Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Kid Things
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Jonny’s a space pilot. He’s got an airship made from an old tire swing. Lucy-Jane’s his girl. She’s wearing tin foil over her dress. I’m an alien lurking on a distant moon, waiting to shoot Jonny down, to pick over his bones. I’m going to go easy on Lucy-Jane, though. Things are rough with her mom and dad shouting all the time right now.
Jonny steers his ship down onto my planet. I clamber over the moon rocks and the slide. His cockpit opens with a hiss and he swings up high into the air and leaps out. Lucy-Jane follows more daintily, her foil outfit glinting in the light of the twin suns.
As Jonny surveys the barren landscape and Lucy-Jane asks what he sees, I crawl close. My tentacles drip ooze. My fangs drip blood. And then I leap. But Jonny, space hero that he is, feels the motion in the air. He spins, his laser pistol already unholstered.
But I leap too wild, and he draws too fast, and his fist catches me in the jaw, and I spill to earth, biting my tongue, the taste of my blood hot and sudden in my mouth.
And then whoever I am is lost back on earth, and now I am the alien, and I’m on Jonny, space idiot, and I am spitting my blood at him as I hit him. And I’m crying, and I think he’s crying. He better be crying. I am an alien. I feed on his tears.
Lucy-Jane ends it. She pushes me off him. I sprawl on the grass. On the moon rock. We both lie there panting, sniffing.
“Why is it always fighting? Why is it always aliens and fighting?” She shouts it. And suddenly she is crying, suddenly there are tears. They stand out, bright as jewels on her tin foil outfit, shining in the light of the twin suns. “Why doesn’t anyone ever come in peace?”
And she turns and she runs, off across the moonscape and out of the park and away into the distance of outer space, out into the great unexplored stars that Jonny and I have no idea about, won’t even realize exist until the slow time travel of our lives has left the park and our spaceships far far behind.
Binoorie
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
The minstrel made a harp of my sister’s bones, polished and shaped them as he needed. He used the silken threads of her hair for strings; plangent, guilt-inducing.
It had seemed such a simple thing to push her over the seawall, to watch her founder and splash and drown. To think that was the end of it all. The wedding day came and I could not feel joy. I took no pleasure in my husband’s face, nor in the thought of our life together, of what lay ahead. Each time I looked at him and tried to smile, all I could see was him aging before my eyes, faster and faster, becoming death.
When the minstrel arrived, his strange instrument on his back, I was grateful for the distraction. He plucked at the strings and it seemed they had anchors in my stomach for the noise wrenched at me. He played my shame, for all to witness; my sister’s bones singing our story for wedding feast guests to hear.
It was simple enough to take the harp from the minstrel’s hands – he gave it up easily, as if he knew it was his only to borrow – and I walked from the hall. I took to the roads, earning my keep with the bones of my sister, singing over and over. I wear my guilt like a cloak, begging forgiveness as a beggar does alms.
My days are cold and lonely, cut adrift from all things that might once have afforded me comfort: husband, hearth, home. Worse still are the nights when she sings me to troubled sleep, her strings moving of their own volition, her voice something that drops through the air like bitter rain. And the sound of the sea, the crash and swell of it just as it was the day I threw her in comes back to haunt me like a refrain.
It would be easy, I suppose, to throw her in once again, to tie something heavy to these polished bones and let her sink into the green darkness; to drown her a second time. But I cannot let her go. I did so once and it was, I now know, my greatest loss. So I keep my penance close, to pierce me like a bone through the heart.