Consider?
Do you mean: how long did I fight to move not a bit?
Do you mean: how long did I hold my breath in the hope that my silence would drown out the call?
Do you mean: how long did I stand with the knife in my hand, with obsidian whispers filling my head?
| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |
She opens her eyes the day after she died.
The mattress squeaks as she rolls to face the window, feathering the midmorning light across the peeling, empanelled walls. The room, like she, is weathered and worn; it, like she, is warming and waking; it, like she, has recently had its vacancy replaced with a new ache.
She reaches down: her stomach is firm, unwounded; beneath, only a simple hunger, and the fading memory of a knot.
And yet…
She feels her chest and arms, touches her hips and thighs; she caresses her new armour, and the silk and marble sing in response… but, far from a battlecry or a song of victory, it is a lament. Each stroke is a memory, each touch a reminder, of her old flesh: raw, yet numb; heavy from her submarine seclusion.
She leaps from the bed, imagining it the source of this stain upon her new form. Fear slices through her and reties the knot in her stomach.
How can she still feel it? She had felt it slide away, heard it drop. It had been her keeper, her prison: how could any part of her miss its torment?
And now, here, it has tainted her new oasis. She feels the slamming of doors, of possibilities closing around her until, once again, she is reduced to a single path.
She runs, her skin branded with shame; her feet, with sand and dirt. She runs, without the song and mystery of night. She runs, bare and burning, driven by the siren song of her lost flesh. Its notes echo in the loss of the vacancy; they harmonise with the plaintive melody of her newness, her hubris.
Here: the trees, the swamp, the grass, the garden. Again, she stands at the end of the garden bed. Again, she steps inside.
Here: her embarrassment. She reads the lines and lies carved into her: ears to heart, heart to mind, mind to vacancy. She is repulsed by its inertness, its incapacity: she will thrive and grow, full of hope and abandon; it will simply rot.
And yet…
Here: on her arm, the same brand; on her face, the same lines; on her breath, the same lies. And in her chest, the one song, the quieter voice beneath the all-consuming quiet, cast across the void between her.
She sits, and holds herself in her arms.
Here: the weight of silence and vacancy, of the betrayal of her body.
She sits, and she bears it.
There is something in the smell of cut grass and gasoline,
Of petrol clinging to the skin like paspalum.
It is the perfume of bruised knees and grazed cheeks,
Of love and unkindness before they had names.
It is a taste, too:
The metallic bitterness of dirt and blood;
The ragged burn of throat and limb.
For sacred and profane are both set apart,
Are both admired and despised,
Inspired and resigned.
Here, from cracked pavement: a weed;
Here, from crumbled mortar: a miracle.
Bound by the high grass,
We winnow while the chaff blooms.
| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |
Her mind had broken quickly; her spirit took a little longer.
Each day, the minutes ground into her, though she gained neither refinement nor utility. She was pressed, drowned, in the quiet expanse of deprivation, gasps of panic the only incision into the muted depths. Life was at a distance, above the uncertain tide: warped in the ripples of fear, or hidden behind the silver of her own distorted reflection.
But, despite these grand images, her reality was cruelly anodyne. Another day, another coffee, a train, a cry, work, eat, scream, sleep, wake, another fucking day, another fucking coffee… all colour and spark reduced to splintered, stinging mundanity.
Surely banality was inhospitable to the wiles and whims of insanity?
Ever present was the cyclical syllogism of domestic denial: justice meted out suffering, and suffering was just. Suffering was diffuse, distant: the logic comfortingly unfalsifiable. Any instance that was worryingly acute, close at hand, could be dissected and diagnosed, removed from the etheric world of karma and sin and sectioned off as a clinical exception to the natural order.
She had become inured to it: what was suffering to a vacancy?
And so it had grown.
Her mind drifted ever more skyward to escape the earthly churn of hopelessness. Annexed into the reality of others, she poured her brokenness into the mill with renewed fervour, smiling, laughing, until it was indistinguishable from ragged sobs.
She had been making a coffee (another fucking coffee) when her spirit had given up the fight. Her mind had snapped back to earth, then been absorbed by the enormity of the vacancy.
How ordinary a moment: the prey realises the shape in their periphery is upon them; that they have been staring at the one place it was not; that all is lost.
And yet.. the vacancy spoke in a calm and quiet voice. While her mind had careened into chaos and her body had smeared into waste, it had been planning. It held her, and stroked her hair, and whispered:
It is possible to die; and, it is possible to live.
It was all that made sense; it was all she could do to survive.
The grinding stopped.
| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |
She heard the dull thump of flesh behind her, but she did not look back.
She walked, naked of skin, of past, of connection, all sloughed away with the decisive turn of the knife, still clenched in her stained hand.
She walked naked, yes, but cloaked in the viscera of night, teasing her tendons and soaking into her bones: a new, nocturnal membrane.
She walked, propelled by the loss of her incarceration. She was the legacy of the night: a quite vesper, a carnyx cry across a dusky moor, a midnight howl.
She walked, metamorphic, blistering with the tactile tales transmitted from the darkness by her new skin. The sky burned with myth, her ears with stellar siren song. The night called into her, and pulled the vacancy from her reeds.
And then she falls silent.
Around, she sees eucalypt and wattle scrub; she feels sand and dirt between her toes. Ahead, the crunch of tyres on bitumen, the flicker of high beams.
Her clothes fall back around her skin, her bag around her shoulder; the knife aches in her grip, leaden and profane. She gasps at the air like blood. Somehow, clothed, she is more exposed; lost from the current of night, her mind and shame return.
Step two.
She had an address, a name, picked out, but all that remains is an impulse for shelter, an impelling recollection of fire and famine, deeper than will.
She drops the knife in her bag and starts walking.
| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |
The party was already raucous when she arrived; already, she felt the camphor of dishonesty diffuse from her. She pulled her jacket more tightly around her, declined a cursory direction to the guest room to deposit it and her handbag, and made her way to the kitchen.
She picked a glass of red and surveyed the scene as an overly intricate diorama. The foreground: a bar laden with comestibles and libations. Behind: the couples and loose gatherings of fluctuating size and attention, talking and dancing; a rogue singer (hastily seated, handed water). Beyond: a tapestry of darkness and shimmering smoke, punctuated by flecks of orange stars.
Her mouth twitched, twisting a cord in her stomach with caustic yearning. She saw herself drift into the tableau: she would smile and laugh (the stench of her subterfuge unnoticed, or at least unmentioned); she would drink too much, casting shards of incoherent insight among the detritus of banter around her; she would cry; she would go; and, tomorrow, she would wake up with the same vacancy.
No.
She felt, suddenly, enlivened by her deceit, empowered by her unwelcomeness. She, the background extra, the incidental guest, would usurp centre stage for a spontaneous, enrapturing final act.
She gasped, and realised her hand had slipped into her bag and around the knife. She let go and pulled a sheet of paper towel from a nearby roll.
The picture in her head was unequivocal: clearer than memory, heavier than though. For months, it had been growing: first, a quiet whisper among many, then louder and more forceful, overpowering and cannibalising its fellows until, in the absence of dissent, it ascended from fear to reality. It was immanent in very moment: each thought, each action, deferred to it for legitimacy until, inevitably, she was here.
“… didn’t even see you arrive and oh fuck, are you alright?”
Here. She snapped her head to Felicity and pulled up a smile. “Yes, sorry, I accidentally… Anyway, I’m fine. Sorry. I was going to come find you once…” She lifted the scrunched paper towel, briefly inspecting her palm, and proffered it as evidence.
Felicity tapped a cupboard with her knee, revealing a bin. “I’m so glad you could make it. I know things have been crazy, for both of us.”
“No, of course. I wanted to say goodbye.”
“What? You just got… I mean, didn’t you just get..?”
“No, yes, I mean… I wanted to come see you, I just can’t stay long is all.” She threw the paper towel in the bin.
Felicity tilted her head and furrowed her brow. She reached out and squeezed her arm. “Are you sure you’re OK? I mean, we’ve got so much food, and you can stay the night if you want to drink.” Her foot tapped the cupboard closed.
“No, thank you, really. It’s been a week and I just wanted to say hi.” She grasped Felicity’s other hand and squeezed it, smiling. “Anyway, I should…” She let go.
“OK. If you’re sure. Let’s do coffee this week, yeah?” Felicity pulled her in for a hug, pecked her cheek, then was gone.
A shudder trembled up from her stomach to her fingers, and teased at her eyes and mouth. She breathed deeply: it could wait.
A side door lead her back into the night; it was colder than she’d remembered. The park was only a short walk, but her fervour had mellowed, so she meandered, dazed. She realised she had not said goodbye. In lieu of Felicity, she farewelled the footpath, the street sign, this car, that tree.
The vacancy stirred.
It was just a few trees and a strip of swampy water, but she had always loved this park. A neighbour had, a few years ago, begun a protracted land war with the “grass supremacists” of the local council and put in a small, but growing, flower bed. She stepped into it, feeling the leaves and the few blooms coaxed forth by the recent, unseasonable heat.
She reached for the knife, this time with purpose. In its blade, she saw the garlands and stars, the water and dirt, her sadness and resolve. Then it turned, and saw the darkness within her.
And, as her body fell, she turned and walked off into the night.
| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |
She leans back and feels the door close behind her with a heavy click. She opens her eyes and, breathing in the nicotine-stained air, takes in the motel room: the torn fly screens and greasy windows; the carpet furrowed into paths (door to bed, bed to bathroom, bathroom to couch); the creeping stain on the cornice and ceiling; the industrial furniture flailing at domestic comfort.
She places her purse on the table beside the door then, reconsidering, removes from it the knife. It surprises her: perhaps she had forgotten she had it; perhaps it was a different woman who stowed it away. In the artificial dusk of the room, it is a beacon. She hurriedly smothers it in the anonymity of her handbag, casts her purse in behind, then drops it in a gap between the couch and wall. For now they, as she, will remain hidden.
The motel is an occult space, stuck, like the blinking clock radio, in a permanent witching hour. The attendant had, if anything, been merely distracted by her arrival, as though she were simply an interruption to his true (higher) purpose. He had dispatched her brusquely, with a cracked plastic keycard and a rote speech on check-out times that, as she, had faded into irrelevance as they mutually eased themselves away from the counter.
She sits down on the bed and stares deeply into the peeling floral wallpaper garlanding the pine panelling. Her body is tense and twisting, but her mind is resolutely blank. Here, in disrepair and neglect, she is, herself, occluded, illuminated only by the jaundiced street light, fading her into the pallor of the cheap, polyester sheets.
Here she is, then: step two. Finally hidden, finally irrelevant. Her mouth and brow tighten as her eyes glance quickly to and from the shadowed nook beside the couch. Finally (she sighs) dead.
