a.s.patric.Ink

Everything Hungry

2012-01-28T08:02:00.002+11:00

A roomfull of people rising from their seats, making a racket. Call it applause.

“Thisis lovely, wonderful,” Edna O’Brien says to the crowd. “When Maureen Stapletonwon an Academy Award, she said she’d like to thank everyone she’d ever met. Ishould probably limit that to Munster… I’d like to thank this wonderfulfestival for doing so much to stimulate the dying flower called literature.”

Thegall is stunning. It takes a moment to take it in.

Apparently,winning 35,000 Euros (a fraction of what the award will bring back soon insales) does not alleviate her literary pessimism. And she makes a point ofthanking almost no one or perhaps I’m missing something. While it might seemthat there have never been as many readers, as many books, as much fervour forliterary expression, I get the feeling Edna O’Brien means capital L Literature when she mourns that sadwilting flower the gnomes of Munster are tending to with their diligent care.

Am Iforgetting a golden era of literature when commuters on trains or paddlesteamers discussed the finer points of Proust? An idyllic period where high artwas universally applauded, lauded and rewarded? I find it impossible to imaginea time when the world was not far more difficult in every way for a writer. Yetthe pessimism grows more virulent. It’s hard to judge when attempting to gaugethe moods of different eras but this modern pessimism is so toxic that even at thehigh point of a career, a writer as successful as O’Brien, winning theprestigious Frank O’Connor Award, can do nothing but mourn the sad passing ofour global literary ambition. It’s a shame she presents her Munster gnomes thekind of cliché a tweeting teenager would be embarrassed to use.

Is theflower dying Edna? Maybe it’s because country gardens with hedges and rows oflavender have fallen out of fashion and the quaint glass houses we used tobuild in the corner of manor grounds for our delicate flowers to bloomfor a season are a tad too tedious for the modern writer and reader. There’s ajungle of literature now. The flower that can snatch a lazy bee out of the noisyair is the kind that I want to ‘stimulate’. Despite thepessimism, the flower of literature will continue to thrive like everything hungry.

Love and Reading in Las Vegas

2012-01-26T07:33:00.000+11:00

Thanks to KNPR Nevada for inviting me to read Las Vegas for Vegans on Las Vegas Radio. I'm especially grateful to David Becker, the host of State of Nevada, for the great interview.

Las Vegas for Vegans on Las Vegas Radio

2012-01-26T07:06:00.000+11:00

Las Vegas for Vegans Interview with A.S. Patric on Las Vegas Radio KNPR

The Brute

2012-01-14T09:27:00.000+11:00

A coin goes in. The fire engine rocks back and forth with a smallspeaker producing the sound of a siren cutting through traffic. The seatvibrates and lights flash. She is turning the small steering wheel, delightedby the fantasy of an emergency. The fire engine ride will end too soon. Thegirl will need another coin. Those who come to the market are never preparedfor the brevity of the machine. A final coin goes in for a second ride. As themachine begins, just when the baby girl is happiest, a woman with a cane stopsbeside them and asks, “Is it my turn yet?” She makes a comment about howdelighted the little one looks. The child’s father smiles, (which might also bedescribed as a brutish grimace) as the woman walks away because he didn't catch the joke and can't think of what to say. His thoughts: a lumbering cow like you would never fit — using acane to deal with your fat buckling legs, you’d never even be able to clamber orgrapple your way up onto the fire truck. There’s a few seconds left of theride. All expression leaves his face as he watches his child and he becomes theshadow of her joy. When the ride ends he wishes he brought more coins.

secrets of slumber

2012-01-10T10:41:00.000+11:00

we gather around DNAfires within the paradisiacal caves of our bones, speaking in the babblingtongue of divine messengers, receiving instructions for resurrection, salvationand eternal sleep, but we have interest only in the secrets of slumber

yes, we're very excited

it's also a bit of anordeal

exhaustion oftenproduces euphoria

joy sometimes collapsesin a heap

on the couch or at anopen fridge

we go into survivalmode for the first few months, living in an elemental state of humanity, usingthe modern world only for its electricity, the occasional burst of music andfor lamplight at the three o’clock feed

Las Vegas for Vegans in The Sydney Morning Herald

2012-01-08T15:50:00.001+11:00

The Sydney Morning Herald have published my

Ned Kelly Award winning story

Las Vegas for Vegans.

You can now read the story online. I had to edit it down
to a third its size and cut out the profanities
but I really like this version as well.

Hope you click over and enjoy the story.

SMH: Las Vegas for Vegans

Guns N'Coffee

2011-12-25T09:30:00.000+11:00

You can now read my short story 'Guns N'Coffee' at Verity La.

'Guns N'Coffee' is the most recent winner of the Booranga Short Story Prize and is also published in
Issue 22 of fourW.

The link below:

Guns N'Coffee at Verity La

B O M B S The Book

2011-12-16T09:36:00.000+11:00

* * *

In the tradition of legendary American Publisher One Story

PAN Magazine have published a stand alone edition

featuring a single piece--> my short story B O M B S

* * *

You can buy a copy online at PAN Magazine

or stroll into your local Readings book store

* * *

From PAN HQ:

Overland review of The Rattler & other stories

2011-12-14T06:41:00.000+11:00

You can read the latest review of The Rattler & other stories on thelink below.

Overland Book Review

I’m very grateful to Overland Literary Journal,and the reviewer, Mark William Jackson.

“Each story in this collection has provenitself in the best literary journals in Australia: Wet Ink, Quadrant,Going Down Swinging, Etchings and others. Together they highlighta mammoth talent, and, without hyperbole, AS Patric’s name should be used oftenwhen referring to great Australian contemporary writers.”

Life on Crumbs

2011-12-11T07:31:00.001+11:00

The only way to write anovel is to give it everything you have, so if things get quiet on thisblog, I hope you'll understand that I'm hard at work on the final draft of anew book called Life on Crumbs.

It’sa novel set in Bayside Melbourne and explores the lives of a refugee couplecoming to Australia in the late 1990’s.

Itstarted off as a phrase that drifted through my mind one morning: Life onCrumbs. It kept growing beyond the short story I thought it was going to beand is now well in excess of 60,000 words. Which is to say, the manuscript isalmost finished, so I’m not signing off for a few years—but it’s been ‘almostfinished’ for too long now.

Recommended by The Book House

2011-12-03T07:59:00.001+11:00

"I receive many review copies of newAussie fiction from unknown authors, but very few are as well written andentertaining as this book. This guy has serious talent. The Rattler & otherstories by new and emerging Author, A.S. Patric, is a cracking read." Robert Holt, Managing Director of The Book House.

About The Book House:

The Book House has been a supplier of books since 1979. Our heritage is as a supplier of high quality books to schools and public libraries. We have been living and breathing books for over 30 years. Infact we thought as we know so much about books, we should make our books available to book lovers and families all across Australia.

We hope you visit us regularly, and support us. We strive to deliver great books along with the best of our knowledge.

We thank you for visiting our site.

Robert Holt

Booranga Prize 2011

2011-11-26T07:42:00.001+11:00

I was delighted to discover yesterday that I'm the winner of the Booranga Prize for my short story Guns N'Coffee, published in the latest fourW. Thanks to editor David Gilbey, who wrote in his editorial that the selection panel was quick to 'arrive at an unequivocal consensus'. I feel grateful to the fine people at the Booranga Writers' Centre.

I hope you keep an eye out for Issue #22 of fourW.

Bookseller+Publisher Interview

2011-11-24T06:46:00.001+11:00

Best of 2011

2011-11-18T07:30:00.001+11:00

My picks for the best collections of stories 2011 are now up on the Readings website.

Readings Best Short Stories 2011

Thanks to the lovely Jessica Au for inviting me to put the list together. I really had a lot of fun reading and researching.

It might be surprising that 'research' was even necessary, but if I was to put together a personal list of top 10 collections, it might have included a few collections not released in 2011.

A little known collection by Amanda Davis called Circling the Drain, a five volume set of Henry James' complete stories that The Library of America puts out, The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen, an Everyman hardback of Frank O'Connor's stories, The Weight of a Human Heart by Ryan O'Neill (slated by Black Inc. for release in 2012), Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, a gorgeous new hardback edition of all F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories just released by Penguin Classics, and Raymond Carver's Cathedral.

The last of which might might be especially astounding to other lovers of the short form. For years I've been disregarding Carver, when it was more a loathing for the mutilation Gordon Lish was responsible for that was at issue.

Cathedral was Carver's separation from Lish and what can only be called a detrimental collaboration. Well for me. Clearly many love Carver/Lish. The short story 'Cathedral', which closes the collection, is certainly the best story I've read in 2011.

The Sydney Morning Herald reviews The Rattler

2011-11-13T17:56:00.001+11:00

"Stories with a sharp contemporary edge."

The Rattler & other stories was reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday by Kerryn Goldsworthy

Two reviews in the same weekend! I'm ecstatic.

I've attached an image to the right

if you'd like to click and read

The Age reviews The Rattler & other stories

2011-11-13T07:14:00.001+11:00

"Provocative and involving." The Age.

The Rattler & other stories was reviewed in The Age yesterday.

Life&Style / Fiction / Pick of the Week
by Cameron Woodhead

I was delighted to get another good review.

Have a read.

Full-Scale

2011-11-06T09:30:00.000+11:00

She was a ballerina when she was seventeen—until she destroyed herknee. She was a whore for three years in her early twenties, (but she has toldme about neither of these things). There’s a picture that was taken of her,dancing. From a full-scale ballet.

Las Vegas for Vegans (Behind the Scenes)

2011-10-30T10:00:00.000+11:00

The article below originally appeared in The Column, on the Spineless Wonders site. Bronwyn Mehan asked me what went into the writing of Las Vegas for Vegans, the winning story of this year's Ned Kelly Awards in the S.D. Harvey short fiction category. I thought I'd share the article with my INK readers.

* * *

I spent years reading prose that was lit up with insights andrevelations. Dense with psychological verisimilitude. Exposing all the nuancesof our most precious relationships. Years with tortured prose that demanded akind of attention and dedication not seen outside of the study of physics,linguistics and theology.

It occurred to me that this is not why I started reading or writing.That there was something more basic. There was a spell that literature cast overanother person’s mind. It was what I was really looking for as a reader, and awriter. It’s the creation of a compelling reality we can call narrative butit’s nothing more complicated than the need for pure storytelling.

I became fascinated with books that compelled us to turn pages. Crimewriting is the purest of narrative forms in this respect. There’s no othergenre, (including the literary fiction genre) that focuses more resolutely onthe great events and challenges of our daily lives. It might seem absurd whenlooked at from the perspective of suburban lives, entertained by the violenceand mayhem of Crime, but our lives are always on the verge of death, no matterhow comfortable they may seem. Even in regular workplaces the day-to-day canfeel life-and-death.

I hadn’t consciously decided to write a genre Crime story before Iwrote ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ recently. It had already started forming as anidea on the page before I found out about the Ned Kelly award for shortfiction. I knew they gave out the award of course, for novels and the like, butit gave my emerging story incentive and focus.

Once I’d decided to have a go at the award, I wanted to write a genrepiece that would fit a classic definition. I wanted to write something with aterrible murder and a surprise ending. I wanted to have a hit man and aprostitute and I wanted them to dwell in a harsh, gritty, ‘noir’ landscape. LasVegas was the perfect place to set my story.

As soon as you start writing something like this, you find thatclichés are not just risks of lazy sentences and poorly realised ideas, but arethe actual figures you are playing with. There’s simply no way you can write ahit man or whore that hasn’t been done before. A protagonist in a crime storywill be defined by the crime, but all you can do is tweak a few features in thebio.

Ian Rankin’s John Rebus loves fashionable rock music, and RobertCrais’ Elvis Cole practices yoga. Features like these seem ridiculous inisolation, but the authors are desperately attempting to escape cliché. WithJames Lee Burke, his character Dave Robicheaux is an alcoholic, ex-soldier,disillusioned cop, etc, etc. James Lee Burke is a superb writer and it’s allbelievable and compelling, but where he really distinguishes himself is in thedetailed evocation of New Orleans; its landscape and culture. So while crimewriters play with clichés from beginning to end, they have to find somethingunique in the way they fulfil genre expectations.

In ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ I wasn’t interested in the casinos, thedecadence, or any of the clichéd perspectives of Vegas, though I do play withthe post card images we all have of ‘Sin City’. I became entranced with theidea of a fabulous palace in the middle of a desert. Emotionally, it was theperfect place for my character, but also for myself. Anyone who practices artwithin our culture, with its corporate culture and social materialism, itspredictable obsessions with sport and cargo-cult fascination for celebrity, isliving within an artistic desert. ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ is a term that sums upwhat it feels like being a writer in Australia at the moment.

But to be honest, we go blindly into these narrativestructures searching for other, less tangible details. So for me, what I wasreaching for is this sense that some of us live in the light of ideals (a noblesense of caring for the planet and its life forms as passed down to my herofrom his parents), or within a sense of order and justice (the virtuous won'tget terrible diseases and/or kill themselves in utter defeat) for basicfunctions of humanity (being a husband and father) and without these ‘lights’the world becomes an endless afternoon stretching into evening.

As unfashionable asthey are, ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ even has a moral to the story: tend to life inall its details, nourish your soul, care for those around you as far as that'swithin your power to do so. I know, a little touchy-feely, but I really dobelieve we live by the lights of things such as ideals, compassion andconnection. I’m not sure if I’d recommend any of these things to writerswanting a long career in crime writing but that’s what went into writing ‘LasVegas for Vegans’.

Minerva Blues

2011-10-27T08:09:00.000+11:00

Minerva looks exactly like a fly these days.That’s what happens when no one prays to you—diminishment and disgrace. Evenso, (and it’s certainly a credit to her former dignity and prestige) thegoddess does not drone or buzz as she flies through my window. She whistles atune called Emily Dickenson Blues,and I hum along for a few bars, before I swat her down into a splotch of inkblack insect afterlife.

You can’t kill divinities as easily as this,I know, but there is a brief moment in which I feel Olympian in the scope of myunderstanding. I lean forward and peer into the entrails of the dead fly andthe cosmos reveals its secrets. And yes, everything is very, very clear, but Irealise that I have already forgotten the lovely tune Minerva was whistlingonly a few moments ago.

I spend years trying to recall how it goesand live with my windows wide open—even at the height of Summer. Mosquitoes ofMesoamerican lineage leave a brail of bites across my flesh but I cannot readAztec or Inca. All I know about them is that they were once high priests whohad a surgical taste for the human heart.

I gather with these late night whisperers ofblood hunger, out by a streetlight that never sees any traffic. I suppose ithas been put here for people like me, wandering around half-naked, on overlyhot evenings. A moth flutters down from the yellow plastic illumination and tellsme it used to visit the moon when all things were still possible. Now we can't even see the stars. I give themoth my lapel to feed upon. Later, it tells me about the many wayscivilisations reach their natural ends.

I shoo the moth away and know that I willsoon forget its revelations. My memories are too many and so they turnthemselves into fireflies. They drift away in a mass and for a moment theyresemble the cosmos swirling into the opposite of infinity. I know I shouldhave found a jar and filled it with these lights, (kept a few recollections) but it’s too late.

The street light will continue to cast out alow yellow glow, yet now there’s nothing else. I cling to the pole and listento a joke the hungry mosquitoes tell about how the only difference between Ovidand Michael Jackson was the glittery glove. They tell this joke again and againand again. Eternal repetition is a favourite punishment in our part of theunderworld.

The Rattler & other stories Launch

2011-10-23T07:54:00.000+11:00

Thanks to everyone who came on Friday night and helped launch
The Rattler & other stories.

I'm delighted I could share one the best evenings of my life with my family and so many great friends.

Best wishes to you all and thanks again.

Bookseller+Publisher Reviews The Rattler

2011-10-21T07:34:00.000+11:00

Bookseller+Publisher

November 2011

"A fresh and vibrant new voice."

Click on the above image to read the first review

of The Rattler & other stories

Many thanks to Editor, Andrea Hanke

and Reviewer, David Cohen

at Bookseller+Publisher

for the Top Picks selection,

for the interview and positive review.

The Rattler & other stories Launch

2011-10-14T19:44:00.002+11:00

The Day

2011-10-12T07:18:00.000+11:00

I tell myself, nothing more can happen today. It is late. There isonly sleep. Dreams are possible though I feel like the nights turn me upsidedown, and shake, making sure all my pockets are empty. No doubt I’ll wake feelingdiscombobulated. There were times when dreams fed me. Surprised and frightenedand delighted. Leaking into my brain as though paradise had cracked. God and Iare not in communication now. I could put my palms together. It won’t changeanything. He no longer sends me updates on the state of my soul. All powerful,sure, but I wonder about memory. Mine as much as anyone’s. What happenedyesterday? What happened last week? What happened when you were an eleven yearold child? Did the phone ring at two o’clock in the morning? What did youmother say when she was given the news? You were right beside her and you couldsmell the warmth of bed lingering in her nightgown but you don’t remember herwords or the contents of your head as the clock trickled away into darkness.The day tastes exhausted and all my air is exhaled. I’m sure that outside, theonly thing moving is the washing on the line. My wife’s bras and blouse and mybaby’s tiny pants and miniature overalls and all our bath towels. I should havebrought the washing in. It might rain tonight. The weather report said therewas a chance that clothes on washing lines in our region would (on the radar) resemblea weather pattern somewhere it didn’t matter, like the centre of the Pacific,where there are no islands and nothing could possibly happen. Even the fishjust drift in the water as if they were socks, handkerchiefs and panties. Thewhole of Sydney might sink like Atlantis in one of my dreams. My eyes havedrowned and I’m not sure how far away the surface is. I shake my head andrealise I’m still at my desk. The day is gone and there’s nothing left in mebut the desire for just one more lovely thing to happen.

A Heart in the Shape of Miranda July

2011-10-08T07:35:00.000+11:00

Whenyou start reading my stories, I want you to keep going, non-stop, even if yourbaby is crying in the background or you’re in the middle of a terrible war andthe lights keep cutting out because of bombs dropping in your neighbourhood.

Please, please, don’t be like me, buying collections by fabulous short story writers—falling inlove with them after a few stories and then moving on to the next infatuationand forgetting someone as lovely as Miranda July for years on end. Mirandawould be distressed to have seen that until last night my book mark never madeit past page fifty of No One Belongs HereMore than You.

Iwant to tell Miranda, (in writing, so it’s official) it was nothing personal.For a few days, maybe even a few weeks, she was like a laboratory’s worth ofwhite mice bundled together in the space of my rib cage. There was a riot ofescape and when I wore a white jacket it was just to make my stories laugh foronce. The experiment was to see if love could be Frankensteined from the bitsand pieces of a big cat. I’m not sure what kind. Perhaps a jaguar or a sphinx. There wasmuch play while whichever kind was away.

ReadingMiranda again last night made me sad because she really is so worthy of all thewhite mice on the planet and I knew you would come and read me with the samehungry eyes. Even now I sense your desire to dart away from me. So I won’tinsist. Let the war pass and let your children grow up. I’ll keep my mouth shutlike a sabre tooth lover.

PAN Magazine, Issue #2

2011-10-06T12:59:00.001+11:00

Just got PANIssue #2 in the mail.

Really delighted to be a part of this mag.

My story'scalled 'Back When Jean-Michel Basquiat Was My Best Friend.'

The journal looks great. I hope you'll buy a copy.

Available online or at good bookstores like Readings.

Exit on Islet

2011-10-02T10:28:00.002+11:00

Island Journal online

I S L E T

published my flash fiction

T H E E X I T

Have a read

Yesterday's Weather

2011-09-27T08:50:00.000+10:00

I shouldn’t write about happiness. I should write about exhaustionthat feels as deep as cancer. (Words need that kind of tension—strung from dotto dot until they strain on every full stop and burst from the string whenread—ideas bouncing and scattering at the slightest touch.) There’s an easy expanseof grass and then the lazy water of the bay. The sky opens wide and slow aboveand the weather is warm enough for a t-shirt and shorts if you’re ambling alongthe shore. I sit on a bench and am a degree or two away from pure comfort.

I shouldn’t write about yesterday. I should write about today and howthe same fatigue continues and mingles with some nameless anxiety—find a way todrive that into a story. Surely not a reminiscence of joy, one day removed.There should be a tragic shadow for a reader to pass through, to shiver beforewe feel the warmth of yesterday’s weather. Because you will not now feel or seethe toddler who plays with a mobile phone, saying hello, hello, and babblingwith the delight of an adventure not even properly imagined, and then saying,bye bye, bye bye.

My wife notices me nodding off and walks away to let me rest. Theymove across the grass before I notice. When I close my eyes, the fatigueswallows me whole, like a disease that will never let me get another glimpse oflight. That was yesterday. I shouldn’t write about lovely things, like a nap ona bench as my pregnant wife laughs and leads my daughter back over the longSpring grass, (such a buoyant green) and is then led by my girl, as she beginsto run to me, her tired old daddy. I shouldn’t write about these things. Ishould write about how death erases us at the edges.

Baby Shoes

2011-09-21T09:05:00.002+10:00

My final piece for Southerly is now up.

You can read Baby Shoes at Southerly.

The Instrument

2011-09-16T13:22:00.002+10:00

My fourth Southerly piece is now up.

You can read The Instrument at Southerly.

The Sea of Tranquillity

2011-09-08T06:08:00.001+10:00

My third Southerly piece is now up.

You can read The Sea of Tranquillity at Southerly.

The Ned Kelly - SD Harvey Short Story Award

2011-09-05T08:18:00.000+10:00

I was delighted to receive the Ned Kelly - SD Harvey Short Story Award

for my story, Hemisphere Travel Guides: Las Vegas for Vegans.

Thanks to the many fine people involved with the Ned Kellys, especially to the

judges of the SD Harvey: Aviva Tuffield, Lindsay Simpson and Chris Womersley.

Bronwyn Mehan recently asked me to talk about my winning story.

You can read my response on The Collumn at Spineless Wonders.

Poetry of the Mother Tongue

2011-08-30T16:27:00.001+10:00

My second Southerly piece is now up.

You can read Poetry of the Mother Tongue at Southerly.

Tall Stories

2011-08-30T06:41:00.000+10:00

Necessity

2011-08-26T06:52:00.001+10:00

Southerly Journal has invited me to write for their blog for the next month.

You can read Necessity at Southerly.

The Rattler & other stories

2011-08-12T09:07:00.000+10:00

I'm delighted toannounce the publication of my first collection of stories.

The Rattler& other stories will be published in late October 2011

by SpinelessWonders.

“Spare and taut,sometimes tricky, sometimes shocking, yet always deeply and satisfyinglytender. A great collection.”

PaddyO’Reilly

"A.S. Patric is that rarest of writers- he is absolutely fearless. His stories take risks, his characters soar and his prose sings. Becareful. These stories might cut you."

Ryan O’Neill

“An explosive mix of muscular prose and sharp originality. In thiscollection, A. S. Patric proves himself to be a writer who must be taken veryseriously.”

Vanessa Gebbie

Short Circuit, A Guide to the Art of the Short Story.

The Interior

2011-08-07T08:43:00.000+10:00

A few raindrops spray across the windshield, but it’s not quite raining.I open my door and step outside. Port Phillip Bay is very near and the wind offthe water races over the bitumen of the car park, gusting a chill upwards. Shesits within the interior warmth of her car. She’s on her mobile, talking, andsmiles at me. We have been friends for so many years, the world has changed popes,presidents and prime ministers. We remember the last days of revolution and togetherwe watched global warfare gathering on the horizon — catastrophic storms imminentfor over a decade. The oceans were full of fish and everything seemed limitlessand possible. We saw babies born and talked about first words and steps and consultedeach other on how to impart the knowledge of death, so it wouldn’t be bitter orfearful.

We watched movies with film stars now dead or grown old and living inobscurity somewhere in the hills of California. There was music and bands inbars — and there were mistakes we made that we daydreamed about with hangoversfor hours afterwards some Sunday mornings. There were books we forced upon eachother because they would change our hearts and minds in integral, utterlynecessary ways. She is looking at me with our histories written on the samepages, sitting in her driver’s seat with her seat belt still on, talking intoher phone, and smiling at me with that long, loving friendship. But we don’tknow each other. We have never met. I close my car door and walk across thebitumen to get my ticket. I return to my car and place my ticket above thedashboard. There’s another spatter of raindrops and soon it will come down in atorrent of ice-cold Melbourne rain. When I pass the car window beside me, Idon’t look over at her again, sitting within the warmth of the interior.

Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons

2011-08-06T12:30:00.002+10:00

a short story from

Circling the Drain

by Amanda Davis

The author of‘Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons’ has a wiki biography that readslike a flash fiction:

Amanda Davis was born in 1970 and was a writer.She released one collection, Circling the Drain, and one novel, Wonder WhenYou'll Miss Me. Davis died at the age of 32 in a plane crash on March 14, 2003.The plane was piloted by her father and crashed on Old Fort Mountain inMcDowell County, North Carolina. She had just begun a book tour.

She has beenchampioned and memorialised in the States by McSweeneys. In Australia shebarely registered and her work had very limited release many years ago. I’mstill waiting for my copy of her collection to cross the Pacific. Which is justas well, since the idea behind these reviews is one story, in isolation.

“That was the year we forgot and woke, bewildered,muttering. It was spring when I noticed them turning in the sky, this way andthat, drifting gently on a breeze.”

These are thefirst lines of the story, and it means we’re salvaging the title to make sense of what we’re reading. Before we know it, we’re crossing thethresholds of storytelling. Amanda Davis does this throughout her story but shedoesn’t need to resort to the clunky mechanisms of metafiction.

We are alwaysaware this is a story, that what we’re reading is being distorted throughwhimsy and occasional poetry. In fact, it’s totally unbelievable in every way astory can be, but Amanda Davis’s genius is to deliver a kiss amidst all this wilddistraction, that you can feel — that you can’t doubt.

“I was thinking with noodles. I was thinking withduck sauce and white rice.”

The world ofthe story is a broken snow globe and pieces of the author’s mind float across our perspective in lovely fragments. An old love shows up. He was once called Fred Luckbut he has changed his name to Jack Luck.

“He’sa natural disaster and you’re trailer city.”

The story is assimple as that. An old lover returns and reawakens passion and possibility, buthe’s undependable and disruptive. It becomes essential that Amanda Davisobscures our vision from this tired, old story. So there’s a desperation to theway she throws images into the reader’s mind.

“…the potted plants that had been resting soquietly beside us on the porch were floating near our heads. It didn’t evenbother me when they smashed to bits during our first kiss.”

The desperationis compelling. The images often striking and original. We invest in the absurdityof a woman who has such a terrible laugh that they ban her from the localcinema and have to have special screenings for her (like DVD players have neverbeen invented). It’s the standard trope that love is sometimes about two peoplewho can accept all the unacceptable parts of each other.

Amanda Davis isable to get beyond these simple ideas and trivial narratives and deliver asense of the world transfigured — because our experience of self can indeed beradically reimagined. We can be revitalised through art and this is perhapswhat we search for most ardently when we go through the stacks of our readingoptions. That’s the open circuit, the buzzing charge, that a reader willdiscover at the centre of ‘Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons’.

“On the radio there was much debate over how toget the fat ladies down from the sky. They waved happily in the daylight but Iimagined they must be hungry by now. But I thought maybe this was the evolutionof things, the way the world spun.”

And the finalline:

“Maybe they would drop quietly as they lost weightuntil they landed here like the rest of us, drawn, haggard, and dreamless, alltheir glorious roundness gone.”

--> You can read Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons at McSweeney's

Deliverance

2011-07-29T07:27:00.001+10:00

A man arrives on my street in a white van. It takes some viciouspulling and pushing at his steering wheel before he’s managed to make a u-turn.His side door needs to be facing my driveway. Maps and delivery details andinvoices cover the top of his dashboard and his front seat. He’s been all overMelbourne — a city that sprawls great distances. No one knows all of it. Hegets out and lights a cigarette; consults a clipboard and tilts his head leftand right, looking for my house number. Doesn’t see me looking from my upstairsstudy. He opens the big door in the side of his van. I’m expecting to see amess of tumbled over packages. It’s one huge bag in the back. He pulls on it,and it jostles, but doesn’t budge. He uses both hands and a foot on the side ofhis van to yank it out; violence in his fists.

An immense nylon mesh parcel,filled with vibrant colours, ready to burst or float into the dismal winterskies above. That’d be a sight. All those balloons let loose and floating free.It would be a quick glimpse. They’d get lost almost immediately in Melbourne’swide skies. The cigarette is still burning in his mouth and I’ll certainly be givinghim an earful if one of the balloons bursts before he even gets it to my frontdoor. Though, of course, I didn’t order any balloons. It’s not my birthday andthere’s no occasion I can think of that would warrant anyone buying meballoons. I’ve never received such a gift and I’ve never sent balloons toanyone. I walk through the house coughing and blowing my nose, trying to thinkof who and why, but I can’t come up with even one possibility. There’s elation inmoving towards the unexpected surprise. I almost stumble down the stairs. PerhapsI’ll release the balloons within the house and they can move from room to roomwhenever a gust from the heating or a door opening and closing nudges themalong. Maybe they’ll congregate in one particular room, and when I walk throughthey will sway with my movement — there will be all that colour clustered at myceiling, nestling and jostling, like creatures ready to lead the way toliberation at the first opportunity. When I open the front door, there’s asmouldering cigarette on my doorstep. The delivery man has walked back to hisvehicle and is shoving the immense bag of balloons back into his white van.

Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes

2011-07-25T08:13:00.010+10:00

a short story from

For Esme ~ with Love and Squalor and other stories

by J. D. Salinger

A phone conversation. Two men talk about a woman. She is the wife ofone, but the lover of the other. She is in her lover’s bed while her husbandlooks for solace from his friend — on the other end of the line.

This phone conversation goes on for the ten pages of the story.

A story that is practically nothing but dialogue. As with so much ofSalinger’s work, there’s a stage play feel to it. The period dialogue. Theverbal ticks that are the Salinger hallmark, all in evidence. Equalparts Arthur Miller and Neil Simon. That Broadway sense for a scene ofdrama, produce in this piece, the perfectly cut New York short story.

There’s also the distance of the stage. We do not enter the personalspace of the character’s lives. We are watching through a curtained frame. Weare not involved in the moral implications of the man who consoles the friendhe has just been cuckolding.

The distress of the abandoned husband negotiating the final stages ofa disintegrating marriage is pitched too hysterically. It reaches an impeccablecounterbalance with the other man’s emotional impenetrability.

My favourite line is perhaps the most extreme point of the husband’ssuffering. He recounts a high-school poem he wrote to the woman lying justbeyond his voice.

“Rosemy colour is white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.”

A bit of (convincingly adolescent) poetry that takes the traditionalsentiments and blends them through the disordering of the senses that love canbe. And more to the point, that it still clearly is.

This story might present the perfect drama, but Salinger’s problemwith this piece would have been how to deal with sentimentality.

If the husband merely begins to blabber about how much he loves hiswife, Salinger loses his reader. It becomes too pathetic and predictable. Hefocuses instead on suffering, and few people understood existential pain betterthan Salinger. This is where the author transcends his often overly stylised,over-written gushes of prose, and finds breathtaking poignancy and value farbeyond his time.

It’s this pain that unites the men in the end, and gives us thegenius resolution to this masterfully written piece of short fiction. Thehusband has suffered in the obvious ways, but it’s only in the final momentsthat we see that there’s a way in which this event has gone to the heart of theother man’s life as well.

The final two sentences:

“He picked a burningcigarette — the girl’s — out of the ashtray and started to bring it to hismouth, but it slipped out of his fingers. The girl tried to help him retrieveit before anything was burned, but he told her to just sit still, for Chrissake, and she pulled back her hand."

The Actual Man

2011-07-24T08:57:00.004+10:00

I’ll speak first. You respond with a thought. So there’s at leastmore than one voice, and we’re still not quite beyond the third sentence. “Thesound of an actual man, talking.” Frank O’Connor wrote in response to thethreat he perceived in Modernism. Is there a possibility that you and I havelost a sense of the actual man, talking? I’m not even sure if it’s you, or it’sme. Maybe it’s Frank.

The Post-Modern world is flat. It’s all about the edges of the map.Let’s pretend the world hasn’t been completely discovered so that we can set out again across virgin paper. There’s a thrill when we can still falloff the edge of the known universe. I’d rather we cut it up and used it as money.Not the paper. I mean the world itself. We can trade in body parts so that wenever forget about you or me, Frank O’Connor or the man, actually talking.

A Study of the Short Story

2011-07-23T09:52:00.000+10:00

"Even from its beginnings, the short story has functioned in a quite different way from the novel... In fact, the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population... which changes its character from writer to writer, from generation to generation." Frank O'Connor.

The Rivers

2011-07-16T10:14:00.008+10:00

We walked along a street in the city. She barely needed to use hereyes to guide me around from park to café to river. We talked for hours withthat sense of desperation in every moment of silence, that we had nothing incommon at all, and this was all a mistake.

Roma Street filled the air with fumes. Buses idled and they roaredinto life and they swung out into traffic as other buses pulled up to thecurbs. It wasn’t hot, but the bright Queensland light eradicated our shadows aswe crossed Roma. She kept on saying she wanted to go south and see what itwas like to live in Melbourne.

Brisbane was getting familiar in spotlit sections, though it hadn’tformed a picture in my mind yet. Months had gone by and there was still norecognition. It was an anatomy of street maps, revealed layer after layer; suggestions of organs with uncertain functions. I wasn’t sure where to find somethingas simple as the brain; the heart or spleen. All I saw when I walked aroundwas a familiar skin on a body that didn’t belong to me even though I keptthinking that by now it should at least be a friend. It wasn’t as though I’dmoved to a foreign country.

I let her guide me. The river wasn’t too far away. We could catch aferry. It was public transport but it was a cheap way to take a cruise of thecity.

Brisbane river didn’t resemble the Yarra. Melbourne’s river neverasked for your attention. It was a quiet suggestion of water whispering throughthe heart of the city. The river in Brisbane rolled with brawling energy, aconstant threat of flood, coiled around places like Kangaroo Point and NewFarm, and brutally pushing through other landmasses. The Yarra wound around ona gentle course, in no rush to find the bay.

We were strangers spending a few hours together. She told me abouthow much she liked fashion and I told her I was writing a novel. We talkedabout music. There weren’t any bands we both enjoyed. She didn’t read and Ihadn’t watched the films she raved about.

There was a lot we hadn’t told each other. There was no reason for meto tell her I wasn’t actually born in Melbourne; that the city of my birth wasBelgrade. That it was placed at the confluence of two rivers. The great Danubecrossing the continent of Europe, and the Sava — a rarely mentioned river,which felt unknown and yet more mine, as though it was as much a gentlywhispered secret through my heart as that river easing through Melbourne rightnow. There was nothing I could tell her about the confluence of the Yarra andthe Sava.

We sailed by Mosquito Island and instead I told her how Lennie, oneof the women we both worked with, had flown down to Melbourne on Saturdaymorning to shop for clothes and returned on Sunday evening. Lennie had broughta bunch of shopping bags back on the airplane with her, one big pink bag filledwith nothing but shoes. No luggage otherwise.

The ferry took us around yet another shoulder of the Brisbane river.She seemed as though she’d been troubled by a thought ever since we met at thepark and had lunch at her favourite café. She said, “The only thing aboutMelbourne is I hear it’s ruined by too many wogs.”

The Water Glass

2011-07-02T08:23:00.001+10:00

I wake up at night to the sound of dripping. It’s a dreamless sleepso I’m roused to full consciousness quickly. I can hear the noise water makeswhen it’s running down the walls.

I’m worried the roof has sprung a leak and I can imagine the ceilingstraining under a burden of water, about to collapse on me and my wife. We’vegot a bad roof. The tiles are old and downpours concern me.

I get out of bed and turn on the light. The bedroom looks as itshould. Dry, quiet and warm. My wife is a deep sleeper and the light barelymakes her eyelids flicker. She rolls over, murmuring into her pillow. It mustbe raining outside but I don’t hear it on the roof. I turn off the light, walkto the window and open the blinds.

There’s a man out there, standing in the winter cold, wearing a t-shirt,in his underwear and barefoot. I blink and swallow dry. I am outside my bedroomwindow, standing in a light rain, quietly falling for hours, a glass in my outstretchedhand, waiting for it to fill with rainwater.

The Swimmer in Winter

2011-06-20T06:45:00.007+10:00

The sun can be particularly bright in Melbourne’s winter. Maybe it’s oursouthern eyes, accustomed to heavy weather—the long dull days rolling along inunbroken convoy—dazzled by the occasional blast of sunlight. In any case, I wascrossing Ormond Road with a baby in one arm and loaves of bread in theother, when I passed John Cheever.

I knew it was the wintersun flashing across my eyes. That it was a man simply resembling John Cheever. It was this and nothing more. But there was the briefest space oftime (unmeasurable even in milliseconds) where it was, in fact, John Cheever.

John Cheever, (master of crystalline short fiction and maker of themost impeccable piece of prose I’ve ever seen) has been dead a good while nowand perhaps never left the environs of New York City or New England, let alonemade the long journey through the air, across the immensity of the Pacific, to theAntarctic’s beloved city of Melbourne.

Despite all this, I nevertheless felt a passing rapture to have seenthe ghost of John Cheever, hustling across the street, steam escaping his mouthas a proof of life. I felt like whispering to my daughter that the world can stillamaze. It can still dazzle, but I tore off a hunk of fresh bread, and gave thatto her instead.

Fountain

2011-06-07T06:02:00.004+10:00

My wife pushes a pram through piles of leaves into a park that was used by Anzacs recovering from the great wars. Surrounded by old trees, dropping leaves as well as entire branches. Boughs hanging low, some resting, elbows and knees on the ground. Warning signs saying beware—the trees drop heavy pieces of wood.

The fountain has been fixed recently and there’s a sprinkling of water that rises into the air that reminds me of my primary school days and the taps we used to drink from. Sometimes a small piece of bark could be jammed into one of those drinking fountains to turn them into similar waterworks.

An angel rises from the centre of this park’s mouldy fountain. A ring around the shallow pool at its base, a strip of earth that might have been a flowerbed, now displays pebbles and a fine rubble of stone. Back in 1918 I’m sure it would’ve been a circle of colour, flowers in bloom around the rippling water, reflective of the skies.

We sit on a park bench. The thin wooden planks below sag and there’s a threat of sudden collapse. We look out across a wide expanse of green lawn—bundles of leaves at all its edges, the shapes and sizes of fallen bodies.

Our baby girl walks across, slowly moving over the grass, occasionally falling because walking is something she discovered over the summer. She waves her arms about in happiness and smiles at us as she approaches and we sit on that Anzac bench and feel nothing but life, love, and delight.

Poolside

2011-06-03T07:03:00.000+10:00

*Every word, thought, expression, is a footnote.

Methods

2011-05-28T06:23:00.000+10:00

This poem was written

first as a hop-scotch

chalk on the concrete

skipping from box to box

This poem was then written differently

this time the stub of a worn-down pencil

on scrap pieces of paper, stuffed into a

box, in a wardrobe full of oblivion

Once this poem was written with needles

injecting a sublime sulphurous ink

below a few layers of baby skin

so that I could be read unto death

I suppose it will now be transmitted

into cyber prisms trapping sunless light

waiting for electric illumination, written

this time in flickers, across your retina

The poem came in the morning and settled down

a sheet of paper was used, ink was lightly scratched

and I found it just as it was intended by the

whoever, wherever, neverever of the poet

This poem was written amid distraction

in refraction, reflection, and reduction

this poem was always the point

I was trying to unmake and make

again

Fat Joy

2011-05-25T06:27:00.002+10:00

Many a story is nothing but a very, very fat, (so morbidly obese at times that regular shower cubicles are problematic) sweat stained hulk, maybe even drooling ogre we call a ‘Novel’ for the sake of being polite, when in fact it’s just a short story with a huge appetite. It is more than ready to chow down at a feast of your time—at even a hint of an invitation.

What a stomach turning thing it is to see this kind of creation. Readers * should know better than to entertain such brutes. Indeed, many a home sports a rampaging colony (idling hours and years away in drowsy domestication) and there seems to be a point of pride in how much joy there has been, how much indulgence in the sport of poking a stick into fat to watch it wobble.

The brief flash of prose though, even at its worst, has the good grace to but nibble at your earlobe. It can be a whisper of fleet footed passion and such a delight of insight that you will pursue it through alligator swamps, and if you’re lucky enough to find a live one, you’ll want to pluck it from the air and feed it (miniature heart beating a million miles an hour) to your starving soul.

* Writers are not to be blamed, being in themselves nothing but the results of various appetites, some wayward, others more focused; in general exhibiting the behaviour of mosquitoes who can be concerned with nothing but the search for a belly full of blood.

A Well Drafted Life

2011-05-20T12:59:00.000+10:00

   You

don't know

   yet

what you

   yet

don't know

Sunlight

2011-05-15T09:49:00.007+10:00

He walks along the canal and stops. The rain has been fallingall day but as he sits on a bench the clouds clear and sunlight illuminates thedrops of water drifting down into the meadow. The shades of green range up fromblades to leaves and still the illuminated rain sifts through the air.

He closes his eyes to feel the break in the clouds. There’s away that the sun can seem so ordinary. More commonplace than a tarnishedfive-cent piece found in the mud. But as he feels it, seated on that bench bythe Elwood canal, he becomes aware that there is an incredibleexplosion, (beyond his imagination how vast in intensity and time) and yet hecan sit there and feel this burning star rolling with waves of the releasedenergy of the cosmos, furiously ablaze just above his head, gently lappingagainst his closed eyelids—washing across his cheeks and lips and ears and noseand forehead, as though it was not remarkable.

He is sitting on a park bench by a canal. He opens his eyes andwatches those rain drops illuminated by the sunlight as the heavy clouds of anovercast Melbourne day roll over towards a dreary afternoon in Autumn.

Poison

2011-05-10T12:01:00.000+10:00

A few years ago I poisoned myself. Nothing more complicated than eating food that had been in the fridge too long. I bled for days and experienced pain that could be called agony. It’s a word often lightly used. Similarly, people will say they are starving. They don’t mean I haven’t been able to eat for the last three or four days.

I lost more than five kilos over a weekend. It took me about a month to feel steady on my feet and it was over a year before I stopped counting the seven hour period after eating something—when I’d know whether the food had been good or bad—and whether I was poisoned again. I would assure myself that, of course, it was fine but the body records trauma and plays it out again and again. There was a sickness I could feel in my stomach during these memories, waiting for the poison to take affect. This would slowly dissipate as the hours of the illusion passed.

After we’re well, we take an interest in our experience of this degree of pain; our particular variety of agony. A woman went grey at her temples after a bout of food poisoning (unaccountably choosing to now leave her hair untreated or undyed) and a man found that his hand went into a kind of clenched rigour like he was holding an invisible pen. It took him five years to fully recover from his experience of accidentally poisoning himself and his hand still forms that clenched shape when he sleeps.

I read an Italian story where a town is pleasantly surprised by a sudden and unexpected profusion of mushrooms. They celebrate this fortuitous abundance with a impromptu feast and then all find themselves in a hospital a few hours later. It almost seems like the afterparty to a wonderful night of carousing but some of the children and aged have died.

The worst part of these extreme experiences of sickness is the illusion that it will never end. The pain that makes you want to find unconsciousness by beating your head against a solid concrete wall progresses from one eternal moment to the next. Then there’s an illusion when we are well, that we will never ever be ill again, and so we begin to behave like there’s no more poison in the world.

* * *

Painting of Fruit by Caravaggio.

Mother's Day

2011-05-09T11:49:00.003+10:00

I’ve never seen a woman devour so much with just her nose as a stranger did yesterday—in a busy restaurant, booked out for the occasion—apologising as she approached our family of three, telling us that she just needed to smell a baby again, and that it’d been so long, she just had to, had to, and before we could reply, almost burying her face beneath my daughter’s ear, drawing back her baby smell like she was feeding, pulling away after a long, long moment and then again bringing her nose back to my daughter’s neck like a vampire straight from a dusty crypt (who might not have fed for five hundred years), and we allowed this woman her indulgence because it wouldn’t be polite to say ‘stop sniffing my baby you fucking psycho’, to kill this innocent pleasure, this rapacious rejoicing in newborn life on Mother’s Day.

The Bruiser

2011-05-07T12:01:00.009+10:00

I suppose you’d have to call it a loss

we can argue about losing on points

or if I was beaten unconscious, but

it doesn’t matter any more

my head has cleared now

I got the focus back in my eyes

that feeling in my chest again

that high riding, freewheeling tap, tap, tap

knocking hard on my sternum

I’m ready to come out again

to dance with my bruises

back into the brawl

* * *

The Fighter by Egon Schiele

Pure

2011-05-05T06:59:00.013+10:00

Perhaps it’s best if we use quotes like we would pure alcohol. It’s a superb agent for disinfecting the skin before an injection. It works wonderfully as a solvent in medicine and in perfume. But we should probably avoid throwing back quotes straight. They are poisonous even in the fruity cocktails of our prose. Let’s not line up shot glasses and propose toasts to health, a lover, football teams or our choice of divinity. Rarely were they intended to be used in such ways and will prove highly toxic.

One such quote, that people like to raise in the bravado that comes before a barroom brawl, is that famous bit of machismo by Friedrich Nietzsche:

“What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Twilight of the Idols, 1888.

We could perhaps consult the original text for a fuller understanding but the German high mountain stroller and street brawler was very much into distilling such pure spirits. Another example is his imperious statement which declares the death of divinity, consequently rendering all invisibles such as consciousness, love and history, nothing more than by-products of biological machinery. The head is thrown back, the eyes are closed, and it is taken in a gulp. God is dead.

Perhaps it’s best to look at him, in the particular, as they used to say in his day. Did Friedrich indeed move into ever more robust modes of health and wellbeing, becoming eventually, inevitably, the strongest man on earth? Maybe his life was cut short, you’d be forgiven for thinking, since naturally you would have heard of such an Atlas-like figure holding up the world.

Sad to say, that indeed he lived long but spent over a decade at the end of his high-stepping life, in an asylum—mostly in a catatonic state. Occasionally he was still capable of being roused and he would play wonderfully on a piano the asylum had provided.

The Nazis were great lovers of such shots of pure Nietzsche. They would congregate in bars and raise their glasses and toast each other. They indulged in quotes of all kinds, saying cheers to their health, their lovers, football teams and the Führer, often being heard to say, “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.” Some of these young German carousers could even utter the quote in a dead language, “Quod me non necat me fortiorem facit” arguing among themselves whether it should perhaps be translated as “Quod me non necat me confirmat”.

It’s not known whether a large percentage of Nietzsche loving Nazis, or indeed the people who have since declared this quote of ultimate bravura, how many have in fact read the entirety of the Twilight of the Idols, 1888, or how many have considered Friedrich Nietzsche dying wordlessly and so very slowly in the oblivion of his own skull.

Development in Derangement

2011-05-03T06:55:00.008+10:00

I read writers like Rimbaud when I was a young writer and got akick out of his Derangement of the Senses idea (though never impressed by the actual poetry). At about the same time I readKafka’s Hunger Artist and thought Iunderstood the point. I’m not sure I really did. It seems to me now that thewriter who tortures himself for his readers, and writes of these torturedexperiences, is creating literature’s equivalent of reality television. Newsmedia making the news seems stupid enough, but when it’s the suffering of anartist, it’s something worse. Should we use the word tragic? The literary process,if thoroughly followed through, yields a Development of the Senses. And yetthere are books like Fear and Loathing inLas Vegas that are passing through my life again and make me grateful thatsome have starved themselves for the sake of a neon lit show.

Books & Bones

2011-05-01T06:26:00.000+10:00

My daughter’s first word was book. Well, actually, it was bug but the very day after she held up a touch-and-feel by Lorena Siminovich and said book. So that’s where we’ll officially begin. Soon after this auspicious start though, everything has become a book—especially dogs. When we go for a stroll along the beach, my daughter leans forward in her pram and points at them, saying book, book, book. Maybe she sees stories everywhere she looks but especially in these animals we keep on leashes. No, I want to tell her. That’s a dog. Doggie. They’re different. Books don’t chew on bones for one thing. We came across a massive book yesterday, straining on its chain. Because my daughter is smiling and pointing and calling out book, book, book, the owner asks me if it’s alright to let it lick my daughter’s feet. It was a sunny day and she was barefoot.

Another Country - James Baldwin

2011-04-29T07:41:00.005+10:00

It is a sweet nostalgia, remembering a book we cherished so much we lingered on every page like it was a letter sent to us from a brother lost in some distant war.

Camelot Toys

2011-04-28T07:26:00.001+10:00

When we were young, children were given tin piggybanks that resembled the financial buildings of London or New York. Most of us had never seen the kind that actually looked like pigs, even though we still called them piggybanks. (It’s a strange idea, stuffing a pig full of coins). Not many of us had seen New York or London but there was a fairytale in those small tin buildings—which no-one’s pocket money ever quite filled. Those fortresses of wealth, recreated in a storybook sketch; Camelots built one coin after another. There was a happily-ever-after in those tin buildings that could never be opened. They could only be destroyed with can openers. We all did that as well when we were children—and felt like thieves afterwards.

The Frame

2011-04-23T08:37:00.001+10:00

—4—

And then it was too late. Everything would have to stay like that. Both of us hanging in the air like a whole world changed from a full length motion picture, running on — reel to reel — to a cut frame. It lands on the floor in something less than a whisper. All the while the sound of the projector whirls along, a flickering light through no lens, onto a screen no-one’s watching. Or maybe it’s just me in an empty auditorium. Even with just that one frame I still don’t know what it was we saw and heard. Just one frame remaining. The green of a tennis court. Late at night and empty. There’s no sound in that auditorium but I can still feel the twist of metal against breaking bone.

—2—

The world was moving past the windows. Inside the car we listened to music from a tape that had been chewed up once or twice. There were rough sections and a chance that the car’s tape-player would catch and chew it up again. The music is gone from my memory in any case. I don’t remember what we listened to. The conversations are all chewed up now to static but there were hours in the cabin of that car, multiplied by days, weeks, months and years. We travelled along together, talking and talking — listening to the sound of each other’s voices — music playing for us in the background. We were travelling from the past into our future for such a long time.

—3—

Everything’s an accident. We think destiny and fate even when we don’t use those words. Even when those ideas have been driven from our minds like the lie of a flat world and God smiling down at us from the white lounge chairs of heaven. Greeks gaze into empty cups and look into the smudge of chaos like scientists stare through their microscopes at a colourless smear of cells — but it’s the same stuff. Accidents of birth, followed by accidents of life and then accidents of death. We collide into the people we marry, and the collision might spill out children… or nothing much at all, when you can’t read the messages in smudges and smears.

—1—

We came around the bend along Kings Way, heading away from the city. To our right was a golf course and its high wire fencing, and beyond that, the lake. The swans of Albert Park, and their trailing cygnets, dozing as they drifted across the cold black starflecked water. There’s a restaurant beside the lake that we used to like. We celebrated my 21^st birthday there on a night where a lot of us got drunk and a girl with a champagne voice whispered something heady into my ear. For hours later, there was the corrosives of jealousy poured into the same ear to clean it out; of other voices and their whispered threats to our love. To the left a tennis court, with night lights, though it was too late for anyone to be playing. The green of the court, with its net and a tired white chord dipping in the middle.

* * *

The Frame is published in Street--> issue #2 of 21D. Check out the site HERE and get yourself a copy of the hippest, hardest street brawler to enter the fray of indy publishing in years.

The Uniform

2011-04-19T06:38:00.004+10:00

On the radio they say that our soldiers think they’re special. That’s the reason they sometimes misbehave. And I’m at a railway crossing, watching the red light flashing and listening to that bell clanging for minutes, thinking, well, don’t we all. We think we’re special. None of us are just ordinary civilians busy with ordinary things.

Maybe we’re worse than most. There’s a special cause we’re fighting for. And we do it for free most of the time. We do it without medals and so many of us have died fighting the good fight in complete obscurity but there’ll never be a day put aside in the honour of writers.

The red lights are flashing. The bells are clamorous. That’s the word that goes through my mind as I listen to them, and I think of swan wings beating up into the air because of the word clamorous. There was a poem by Yeats. The word clamorous always reminds me of The Wild Swans at Coole.

The radio goes on about the heavy burden placed on our military and an expert commentator says that sometimes it takes a soldier many years of civilian life to fully adjust.

I wonder if there’s a day where he looks at the old uniform in the wardrobe and thinks, well, that was just another set of clothes I used to wear. It was a costume for a theatre of war, and most of the time there wasn’t an audience, and what I did in that camouflage didn’t really change the balance of freedom or democracy. The retired soldier adjusting to civilian life might close the wardrobe door and be happy to finally get over the sense he had of being special. There’s a way to breathe without this burden.

The boom gate doesn’t move even though the lights have stopped flashing and the bell is silent. It takes another long moment of listening to the radio before traffic can begin to flow across the railway tracks again.

Get a little God into you

2011-04-09T05:56:00.000+10:00

If all the men in the world died and it was just me and the women—well, I reckon I’d be OK with that. Peace and harmony would be ours. There’d be occasional bitchiness but war would be a thing of the past. Just me and all the women. Imagine that. The planet would finally be able to rest without that male agro all over the place—that terrible way blokes have of competing over every little thing would be over. Well, actually, women can be pretty competitive as well, but they probably wouldn’t kill over real-estate, oil or messiahs. Yes, it would certainly be a better place. The women, and a happy little god like me.

Paradise on Fire

2011-04-02T06:31:00.000+11:00

Ever experience a cliche? Like being 'electrified'. A tired expression like that sometimes catches you unawares, and you feel a ferocious charge go through every nerve in your body. I first heard this performance five years ago and it's like one of those near death experiences. Except in this case, I remember experiencing a paradise on fire.

Centrifuge

2011-03-26T08:35:00.003+11:00

I took my daughter to the library yesterday. Her first time. There was a circular room (glass walls running along most of it) lined with women and their babies. A librarian sang songs and read stories. There was a puppet waved in the air briefly.

My daughter crawled out into the middle of the circular room and looked around happily at all the singing mothers and their children. They were mostly content. The singing was modest and the babies were quiet and sedate.

I wondered how long I should let my daughter sit there. By herself.

Maybe she could just sit in the middle of the room and it could all happen around her for a few moments. Was there a better place to be than in the middle of that glass room? Why line the walls like the rest of us?

She doesn’t yet feel the centrifuge that presses people to the glass walls. I went into the centre of the room three times to collect my daughter and I felt delighted every time she went back out.

Cinders & Bugs

2011-03-15T16:27:00.002+11:00

She was crying in line at the Post Office. Too close to me. Every time we moved forward a step or two, I hoped she would take the space to settle herself—or spread out her grief—but she pressed forward. I wondered how far my charade of deafness would stretch. Her tears came with words for her companion. A man who told her to be quiet; that they’d talk about it later; discuss it somewhere else.

She was persistent in her grief, which trembled with an anger that had, for the most part, been beaten out of her. Violence wafted from her like a house almost burned to the ground and now her words were cinders burning what was still standing.

We took another step forward. Moved another step. And another step, together. She pressed her sobs into the back of my head and said that the man had been cruel talking about the bugs in her hair. That, in fact, she washed regularly and telling people she had bugs in her hair was a hurtful lie. The man shooshed her.

She was whimpering as I went on with my deaf man pantomime, perfection in my performance of a bloke simply waiting in line, as though I wasn’t disgusted or afraid, but I could almost feel those bugs hopping up and down below my ears.

The Myth of Jazz

2011-03-09T08:20:00.000+11:00

I once thought about the great jazz performers playing the small bars of New York & Chicago before the world woke from its lazy musical stupor and felt the sound of Jazz change everything. Perhaps most listeners went on with their warbling ballads and old timey tunes but radical art had finally broken through--> and from then on, there was a choice of living in mediocrity or getting beyond it to a new frontier of thought and feeling. In this mythology the gods were men rising from the slums of broken towns and the generational abuse of slavery and disenfranchisement. The creative surge became a sacred article of a new faith. The divinity was an inborn genius that was as simple as electricity. But there is always a desperation to that virtuosity. There’s a regular socket in the wall and the well aimed metal fork. And there’s the willingness to be electrified for the music. It’s been a while since I listened to Jazz every morning and evening. Sometimes I don’t listen to it for months on end but the mythology remains.

Image by Mike Welch.

Lyrics

2011-03-05T12:25:00.001+11:00

You’ve got to fill your eyes
but you choose to feed your heart
and no-one picks the dream tonight
sleep will come and forget us both
the lyric goes,           you got wings honey
                                    you’re gonna fly
even men in cages
wanna see you high
and if I don’t find a way
to get through the night
I’ll leave you something to eat
‘cause even if you don’t feed your heart
honey you know you can’t kill it
it’ll just get small and misplaced
                                    a sail’s gotta have wind
                                    so we’ll wrap our love in canvas
                                    and sink it to the bottom of the ocean
                                    currents and tides and particles of us
honey you know we can’t just kill it
it’ll just get small and misplaced
and you’ve got to fill your eyes
but you choose to feed your heart
and no-one picks the dream tonight
sleep will come and forget us both

.

Electrically Recorded

2011-02-22T10:53:00.003+11:00

We all dead now of course but I was Willie Lee Brown and I recorded on Paramount even if none of them records survive. There’s not a lot in my recollection (the first thing to pass away over here are the torments of the vale) but I do recall Charlie Patton had a very strong handshake despite he was a deceiver and Son House used to cry even when he was hardly provoked. And then there’s the music and especially when I got them new guitar strings and what the song felt like in my throat when the house was full and almost knocking me outta my seat and all I could see was the hard dirt floor and the bare feet of them women filled with the beauty of paradise — all of them delighting.

.

The Way the Water Talks

2011-02-11T11:16:00.002+11:00

My wife moans like a dog. There’s no story in that, so the Yankee ignores it. He asks again about the baby shoes hanging from a nail on the wall. I like this black iron nail hammered through the concrete. You must have used a big hammer to get that nail in so deep. Give me another cigarette, I tell him. No really, I’m interested in those shoes. Why do they hang on a blank wall? A big picture would obscure some of these cracks. They make your house seem poised — as though about to collapse. I tell him my wife still makes noises like a hungry street dog on occasion. He thinks that is funny, but I think I don’t talk very well and most of the time I’d rather just have the sound of the ocean speak my mind back to me when we go out there. Except he’s always talking about the fish and where I go in my boat and how often I catch the big fish. It’s always about the big fish but I live off the small fish. That’s for food and the big fish is for being a hero. They are for famous men like the Yankee and the free people in the homes of the brave over the waters. Boatfull’s of people go over and drown for stories like the Yankee tells about being brave and free and rich but me and my wife just stay quiet most of the time.

Sometimes we talk about the people in the market and sometimes our family, if something nice has happened to the nephews and nieces, or like recently, Gabriella’s cousin, who got a job as a teacher in Guantanamo. I tell her it’s a lovely city because Gabriella has never yet been there and that it is good for him to live there with his new wife and Santiago Junior, his beautiful baby boy. We are still very proud of him becoming a teacher so we talk about Santiago many nights, in bed, when it is quiet and dark and the Yankee has gone back to the hotel to drink cocktails and make love with women on the clean sheets in the air conditioning. Gabriella says Santiago was always such a clever little boy and Junior is bound to be very clever as well. She remembers that when they were children together, her cousin liked the books with numbers and letters in them, and he said intelligent things but she can’t remember what they were anymore, and so she makes the sounds of a starving dog again and I can say nothing because I have already drowned and I must remain quiet and can only move close to her head and breathe over her without touching the noise. I have learned this from the way the water talks. All we can do is let the winds and tides change the world to what it was as much as it can. In the morning I wake and there is a note on the kitchen table from the Yankee that says he’s got what he needs for his story and he won’t be coming back. There is the money that we agreed but the baby shoes from the wall are gone and I am worried what will happen when Gabriella sees what he stole from us.

Tricks or Tragedy

2011-02-09T07:38:00.001+11:00

Ever have something you thought was pure genius turn out to be kind of stupid? A friend and I were having dinner last night and we started talking about flash fiction, and he brought up that Hemingway classic six liner, “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” I used to think that was incredible, and I suppose I still do, but it’s also actually dumb, and I’m kind of amazed I never noticed it before.

What’s still incredible is the ability Hemingway had to make us look into the story and imagine the loss of a child who didn’t get to wear his baby shoes. Our imagination takes those six words and generates a whole world to fit the details and we do glimpse a tragedy, so there’s still something astounding about that six word trick. The problem is, it doesn’t make sense, and I suppose the truth is we don’t really witness that tragedy, and we certainly don’t feel it. Perhaps we don’t do any more than respond with a reflexive ‘Ahh’ of amazement like children at a magic show.

I started thinking this morning that it might be an idea to try to write that six word story out into an actual novel, or failing that, a regular length short story. And I suppose that’s were the illusion turns out to be a coin pulled out from behind someone’s ear — money that never left Hemingway’s hand, and it never will.

Why? Because it doesn’t have any logic. Or to put in another way, there’s almost no reality in Hemingway’s six word trick. The value of baby shoes, used or otherwise, is so low as to make it ridiculous to try to sell them. I suppose we could imagine some very special, shiny, white leather shoes, but still? How much would the advertisement cost? And who’d want to buy these tragic little shoes for their own child? What about the grieving couple selling the baby shoes of their dead child? The tragedy seems kind of reduced to fairly pathetic proportions if we imagine Mister H. walking to the newspaper to put the advertisment into the paper: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Imagine the clerk behind the counter taking that down: ‘So… how much do you want for your baby’s shoes?’

I’m sometimes appalled with the games we play as writers with genuine tragedies. It’s not a coin behind someone’s ear. To those that have lost a child I don’t think there’s much genius to that Hemingway six liner.

Birthday

2011-02-01T11:47:00.008+11:00

They walk across the park. It is morning but high summer already flares across the water of the lake and the rising heat makes her skin feel red in the cool of the air. That coolness is the last breath of the evening just gone, and when it passes entirely, the heat of the day will be annihilating.

For now there’s lingering delight along the water’s edge as the swans and ducks move through the tall grass nearby. She tells her child, who is a year old today, that her favourite lie is that the ancient Egyptians could keep flowers alive in a vase for nine months! Her daughter squawks with the babbling water fowl and seems happy to keep their secrets.

Open Era

2011-01-29T12:36:00.001+11:00

The world is just starting to take form in our minds and there’s a telecast from somewhere far away. Two men play a sport called tennis, and though you have seen the rackets and balls, you have never seen human Will become colossal.

For those without the bible, here is a first taste of the biblical. Heaven and hell are very close to the earth. You can see them in the faces of these two men, who walk through alternating moments of torment and ecstasy.

The court is a pristine place, of neat, unchangeable white lines, and since it is always the same, every time you have seen it, it represents an eternal space. The tennis players are temporary and usually disappear within the space of a news item; yet more numbers of nonsense and names receding quickly back into anonymity.

These two men are playing as you watch, and Now becomes something different; it becomes illuminated by a slower, more precise light, until there is nothing outside its spectrum. Within this magnification is human Will. Monstrous in its hunger; exceptionally brutal to itself.

These slow moments go on, gathering light and space, until nothing exists beyond the gravity of two men drawing the world to attention, longer and longer still, until there is only an agonised limbo that tortures with feather touches of bliss — and then letting go like something immense breaking, spilling out glory and beauty — releasing me and everyone else, watching our televisions. It’s as simple as a victory and it’s just a telecast once more, from somewhere far away.

Writ in Electricity

2011-01-24T11:48:00.000+11:00

In these last days of the printed word, let’s remember the human hand. There’s the kind that the writer used to press ink into paper. So as to be able to pass this message on to you, he found someone who would recreate the message — using machinery this time to simulate those same impressions of the writer’s hand; the edge of the hand pressed down to paper, fingers scratching ink into the fibre. They were faithful reproductions.

These artefacts could be sold in markets. There were book fares and some of these still exist but the world is changing. Back in the early days of the printed word it became convenient to house these artefacts, so that they might seem to have permanence. Things now disappear very easily. Within these buildings, (found here and there in every city and town in the world for many, many generations) you were likely to find people that might as easily shake your hand as talk to you.

These booksellers were devoted to the hands that made the books as well as the hands that wrote the long messages that were being faithfully reproduced. Now these buildings are being converted to other uses. Cheap shoes made from wage slavery are sold within them and sometimes a new café is opened. Supermarkets began opening as well, to sell the printed word at wholesale prices.

The new artefacts resemble junk food in commerce; they are designed and sold by people who often are entirely unaware of the contents, and that are in fact too busy, and even if they had the spare time wouldn’t be interested to spend a few hours making this kind of contact with some stranger calling themselves ‘author’.

The book supermarkets are also beginning to have a rather precarious relationship to the printed word and soon, some say, we will have nothing but screens and an ocean of readable electricity. Our methods of interfacing with each other will be far more capricious, governed by the tides and moon as any gaudy clown with an opinion.

Some prance and proclaim, dance and are delighted, that this will mean such experiences will be cheaper. Literature will finally be a thing generated and consumed with as little effort as pub banter and heckling, and as easily forgotten as cheers in the Colosseum. There are those of us that remember the book fares and the handshake when a book was passed from one human being to another. There is a memory of permanence, of lifelong dedication and the weight of a hand, paused on the paper, as what was written is considered.

It all reminds me of the tombstone of John Keats, where into the stone were chiselled his words, Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ In Water.

Flash Cards

2011-01-19T07:54:00.000+11:00

I’ve been looking after my daughter today. That takes up most of my time, though at the moment she seems content to play with Charley Harper flash cards that have designs of animals and letters on them and a puzzle on the back that will take her years to figure out.

“When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don’t see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures. I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of painting; in a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.” Charley Harper

Now my daughter, almost a year old, picks up blocks designed by Alison Jay, which have a surreal set of animals. A rabbit rows a boat with a rolled up parchment and a bouquet of flowers in wrapping paper. An elephant holds a red apple, a frog plays out the line on a fishing rod and a cat (which reminds me of the Mona Lisa for some reason), looks over her shoulder as a red biplane is taking off in the distance.

I read my daughter stories (that I secretly think have literary merit) and I wonder what goes into creating her dreams when she goes to sleep a little while later.

I fed her risotto for lunch, though she spat out everything that wasn’t rice, and I’m worried about whether she ate enough or not. There are moments of boredom and then there are those quiet periods of joy that makes it a pleasure to feed my daughter a thimble full of rice at a time for 45 minutes.

I had about an hour to write while she napped from 10:30 to 11:30. It was a productive burst--> I wrote a flash fiction called Phosphorous that had begun forming in the back of my mind as I wheeled a pram from the bakery this morning. When she has another nap at 2:30 I plan on getting back to work on a novella I’ve been writing over the last few weeks. I answer emails, read a little more of Lydia Davis’s wonderful translation of Madame Bovary, do some Verity La editorial work, perhaps even a bout of blogging, while she’s content to keep playing with those flash cards, blocks and board books near my desk. Soon we’ll go for another walk.

Phosphorus

2011-01-15T08:03:00.004+11:00

Lucas walks to his kitchen in the morning feeling more exhausted than when he went to sleep. Tomorrow is shopping day so there’s not much in the flat to eat now, especially since he’s been unwell and stuck at home all week. The only food he has are rolled oats, a bit of wheat germ, oat bran, and a teaspoon of soy grits. So he can make a good bowl of porridge but when he picks up the box of matches he finds every match head is shrivelled and black.

Lucas is well enough today to walk to the local milk bar. He buys bread, milk and a box of matches and walks back to his apartment. He climbs the three flights of stairs and discovers his door is slightly ajar. It’s not like him to be so careless, but then again, he isn’t the kind of man to place matches back into the box after they’ve been used either. He carries his plastic bag from the milk bar around the apartment, making sure that no-one has entered while he was gone.

When he’s in his kitchen again, Lucas begins preparing his porridge but when he opens the box of matches he just bought from the milk bar he discovers that every match head is just spindly black charcoal. He stands there a moment, aghast. It’s random and trivial but there’s a sense of despair, as though this is an incredible stroke of misfortune. He still feels exhausted and he knows he’s not entirely over the flu that he’s been struggling with.

Lucas has a slice of bread to take the edge off his hunger as he walks down the stairwell to ask a neighbour for some matches. Veronica laughs when he tells her about the box of matches he just bought from the milk bar, that were all used up. She says she doesn’t trust Ma and Pa stores for that very reason, as she hands him a box of matches.

When he opens Veronica’s box of matches he finds that every match head is burnt out black. Lucas sits down on a kitchen chair and looks at the plastic carton of milk sitting near him on the table, beginning to bead, the plastic bag stuck with a film of condensation to its side. The open bag of bread is just as he left it a minute ago but all of this, he understands now, is a dream. Lucas is still exhausted and wishes he could wake up. He sits in his kitchen, waiting, feeling his stomach beginning to eat itself.

The Taste of Others

2011-01-09T09:45:00.003+11:00

The drive from Maroochydore to Brisbane was risky. An hour and an half along a long road at night, after a pleasant film, was lulling torture. No matter what kind of music you played or how loudly or how much coffee you drank, once you got past the bridges and lights of Brisbane, and the freeway slipped away and the street lights became divided by intervals of perfect darkness, easy catastrophes teased your eyes. I watched Le Gout Des Autres twice at the Centro, in Fortitude Valley. Two times, in two weeks.

I have a friend who is learning how to speak French and she asked me what films she might watch. She bought Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut's 400 Blows, but Le Gout Des Autres has become difficult to find. I don’t want to learn French and don’t like their films anymore but I’ve got a copy of it making rapid progress to Melbourne from Europe and I’m wondering why some films are worth the risk of crashing and fill us with the kind of passion that you’d only find at the lips of a long lost lover.

Cannonade

2011-01-06T11:32:00.002+11:00

Roused out of sleep

by a cannonade

and

I know the sky

must be lit up

but

I turn in bed and shift my head

let

twelve o’clock

pass

no dear kisses or well wishes

just a drift

through fireworks

and the silence of my baby sleeping

Hesitation

2011-01-03T18:16:00.000+11:00

On the phone, (I haven’t talked to her since my father died) she says, “There’s that little pause every time I write it. The pause is sometimes as long as a breath held in fearful expectation. That sudden indrawn air that seizes the lungs and releases afterwards in relief — nothing really happened after all. Just my cat tipping over an old vase and the flowers falling softly to the kitchen floor. Not the baby at the glass cabinet, pulling on the bottom of the doors. Then the pause gets shorter, like a breath after a run. It gets to a point where it’s just the slightest hesitation and you’d barely even notice it, as though I know it without thinking. Like it’s certain; as true and as real as writing my name. But now I have to start all over again. I’ve got to remind myself every time to write 11 and not 10 but I know I’ll have that slight, halted moment, for most of the year.” For a few moments neither of us say anything.

A Good Year

2010-12-26T08:42:00.000+11:00

Our years pass and we're rarely clear whether it was a good year. It's usually more like wine and we need a decade or so to really be able to hold it to the light, take a mouthful and savour it for what it was. Then again, there's the kind of year that goes beyond the winepress of our writing, and makes us realise while we're living it, that there's nothing that we're looking for in the glass--> that the taste we're searching for simply reminds us that we're alive in a way that is unforgettable.

Thanks to all those that have stopped, however briefly, here at Ink, and especially to those that have offered encouragement and feedback. Best wishes to you all in the coming year. May it be a good year.

.

A Saturday Afternoon

2010-12-25T17:07:00.000+11:00

I went down to the river today. Groups of people sat all along the banks of the Yarra. My family found a tree that would give us shade and we spread out a blanket and ate sandwiches that among other things had avocado, (which I’ve only started eating recently), and then my wife placed strawberries, (the sweetness perfectly balanced with their subtle bitterness) into our mouths. My baby girl made her way off the blanket and crawled across grass for the first time in her life. We put her in a pram and took her for a walk along the river, under one bridge and then over another. We stopped on a park bench on the other side of the river (where there were no groups of people) and the baby fed from her mother’s breast and I was divorced by the thought of Seurat, by that famous painting and by Art. For a moment I understood the reference to time, both in the river and the pointillism, and I saw the community gathered by the water because of the sunny weather, but I’d forgotten the dour separation of his principle figures. Seurat faded from my mind as I sat on that bench with my wife and child, and for moments I forgot, and I was happy to barely exist at all.

This Far Away

2010-12-20T08:11:00.000+11:00

I know Truth is somewhere near. I can smell her perfume on the shirt I wore last night. Smudges of lipstick on the glasses we used. I’m sure there’d still be a taste of her in the bead of wine at the bottom of the glass over there on the window ledge. We must have been leaning out. I remember drunken songs in snatches — stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore. I think we threw some books outside as well, to watch them flutter down on their broken wings. Just a few books that I wasn’t going to read, but my memory is a bit hazy, and I notice my shelves are all empty now. The roar of traffic is loud through the open window and whatever remains of them outside must have been shredded to the smallest fragments of paper. I’m not sure even a word would have survived on that relentless road to Rome. There’s the dress she was wearing, still draped over a light stand, so she can’t have gone far. Holes through the fabric of her gown (a shade of red she described as being the colour of a closed eye looking up at summer skies during high noon) puncture marks like a machine gun has swept across the dress. I should have told her how hungry my moths are this far away from the sun.

Image by Bill Viola

A Gift From Gary D Wilson

2010-12-14T08:49:00.000+11:00

Busy days.

Five minutes to read yesterday.

A world opens up, lives push out and fill my mind, vivid, complete, honest, a moment that dilates over decades, resolving perfectly.

Delivered. Done.

These brief moments of virtuosity received in the space of a prayer.

Nuclear Whisper

2010-12-09T11:09:00.000+11:00

I’m almost done with God

but I see prayer

in every poem

almost through with history and time

almost past my place in a dead

calm future

but there is that discovery of poetry

back

in the bear cave

of my bare soul

back before my words for me were invented

before they discovered the continents of self

before they discovered nuclear explosions of

there was that single voice

whispering into the fire

and in the whisper of every poem since

there are the silently moving lips

of prayer

* * *

Nuclear Whisper is published in Issue #8 of Page Seventeen.

Sold at Readings and other good bookstores.

Jiggling the Molecules

2010-12-05T08:41:00.000+11:00

Michelle was a poor student but so was I. Neither of us could take education seriously. Some of us couldn’t get over the people we were in the world with. We spent all our time thinking about what they were thinking and feeling. What they desired and where they wanted to go. Her folders were full of texta messages. Bands she liked. Singers she loved. Pictures and posters in her locker of bands like Uncanny X-men and Brian Mannix. We didn’t speak more than a few distracted sentences to each other in those years, but we both liked to talk about music. I wanted to cut my hair like one of the guys from Duran Duran and she thought they were cool as well.

It was the reason why after school we got together a handful of times. Houses always had to be empty of parents for some reason, and one day her friend Amy told us we could come over and listen to Purple Rain. I was thrilled just to be invited to come along. To enter a strange house and to sit in someone’s lounge to listen to music on a proper stereo. Amy brought out chips and soft drinks. We talked about films we’d seen like American Werewolf in London and shows we liked watching on TV. Teachers we hated. Kids in school that had done stupid things. But nothing I said or did really made a difference. None of it got me beyond the elusive periphery of Michelle’s attention. There was a knock at the door. We didn’t have to wonder who it was. I’d already told them I’d invited my friend Anton.

He was a year or two older but he didn’t go to Kealba High with us. He didn’t even go to High School. He went to the local Tech. It was always a mystery what kind of school that was. Mostly boys. Tough. Lots of fights happened over there and they studied trades like carpentry and plumbing. But Anton didn’t seem like he’d been in a lot of fights and there was nothing about the Trades in the way he looked. He walked into the room and everything changed. It wasn’t an after school get-together any more. It was something else. We didn’t know what, but there was no mistaking the change in atmosphere.

Anton and Michelle both had things they liked to say over and again. Some people get into unconscious catch phrases. They don’t realise it themselves. Michelle said, ‘Up here for thinking, down there for dancing.’ Anton liked to say, ‘Let’s go and jiggle the molecules.’ Marlon Brando used to say that and Anton had picked it up. It meant having a good time. It meant sneaking into night clubs and drinking. It meant having sex. There was still a difference between that and fucking. A subtle one that was changing even in that suburban house.

When Anton walked into the lounge he made us feel like children at a stupid kid’s birthday party, eating Twisties, drinking Fanta and listening to Prince. I’m not sure how much thought Michelle put into what she meant with her mantra. Maybe it was a lyric by Brian Mannix, or a sound bite from an interview. She told Anton she loved to dance and Anton sat down on the couch and lit a cigarette. He said, ‘Alright. Dance.’

We got drunk without drinking. Things just started changing quickly. In Science they taught us the air was actually a gas. Not just the nothing that it seemed to be. I could feel myself breathing in that kind of heavy air. I watched Michelle dancing by herself in the lounge room to the song Darling Nikki. Amy left to get an ashtray from the kitchen so that Anton wouldn’t ash on the carpet. I didn’t know what was wrong with it but there was something broken about Michelle’s movements. I wanted to close my eyes or turn the stereo off but I sat next to Anton and watched Michelle dance. The air swirled around her like it was turning into a kind of gas she could swim through. If Anton lit another match the whole room could explode but he just smoked his cigarette quietly, and before she was done dancing for us, he got up and left the room.

We weren’t sure where he was going but staying in the lounge afterwards seemed impossible. The sudden intoxication sent us reeling down the corridors. When we walked past Amy’s bedroom I told Michelle I had to tell her something and we went in there and I closed the door. The curtains were drawn in Amy’s room, as they were everywhere else in the house. It might have been the way Amy’s parents preferred it but maybe Amy pulled them shut because we were coming over. Amy’s bed was small. Her parents had bought it for a much younger Amy. The stuffed animals piled into a corner, head over tail, would sometimes still have a home on her bed. She had a good collection of records, like Thriller, Madonna (the self titled first album) and Born in the USA. Michelle and I looked at the records. She said Springsteen sucked and I told her I loved her and I wrapped my arms around her and tried to kiss her.

There was a park nearby. Anton and Michelle sat on a park bench. Anton didn’t see anything in Michelle but he felt the allure she had in my eyes. The love I had for her was confessed and pledged through him, as to a confessor who knew the mysteries of this kind of god. He’d understand what could be done with such a love. One that plagued the mind on waking, and troubled the sleep before it, and riddled the days after, until everything was upside down and inside out. The love of children before they are properly out of childhood, but not quite innocent any longer, is worse than anything likely to be felt later when experience has come and worn down our hearts a little. We never get turned inside out quite the same way again.

Amy was Michelle’s friend but we sat on another bench trying to find something to talk about. I told Amy I really loved Springsteen, especially Born to Run, but she hadn’t heard it. She asked me if I wanted to go watch Desperately Seeking Susan with her on the weekend but I couldn’t even pretend that was likely to happen. We watched our lead actors lean forward on that park bench and kiss. We watched them move closer and embrace. We watched them get up and move deeper into the park until Amy got up and said she had to go and I sat on that park bench by myself, not knowing what to do. I felt like I’d fallen over and broken some ribs. I took shallow breaths and thought about how they’d only met because of me.

Anton hadn’t forgotten what I’d told him about Michelle. His voice called out from behind trees, foliage and grass; from somewhere in the park. I got up after a few moments and heard him call out to me again. I followed his voice through to a small natural alcove between low hanging trees. He was lying on top of Michelle. She was lying on bark, the backs of her wrists pressed firmly down beside her head. She looked afraid and I could hear all three of us breathing as though we were in a small room together. A tiny space the world didn’t know about. She wasn’t afraid that Anton was going to do something to her, as much as she was that he’d just get off her, and leave. She didn’t want me there so she didn’t look at me. Anton told me to undo the buttons of her shirt and I looked at Michelle and I knew she wouldn’t make a sound. If this was what Anton wanted, she’d do it. She didn’t struggle against the arms that held her down to the rough bark beneath her wrists. I didn’t want to touch Michelle. All I wanted was for her to look at me. But she was lost in that park and there was dancing in her thinking and drunken thoughts in her feet and I closed my eyes and crawled back out from beneath the low hanging trees.

I walked home along suburban footpaths. Men were watering their lawns or walking their dogs or getting into their cars or coming home from work or checking their mailboxes. Children were playing games and there were women calling them in or bringing them out jumpers, or carrying out apples. The houses were shut and curtains drawn as I made my way home; seeing none of it. A fifteen minute walk home, every step of it taken with a face wet with tears. I don’t think I’d cried like that before that day, so helplessly. Passing all those houses, not even able to cover my face with my hands.

* * *

'Jiggling the Molecules' is published in the most recent Page Seventeen, Issue #8.

You can get it here.

I Wanna Be Murakami

2010-11-28T09:02:00.001+11:00

I used to be happy. Tolstoy tells me I shouldn’t have sex. Henry Miller tells me I should get more; to be experimental and maybe even rough. But I like the way Murakami kisses. Not the author himself (since he’s kind of ugly) but his lovely characters. I could watch them kissing all day. Every book comes with a soundtrack and bad things might happen but it’s alright when they do.

It’s not like when I nailed my hand to a wooden beam with my new nail gun. I was left hanging there for hours. I didn’t have my mobile with me and there was no-one around. I could have shouted out or screamed, and perhaps a neighbour in one of the adjoining flats would have heard me, but I have a dreadful fear of looking like an idiot.

Maybe I would have starved to death hanging from the nail in the beam, but I fell off the ladder. They put stiches in my hand that resembled a Japanese word — that’s what gave me the idea that life as Murakami would have been so much better than the life of A.S. Patric.

I’m sad all the time now. Hanging from my nail, I imagined all those Japanese women kissing me on the lips. Some closing their eyes and others keeping them open. Some smelling as nice as well groomed fluffy cats and others smiling like drowsy kittens looking for a puddle of sunlight to nap in.

I was hanging there for hours and I felt kind of lonely. There was no soundtrack music to the book I was writing and no-one wanted to magically appear at my window.

While I was hanging by that nail I wondered about what Anais Nin would have kissed like. Anais kissed famous women and notorious men; kissed people that tasted of mint leaves in Cuban bars; under tables in Parisian restaurants and in the alleyways of Barcelona; in New York art galleries, and she would have kissed me like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Things like that happen to Murakami. Anais would have been strolling by my window and then she would have walked right in and pulled the nail out with her pearl white teeth. She had a small feline face and it would have been easy for her. Maybe then she would’ve spit out that long nasty nail and kissed me.

Thoughts of kissing Anais now only brings me sadness because she’s off to different stories like she was never anything more than a character in other people’s minds. I know that’s not true and that there were months on the Seine, in a houseboat, where she dreamed about men like me wanting to kiss her. I’ve got a pain in my hand thinking about it.

I suppose when something bad happens, like accidentally firing a nail into the back of your hand with a nail gun, you hope that whatever angels you have floating around your soul, will come to console and make you feel like you’re not alone in the universe with your sadness. I wish Anais Nin could’ve shown up at my window, if only to wave, but she didn’t. I know if I was Murakami that would have been possible.

* * *

'I Wanna Be Murakami' is published in the most recent Stop Drop & Roll, Issue #2 - Paraiso. You can get it Here.

Twisting Light

2010-11-23T08:47:00.000+11:00

this heavy morning sun on your

eye

lid

One in a Million

2010-11-01T10:52:00.000+11:00

A white Mitsubishi Colt with a cannibalised door (same colour, but a different edge guard from another year’s Colt) draws into one of the empty fuelling bays of a 7-Eleven. After three in the morning; nearing half past. The driver is motionless for a minute within the car’s cabin.

The night has that dead Melbourne winter air which would be brought to life by something like snowflakes. As it is, just flat black nothing, like long endless empty roads.

The driver gets out of the car and walks around the side of his car, spinning his keys around once on his finger; a distracted cowboy. He places the nozzle into the tank and waits, enjoying the smell of petrol.

Sometimes it’s as long as five minutes before another car passes along the road. It’s been about as long since an expression passed across his face. Thoughts pass through his head like desolate bullets fired from distant barricades without even the hope of a target.

A young man with irrelevant youth. Not even wasted. Just forgotten before it was something to hold onto. Already with his own cannibalised doors. With nothing in his head, he still gets lost in these long middle of the night dreaming minutes. In memories, dissolving before registering.

In the clear light of day, he’d taken a walk along tree lined mid-winter streets and felt a leaf fall onto his shoulder. Which, in that moment, felt like something as rare as being struck by a lightning bolt. The trees naked to their bones. The last leaf of summer. A muffled and meaningless one-in-a-million.

The nozzle doesn’t cut off when full. The fluid rushes out and down the side of the white Colt. Splashes across his boots and the bottom of his jeans. He pulls the nozzle out and there’s little more than a slight look of annoyance animating his face.

He pours water from the 7-Eleven’s grey plastic watering can to wash away some of the corrosive fluid from his paintwork. Forming petroleum rainbows in the water at his feet.

He walks into the 7-Eleven and pays for the fuel with a credit card. The Indian woman working all alone through the night doesn’t say anything to him. He doesn’t say anything to her.

He walks back outside to his vehicle and coming around the back end of his car places a foot in the glassy mixture of petrol and water, and finds it simply skates out from beneath him, and sails out into the air taking his other foot with it.

For a moment — entirely airborne.

His body falls to the hard concrete with barely a sound. He picks himself up quickly and lightly; gets back into the white Colt without an expression on his face. Pain somewhere inside his body but none of it showing.

--> One in a Million is published in the most recent Stop Drop & Roll. You'll find Paraiso, Issue #2, Here.