far you are from the ground. it must be a hundred miles. when it makes me scared i remind myself i’m not scared to die. other people don’t seem scared of being so far from the ground, they trust the plane because it’s still singing ‘flyyyyyy’.  

even when i’m very tired i can’t sleep here. my head lolls and begins to fall and i stiffen and straighten and am wide awake again. i dream about planes crashing. it wouldn’t be nice to wake up here after one of those.

this august is the month i get my first period. i know it will happen, of course, but when it comes i am shocked. my womb pulls and tears and wrings itself out like it is wet clothing. it hurts me so much i can’t even cry. i think maybe it misses the blood. that bright, sticky mess i collect curiously across my fingers in the shower. maybe it didn’t want it gone. but it goes. i dig my nails into the bed, into my thighs and hips and i try to sleep the hurt away. i don’t sleep but after some time my womb stops aching.

i know i am a woman now. my nipples are swelling into breasts, slowly, and i want to make love to the swedish boy my father pays to feed the chickens when we go on holiday. it is a wonderful thought. i have only seen him three times now, but i have seen him enough to imagine his chest and the way he’d kiss. he has never seen me, i am scared i would be too young and too innocent and he would laugh. but i have seen the way boys look at my older sister’s body, and when i grow into mine he will want me.

in our backyard the flowers have melted into the earth and our gallahs are dying from heatstroke. i am eight and i have a love-hate relationship with the heat. my mother is still young, her hair reaches her elbows and she is always laughing. she buys a blow up pool from the store and we spend forever blowing it up with our breath. eventually when it is done i sit in there naked with the hose on and it slowly fills with cool water. i sing ‘mama, come in it’s so nice!’ and she takes off her clothes and we sit in the blow up pool together beneath the sun. our skin sizzles and cools, she is holding me so that i can feel her breasts at my back and her burning face against the side of mine. she tells me ‘baby, i love you so much i could fill the ocean with it’ and i tell her that all the water in the world is my love- the seas, rivers, rain, baths. i imagine all the water alive. she kisses my forehead many times and we stay in the pool until the sun no longer troubles us and our toes look like prunes.

this is the summer of unusual happenings.

it begins with granddad. he is on the veranda one day after dinner when suddenly a possum throws itself from a tree’s branch and begins climbing across the railing. me and mama are in the kitchen washing dishes and listening to the radio but i can still hear it land and hook its claws in the wood. you have to imagine granddad, he is very tall but he is the most gentle giant you would ever meet. he is always saying ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ and ‘look how pretty my girls are!’- though mostly he is quiet. this time, when i strain my ears i hear this:

‘mr. possum, how are you this evening?’

‘little hungry stanley, but otherwise quite dandy’

i look at mother with very wide eyes and she laughs like i am just pulling a face to be silly. i put a finger in front of my lips so she hushes and i keep listening.

‘would you like some mango or an apple?’

‘very kind of you stan, but i couldn’t let you do that’

‘oh it’d be my pleasure, always good to help out an old friend’

granddad comes inside and grabs an apple and i stare at him in disbelief. he looks at me like maybe i’ve gone a little crazy then he smiles at mama and she smiles back. the door closes. crunching noises.

‘good apple sir, good apple! red delicious? no, don’t tell me! pink lady? one of those exotic buggers from new hawaii?’

‘can’t say i know mr. possum. but i think we both know there are more worrying matters at hand.’

now their voices are getting softer and i am trying with all my might to hear them above the sound of ‘lucy in the sky with diamonds’. 

‘yes, i know. i’ve been listening to the moon and it seems dreadful. absolutely terrible.’

‘but we can still-‘

‘i should believe so. but if this happens-‘

‘we won’t let it will we? all we have to do is find the rumblebeast in the hunter valley before-‘

suddenly i drop the dish i am drying and it shatters into a billion starred pieces on the galaxy of the kitchen floor. there is all silence. i can hear the possum scurrying away. and i want to cry out ‘before what granddad!’ but when i run out there he is gone too. and mum is cross at me for running away when there is so much broken glass everywhere. 

‘stay on the veranda and don’t come in until i tell you so’ mama says before i can go looking for him. an apple balances on the railing, it has tiny teeth marks all over it. i lean over and look over the front yard, but there is no sign of him. i take a bite of the apple and it tastes funny but i’m eight and i don’t really care. i watched the trees and their whispers sound uneasy. i am worried for the moon, the possums, mama and granddad. i’m even a little worried about the tumblebeast- even though i don’t know who he is yet.

when we were younger the world was a film. i remember my father taking me for drives in the night. my eyes were sleepy, blurring the street lights into many suns. i followed them to their deaths far behind us and i pressed my fingers against the cool glass, wanting to feel the outside air. we drove through the city and watched in awe the buildings standing miles above us. so high clouds circled the tops and you could touch the sky from the roof. it was all so foreign and interesting. i watched the road below and the shop windows and gardens and thought, i’m really in all these places, it isn’t just a movie playing on the windows of the car.

something precious sleeps against my breast, a baby with a head of thick curling hair. her round lips sigh and yawn and it is the sound of the most fragile wind. her eyelashes are tiny, fluttering leaves. from seed a flower is grown.

with her birth i am reborn into a world of blushing cries. a world where nightmares of her suffering keep me from sleeping. a world of an all-consuming love, felt in every bone and every cell. it is watching the future unfurl and being responsible for all of its beauty.

i trace my nipple and the tiny hills, goosebumps risen from the dirt-rose. i imagine my breast plump with red wine, red rivered streaks to my stomach from where the wine has dripped and not been drunken.

we are a beginning with no end. a pair of hands clung tightly, fingers between fingers. we are the soft gums of the mouth of the world, clinging to ever-rotting teeth that loosen and fall. 

we were snorting lines off of our child’s back when we were sixteen. after the novelty wore off we snorted it from a large broken piece of mirror. i always found it kind of ironic, because it’s meant to be bad luck. well we were made of bad luck. we fucked bad luck and ate bad luck for tea. 

i’ve never done heroin. kane says it wouldn’t be any good for me. says it’d suck all the life from my eyes and make me kill sofia rose, so i don’t want it. but sometimes when he melts into the armchair like he is ice in a hot bath, i want it too. one day i thought he’d died and i was fucking happy. not that i don’t love him, but i don’t want to see him go to heroin heaven everyday of my life and not be able to join. kane says he’ll let sofia go with him. he says to sofia ‘wanna come with daddy to heaven’ and she says ‘daddy, daddy’  over and over and he takes it as yes. but i don’t let him put the needle under her skin. why the fuck should she be allowed if i can’t? (and to be honest i’m scared she’d die).