Things that take 20 minutes (or less)

*Trigger warning*

A response to Brock Turner’s father. Click here to read the letter Brock Turner’s father wrote regarding his son’s sentencing.

If you ask anyone about what their most defining moments are; the things that have lifted them up or turned their world upside down or damaged them beyond repair, the things they will mention will likely only have lasted moments, epiphanies that occur from reading something powerful, from seeing their child take their first breath, from seeing a loved one die, from the time they went from feeling safe and happy to feeling afraid for their life and the lives of those around them.Twenty minutes is twelve hundred seconds. A lifetime. You can save someone’s life in 20 minutes. You can listen to six and a half songs. You can go for a walk, cook a meal, read a chapter of a book, drive to work, have a deep and meaningful conversation with someone – well, you probably can’t, but the rest of us can. Your son can swim 2000 metres in twenty minutes! I know that because his swim times were posted with some of the articles written about this case. Because, you know, that matters in a rape case. You can take twenty minutes out of your day (because, to you, apparently, twenty minutes is no time at all) and read the beautiful words written by your son’s victim. I hope you have. I hope you do. If that doesn’t change your mind, then nothing will.

But I’m going to try anyway, just in case you have a spare twenty minutes. You can read this, and I hope that when you do, you hear the voices of all of us in your ear, for a full twelve hundred seconds and maybe, just maybe, begin to comprehend the reprehensibility of your actions.

Here is a list of crimes that take 20 minutes or less, itemised so that your micro brain can comprehend them.

1. Shoplifting.
2. Mugging someone.
3. Breaking into someone’s house or car.
4. Shooting someone.
5. Assault and battery – I guarantee you that if someone were beating you for twenty minutes, you would likely be dead.
6. Raping someone – Yes, I included it! Because you seem not to realise that however long someone is being raped for, whether that be twenty seconds, twenty minutes, twenty hours, twenty years – it is rape.

What has happened in their lives prior to this life altering, devastating, damaging twenty minutes does not count. The twenty minutes is what counts. That’s twenty minutes of him panting in her ear, rubbing himself against her bare legs, shoving his hand inside her, while she lays there, uncovered, unconscious, unable to say no. Twelve hundred seconds of her being pressed into the dirt, gravel and pine needles being pushed into her skin because your son was taking what he wanted; doing what he felt like doing. Twelve hundred seconds of her lying there half naked, without responding. ‘Twenty minutes of action’, as you so charmingly put it, or, ‘the rape of a human being’, as decent people put it.

You know what takes longer than twenty minutes?

1. Raising a son that believes women are his equals. That he is never, ever to take what he has no right to. That if he does something wrong, he should apologise. That he should mean it. That he should spend the rest of his life making up for those twelve hundred seconds of devaluing, degrading, dishonouring another human being. Of putting his hands where they do not belong. Of taking what he had no earthly right to take. That, my friend, takes a lifetime. One that your son has been granted. Use it. 
2. Realising that your son is not the victim, and that you are not the hero. This will take more than twenty minutes for you because you have demonstrated no aptitude for introspection. Why would you ever have to?  When you can hire an expensive lawyer and casually watch said lawyer tear apart your son’s victim and then write letters stating your son’s punishment was too harsh, a tendency toward quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow’s-point-of-view is seldom necessary.*  You probably spent less time on that letter than your son spent assaulting another human being.
3. It will take the girl your son assaulted much, much longer than twenty minutes to recover from this nightmare.

She will heal, gradually, because she is brave and strong and has the support of millions. She will go on to be a productive member of society. She has already inspired people around the world to stand up and be counted. She has proven herself to be compassionate and intelligent and wise beyond her years.

She has given a voice to anyone whose voice was stolen from them by people like you, with your casual, indifferent dismissal.

With your entitled, arrogant world view.

With your fancy lawyer.

With your silly little letter.

 

 

*Thank you Sir Terry for those words. I trust that you won’t have a problem with me using them here.

 

 

 

My life was women.

My life was women. From a very young age, with very few exceptions – the main one being my excellent father – women were all I knew of the world. It was my mum, my three older sisters, an endless supply of aunts, my grandmothers – both grandfathers having passed away before I was born, and even a great-grandmother. Dad worked a lot and Mum stayed home with the girls. I never had a brother. We did have a male dog but his balls were unceremoniously chopped off one day, so.

I didn’t know that being a girl was considered second-rate, even in the 80’s and 90’s in Australia. That being a girl was considered alright, but. That my parents would get looks of pity every time they had yet another girl.

Are you going to try for a boy then?

Will you just keep going until you get one?

As though my sisters and I were unsatisfactory toys pulled out of an arcade claw game, and they had been aiming for something better.

I didn’t see any of this. It passed me happily by.

My first babysitters were female – my grandma Aud or my great Aunt Lola. We’d eat ham and pickle sandwiches and drink lemonade from glasses with orange flowers stamped on them. The bubbles would pop softly in the heat. We would watch Mornings with Kerri-Anne – I had no idea what it had taken for her to succeed in an industry where even the queen of daytime TV herself didn’t get paid the same amount as men doing the same job.

My mother went back to work once I was old enough to go to day-care, then I went on to primary school. My teachers were mostly female – a male anomaly in year 6 but my school Principal was a woman. I was friends with boys; I didn’t view them as some strange ‘other’. I only knew that to me it was more fun making mud pies, skateboarding and hitting each other with our school bags than it was to act like a lady. My oldest sister bit all the heads off any dolls that made it into the house; the bottom of her closet a strange cemetery of tiny plastic limbs and synthetic hair. She also taught me how to write my name and how to spell before I was 6. My second oldest sister would teach me Maths and the importance of standing up for others, and my third oldest sister would make me go with her down storm drains and up trees from dawn till dusk, when we would return home covered in ant bites and dirt. We read books, and if we were ever bored, Mum made us write a story for her. I have a whole folder of my stories, carefully kept for all these years – my favourite is one about a group of spiders who hid in some people’s shoes, then bit them and turned into those people. No unicorns and princesses here; not for me.

We went to Mass once a week and I would ask why there were no women priests.

Because women can’t be priests. My eyes widened. But it was probably just a one-off, right?

Lunchtimes at primary school were filled with playing Zoombinis on the computers in the library or games of handball on the quadrangle. My friend Joey came up to me once when I was just about to serve and pulled me aside, his face serious.

I think you’re ready to play with the boys.

What?

You’re good enough. You should play with us instead.

When I did play with them and beat them all I was told to go back with the girls where I belonged. Same as when I was the only girl in a swimming race in year 2. I beat them all in the 25 metre freestyle. Dad had come to watch and I’d never been more proud. There were a few crying boys, upset at being beaten by a girl, but I didn’t feel bad. I was just better than they were.

At the age of 12, I was told I needed to start shaving my legs.

Why?

Because you have to start acting like a lady.

But I’m not a lady, I’m 12.

When I did take that step I was praised by the girls around me and I felt better about myself. Felt like I fit in. That boys would see me as a girl rather than their friend, and that was what I wanted, right?

My high school was all girls. My sisters had all been there before me, done that; they were school captain, vice captain, prefect, dux of subjects – the list goes on. They are now a teacher, a doctor and a medical student. They are fierce, they’re the smartest people I know. They’re my stars.

My mother duxed her school. She told me once that her father was completely shocked that she won scholarships to attend university.

Why would you want to go to uni? You’re just going to get married soon.

Because I want to, Dad. I want to learn about the world and get a job and contribute. 

My grandmothers hadn’t finished school. I was gobsmacked when I learned that.

Why not? I asked.

Most women didn’t, was the answer.

But why?

Because we knew all we’d need to know by then. A woman’s place is in the home. You don’t need a fancy degree to know how to cook and sew and clean and raise children.

People ask me why I haven’t changed my last name since I’ve been married. This always puzzles me. Why would I? It’s not my name. I have no connection to it. It’s my husband’s name. He’s welcome to keep it.

But what about when you have kids?

Well, IF I have kids, that decision will be between my husband and me. If they end up with his last name, they might ask me why my name is different to theirs, and if they do I’ll tell them. Because my name is mine. Because being a woman doesn’t mean you have to accept things the way they’ve always been. If you want to change your name, that’s great. If you don’t want to, that’s great too.

My life now is women. It’s nurses on the ward, but usually not doctors. It’s hospital administration, to a certain level; it’s my manager, but not her manager. Why not? Oh I don’t know, lack of ambition, family commitments, too emotional, you know. They hold themselves back really, don’t they?

I read articles about a girl being raped in Croatia by three Australian men who pay her just over $30000 in a rape settlement. They have their one year sentence reduced to five years good behaviour. They buy their freedom, then make jokes on their instagram about joining the mile-high club with the flight attendant on their way back home. I read about Brock Turner, and other college campus rapists who get let off easily, and see how vilified their victims become.

I speak to my sisters of other colours, creeds, abilities – they face things I have never had to experience, thousands of tiny aggressions, again and again and again, and are told they must be twice as good to get half as much.

I see online vitriol sent to feminist pages. I see stomach-churning messages that guys send to my friends if they turn them down for a date. I get yelled at when I walk to the shops. I get into taxis and listen to the driver go on and on about how young women these days don’t act like ladies and they disgust him.

I’m 20, listening to my best friend tell me about a guy who keeps turning up to her place of work, asking her to join in a threesome, all the while insisting his attention is a compliment, while her male manager laughs it off. I’m 18, sitting at a bus stop, and a drunk man sits next to me, and I’m torn between wanting to move to keep myself safe but not wanting to seem rude. Then he turns to me, and starts saying disgusting things. Things that involve what he wants to do to me, how much I’d like it and I can’t move. I can’t believe what I’m hearing, and my face is heating up and my heart is a drum telling me to get out of there and I’m sick and feeling dirty and as though it’s my fault, then my feet can finally move and I start to get up and he pins me down and I start to scream and out of nowhere a security guard is there. I am crying and I run across the bridge, calling my mother to come and get me and the pain and anger in her voice when she hears what happened to me is palpable, and I am scared and sad and feel so wrong inside, like I’m polluted.

What can we do about these things? We’re just girls. And society tells us that it’s okay to be a girl, but.

We can be there for each other. We can be each other’s strongest allies. When we have daughters or meet people with daughters, we don’t smile sadly at them. We beam and congratulate them on their little bundle. And then, you wrap that little bundle up in our hope for their future. We will raise our daughters to believe in themselves. That they are never, ever, to think that they are worth less or worthless because they are a girl. That they are powerful and fierce and that they never, ever have to just shut up and take it, or smile, sweetheart, or that they have to get back in the kitchen. That they don’t have to laugh if they don’t think a joke is funny. That they are funny, despite what people say about female comedians. That they are wise. That they can be pilots or doctors or lawyers or nurses or teachers or firefighters or astronauts or mothers or soldiers or philosophers. You can even tell them what my parents told me. That if you want to be a writer, you should be a writer.

That you are important.

That you can change the world.

That anyone who says or thinks otherwise can suck it.

 

 

I’m putting my hand up.

*Written December 2014

I’ve just quit my job. My steady hours, steady pay, guaranteed employment job. Why? I hear you ask. To be a writer. For an un-steady, un-paid, very small chance of success, stay at home in your pyjamas kind of job, get up at 12 and work till 2am kind of job. There is nothing good about writing.

Except for how it makes me feel.

Braver then I can ever be in person. More real than I could ever imagine. Plumbing the depths of my soul, and all that jazz.

But it wasn’t easy.

Nursing is a great job, a necessary job, a job that if you do it right can make you feel competent and knowledgeable and useful and necessary, and I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t want to feel like that every day when they get up and go to work.

But it wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough for me.

It was part of my identity, and maybe it still is. It’s the answer to the question, what do you do?

“I’m a nurse.” I don’t DO nursing. You are a nurse, or you aren’t.

I’m a nurse. A nurse who’s also a writer, but I’m telling you that I found it too hard to do both. And then this job came along, this different, wonderful, easier job with better hours and better pay and no night shifts or getting home at 11pm and having to do all the housework before getting up at 5 to go back to work in the morning, or working a double shift because everyone’s called in sick and it’s the only option.

So this job came along, and the tiny, dangerous voice in the back of my head said, here it is. Here’s your chance. Take the job, quit, and WRITE. It’s what you were meant to do.

My husband even sat me down and said that if I didn’t take this job he would never understand that literally here was every opportunity I could ever ask for and if I didn’t take it I was an idiot who didn’t deserve what I was given (but in much nicer way because he is lovely).

So I took it. I handed in my notice, then spent the next 6 weeks at work thinking about what I’d done. Had I made a terrible mistake? Had I just thrown away years at uni and years at my job where I was probably getting a promotion within the next year or two, and long service leave after that, and what about the fact that after I left I could no longer call myself a nurse? That was the hardest pill to swallow. That was the part that hurt the most. I didn’t want to give that part up. That part wasn’t for me. I LIKE calling myself a nurse, I liked being the one at dinner with the crazy stories about the poop and the blood and the shocked looks on everyone else’s face. I liked knowing things about surgeries with hard to pronounce names, and being the one my friends called for an opinion on whether this colour was normal, or who their mum should be referred to. I was competent, and good at my job, and for the most part I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. No matter how hard I tried, how often I tried to talk myself into it, or when I had a bad shift trying to reconcile that with all the things I thought nursing would be but so clearly weren’t.

So 6 weeks went by, and I pondered, and then it was my last shift, and people were signing my shirt and handing me cards and hugging me, then I walked alone to security, and handed in  my pass. And that was that. I went around the corner to walk to the carpark and I couldn’t stop crying. It was grief, pure and simple. My heart recognising what my brain couldn’t; that a part of my life was over and I was sad about it,

Sad that I hadn’t loved it enough to stay, that I hadn’t been strong enough to keep at it, that I wanted something else in my life.

In my first year as a nurse I came very, very close to making a huge mistake with a patient. Fortunately, my want to protect the patient outweighed my ego, and I went and got the manager to see if I was doing the right thing. I wasn’t.

Experience is a brutal teacher, but by God do you learn. We caught my mistake in time, and I luckily did not cause the patient any harm. A friend of mine said to me the other day that sometimes the biggest successes of our lives are actually recognising when you need to make a change. There are moments you can look back on and be most proud of yourself, and those moments for me are when I recognised I was making a mistake. I stopped what I was doing. I put my hand up and said, I need help.

Thinking about crashing your car or falling down the stairs as you go into work, not so badly that you’ll be really hurt, but just badly enough that you have to miss a few days of work is a sign that you’re not okay. Coming home so stressed that you cry if you drop an egg, or yelling at your family because the internet is slow is a sign that you need to stop. Something’s not right.

You’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You are making a mistake. Remember that thing five-year-olds can do that adults don’t allow themselves to do? Stop what you’re doing. Put your hand up and say, ‘I need help.’ Treat yourself the same way you would treat a patient, a friend, a loved one – you want the best for them. Why shouldn’t you want the best for yourself? It might not save your life, but it might just save your soul.

 

It’s that time again…EPIPHANY TIME! and this time, I want YOU to join in.

Look, see? It’s me!

 I’ve just returned from the Brisbane Writers Festival where I was asked to read some of my work at the Queensland Writers Centre Whispers salon, and, let’s be honest, I might be on a bit of a high.

Being up there, finally able to share with a real audience some of my own work was such a fantastic experience. It was daunting, yes, and I may have needed 3 trips to the bathroom beforehand, and there may have been some positive self-talk mumbled under my breath to the tune of I think I can I think I can, but once I was up there…It felt like I was doing what I should be doing. More than I ever feel at my work as a nurse, even on my best days where I know that to that one person, I am making a difference. This was different. It felt right.

My parents, husband and friend were cheering me on in the benches, and people afterwards I had never met before were very gracious in saying how much they enjoyed the reading, and one lovely lady even said she’d buy my book. I felt a thrill I’d never felt before. A tiny, tiny spark. A dangerous, maybe I can do this in the back of my mind.

HELL IS EMPTY (and all the devils are here)

PROSPERO

My brave spirit!

Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

would not infect his reason?

ARIEL

Not a soul

But felt a fever of the mad and played

Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners

Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,

Then all afire with me. The king’s son, Ferdinand,

With hair up-staring—then, like reeds, not hair—

Was the first man that leaped, cried, “Hell is empty

And all the devils are here.”

 – William Shakespeare, The Tempest

That last line has kicked around in my head for a couple of days, and I think I know why. I’ve been working on an article about the link between the creative mind and depression, and this quote made me make that embarrassing ‘wo-hey!’ noise people make when their mind is doing it wrong. Being prone to depression myself, it has felt exactly like that at times – that hell is empty and all the devils are here, in my mind, just chillin’, turning my formerly logical, productive self into a pile of numb that alternately cries because I can’t get through folding the laundry or makes me sit in bed all day watching Orange is the New Black. 

At the Movies with Anna & Stephanie

My big sister was born on a Wednesday; the kind of Wednesday that meant she’d be full of woe the rest of her life. We had that poem on a square biscuit tin and we’d always pay Anna out about it, ourselves being fair of face, workin’ hard for a livin’, bonny, blithe, good and gay and all that jazz. Anna responded the way she always did; that is to say, she didn’t really respond. She was a weird kid.

But I wanted to be exactly like her. When Anna decided she hated having her picture taken for anything, I suddenly hated having my picture taken (even though I capital L-, bold, underlined, italicised –o-v-e-d it, but Anna was my tastemaker, my barometer of acceptable and cool. So when we go to the movies, and I laugh at something I think is funny, I look around to see if she’s laughing too. Only, she never is. There might be a flick of a smile and then it’s gone, Anna’s face a silent, severe, respectful mask.

One time a large group of us went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and there was a crowd of rude teenagers being themselves: chatting, yelling out, throwing popcorn at each other. There were so many ‘tuts’ and ‘tsks’ it was like being surrounded by geckos, but no one said anything. No one but Anna. People don’t often ignore Anna when she speaks; she does so with such conviction it will make anyone think twice. She’ll turn it on her family too, when we’re at the movies together, laughing our assortment of laughs, and there will be Anna at the end of the row, serious and watchful, and she’ll lean towards us, a fierce ‘sh’ at her lips, and mum will dramatically act abashed and dad will smile and I’ll roll my eyes; Em will be too busy asking if the movie is a true story or not and Claire won’t even hear because she’s laughing her head off at the screen.

‘Well’, Anna says reasonably afterwards when we all give her shit for it, ‘people pay to see the movie. We need to respect that.’

Have I mentioned she’s an actress?

Once, just Anna and I went to see the last Lord of the Rings together, the last real trilogy, before someone in Hollywood decided that the 3^rd film in any trilogy needed to be split into 2 films. Bye bye trilogy, hello quin…tilogy? tology? tuplet?

I remember crying when Frodo is hanging off the ledge in Mount Doom as the world explodes around them, and he gets that look in his eyes that says he’s just so tired, the ring is gone and won’t it all just be so much easier to let go? I was smooshed into my seat, hunched to protect myself, whispering ‘don’t you dare’.

I couldn’t look at Anna. I was too afraid she’d think I was ridiculous, that this moment would be taken from me, that my tears would be downgraded somehow by the lack of her own.

As the credits rolled and ‘On the Horizon’ began playing right after Sam closes his front door, Anna at that moment turned to me.

Her face was streaming wet, her eyes red, and more tears fell as she spoke.

‘That movie,’ she choked, ‘shat all over the other two.’

Will You Still Love Me When I’m No Longer Young And Dumb?

Yes, Miley’s VMA performance was weird. Strange, even. Unsettling. For some, downright wadafaaaa? She’s clearly doing her darndest to shed her image – she’s had a ratchet makeover and has twerked her way into the twittersphere to prove it – and the performance wasn’t even all that good with shaky vocals and limbs flying about willy (oo-er!) -nilly and the whole thing is rather awkward and train-wreck-y in a “I’m young and dumb and having fun” sort of way, but why is no one talking about Robin Thicke?

He’s 36, married, and a father to a 3-year-old boy. Thicke has been quoted as saying that his son, Julian, “has changed everything — every move I make, I know that it will affect him, his growth and his happiness”, which is really lovely and all, but I would take that more seriously if his only response to the VMA matter wasn’t a tweet that said, ‘that was dope’. Why did he let it get that far? Why didn’t during rehearsals he say something like,

“Hey, Miley, you’re 20, you can’t even drink legally yet, so maybe don’t stick your butt into my crotch, lick my chest and stroke my junk with a big foam finger?” 

The backlash has been full-on Miley-wise, while Robin has escaped with no more than his mother coming out and saying, “Him? Loved it. I love that suit, the black and white suit,” then follows that up with, “I don’t understand what Miley Cyrus is trying to do. I just don’t understand.”

There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this. Not only with the double standards we’re all apparently happy to adhere to by placing the blame entirely on Miley’s shoulders, but also by our willingness to overlook worrying song lyrics because it’s catchy and we like their outfits. Please, mothers, please don’t be proud if your son’s career shoots into hyperspace with a song called ‘Blurred Lines”, featuring such charming lyrics as

“I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two…”

and so on and so forth. Of course, it was Miley’s choice to say yes to this collaboration – I am in no way saying that Miley shouldn’t be responsible for her own actions; she is, after all (as she is so fond of reminding us) a woman now and her own person, but she is still in the process of finding out exactly who that person is.

Thicke, on the other hand, is in a drastically different stage of life to Miley and should have enough self-awareness by now to recognize that grinding his junk against a 20-year-old’s backside probably isn’t the best thing to do. Maybe it’s a side effect of being surrounded by naked ladies in his film clips all the time that has warped his brain into saying, “it’s fine, it’s all entertainment, that’s show business baby,” but if so, how sad is that? Not only sad, but dangerous. To be surrounded by those ideas day in day out numbs you not only to the weight your words and actions carry, but also to the disturbing undertones present in this song, the film clip and this performance.

The awful thing is, Miley’s behavior isn’t any worse than what you encounter in any night club on any given Saturday night. Girls think it is okay to dance like that to music like that, because they’re young and dumb and having fun, and they know they shouldn’t enjoy music like that but they do because it’s catchy and it’s dark and there’s alcohol and who’s going to notice anyway? In Miley’s case however, everyone gets to see it– whether we want to or not.

So, yeah, she crossed a line somewhere, or ‘blurred’ it somehow (har har, see what I did there?), but so did he, and his part in this is, for me at least, a little less defensible.

They both did this; all I’m asking is that someone points the (foam) finger at Robin, too.

CALLING ALL EDITORS

I have a short story I’m about to send in to a competition – 1000 words max.

Would anyone be able to help out with offering their thoughts on the story?

For those interested, the competition is for Yen Magazine, and must feature a suitcase. The details are here. Entries close August 15th – get writing!

Steph x

Blind Spot

We all know The Bachelorette is awful. It truly is. Anything which manufactures situations in which people actually have no choice but to fall in love and get engaged within 8 weeks of meeting one another has to be awful. Right?

But is it though? I mean, compared to poverty and famine and Mugabe, is it really that bad? Does it have any redeeming qualities? Is it actually, for instance, a searing satire of the harsh realities of dating life, seen through a microscope? Maybe not, but what it might be is the most feminist show on television. Or at least a feminist show on television. If you squint.

Hear me out, quickly, before I think too hard about this because I’m pretty sure this theory is already wilting in my mind-grapes.

One independent girl going out to get what she wants, dating 20 guys at the same time, stating openly and honestly what she is looking for without fear of retribution. In a society where asymmetrical sexual moral standards between men and women are the norm, one could argue that The Bachelorette is, albeit accidentally, leveling the playing field. The casting of a woman in the traditional gender role of the male (complete with his inherit right to sexual liberalization – pah!) seeking out a mate; testing all available options, picking some and throwing away others while female viewers cheer her on shows we’ve come a long way from the kitchen sex bunnies of the past….but only if you overlook the fact that the main goal of the Bachelorette is to find a man to propose to her, marry her, complete her, give her life meaning, etc, etc.

See? I told you you had to squint.

Help me out here guys, I need for this show to be forgivable. I need for it to deserve to exist. Why?

Because I have accidentally been watching it every week for the past 4 seasons.

I don’t just watch it though. You can’t ‘just watch it’ in Australia. I actively seek it out. I do more thank seek it out, I download an app onto my computer which hides my IP address, which means I can go to US-only sites like abc.com and stream it online every week and –

Come to think of it, maybe The Bachelorette is really really Marxist. And, um, postmodern. Socialist? No? You know what? Screw it. It’s actually kind of brave, going on television and telling the world that what you want is to find someone to spend your life with when most people can’t even say that face-to-face to someone they’ve known since they were 2. I have a certain respect for people with that kind of courage, and if that sort of courage means they occasionally do silly things like sign up to be the next Bachelorette then so be it.

Pass the remote, Germaine.

 

Ode

Death isn’t spoken about much in society, except on tumblr by teenagers who just want to like, die, or whatever. 

Which is strange, because it is the only thing in the world that everyone has in common – that one day, you and everyone you love will die. But it’s still a taboo, and today that’s not okay with me.

Four years ago my friend died. It’s still not real.

I’m not in shock, or denial, but the reality, the finality, the unfairness of it all has hit me only a very few times, in moments like short bursts of light, flaring and breathtaking and all consuming. Those moments have taken my breath away. The enormity of that word – death – and all it encompasses are things that can only be felt, not spoken about, but it’s a very human thing to try to explain the inexplicable; this compulsive need to plumb the depths of life’s great mysteries.

She was here. She was a living, breathing part of this world. She was funny and pretty and smart and had so much hope. She was positive and sarcastic and biting and loyal. She didn’t take anyone’s bullshit. She was twenty. She was all those things.

She was here, she was alive. And then she wasn’t.

And then? The weirdest thing happened.

I got used to it.

I pushed all that enormous enormity aside and moved on. But – I’ve never forgotten. You never do forget the first thing which makes you realises that you have a soul and that it can hurt. 

Annie will always be a part of me; she changed my life. How sad that it was only after she died that I could say that.

Annie I remember you. Your warmth, your light, your strength. Thank you for being my friend. What a privilege it was to have known you.

And so today I lay aside all other things. Tiny distractions, life goals, money troubles, DIY projects. Today is for you. Today is for you and all those who loved you. All those you loved.

But please don’t mistake me when I talk about today. Anniversaries are just our way of marking time, a way of coming together, an excuse for those who have trouble expressing themselves otherwise that you meant something to them. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think about you the other 364 days of the year. Not by a long shot.

Today is just the day where we get to say it out loud. 

GOODBYE IDOL, or, I DID IT MY WAY

Well, it's finally come to an end. And what a competition it has been! I can't believe how far I've come in this, to have made it this far is such an honour for me; to be in the company of some very fine writers makes it even better that people have read, enjoyed and voted for me over the past few months.

I've made a quick voice post sharing my thoughts on this competition, feel free to have a listen and let me know YOUR thoughts. I'll give you a penny for them 😉

Lots of love,

Steph

Week Twenty-Seven prompt: Once Upon a Time

You should know upfront

That there is no once upon a time.

That this is not a love story.

That liars kill their kind.

Boy meets Boy,

one day on a train.

It sounds like a love story,

and it might have been

(for what is a love story but a story about love?),

but then they meet

the Girl.

She sits between them,

All five feet

a clear-skinned mystery

they want to solve.

A pinch and a tickle

they get for their troubles.

But, that day on the train,

they find a promise

in her silver laugh

in her small hands,

in the voice of her eyes,

“I am yours.”

From somewhere deepdeepdown,

they feel a push.

Boy and Boy slip.

Boy and Boy trip.

(They don’t want to get back up.)

Something as stupid as

an upside-down frown

holds them hostage.

She goes to them,

to Boy and Boy,

one by one.

She touches and

heat is hot andwhispersarehotter,

Skin to skin and skin to skin,

“IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou,

is that okay?”

It isn’t,

But-

people can get used to anything.

There is a week,

and then two,

she isn’t where she says she is.

Boy and Boy play darts

dripping with doubt.

They find her,

one day on a train.

She is kissing someone.

Familiar,

like her lips kiss his lips

every day.

It sounds like a love story,

and it might have been –

(for what is a love story but a story about love?)

but Boy and Boy don’t believe in love stories

any more.

She feels a push.

She slips, she trips,

She wants to get back up.

Boy and Boy wear upside-down frowns

as they hold her hostage

until the train comes.

“Such a shame.”

“Terrible accident.”

“So young.”

“What an awful way to go.”

There is no once upon a time.

This is not a love story.

Liars kill their kind.

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Week Twenty-Six Prompt: Sated

This is written in the same universe as 'After-Haze', my week 20 entry, but it can absolutely be read on its own. 'Sated' took me in the opposite direction this week, of wanting so badly to feel fulfilled, and knowing it will never be a possibility. Let me know what you think!

A History Lesson

Thanks Michael. Sit down please, Lucy, Tom. I promise this won’t take long. Rachael sees the dubious looks on Tom and Lucy’s faces and rolls her eyes. Well it might. But it’s important. No Lucy, your father and I are not splitting up, don’t be ridiculous.

Tom makes a small noise that might be a cough and Rachael’s eyes flash.

 What was that Tom? 

Tom is silent, slightly mollified and he thinks that maybe now isn’t the right time to stir his mum up.

That’s what I thought, Rachael nods. Now. 

Rachael inhales slowly and her children stare back at her, little faces peering up at her with the intensity only the combined forces of three children under twelve can muster. 

I have decided – Rachael pauses here, takes a breath and continues – to tell you about your uncle. 

Which one mum? We have like, over a thousand.

No, Lucy darling. Your other uncle. The one you never got to meet. 

Lucy's brow furrows. But, we already know – 

Tom elbows Lucy and she shoots him a vicious look, mouthing what? What? But Tom ignores her, staring at his mother. She looks sad and he sort of wants to hug her but he can’t really, he’ll be twelve soon, but Michael is there with his too-small arms and his mum is suddenly smiling again. Tom feels himself relax a little bit, enough to turn back to Lucy and poke his tongue out at her and watch her face heat up with indignation while he smirks, satisfied, and turns back to his mother.

Thanks Mikey. I’m alright. You can sit back down. I know you know about him, Lucy, but I want to tell you three properly, because – Rachael's voice breaks and she looks down at her hands. The three children stiffen slightly and Lucy’s breath catches; a tiny, fragile sound that is almost lost in the crackling of the fire in the hearth beside them. Rachael's shoulders straighten and she looks back up again.

Okay?

Okay. 

Okay. So. Here we go, then. 

Okay mum. 

This is going to be me, telling you about your uncle.

Alright.

Okay. 

A noise at the doorway startles Rachael and she looks up. Her husband, Dan, is leaning against the frame, staring at her in the pale grey winter light, last-minute Christmas packages in hand. Her eyes meet his and he wills her silently to continue. They have talked about this, late at night when Rachael’s legs are lying over his and his hand is wrapped in her hair; when words are breaths in the dark and everything around them is stillness and shadows. Rachael wants her children to know – they both do – so much, about her brave, clever, impossibly funny brother, who was no longer here. She wants to tell them how he teased her mercilessly over her crush on Dan, how he had once saved her from drowning in the creek out the back of their childhood home, how he had once let her into his tree house for a treat on her sixth birthday and let her eat as much mud cake as she wanted. She had been sick for a day afterwards and he had come to her with piles of Charlie Brown comics and read them to her, doing all the voices, til her stomach hurt from laughing so hard. She wants, with her whole being, has wanted for years, for them to know him like she had, which she knows is impossible but – she wants him to be more than just a name to them. 

Looking down at them all; at Lucy, fidgeting quietly with legs crossed in front of her, at Michael, so like her brother with a sort of quiet intensity in those bright green eyes of his and at Tom, who was trying very hard to look serious and grown up. Do you know, she thought, how much he would have loved you? How he would have spoiled you? How he would have claimed the ‘Cool Uncle’ title and demanded they come to him for advice about which spot exactly to tickle their mum in, or to teach them the Repetition game and, much later, to ask for advice about relationships and, God forbid, sex? How do I even begin to start telling you about this brilliant person you will never get the chance to meet? Somewhere in the very pit of her, buried so deep within her skin she had forgotten it was there, a tightness ached suddenly with this want, this want to have her brother back, this want for him to never have got into that car, for her children to know him, and she felt terribly sad that they would never – could never – know him, not really, not in the way she wanted them to. 

I’ve heard – Rachael can hear the smile in Dan’s voice as it cuts across the living room and three little heads snap up to stare at their father – that to start at the very beginning is a very good place to start.

Rachael looks up at him then, her eyes meeting his and he crosses the room and sits next to her on the couch, her body dipping towards his slightly as he settles; the warm length of his body in line with hers, smelling of Christmas and night-time and so very Dan it almost overwhelms her. Her hand finds his and the tightness unravels slightly and she thinks that, for the three little people in front of her, she can bloody well try. She takes a deep breath.

His name was Rob.

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Week Twenty-Five Prompt: Intersection, “Closer”.

Closer

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others…for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.” – Albert Einstein

“At this stage, it remains unclear how many people have been injured, as the chaos surrounding the nightclub fire continues. First reports indicate an electrical short ignited the acoustical backing which surrounded the stage area…”

*

The morning has been chaos, I’ve been down in Emergency helping transfer the stable patients to theatre or a ward. The hospital is on bypass now, we’re not taking any more admissions. The burns unit is full and every bed up here contains someone in pain. Alexa asks me to do a dressing on a patient for her; rattling off a quick handover: She’s come to us from Emergency overnight, she’s fairly stable, extubated already, the main problems for her are pain management and infection control. Alexa touches my shoulder, “It’s a mix of first, second and third degree – her face, right arm, bilateral legs, abdo – face and arm are the worst. Just those dressings for now. Thanks.” I nod and enter the room, wheeling my dressing trolley in with me. The TV is blaring, another newscast about the fire fills the room. I mute it, and suddenly all I can hear is the ticking clock and the soft put-put-put of the pump pushing fluids into the patient’s one good arm. 

I cross to the sink, scrubbing my hands for the thirtieth time that day. My skin feels raw as I grab a towel and pat them dry, snapping gloves on after opening the dressing pack. What I can see of the woman is covered in bandages; swollen eyes and mouth are all I can see of her face. Puffy fingers peek out from one bandaged arm; the other arm uncovered, relatively unscathed. Good. One good arm. That is good. That will help. She begins whimpering as I slowly and carefully drip sterile saline onto the old dressings on her arm. 

“I know it hurts, I know. Try to take slow breaths.  We have to soften the bandages first before changing them.” 

Clotted blood and haemoserous stains turn wet, shiny from the saline. The dressing relaxes, no longer dried out papier mache, and I slowly, carefully, peel it back. 

Stop. Just stop. Get that look off your face. This is your job. Breathe through your mouth and suck it up. Breathe. Just breathe. This is a person. She is still a person. 

I bite my tongue. Stop. Her arm, what used to be an arm; what might, some day, again be an arm, stirs, reaches out, searching. Just stop. It brushes against mine; hot and angry. I watch it for a moment, see the red, oozing, raw skin against my own. My first impulse is to draw back, shake it off, some disgusting, rotting, inhuman thing touching me. She pulls her arm back, leaving a smear of clear fluid on my skin. I stare at the mark she left, anchoring me to this moment. Get that look off your face. The smell smacks into me, sinking into my nose, my skin, my clothes. This is your job. I close my eyes and suddenly, I am two years old again. I am staring out at the driveway of my childhood home. It is 45 degrees outside – mum and dad keep talking about it, “heat wave”, “we really should get air conditioning”. The driveway is paved dark stone and the heat is visible, rising in hazy waves to meet the hot blue sky. I am wearing latticed white stockings, no shoes, and a dress. It is 45 degrees outside. The door is propped open to let some air in. I step outside. 

Breathe through your mouth and suck it up. I think of the effort it must have taken this woman to touch me, how much pain it would cause that arm to brush against mine. Her eyes are wet; she is blinking as though she can’t see clearly. I look around for a tissue and grab one from her bedside table, holding it to her eyes. The tissue soaks up the salt water and I watch her mouth. She seems like she might be trying to talk, but I can’t understand her.

I reach to take off the dressings covering her face. They peel off, one by one, the smell rising up in cloying tendrils, getting worse with each unraveling layer. I gasp. I can’t help it when I see her face. What used to be her face. What might, someday, again be her face. But not today. Today it is half gone, blackened and shiny and swollen and oozing and it's never struck me before that without hair, eyebrows, a nose or cheeks a person doesn’t look like a person any more. Breathe. Just Breathe. The breaths remind me to focus on what she has been through. What she will go through. I see it all now, spinning out before me on some kind of timeline; I see debridements and amputations and skin grafts and excisions. I see how completely her life has changed even though she doesn’t know it yet. I see that right now all she needs is for me to be calm. In control. I take a deep breath. This is a person. I wipe a smile onto my face. 

“You’re going to be okay,” I lie through my teeth. I am two years old again. I am screaming and screaming and screaming as my stockings melt into my feet. I cannot move. I can only scream. 

“I’m just going to change these dressings okay? It will be over soon.” Panicked footsteps, and my dad is almost there. I know it’s my dad, even through my tears I can see he is dad-shaped and crying and trying to get to me faster. Closer now. Closer.
Almost there. 

“Almost there, I promise. I just have to clean this first.” He’s there, scooping me up, crying and yelling and so mad at me but gentle and I am so tiny in his arms and then I am in the car, feet in an orange bucket. There is ice and water in the bucket and I cannot stop screaming. My sister is holding me, shushing me, telling me it will be alright. ‘You’re at the hospital now, they will take care of you. This is where people come when they’re hurt because people know what to do here. They look after you
here.’

She is still a person. 

“Right,” The nurse smiles down at me, I smile down at the woman; calm, in control. “Let’s get you fixed up.” I relax in the nurse’s arms. I trust her. The woman grips my hand suddenly, tight against mine, and her breaths come easier. She trusts me. 

**NB** 45 degrees Celsius is 113 degrees Fahrenheit. 

This has been an intersection with the very lovely , who put up with my nitpicking like a real trooper. Now go read hers, it's awesome!

Many thanks to  for 'whipping' (har har, see what I did there?) this into shape. 

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Week Twenty-Four: In your wheelhouse

A Love Letter (of sorts).

          Last night I dreamt I went to my old wheelhouse again. It seemed to me I stood by the front door and could not enter, for a liquorice padlock and barley chain barred the way. I called out in my dream, but there was no answer.  Moving closer, I peered through the pasta curtains and saw that it was deserted. Suddenly, the way it does in dreams, bread appeared in my pocket, and I took it out. It was warm and crackled in just the right way as I sat down on the front stoop, glancing furtively around. I ate it; bites too loud in the unforgiving silence.

It sounds stupid, unimportant, ridiculous, to dream about something like that. Most of my dreams are exactly that, but not this one. This one wrapped me up in a blanket of yesterday and kissed my forehead, a bittersweet lipstick mark left behind.

What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t stupid to me.

This is a love letter, of sorts, to all the food I can no longer eat.

To the pasta, durum or soft wheat; you entered my life the way you left it – with ease and tender tastes and loops and swirls and bowties. The last time I had you the water spilled over the pot, and I tried to avoid using a strainer because I’m lazy. You stayed patiently in my freezer waiting for me to fulfil your destiny (you almost got eaten by my roommate but I saved you, remember?). It hurts my heart to leave you for a lesser substitute. This I promise you – I will love you, only you, not your lesser imitations, for the rest of my life.

To the KFCs, the Burger Kings, the Subways and especially the McDonald's. You were there for me when I needed you most – in moments of weakness, solitude, and, on one occasion, in Switzerland when you were the only thing I could afford. I drive past you now and see your golden arches through the fogged up window of my car, soft and alluring. Regret lingers in my chest; regret for things lost which cannot be regained, for the damage you did to me which I asked for. For the fact that the choice of what I can and can’t eat has been taken from me.

To the meat pies – I will miss you on the days when all I want is to be a kid again; to remember the times mum picked me up from school, and I would beg for a pie and I would get you, sometimes, if I promised you wouldn’t ruin my dinner. The pastry was soft and the meat hot; one or the other spilled all over me and I would lick the sauce off my fingers, sticky and sweet and not caring I looked like a grub. You, more than anything, more than photos and love letters and report cards carefully kept (“Stephanie is a friendly and outgoing student who would benefit from more time spent not talking in class”), are my childhood. You are my childhood, and I put you away with the teddy bears and the frilly socks with a heavy sort of sadness in my soul.

To the chocolate – O! The chocolate – the milky sweet melting moments we have shared are now locked away forever in my secret heart of hearts; a souvenir of the past, like so many smeared post cards from my father, illegible after years of being read, and re-read, and held to my chest with tears in my eyes. Thank you for all that you have given me.

To the bread, who has known me all my life. On cold mornings, fresh from the bakery or the oven; I have kneaded you, I have cut you, I have toasted you, I have squeezed your crust and felt it splinter under my fingers. You are the best and the worst of them; I want so badly for you to still be a part of me, but that hope has been taken from me. You were my wheelhouse and I have been served an eviction notice. I am outside of my wheelhouse now, looking back at it from some far-off place, imagining how you are getting on without me, now that you have made it clear how much you don’t want me. You make me sick, you’ve made me sick for years only I didn’t know it; I blamed grief and stress and myself while you and your gluten destroyed my insides, and I can’t look back without feelings of betrayal forcing me to feel hate for the thing I once loved so dearly.

I said this was a love letter, of sorts, but really this is goodbye.

I will venture off into the wilderness of the health food aisle and allergy information blurbs. I will explore the exotic lands of Quinoa and Millet and leave the shores of wheat, barley and rye behind. I will face the future with feathers in my heart and the knowledge that I will be truly well for the first time in years; that this is something I can control; that I will be happy and won’t cry for no reason; that I won’t need to get treatment for illnesses I don’t have. That I won’t have people telling me I’m anorexic and that I’m disgusting and should be ashamed of myself. I will build a new wheelhouse, made from rice and salad and fruit, and I will live in it, one day, when I grow into this new world of mine. And I will not talk of you again; I will not tell of my dream, for the dream is mine no longer. The dream is no more. 

NB** The first paragraph and last few lines are inspired by the opening chapter of 'Rebecca', by Daphne du Maurier.

I've never posted anything so true to life before. I wrote this because I have been recently diagnosed with coeliac disease after years of feeling unwell and being tested for everything under the sun. I am so so happy to finally have a diagnosis so I can move on with my life!

As I have never posted anything like this before (completely from my own point of view, non-fiction), I would love to hear what you think. 

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Week Twenty-Three Prompt: The weak force

                                                                    Off the Beaten Track

   

“Hiking?” Jason’s eyebrows raise as he takes in Hannah’s fretful expression. She is standing before them, laden with an enormous backpack and looking very, very sorry for herself. 

“He’s taking you hiking on a date? That’s no way to get into a chick’s pants.”

Hannah nods miserably, apparently unconcerned that she has barrelled uninvited into Jason and Tracey’s Sunday morning breakfast at Salt. She groans, sets her bag on the floor and sits down next to Tracey who is trying unsuccessfully to hide her laughter.

“I know, I know,” Hannah says, covering her face in her hands. “I don’t even know why I agreed to it.”

Tracey coughs.

“Yes, alright, shut up, I know why I agreed to it,” Hannah snaps. “Because I’m weak and he has this weird kind of force-field surrounding him that makes me forget myself, but it was stupid.” Hannah slumps over the table with a bang, hair falling over her face as she whimpers.

“It gets worse,” Tracey adds gleefully. 

“Worse? What could be worse?” Jason laughs down at Hannah, who now has her head pillowed in her arms on the table, bemoaning Bonds T-shirts and Those Who Wear Them.

“Bonds T-shirts?” Jason asks curiously.

“It’s the lycra.” Tracey explains, waving an airy hand. “It adds – What was it?”

There is an embarrassed silence from Hannah, then, in a small voice, “clingy zing.”

“That’s it,” Tracey winks at Jason. “I’d forgotten.”

“Don’t forget the slight puffing effect around the biceps due to the ribbed edge of the sleeve cuff,” Hannah says from the table, turning her head so she can speak. “Keep up, Trace.”

“Well, that goes without saying,” Tracey nods seriously. “Go on Hannah; tell Jas what else you did.”

Hannah emerges out from under her hair. “I told him I’d been before.”

"Oh," Jason says. "Well that's not that ba-"

“Not just that you’d been before,” Tracey snorts around another forkful of bacon and eggs and Hannah glares at her.

“I told Troy that I go every month with my family, that we love it and that I can’t get enough of nature and being outdoors and – it is not funny Jason!”

“Sorry Han, it’s just that you’re not the most outdoorsy person I’ve ever met."

“I’ll be alright though, won’t I?” Hannah stares at them both, worry etched across her features. “I mean, I’ve brought lots of books and things with me,” she trails off, leaning over to search through the backpack. Tracey coughs slightly. 

“Of course you will. Won’t she Trace? You’ll be fine, totally fine. I mean, granted, the one time we went hiking was a complete disaster because I got heatstroke and Trace had a fit over the state of the toilets along the trail-”, Jason breaks off and looks across to see Tracey frantically shaking her head at him.

Hannah is staring at him suspiciously. “Toilets?"

Jason pretends not to hear, looking vaguely around the cafe as though searching for someone.

"What is wrong with the toilets on a hiking trail Jason?” Hannah demands fiercely, brandishing the book (Born Survivor by Bear Grylls) she has taken out of her bag.

Jason closes his mouth and turns his head upwards, eyes searching the ceiling for divine inspiration. 

“Um, they’re sort of. Well, you know. It’s like.”

“Just tell her,” Tracey interrupts. “It will be better if she knows.”

"Knows?" Hannah's voice is very high. "Knows what, exactly?"

Jason takes a deep breath. “The toilets are…well, they’re called ‘long drops’.”

“Long drops?” Hannah whispers, eyes glued to Jason’s face, brows furrowed. “But what does that even-” She pauses, a look of appalled comprehension dawning on her face. “Is that,” she begins uncertainly.

“Exactly what it sounds like? I’m afraid so.” Tracey pats her arm sympathetically as Hannah whimpers.

“Never mind darling. Just pinch your nose. Can I have a look at what else you’re taking?”

Hannah nods vaguely, wordlessly mouthing something that looks like long drops while staring into space looking slightly green. Tracey begins rifling through the bag, humming to herself.

“Oh awesome hiking pants!” She pulls them out, inspecting them. “But,” her brows contract. “Didn’t you just buy these?”

Hannah starts and looks at her. “What? Oh. Yes. Why? Is there-” she breaks off suddenly and lunges for the pants, cheeks colouring. “Never mind that, it’s just-”

“Hannah,” Tracey squints, “is that…Did you rub dirt on them?”

Hannah is a furious shade of red now and Tracey is laughing, shaking her head. “I cannot believe you.”

“I had to make it look as though I’d been before, didn’t I? So I couldn’t very well turn up with a pair of pants that looked new,” Hannah reasoned. “And I’ll take those, thank you, I have to go get changed. He’ll be here in a minute.” 

Standing up and sniffing haughtily, Hannah turns to make her way to the toilets and Tracey mumbles under her breath that she had better make the trip count and Jason cracks up again while shovelling eggs into his face. Tracey talks about how weird it is that Hannah is going out with Troy Adams, heartthrob, personal trainer, and darling of the English department to boot, so perhaps it is not so very shocking that Hannah likes him after all. She pretended for months that she didn't, huffing that 'he might be good looking and all, but he's a complete idiot,' until she started speaking to him during her more and more frequent trips to the gym that had nothing to do with the way he looked in those bloody t-shirts, thank you very much, and found that he was as anally retentive as she was when it came to her coursework, and, well. That was that.

Jason has finished counting the freckles on Tracey’s nose when he realises Tracey has fallen silent. She is staring towards the front of the cafe with an expression on her face that Jason doesn’t like to see directed at anyone but him.

He turns and nearly swallows his fork, because Troy Adams is standing in the doorway. He is wearing a white Bonds T-shirt which seems to hug his torso in all the right places, contrasting perfectly with his tanned skin as he glances around the cafe with a thousand-yard stare. 

Jason dislodges his fork from his mouth and stares. He can't help but notice that Troy is, emphatically, a Very Good Looking Man, even though, and he wants to be absolutely clear about this, Jason is straight. However, this doesn’t seem to stop words like ‘rippling muscles’ running through his mind, and he finally understands exactly why Tracey giggles every time his name is mentioned and why Hannah, the most sensible person he knows, is reduced to the sort of incoherent babbling mess who ruins new pairs of trousers and agrees to go on hikes. Troy is, Jason thinks, the sort of man that makes you want to renew your gym membership.

Across the table, Tracey is suddenly very aware of her tongue and she jumps as she feels Hannah touch her on the shoulder. 

“I'm back! And, oh- bloody buggering hell, he’s here and oh. That’d be right,” Hannah mumbles savagely. “He’s wearing one of those bloody shirts.”

Troy’s face breaks into a smile as he sees Hannah and he strolls over. Hannah pastes on a bright grin and says, too cheerfully, “Well Hi! And how are you!” The exclamation marks are clearly audible and Hannah hates herself because she sounds like a pre-school teacher.

“I’m fine thanks. You look nice.” His deep voice practically caresses the air and Hannah blushes and tuts, playing idly with her hair. Beside her, Tracey swoons and Jason glares and Hannah hates them but is glad they are there because this way, she thinks, there will be someone around to witness her last words before she dies of embarrassment.

“Well! Enough lollygagging!” What? She thinks desperately, but there is no stopping herself now. “Let’s get a move on or we’ll miss the astronomical noon!” Whatwhat? 

Tracey is muttering ‘ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod’ under her breath and Jason is staring at Hannah as though he has never seen her before.

Troy, on the other hand, is looking at Hannah as though he thinks she's adorable and says, “Of course, sure, we can’t miss that," as though it is completely normal to talk about astronomical noons somewhere other than a Conference for the Very Boring. 

"So let’s get going then,” Troy says, and he takes Hannah by the hand and leads her away and Jason and Tracey both let out a breath they don’t know they’ve been holding.

They sit there in shell-shocked silence for a minute, until Jason clears his throat. “I’ve been thinking.” 

Tracey looks at him curiously.

“I should get one of those t-shirts.”

Tracey agrees.

*

Without the t-shirts, she thinks, she would have been safe. She would have been sitting safe in her English Lit class, content with her un-tanned lot in life, not knowing or even caring that there were people out there who did this sort of thing for fun, the idiots, but now she is here, trudging through the scrub, sweat pouring down her face and arms and back, going through this hell and it is all because of stupid-face Troy Adams and his stupid, stupid t-shirts.

Well, if she is honest with herself, it is also because of his back. And his arms. And his bum. There had been a reason she had suggested that he walk ahead of her in the first place. There had been plenty of occasions where lunging over rocks had been rendered necessary and these moments almost (almost) made up for everything else.

Troy stops in front of her and Hannah, who hasn’t been paying attention, smacks into him. For a second it is okay because she is pressed against him and that could never be a bad thing but then she feels herself falling backwards, arms flailing uselessly in front and heavy pack pulling her into weightlessness for a moment, teetering until she gives; then she is tumbling over and over down the mountain when she falls against something, hard, and cries out as a sharp pain splits through her foot. She can hear Troy yelling her name and suddenly he is beside her and, oh my God, she is crying and she tries to hide her face in her arm but realises she can’t because her arm is stuck under her stupid, stupid backpack.

“Hannah, are you okay? Where does it hurt, what’s wrong?” Troy’s deep voice is filled with worry as he lifts the backpack gently from her shoulders and this only makes Hannah feel worse. She can’t stop crying and then she feels herself go weak and she has no control over her mouth, which is exactly how she found herself in this position in the first place and she really just needs to calm down, but-

“I don’t even like the outdoors,” Hannah wails pathetically. “It makes me itch and I’ve never even been on a hike before, I only said that because you’re so into this sort of stuff and all, ‘Mr Fit Man works-at-the-gym-gets-up-at-5am-to-do-yoga-before-making-your-own-chai-tea,’” but Troy has cut her off with his laughter and Hannah huffs angrily, “Will people just stop laughing at me today?”

He calms down enough to squeeze out three, beautiful, exquisite words which make Hannah forget all about the pain in her ankle and the fact that she feels sticky and dirty and her nose is blotchy and her eyes are red and her face is shiny with sweat.

 “I hate hiking.”

Hannah blinks. “You what?”

“I hate it,” Troy shrugs. “I only suggested it because you’re always at the gym and then when I suggested it you seemed so excited that I thought, crap, well I’d better do it then, and I,” he hesitates for a moment, something that might be a blush creeping up on his cheeks but he ploughs resolutely on. “I went and bought myself a pair of hiking boots and frayed the laces with a pair of scissors so that you would think I did this sort of thing all the time."

Hannah starts laughing then, because they are both so stupid and she manages to gasp out, "You are such an idiot," followed by, "Can we please get out of here?" and Troy joins in, grinning at her, a bit sheepish. She grins back and thinks how stupid they must look, sitting there grinning at each other like a pair of idiots (which we are, she reminds herself) but she decides she doesn't care. The sun beats down and the smell of the grass is all around them while something new fizzles and shifts in the heat between them. Hannah’s not sure whether it’s the force field surrounding Troy that causes her breath to catch as he leans in with a serious look on his face, and she feels like a weak swooning heroine from one of the 'special' books her mum hid from her as a kid.

“Does this mean that you aren’t interested in seeing the astronomical noon?” He asks in a low voice, tucking a stray curl behind Hannah’s ear. She can feel her cheeks heating up as she places her arms around his neck.

“Troy,” she says solemnly, “I don’t even know what the astronomical noon is.”

“Thank God for that,” Troy laughs quietly as he covers her mouth with his, and Hannah thinks it is the best date she has ever been on.

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Week Twenty-Two Prompt: Bridge

Gremlins

We ride bikes over bridges. There are hundreds here, spread all over Osaka like some gigantic game of pick-up-sticks. We ride bikes because Alex isn’t allowed to drive or even get in a car for the next year. They ride bikes to work, riding straight on to the ferry then off again, then onto the train and off again, and I can't keep up. Alex and her friends laugh between themselves, calling out to one another, “The artist will not risk any harm, accidental or otherwise, to his or her body, while contracted to the company.” I don’t get the joke, the awkward younger sister playing catch-up tag-along with Alex and her friends. She explains over her shoulder. 

“We’re not allowed, but when we’re drunk we take taxis, and one night Chantelle wouldn’t stop repeating our contract, over and over, and I guess-” she sees my face falling. It’s not that funny.

“You had to be there,” Alex finishes lamely and I nod, uncertain. 

I’ve come here to help Alex, but she doesn’t want help. She wants to ignore it and I’m on ice around her, trying not to slip. So I nod and we ride, and there’s nothing between us but the wind in our hair and the whistling hum of bike wheels over bridges.

*

“Suit work is hard,” Alex tells me. 

“Suit work?” I’m distracted by the night parade spinning past, screaming at me that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. Normally, for my family, it would be, but since that phone call, the one that changed everything, Alex has been ignoring us. So now I’m here, watching the night parade and Alex is beside me because she has the day off and wants to talk about suit work which she's never done but her friends have.  Suit work, when you have to dress up as Shrek or Bugs Bunny and spend hours standing around, every movement bigger than life, your face melting under the heat and the claustrophobic giant head over yours. Real important stuff.

Not as important as the answering machine telling you your sister needs to begin treatment for a cancer no one knew she had. Not as important as the scrambled panic to dial the buttons to call Alex to give her the news. She was only home for a week, and went to the doctor for a check up and then flew back to Japan to be an entertainer for another year, forgetting to wait around for the results, assuming she was fine. I hear the click that means she has hung up on me, and that click tells me she needs me. 

So I pack my bags, and while I’m packing I remember something from our childhood, something Alex was never seen without, something that lies forgotten in a closet somewhere. I pull him out, a bit dusty but still grinning. Gizmo, the Gremlin. We went on the Gremlin ride at Movieworld when we were little, screaming and clutching each other. Alex made me go on another seven times. Dad bought Alex the Gizmo toy and she dragged him with her everywhere she went; school, parties, bed. I hold him close now and breathe him in; he smells of childhood and is so tied up with Alex as a little girl that I start to cry. 

But now I’m here and I’m not crying but she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wants to talk about how hard suit work is, because she can’t admit to herself that she’s very, very sick. 

*

I lie on the floor of her tiny studio apartment; the one they give the entertainers who work for the company. Free from rent and space, the bathroom is in the kitchen and I’m on a mattress three feet from the front door, next to the toilet closet. Alex is on her bed and I’m dozing off when I hear her gasp. She sits up and I swear I can hear her heart pounding, or maybe it’s mine but I’m up on the bed next to her. She is struggling to breathe and I take her pulse. Her heart is racing and she looks at me with something like fear in her eyes. I reach into my suitcase and rifle through. My hand catches on an ear and I pull Gizmo out. Her tears fall like hailstones and her gulps are loud in my ears as we cling to each other on her tiny bed. 

“We’ll get through this. We have to.”

She holds me tighter and I know what she’s saying; that she’s not ready yet, that she’s glad I’m here, that she doesn’t want to leave but she will come home soon. That she can’t believe her younger sister is taking care of her. That she wants to say thank you, but can’t find the words. 

I find them for her, and I whisper to her in the dark. Words of encouragement sink into the night around us, wrapping her up in my hope for her future. You will be okay, you will get better, you will fight this and you will survive. Slowly, her breaths come easier. 

*

We wake, wrapped around each other, necks stiff and knees creaking. My eyes are puffy and I blink them open. I must have cried at some point and I feel like a wet rag wrung out, left to dry in a heap on the bathroom floor. Alex is next to me, eyes still shut, hands curled around Gizmo, so much younger than her 26 years. The street noises far below drift up to us like smoke signals. Start your day, get moving. 

She stirs, then clears her throat.

“Wait here.”

*

Alex is gone for over an hour, and I stare out the window in her apartment. I see the smoke stacks, the buildings, the cars, the bridges, stretched out over the city, people like ants from up here, crawling aimlessly. I wonder how many other people out there are sick, how many are crying, sleeping, laughing, eating. At times like this, I imagine there is a plan for us all; that we can’t all be here for nothing, that all the suffering has a point. I imagine the world is better than it is. Then I stop, because if I don’t I’ll go crazy and I do know the world also has a lot of good in it, and there’s a knock at the door and Alex’s friends are looking for her and they see that something is wrong and they wait with me. 

They stream America’s Got Talent on Alex’s laptop; one of their friends back home is going to be in it and they want to cheer them on. I’m sitting in the corner of Alex’s room, waiting for her, hugging Gizmo to my chest. One of Alex’s friends teases me about Gizmo, and another one tells me one of the judges was the voice of Gizmo in the Gremlins movies. 

Their voices mingle around me and I lose track of the conversation. They cheer for their friend, but I can’t; I don’t know this person, I don’t even really know these people, but I am grateful they are here and that they seem to care about Alex. 

She comes in and stops short at the sight of us gathered in her room. They mute the computer, and I can’t look at Alex so I stare at America’s Got Talent; watch fire twirlers glinting in the stage lights and I think for a moment I’d give anything to be one of them instead, away from this tiny room. Alex crosses over to me and snaps the laptop shut. My neck cricks as I look up at her. 

“I’ve just been to talk to the director. I’m going home,” she says to the room at large, but she’s looking right at me and suddenly I am five and I am on the Gremlin ride at Movieworld.  I am lost and scared and screaming and wanting to run from the Gremlins which have taken over and then out of nowhere I feel a hand over mine; I open my eyes and see it is her hand, and I look at her, teary-eyed and she is shrieking too. She squeezes my hand. It is her way of telling me that she’s here with me, that it’s okay to be scared, that we don’t have to face the Gremlins alone.

This has been an intersection with the ever lovely . I wanted our team name to be whipgig, but she just looked at me funny. 

Week Twenty-One Prompt: The straw that stirs the drink.

Geoffrey looks a little like Karl Lagerfeld, minus the rings and the camp. I know his name is Geoffrey because I sneak a peek at his boarding pass as I stash my bag in the overhead bin. My friend plunks herself in the window seat, insists I take the middle, and she pulls down her eye mask, pops in her ear plugs and there is no hope for me. Geoffrey and I sit on the plane next to each other, perfect strangers confined in a petri dish for the next 16 hours. I tell him where we’re going. He nods as I list off the usual hot spots, but his eyes light up as I mention his home.  

           
            I’ve lived there for 20 years, he tells me.

            I spent three days there once. Does that count?

            It’s not enough.

            I know, I say. That’s why I’m going back.

As the plane touches down, he hands me a vomit bag. Across it he has scrawled bars, restaurants, hotels, sights, hand drawn maps. Two words etched across the top of the paper in messy ink hold my attention.

San Francisco.

*

            I could never live here, she says with a toss of her hair.

She sucks her juice through a straw as she looks across the bay. I hate the way she does it, lifting the straw above the level of the liquid, just enough that the noise disturbs the group of German boys at the next table. I want to snap at her. She knows what she is doing, she knows the best way to stir me after five months of travelling together, but it is getting old.

We have been to Victoria Falls, then Johannesburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Lausanne, Paris, London, New York, Vegas, now, finally, San Fran. Five months away. It feels like the whole world should be changed and my mind is half back home, in my sunlit bedroom, listening to music and cooking dinner, going to work, dropping by my parents house. Five months and the friend I’ve been travelling with isn’t my friend anymore. Conversation has run dry, there are no more words spilling from our mouths. We go some place loud, some place we don’t have to talk and just dance the night away. There have been people we’ve met along the way who have filled in the blanks, but now I’m sick of it.

So I take a breath.

I am silent, taking in the way the light slants off the bay, the faint noise of the Pier 39 seals below us, the beat of this city. I close my eyes, tuning her out. She is saying something about how it is too slow here, the people are too simple, the place is too pretty and it is all just a bit vapid. We pay and leave Eagle Café and I take another breath, watching my feet wind their way through the street, careful not to step on the cracks. There are so many here, spread out over the road like scars. I imagine they are from earthquakes that rumble underneath the city while cats hide behind refrigerators and people sleep on, undisturbed. People who live in an earthquake city aren’t slow or simple, I want to yell at her. So what if it’s pretty and the people are nice? Does that mean it can’t also be taken seriously?

*

We walk down to the water and take a ferry out to Alcatraz. It’s one of the strangest places I’ve ever been to. I stand in the tiny cell open to visitors, stare at the four walls and imagine how cold this place would be at night. My not-friend takes photos of herself putting her head through the bars, pulling faces and I look away, a bit ashamed, but she just shrugs and says the men who were in here deserved everything they got.

*

We rent bikes from Dylan’s Bike Store, and we follow the map he marks out for us in highlighter, right before he adjusts the seat heights for us and gives us a number to call if we puncture a tyre and I can’t stop saying thank you because people are so friggin’ nice here.

We ride through Marina and get looks from rich young things spending their money on Union Street underwear, and I stop and stare through the window at the French lace corsets, delicate as butterfly wings. The women who wear these are tall and tanned (and young and lovely) and I want to be them, or be friends with them or I would even settle for standing near them sometimes and smelling their perfume.

We wind through Russian Hill and take in the zig-zagging Lombard Street. I imagine the architects and town planners; and someone slapping their palm onto a table crying, “I’ve got it!” The houses are tiny leaning towers of Pisa and there are eight hairpin turns slashed into the hill and she thinks they were kind of crazy, but I think they were kind of amazing.

We turn onto Valencia and suddenly we are in the Mission. We fly past bars and restaurants and colours, so many colours they blur as we tear down the hill towards the water and then we are at the waterfront. The rest is a haze of shape and shadow until we reach the bridge. We climb off our bikes and look down at the waves crashing against the pillars holding it up. We see the tiny dots of the surfers in full winter body suits, and something comes over me and I speak. She almost listens.

*

I would rather live in New York, she says to me as we stroll through the Farmers Markets looking for cheese.

I shrug and don’t say what I’m thinking, because in total I’ve spent less than eight days of my life here and I know that it’s incredibly weird, but I’m protective of this place the way I am about my family, and I don’t want anybody insulting it.

New York is the younger sister skulking behind a tree; edgy and bright and boiling over with too much of everything. Lost souls are drawn to her bright lights and she burns them out while they don’t even notice.

Las Vegas is the older sister dressed in sequins tap-dancing around the kitchen table. She gets a boob job and a tattoo that says princess just above her butt and she makes no apologies for it.

San Francisco is the middle sister lazing on the couch reading a book, effortlessly stylish in a way that tells others she doesn’t give a shit. She has fights with her parents about global warming and the importance of standing up for gay marriage, and she brakes for animals. She is kind, kind in the way that doesn’t come along too often these days and she feeds the homeless regularly. She can peel an apple in one long strip.

*

We’re in Haight-Ashbury, having been directed there by the hotel, spending so much money there’s no point putting my credit card back in my wallet. Even she has to admit the shopping here is fantastic, and even though we had other plans today we let them slide with a ‘we’ll get to that tomorrow’ as we stare at rack after rack of clothes, shoes, bags, knick knacks.

It’s a shame that it’s winter and I’m wearing so many layers because much valuable shopping time is lost peeling leggings and stockings and thermals on and off again. I’m in a frenzy, ripping things I don’t need from shelves and saying, “I’ll take it,” and I feel sick at the amount I have spent, but this place is getting to me and I need to take a small part of it home as proof.

I will keep these things in my closet until someone I trust comes over for tea. I will wait for a lull in the conversation, then I will take the things out of my closet, shyly offering them one by one to the person I trust. I will show them the vomit bag Geoffrey gave me, carefully kept for all those months. I will show them photos of me on the cable cars. I will make them touch the fabric of the clothes and trust in the power of osmosis to explain for me the unsettling pit in my stomach; one which tells me that I feel at home here in a way that startles me out of my old skin. I could carve out a life here, here in this pretty earthquake city with the vapid slow simple people. I could hang out in the Castro and make gay friends and I could run down by the waterfront, only eating organic veggies I buy from the farmers market. I could be a kind stranger on a plane dispensing advice to young girls about my home and I could take my mum and dad out to Alcatraz when they visit, and they wouldn’t stick their heads through the bars. I could ride my bike over the bridge, pausing at the top to watch the fog roll through the bay, freezing my hair into slick tendrils that stick to my skin. I could leave my sunlit bedroom behind and settle into this city by the sea, and I could get a cat that would hide behind my refrigerator as I sleep undisturbed in my San Francisco bed.

I could.

This has been an intersection with the very lovely . Many thanks go to her for being so inspiring, and also to , for her insight on how to make this not suck. 

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Week Twenty Prompt: Open Topic

After-Haze

Rachael wanted to know. She couldn’t help herself. She needed to know if it had really happened. She needed to know how it had happened; not just in the vague ‘some sort of accident’ way. She was filled with a perverse desire to know exactly what had gone on in the seconds, minutes, hours before and what had happened immediately after. When exactly had his heart stopped pumping, his blood stopped running and his body stopped breathing? What he had said, how it had smelled – was he even really gone? Because it couldn’t – it just sounded stupid.

She had gone to Dan’s hospital room at some point during the night, or it might have been the day; who could tell anymore? Who even cared? She didn’t want to hold her mother in her arms or watch her dad’s resolve crumble. She didn’t want to see anyone else’s heart break. She was sick of being hugged, sick of being cried over and sick of being sick to her stomach at the thought of what might have happened to Rob. So she had left, her footsteps squeaking dimly on the shiny linoleum, the clamour of the emergency department fading slowly as she made her way up the long hallway. She thought she might have brushed up against a shoulder and mumbled an apology in the elevator but she wasn’t sure. Her ears were filled with a quiet beeping and buzzing; it might have been the machines or it might have been entirely in her head. She didn’t really know. She just knew she wanted to talk to Dan. Dan, who had been getting a lift home from the party with Rob, who wasn’t a part of their family (although he was, really); Dan, who was her sort-of boyfriend and who was alive. The door to Dan’s room had been left open and she slipped through, leaving the confusion and noise of the ward behind her. She stood for a moment, letting the quiet of the room settle like dust around her, falling silently to the carpet beneath her feet.

She had thought she needed to think, but up here in this stillness her thoughts made no sense. Up here, she felt like the only living person left in the world. Everything was hazy. The blues and whites of the room dimmed around her and she was vaguely aware of feeling cold but Rob might be gone forever and so it didn’t matter. That was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. That he could go from existing to just not all of a sudden. She squeezed her eyes shut and heard Rob’s laugh fade as a car swerved into oncoming traffic. There would have been the squealing of tyres and a panicked turning of the wheel and the sudden, sickening crunch of metal on metal and then…nothing. Rob had just…gone, as though on some kind of trip, but not the kind you could check his facebook for updates on. Her heart stopped as she realised Rob might never again update his facebook, and then she laughed, because her mum’s voice in her head was saying, “honestly Rachael, what a thing to think of at a time like this!”

She had to make sure, though, absolutely sure that there hadn’t been some terrible mistake; that she wouldn’t wake tomorrow to find that this had all been a dream. She knew it had happened, but, what if?

Her brothers were okay. Physically, they were okay, but she didn’t think she could ask them for the proof she needed. She couldn’t ask Justin, because he had made a stupid joke to lighten the mood, but it had left a bitter taste in her mouth and Rachael had turned away. She couldn’t ask Steve because he was Rob’s twin and how unfair was that and she wasn’t even sure he could hear her, anyway. She wasn’t even sure she could hear herself; and seventeen year old girls never have a problem hearing themselves.  

Dan had been asleep when she entered the room, curled on his side amongst the blur of white on white. For a moment she didn’t want to disturb him, but then he was stirring and stretching and sleepily blinking his eyes open. He tensed as he saw her there and shifted in the bed; a movement that seemed to say, “I’m here” and he sighed, once, and held out his arms as if to say, “I’m so sorry”.

Rachael nodded, finally, and (because Dan was alive and he owed her this at least) asked him if her brother was dead.

He was.

*

Justin’s girlfriend Lisa comes into the kitchen, arms full of books and face full of tired. She searches Dan out and finds him sitting on the counter next to the stove.

“I was up all night trying to find something that would help me to verbalise it. I went through poems and verses and articles.” She sets the books down on the table with a heavy thud. “I found some. They might help.”

Dan sees that she is trying, that she hates feeling impotent and can’t stand the idea of not being able to solve a problem. He sees that books and words have always been able to give her solace, but –

“But nothing seems to fit,” she says. “They’re not-”

“Enough,” says Dan.

“Yeah.”

They stand there in the kitchen together not saying anything, because they are both a part of this and outside of it and they don’t know what to do.

*

It’s the third night after the accident, and Rachael and Dan are sharing her single white bed. Normally this wouldn’t be allowed but normal is a place so very far away from right here that everyone just sort of turns a blind eye. A part of Rachael feels as though she is taking advantage of this situation, but she has locked that part up somewhere very small and out of the way (maybe behind her left knee), because right now she needs him.  

She is lying with her head pillowed on his chest. In the silence, she can hear his heart beating and without warning the tears come, slowly at first but then in earnest, until she is gasping and shaking in his arms. He holds her and she is curled against his chest, all arms and hands and awkward elbows pressed between their bodies. She taps the place where she can feel the beat and says, “It’s your heartbeat. You have one.”

Dan groans and pulls her closer and mumbles something into her hair; something that might be “I love you” but all that matters to Rachael is the solid press of him against her. She thinks that might be enough for her to get to sleep tonight.

*

Sometimes Rachael gets so angry she can't stop shaking. It happens at stupid things, like when people tell her to stay strong, or when the florist asks her if she minds waiting till she has finished serving someone else. An unreasonable surge of fury will course through her, scaring her a little bit because she has never been a really angry person before, but now she feels like yelling at everyone, at everything. Yelling things like, “Are you serious, you dickhead? Don't you know that my brother just died?” She doesn't think she should have to wait to talk about the flowers for the funeral; she in fact shouldn't be organising a funeral at all because Rob should be here with her instead, chatting the assistant up while winking at Rachael as she rolls her eyes at him and the whole thing is ugly; so ugly it hurts.  She can't believe she uses Rob's death as an excuse for being a bitch but she can't stop and the worst part is that she doesn't really want to.

*

Rachael has a lot of time to think, because no one is saying anything, except by accident. And so she thinks.

She thinks it's funny that she spent her entire year thinking about Dan because her world had become about him, but Dan is here and her brother isn't and isn't that ironic? She could have been spending every last second with Rob instead; maybe then she wouldn't be left with this horrible pit in her stomach that told her she wasn't a good enough sister; that she should have tried harder, been better, somehow.

She thinks that the funny thing about her brother dying is that she doesn’t die too; her body still needs to eat and pee. Rachael sees the looks on people’s faces; the understanding glances passing between friends and hates that they are thinking it is a good sign that she is showering.

Rachael wonders about these things that make up a person; these hearts, these veins, these lungs encased in skin. She has always known that skin can be touched and tasted, that it can shiver and grow and breathe, but she has learnt that it can tear and bruise and bleed; that it can be ripped from your body and that there is nothing you can do about it. She has learnt that really, it isn't that hard to die and she hates how fragile people are; hates that Rob wasn't (as it turns out) ten feet tall and bulletproof. 

Then there is Dan, Rachael thinks. Dan, who has never had a family (except for hers, when her mum insisted he stay with them rather than his dropkick parents), Dan, who knows loss better than almost anyone, but he doesn’t get it, not really. He doesn’t get the fact that there is one less person in her world; one less person who will nag her and call her names and stick up for her virtue and make her laugh and make her cry until she laughs again. One less person who she loved who loved her back.

*

It is a week before Rachael smiles. This happens on the same day that she has put on make up since it happened. It is also, incidentally, the day of the funeral and she is upstairs, leaning against her bedroom door, trying to breathe.

She hears Rob’s – no, Steve’s – voice say “Rach”, very softly. She opens the door and Steve is standing there, looking so much like his twin it hurts, the memory of Rob hanging between them like some kind of twisted double vision. Steve is smiling and holding a piece of paper. A ripple of fear runs through her and she thinks he might actually have gone mad, but then he flips the paper over to reveal a diagram scribbled in boyish scrawl. Steve is laughing, saying something about going through Rob’s things and finding a blueprint for a robot from when they were thirteen and stupid and Rachael smiles then, a real smile, and feels the bubble of something strange gurgle inside her. It’s laughter, and even though it’s not that funny, they sink to the floor together, stomachs aching from laughing so much. Gasping for air, Rachael feels like she can breathe again.

*

Dan is in the yard and he looks up as he hears the back door open. Rachael is standing on the veranda, leaning over the railing watching him. Dan pulls a face at her. The ghost of a smile flits across Rachael’s face and then is gone, like a child scurrying home just as dark begins to fall.  Dan wants to grab on to that moment, the moment where he feels powerful, like how you feel when you make a baby laugh. Only thing wrong with feeling that way is the baby will tire of silly faces eventually and will be more interested in sticking its feet into its mouth, and you wind up feeling worse because you know what you are missing out on.

*

Sometimes Rachael walks into a room and stands there for a while, then walks out again because she can't remember what she is doing. She is too busy wondering.

Wondering whether he knew, whether he could see his life as though on a timeline, the ones of your own life you had to draw at school during ‘Personal Development’ lessons. Could he see where the end was marked, hazy and indistinct until those moments; those final, fleeting, forever-moments just before it happened? Did his brain click and slot the last piece of his life into place like a jigsaw puzzle? Rachael hoped not, because Rob had hated jigsaw puzzles; hated the way they always made an entirely different picture from the one you imagined.

*

Rachael walks into the kitchen to find her family (minus one) sitting around the table. Her mum beckons her over and she does something she hasn’t done since she was a little girl and climbs, rather awkwardly, into her mum’s lap, jabbing her in the stomach. Her mum doesn’t mind and Rachael closes her eyes, letting the talk of the others wash over her as she leans into her mum’s chest. She hears her mum’s heart beating a steady thump against her own and she smiles, glad the beat is so strong.

Beside her, Justin is pissing himself over a story Steve is telling about Rob making a dick of himself to impress some girl and her dad keeps interrupting them, shit-stirring them by reminding Steve exactly who it was who had run screaming up the stairs after finding out where he came from and Justin is saying in an imitation baby voice, chin wobbling, “You mean, I wasn’t delivered by a stork?” Rachael isn’t sure whether they are laughing or crying; her mum’s shoulders are shaking so hard that Rachael’s head knocks painfully against them but she doesn’t care because she feels so close to normal and she doesn't want to let that go.

*

Later, she goes up to her room and Dan is there, having snuck in the way he always does these days.  The shadow light filters through the curtains and something stirs within her. She is suddenly right here, in this moment, in a way she hasn’t been in weeks, then she is beside him, under the covers with him and their faces are too close together and they are kissing like kisses are light and they are stuck in the dark, trying to get out.

Afterwards, they lie there cramped on the single mattress and Rachael feels compelled to talk, to say something to reassure Dan that she is getting there, wherever there is.

“I’m trying,” she says to the ceiling.

He rolls toward her, slipping an arm around her waist. An “I know” is mumbled into her back and they are kissing again, and Rachael feels as though each kiss is one stitch back together after being broken open for so long.

*

Justin leaves the next day, saying something about needing to get away and spend some time with Lisa. Rachael doesn't like how lonely he looks as he heads towards his car, shoulders slumped and hands in pockets, kicking idly at the grass pooling around his ankles. 

Steve is spending more and more time at his and Rob’s shop, though it’s really just his now. He is interviewing for a new Assistant Manager and each night when he comes by the house he looks at Rachael's hopeful expression and shakes his head. "Not yet. But there's a guy coming in tomorrow I've got a good feeling about."

Her parents visit the grave everyday before work, and her mum volunteers at the hospital whenever she can.

*

The world-heart beats on, on, on. Water runs through its river-veins, the earth-skin breathes in, out, in. Days spin by and some things (but not everything) are lost in the pain-haze of the then and the now.

Until.

Rachael looks up. Dan’s blue eyes meet her brown ones.

“Hi,” (I’m still here).

She will be okay.

Week Nineteen Prompt: Et tu, Brute?

The House that You (and Jack) Built

I stare up at your house; your beautiful, ridiculous house. I remember when you came to me, eyes shining and cheeks flushed -“We got the land!” and it had been my flippant idea to make a house out of cards. You had stared at me, and I had no idea what I had done until it was done. Cards, paper, strawbale, mudbrick, rammed earth – anything you could get your hands on, you did. You had me over to colour consult; there were taps and light fittings and trips to the tip for "inspiration". Jack would roll his eyes at me behind your head, a private joke, but you went ahead and you made it. You built a life there, a green, vegan, recycled life, you and Jack, Jack and you – it was the house that you and Jack built.

I had thought it would be raining. It’s the kind of thing you expect, for it to be raining when you tear the world apart, but it's Spring and there are birds and a light wind blows my dress against my knees. If I tilt my head to the side and squint, I think I can see your house swaying in the breeze. All it would take is a chip in the right place; a chip that, funnily enough, I'm here to provide. I know what I’m getting into, by doing this. I can hear the things you’ll say in my mind and I know the look you’ll give me. But I want you to hear me. I want you to hear why.

I want you to know that I would never hurt you, except that I did, worse than any friend could hurt any friend, worse than your worst enemy could. I wish I could say I didn’t mean for it to happen, like all those girls in movies do, but I don’t. I was sick of it, sick of your everything and my nothing when for all our lives it was the other way around. You had the problems, I had the answers. But then you went and got your own answers, and I got left behind, so I took yours. I took Jack, that night we went to dinner together but you went home early because you were sick, and there had been a look, and then it was a touch, and then it was me and Jack, Jack and me, and now I’m standing here at your front door working up the guts to ruin your life.

I didn’t mean for Jack to fall in love with me. I didn’t mean to fall in love with Jack. I didn’t mean for it to be anything more than a restoration of the balance of power between friends – between you and me, me and you. Sometimes we would lie in your bed, Jack and me, me and Jack, and suddenly it was my house, my husband, my bamboo cotton sheets we were lying on. Everything Jack and I were and are and can be is built on lies, but when I lie there with him, head on his chest, heartbeat to heartbeat, the world beats away.  The space between us, normally occupied by the memory of you, becomes space no one can touch.

I want you to know that I know you don’t want to hear this; that I know this will make you sick and that I know I’m the person you don’t want to know. I wish this hadn’t happened, except that I don't. I wish Jack didn’t love me, except that I don't. I wish I could tell Jack it’s over between us, maybe even slam a righteous door in his face, except that I don't.  I wish I was the sort of person who had the guts to say this to your face, instead of to your cardboard door. 

But I’m not. Instead, I’m going to knock on your door, and you are going to answer it. You will smile at me, and I will tell you I just dropped by for a visit. You will make us tea. I will pretend that I still have the right to call myself your friend; that there is no Jack and me, me and Jack. I will sit there with you and I will know that when you find out, when your house of cards clatters to the ground around you, you will remember this day, this warm Spring day with the birds and the breeze that blew my dress around my legs; you will remember the look in my eyes and my uncertain smile, and you will hate me more than I hate myself.

I raise my hand to knock on the door of the house that you and Jack built, and I can hear you moving around inside. There is a moment before you answer, a moment when the wind stirs my hair around my face, a moment when I speak to the air before me, words falling to the steps below me, words that tell you, before I see you, I’m sorry.

 would like to make it clear that this is a work of fiction inspired by this week's topic and by a play her sister was in recently, 'All's golden square in love and war'.

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Week Eighteen Prompt: Inspiration

Shopping Trolley

I am a shopping trolley.

This is not a metaphor.

(I know what a metaphor is,

because a small human

hanging off me asked

a large human

what it was, once.)

I am a shopping trolley

(this is not a metaphor),

and I need to get to the sea.

I do not know why.

There is something somewhere,

in all of us. In the abandoned receipts,

in the one bad wheel,

in our metal bones,

that speaks to us.

To the sea, they whisper.

They whisper now to me.

I am a shopping trolley

(this is not a metaphor),

and I need to get to the sea.

Mr Coles and Mrs Woolworths;

they chain us together.

They do not want to lose us

(but what they do not see

is that

we want to be lost).

We are shopping trolleys

(this is not a metaphor),

and we need to get to the sea.

There is a careless woman,

one day.

She does not know, or has forgotten

that thing that mothers say,

“less haste more speed”. She leaves

me in a car park,

with one coin,

with an old plastic bag,

with her careless blessing.

I am a shopping trolley

(this is not a metaphor),

and I am going to the sea.

One more day, then

the day after that, and the

day after that.

Squeak, groan, rattle.

Damage done. Too many

Coupon Tuesdays.

But,

I am a shopping trolley

(this is not a metaphor),

and I want to get to the sea.

And then?

There is the salt. It catches me

like an idea.

Clinging to my

abandoned receipts,

to my one bad wheel,

to my metal bones.

I have arrived.

There was a man

who oiled my joints.

Replaced my bolts.

Straightened my casters.

Welded my frame.

Until I felt brand new.

(I am a shopping trolley,

and I am at the sea, but-)

Him I will miss. 

Him, I might even send

a postcard.

End. 

Why did I write this?

Throughout this entire competition, so many writers impress me week after week with stories I could never dream up; stories which gave voices to the most unlikely of characters. One writer in particular has this week caused me to approach things a little differently, to find the magic in the every day, and to realise that everything, every person, every object, every thing you can imagine (and some you can't), has a soul worth writing about. Thank you  for helping me to see that.

Image courtesy of this website

Many, many thanks to the very lovely  for the speedy and thoughtful beta job. 

Week Seventeen Prompt: Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight

"All I know is that every time I go to Africa, I am shaken to my core." 

—Stephen Lewis

Sean finds the turtle shell on his grandparents farm outside of Harare. It is empty, sunbaked and dried out and so, so cool. He picks it up, tiny hands clasping the grooved surface, white against green, determined. He isn’t worried about the fact that it’s dirty, or that something has died in there and rotted out and that he could get an infection. He does what every other six-year-old boy would do. He straps it onto his back, cuts his mother’s tablecloth into strips, ties those strips around his forehead, ankles and wrists, and tells everyone he knows (and some he doesn’t) that he is a teenage mutant ninja turtle.

Now all he needs is a knife.

Sean makes knives in his dad’s factory; long jagged pieces of steel torn off from discarded sheet metal lying on the factory floor. Sean watches the orange sparks skitter with the dust motes in the factory air; watches his knives against the grinder, sharpened by the workers who won’t ever let him use the machine himself.

Sean eats with the workers, small white hands mingling with their large black ones in the bowl of sadza nyama nemuriwo, rolling hot sticky gloops between his fingers, slipping them into his mouth before it gets cold. Friday laughs at him, white teeth bright and flashing as he shows Sean how he makes it. The steam warms Sean's face as he leans over the bowl, breathing it in. He has never tasted anything more delicious.

Years pass, and Sean’s parents worry about him. They worry for his safety, because a friend of theirs has just been shot trying to pick her kids up from school. They worry because one of Sean’s friends found her dad’s gun, put it to her belly and pulled the trigger. They worry because blacks and whites are dying and there’s no food or petrol left and Sean won’t be a boy much longer and pretty soon he might have to use his toy knives for survival and his parents don’t think it will be enough against all this history and hate and corruption.

It breaks their hearts, but they leave, because they are in a position to do so. 

Sean brings his Australian girlfriend to Zimbabwe when he is twenty-five. She has never been in a place where the difference between white and black is so pronounced before. 

She brings a journal. “I’m going to find out everything,” she tells Sean and he smiles. That’s how she shows she’s here for him.

She talks to everyone, as much as she can, because she wants to understand this sad and lovely place Sean comes from. This country which has fought itself broken and back again and she wants to know why.

Everything is solid here; the air, thick and overwhelming, the ground beneath her feet dirt red and rich and green, so green she can't believe it. The houses and the furniture, everything seems to be carved out of the earth, hewn from rocks and trees and there since forever.

Here, nothing comes from Ikea and there is no such thing as Tupperware. The people here draw warm, easy breaths into their hard working lungs, people who, according to Knowledge, the bus driver she talks to, can do anything. He says the people of his country could do anything given half the chance, and she can see that he is hoping with all his might for that half a chance to come along.

She speaks to a farmer who immigrated to Zambia after being thrown out of Zimbabwe, and he is bitter and broken and trying not to be. “As long as you have this white skin? Ah sut, you are just a visitor. You don’t belong.” He is speaking more to himself than to her and she is not prepared for this. She doesn’t know what to say.

Tulani tells her that although things were nicer before, they are getting okay now. He is guarded when she asks him about the election coming up (whenever Bob decides to call it) and who he thinks will win. Tulani does not have the luxury of an opinion, but he hopes things will get better for him, his family and his country.

The pilot she talks to tells her that 2002 was a bad year; the year they all nearly left. He is lean and careworn. There is something in his eyes she can’t bring herself to look at, because she doesn’t know how to define it, and she has never had that problem before.

She does not understand what has happened here, and her African adventure is not at all what she imagined it would be.

Instead, she has come to an old country, to God’s country, and she has seen sunsets and waterfalls and lions eating baboons and shanty towns and community vegetable gardens and bowls made from cut off pieces of telephone wire sewn together with copper and kids playing soccer with rolled up TM bags and this place, this hopeful hopeless place stirs her blood more deeply than anything she could possibly have imagined.

Sean finds her sitting on his grandma’s spare bed; quiet, unopened journal in her hand. She looks soft and young and fragile like this with a patchwork quilt beside her and her legs tucked up under her.

“Hey,” he smiles at her. She looks up. “What are you thinking about?”

“Oh,” she sighs. “Just,” there is a silence. He waits. “Everything I guess. This place,” she gestures vaguely.

“It makes you want to save it, you know?” She is earnest, her hands fisted at her sides. “But there's too…It's too…You can’t.”

She knows how naïve she sounds and hopes he won’t make fun of it. She feels impotent and inadequate and everything she has never felt before in her first world life. Her intentions, her words, her journal are no use here.

“No, you can’t,” Sean agrees. He slips an arm around her waist. “It’s just going to have to save itself.”

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BETA HELP ANYONE?

Hello! 

Just wondering whether anyone out there would like to give me a hand with this week's entry. I'm looking mainly to see whether it fits the prompt okay, and suggestions for whether it's too sappy or just plain not good enough.

Let me know!

Steph

Week Sixteen Prompt: Reinventing the Wheel

An Alternate History of the Universe

It doesn’t end well, the story of you and your friend, so you rewrite it. This way, you get the ending where your heart doesn’t break; this way, you never have to write your friend’s eulogy, and the world is as it should be.

In your story, Switzerland isn't a place, and she never tries white water rafting. In your story, freak waves and capsized boats don’t exist.

You never receive a gasping-and-shaking call on a Monday morning; you never have the feeling you’ve been ripped up from the inside out. At no point do you yell at a florist for screwing up an arrangement, nor cradle her mum in your arms. There is no need for others to tell you to stay strong.

In your story, she was never dragged under the heartless river. You don’t lie awake and wondering at night, thinking about the water, or how scared she must have felt, or punish yourself for not seeing her off at the airport because you were sick. In your story, you are not numb, you don’t forget your mother’s birthday and there is no need for antidepressants. You never call her phone to hear her voicemail and you never, ever, stand at her grave and whisper ‘I miss you’, into the autumn wind.

The story you write has a different ending.

In your story, you take a trip to the coast together. The air is warm and salty; the sun drenches you both as the sand squirms between your toes. You daydream about Ryan Gosling and you fight over which flavor of Boost juice is the best. There is a sunset, and there is the drive home, and there is the promise of tomorrow.

In your story, tomorrow comes. 

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Second Chance Idol: Week One Entry – What’s Missing?

Language warning.

The woman in front of her, “Call me Jan”, hard-faced and crazy eyed, demanded to know what was missing in her life. Jan’s words were sincere, but Rebecca knew better. She knew that the only reason this woman was bothering with her at all was for the commission she would make if Rebecca signed up to Milestones, all for the low cost of a $400 start up fee, plus a small annual fee, teeny-weensy ongoing fees for conferences, meetings, gatherings, forums and of course another minuscule (but so worth it!) fee for leadership training, at which point you begin to receive deductions for the amount of new people you sign up. Really, the only thing Rebecca was missing right now, she told herself, was a way out of this room.  

She had only come to support her best friend Renee who was desperately searching for a way out of Milestones. Was it impolite to call it a cult? Rebecca didn’t think so. Rebecca watched Renee from across the room, wondering how her wonderful, sensible, beautiful, intelligent friend had become involved in this crap. She couldn’t reconcile this needy, sad Renee of the now with the Renee of her past, the Renee who had helped Rebecca through break-ups and moving house and the Alison debacle (someone had called someone else a slut, and Renee hadn’t judged. She had held Rebecca and let her cry on her shoulder and had told her that all people made mistakes, but that good people made up for them). Intellectually, Rebecca understood how someone could become involved in this. She understood the allure of the promise of having it all, the assurance of finally having the answers, of moving to where the grass was greener; a better life, prepackaged and available in shiny bite sized pieces for the modern consumer. Just enough to keep them coming back.

“I know why you’re here tonight.” Jan was persistent. “Have you been feeling as though things aren’t how you thought they would be when you were little? Have your dreams of your future melted away before you? Have you sunk into mediocrity? Are you wondering where your life went and what you can do to turn things around?”

Rebecca was twenty-four, and thought that was a bit much. “Not really,” Rebecca was noncommittal. You could not give these people an inch.

“Rebecca,” Jan’s voice oiled its way to the floor between them. Rebecca nearly shuddered. A familiar heat crept over her; her palms became sweaty and she felt droplets forming on her forehead. “What you don’t realize is that you have so much potential in you which you will never unlock until you learn life’s secrets.” Her mouth was filling up with thick saliva, and she couldn’t swallow fast enough. “You can do it, Rebecca. I know you might look at me and be intimidated, but you could have my knowledge one day, if you’re brave enough to accept it.”

 “Excuse me,” Rebecca stammered as she turned and nearly sprinted for the bathroom. The door slammed shut behind her as she hurtled herself into the cubicle. The toilet cover felt cold through her jeans and she dug her nails into her palms, trying to force deep calming breaths but the nausea was too much for her. Spinning around and lifting the seat cover, Rebecca felt the all-too familiar bile rise in her throat, the scratchy heat as the warm, lumpy liquid came racing into her mouth, stomach contents splashing into the bowl in front of her, then it was over. The outside world went quiet for a moment, and all Rebecca could hear were her own harsh gasps and the quick thump of her heart.

Shaky hands pulling the seat cover closed, Rebecca took a sweaty breath. Jan was a bitch, but Rebecca couldn’t blame her for this. The thing was, Rebecca knew exactly what was missing in her life, and it wasn’t love, it wasn’t a reconnection with her parents, it wasn’t more money or success or failed dreams or lost hopes, it was a diagnosis; one that she was too shit scared of seeking.

She had no idea what the hell was going on with her body. Suddenly and without her permission (which just seemed rude, really), she had started to feel sick four months ago. Constantly, endlessly, vaguely sick. Exhausted, nauseated, bloated, sore, and – she paused there, thinking about the recent changes in her bowel habit. “Yuck,” she muttered to herself. She knew she definitely wasn’t pregnant because she had been too sick to have sex with her boyfriend for the past four months, but that was as far as she’d got in finding out what was wrong. There had been old articles in women’s health magazines, symptom trackers, medical textbooks and hundreds and hundreds of google searches, the top ten results of which were invariably cancer. Each time she saw the c word her blood ran cold; she thought of bald, sick, old people who were too weak to go to the toilet by themselves and who smelled and ate through a tube and who, invariably in her mind, died alone with relatives fighting over the will, and she was only 24 and she was in love and had her whole life to live and she had plans, damnit, and what if that was all taken away from her so suddenly in a quiet, well decorated office somewhere with someone she didn’t know sitting across from her telling her she might die and it might be soon and she shouldn’t be feeling like this at all and her family would be so mad at her if they knew she wasn’t getting treated but she just –

It was easier to ignore it. A sort of, ‘this too shall pass’, kind of attitude.

“Bec?”

Renee’s voice cut into her thoughts. Bec drew a shaky breath, laying her palms on the cold floor either side of her.

“In here.” Her voice was weak as she leant forward to slide the lock open. Renee squeezed into the stall.

“You look horrible.” Renee’s voice was welcome as air. “Let’s get out of here before these Milestone weirdos realize I haven’t paid my cancellation fee.”

*

Renee started to cry on the train ride home. Ugly crying, the kind where her entire face went red, followed by her neck and her arms, the kind with visible snot and mascara everywhere where words aren’t possible. Renee tried to speak.

“I just,” Gasp. “I just,” Gasp hiccough. “It’s just-” unidentifiable noise. “I’m so freaking-” Whimper. “Relieved.” Rebecca stared at Renee, willing her to continue. Somehow, Renee calmed enough to piece a sentence together. “They were so awful, and now I can forget about all the crap they taught me and just bloody go live my life the way I want to. You weren’t stupid enough to believe in it. You’re not scared of doing exactly what you want.”

Rebecca held her friend close to her, marveling at how someone who knew her so well could be so wrong about her. She looked down at Renee’s head on her shoulder, and felt her heart
swell at how Renee saw her – as someone brave, someone to look up to.

Someone who, if they thought they might have cancer, would bloody well do something about it.

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Week Eight Prompt: A Travelling Travesty

Ellen had never been what you would call artistic. She’d never been able to make the picture in her head come out the right way; the images instead teensy and wonky and just sort of curious – a travesty of what she had wanted. A teacher had told her once that she had no poetry in her soul and she hadn’t even been offended. Words, she understood in a way she never could a picture or, if she were honest with herself, a glance or a touch; such tiny actions which rendered her – Ellen Michaels – speechless. Words were something solid, something dependable and you always knew where you stood with words.

Then the plane touched down on the tarmac at Sydney International, and Dave was beside her, outlined against the beyond blue sky in the tiny window. Dave had grabbed her hand suddenly, painfully, and his hand was sweaty against hers but she didn’t mind because her stomach was twisting and jolting in a way that should have been unpleasant but she might be about to meet her birth mother and –

She had no words. They should have sent a poet.

*

Ellen had thought Australia would be hot, even during the winter. She had thought she wouldn’t need a coat or a scarf here; that her lips wouldn’t be chapped from the wind and that she wouldn’t have to apply moisturiser to dry cracked hands in the morning, rifling carefully through her bag in the semi-darkness of the hotel room so as not to wake Dave. He tended to drift off at odd times, like when they were on the bus or in yet another waiting room or once, sitting in a grimy booth at McDonald’s that to Ellen just felt dirty. She stared at his dark head on the pillow next to her, thinking about how different things had been since his brother had died.

At first, they had touched a lot. They had even kissed once, at the wake. She had paused at his door, listening for any noise. Suddenly Dave was in front of her. She had been pushed roughly up against the door, black dress against black suit and hands slammed above her head.  Heart hammering in her chest she had seen something in his eyes that scared her, because she wasn’t sure if she could fix something so broken and the thought that Dave might never be the same again was too awful to contemplate. Dave had grunted and crashed his lips to hers and Ellen had had to remind herself that this was Dave, her Dave, and he wouldn’t hurt her, ever, not in that way. So she had closed her eyes and kissed him back, because he was still Dave and she wanted to yell at herself because she was only eighteen and shouldn’t be thinking things like oh God, this is it, forever at her age. Maybe, though, with one of Dave’s hands tangled in her hair and the press of him along the line of her body, there was hope for them and she shivered at the idea.

Perhaps Dave had felt the tremor run through her because he had broken off suddenly and pressed his forehead against hers for a moment, eyes closed and shoulders heaving, gradually loosening his grip on her wrists. She brought her hands down slowly, the way you would with an animal that has been cornered, no sudden movements. The grip marks on her wrists were red and angry against her skin and she rubbed vaguely at the marks. Dave had opened his eyes then.

“Did I do that?” His voice was thick and heavy, and if Ellen had been a meaner person she would have looked to see if he was crying, but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled the sleeves of her cardigan over the marks, shrugging.

“It’s fine. You didn’t mean to.”

“I’m-” Dave’s voice broke, and Ellen reached a hand up to his face suddenly. He started at the movement, and she caught a glimpse of his anguished expression before he tore himself away.  She pressed against the door as she listened to his heavy footsteps down the stairs.
They hadn’t spoken about it since.

She had thought that Dave needed to be somewhere different where his siblings weren’t walking around like ghosts and his mother didn’t burst into tears at the sight of a pair of Jack’s socks; somewhere his father’s mouth wasn’t a perpetual grim line. He had offered to go with her to find her mother, one hand rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly while trying not to look as though he was saying something important. She had wondered whether this had anything to do with the kiss, but then he had cleared his throat and she had looked up to find his eyes on her, and that had been that. She had nodded, and he had nodded, and they left a week later.   

She had thought that they would be okay here in Australia; that they would be a they here, not a him and a her, but the hotel air between them was filled with awkward space she couldn’t breach. Watching him sleep was all she had and it wasn’t enough and she shouldn’t even be thinking about this while she had a job to do. 
 
Over the next few days, they continued to search, grabbing phone books and business directories from hotel concierges who spoke something that sounded like English but wasn’t really, and they would emerge from the lobby, blinking in the bright light that was bright in a way that was different to how it was in England.

Ellen imagined that when she met her mother, she would pat her on the head and tell her it was just culture shock, but her mother was sort of the problem. Ellen didn’t know where she was.

*

“We’re going to Brisbane.”
 
Dave’s head snapped up from his study of the remote control and he nodded slowly.

“Okay." There was a silence, then, “Do you want to play a game?”

Dave’s eyes met hers and she swallowed. “What sort of game?”

 “Well,” Dave began, “It’s meant to be played with alcohol.” 

Ellen shifted against the door, and Dave’s eyes followed the line of her legs up to her thighs. Ellen tried not to look at the way his hands clenched slightly, skin pulling taught over thick fingers and veins standing out for a moment. It’s just a hand, you idiot, she told herself.

“It’s called, ‘I never’, and you have to start off a sentence with ‘I never’ and then follow it with something you’ve never done, and if the other person has done it they drink.”
Ellen nodded slowly as Dave rummaged in the bar fridge, muttering to himself.

“I know there’s some in here somewhere.”

He looked up at her with a smile on his face, bottle in hand.

“Ready?”
*

“I’ve never failed a subject in my life,” Dave nudged her with his shoulder; head tipped toward hers as he took a swig. Ellen wanted to tell him that he was missing the point of the game; that he was meant to say things he hadn’t done, but he winked at her like he knew what she was thinking and she giggled. They lay next to each other, shoulders touching. A tiny part of her was horrified at the fact that she was brave enough to try to chase down her birth mother but still couldn’t tell Dave she was half in love with him, so she told him something else instead.

“I failed art.” Ellen screwed her eyes shut. She felt Dave shift beside her and cracked an eye open. He quirked his eyebrow at her.

“You failed it? Actually failed?”

Ellen nodded, flushing red.

“Yes.”

“Wow.”

“I’m just not creative. It’s fine, I’ve never really been bothered by it. Once actually, a teacher looked at this picture I had drawn of my adopted family and just about fell to the ground laughing. I was ten.”

“That’s horrible! What a useless bloody teacher.”

She shrugged, “Not really. It was a rather dreadful painting.”

“But still, I mean, it’s not as though – she could’ve been nicer about it couldn’t she?”

Dave looked so adorably put out that Ellen wanted to hug him. So she did. He stiffened slightly before Ellen decided that enough was enough.

“Just hold me,” she mumbled into his shirt, just quietly enough so that if he wanted to he could pretend not to have heard it, but then he put his arms around her. The tightness in her stomach receded and she breathed him in.

“Imagine if I hadn’t run away from you last time,” Dave said suddenly into the stillness, anger underlying his voice as he gulped his drink.

“I would’ve…I would’ve kissed you a lot sooner.” The air was filled with a pleasant tension that sizzled and popped between them, and maybe it was the alcohol but Ellen felt something swelling inside her, like if air was a feeling.

“If I let you, you mean,” she teased, nudging him with her shoulder.

“Let me?” Dave said, mock offended. “Please, you were begging for it.” There was a beat, then, “I would have wanted to.” Dave’s voice was barely above a whisper and Ellen could feel the warm vibration shift the loose strands of hair around her ear. She looked up at him then, and her breath caught because in that moment, in that hotel room in Sydney with the noise of passing traffic muffled on the street below them, she could forget, for a tiny moment, about why she was there and focus instead on the person she came there with.

“I had fun tonight. I mean, despite everything, this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.” Ellen’s voice was breathless and a slow smile spread over Dave’s face.

“Yeah. Me too.” His voice was thick and low; it made Ellen shiver a little bit. He reached out an arm towards her, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Thank you,” he said seriously.

“For what?”

“For just…you know. Being there. For everything. For letting me come with you. These past few weeks have been bloody awful, but you’ve made it…you know…bearable.”

“So have you,” she said. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”
 
Her stared at her and she swallowed noisily.

“It’s funny,” Dave said. “It changes you,” and Ellen didn’t have to ask what he was talking about. She could hear it in his voice, the slight ache that always came when he spoke about his brother Jack.

“Maybe not in a huge noticeable way, but it does change you. You look at things a bit differently, and you feel,” Dave hesitated for a moment, shrugging, searching for the right words. “I dunno, you feel sadder, I guess, and older, but not necessarily wiser,” he smiled ruefully as he said this and looked at her sideways.

“I’m going to be there for you, you know,” Ellen said suddenly. “No matter what.”

Dave was silent for a moment, just staring at her. Then, without warning, he leaned closer, trailing one hand along the side of her face till he was cupping her chin.

“Ellen. I think you’re bloody brilliant,” he said, and then his lips were on hers, and Ellen’s arms found their way around his neck. It was all softness and slow, warm motion and Ellen sunk down deeper into him, until she couldn’t remember what it was like to not kiss Dave, to not be with him like this. He tasted like heat and alcohol and smelled so familiar that she felt an ache well up inside her at the thought that finally, finally, things were making sense. She was going to meet her mother and she would be with Dave.

*

Ellen hadn’t expected Brisbane to be beautiful, but after spending two days walking around the city squinting in the harsh winter sunlight that didn’t seem to warm anything up, she had gotten used to the light and the space and the winding river that ran through it all. It reminded her a little of a smaller, quieter London, but this time it didn’t make her homesick. With Dave next to her, occasionally holding her hand and rubbing his thumb against hers, she thought that maybe they could one day come back for a visit; a proper visit, with cameras and dorky clothes and they would smile and laugh more. They wouldn’t have a job to do.

 “Here we are,” Ellen said, peering up at the tiny numbers over the doorway.

“I’ve got a good feeling about this one,” Dave said and Ellen smiled. He said that every time.

“What’s this now? Seventeenth time lucky?”

“You never know.”

*

It was her mum’s voice that did it. Ellen had waited anxiously for her knock to be answered, and it was, and her mother had known who she was, and she had said, “Hello”, as though it was something they had said to each other every single day.

There was a silence for a while, during which Ellen just stared at her mother, drinking her in, and she so badly wanted to hug her and have her mother tell her that everything was okay and stroke her hair and make her some cocoa and talk to her about the Dave situation and her mother would be happy for her, but –

She didn’t have the words.

*

The introductions were a tiny bit awkward. Dave had tried very hard to look as though he hadn’t spent the last week or so sleeping in the same bed as her daughter. He had kissed Ellen’s mum’s cheek and then tactfully disappeared, saying he would meet up with her at the hotel.

*

Ellen was waiting in the lobby when Dave finally returned. She heard a cough behind her and spun around and saw Dave standing there with a small package in his hands. She took it confusedly.

“What’s this for?”

 “Just open it.”

A small box fell out, with the words ‘digital camera’ printed on the side. Ellen stared at the box for a while, dumbfounded.

“Well, are you going to say anything?"

Ellen looked up at him, and the expression on her face must have reassured him somehow because he visibly relaxed, the tension fading from the lines of his shoulders as he breathed a sigh of relief.

“So do you like it? You do like it don’t you?”

“I-” Ellen said. She didn’t think ‘like it’ were the right words here. Maybe, love-it-so-much-you-are-so-brilliant-I-want-to-be-the-mother-of-your-children, might have been going a bit far, but she didn’t think so.

“I know you don’t think you’re artistic, and all that,” Dave continued, “but I think that you should, you know,” he stopped, brow furrowing as he thought about what he was trying to say. “You have things in your life that you should make memories of, you know? Good things, things that you’ll want to look back on and be like, yeah, that was bloody brilliant, and it doesn’t matter if everything comes out blurry, you shouldn’t let that stop you.” He took a deep breath and slipped his thumb along her jaw.

“Because you’ll want something like that at some point. I wish-” he broke off, staring at her for a minute. “Well, I had to use Jack’s money for something, right?”
 
Suddenly, telling Dave she wanted to be the mother of his children didn’t seem to be a big enough gesture, but she thought that with Dave, she might have to start small.

“Thank you,” she said, trying to convey in those two words exactly how grateful she was to him. Dave nodded and she decided she didn’t care that they were in a hotel lobby. Today, she had met her mother and it was all because of him. She threw her arms around him and kissed him then, before she could change her mind. Dave did this thing with his hand where he traced a small circle on her back and nothing mattered except the feeling of him against her and the fluttering in her stomach and the beat of his heart and she didn’t want to stop. Ever. She somehow thought that Dave wouldn’t mind.  

*

Ellen wrote to her mother every fortnight after returning home, and Ellen visited her again many times. Ellen always took two things with her: Dave, and her camera.

 

RECOMMENDATION

I just wanted to quickly recommend an entry which isn't doing as well as (in my opinion) it should be doing. It's a beautifully written entry focusing on the idea that we all come from nothing and dissolve into nothing, but told so much more beautifully than I can give words to. Please read it!
http://cemetaria.livejournal.com/2901.html?view=48469#t48469

Week Seven Prompt: Bupkis

Security saw her as soon as she came in. How could he not? The store was nearly empty; it was just before closing time. She nearly waddled in the way heavily pregnant women do, sizing up the bedroom showcases as though looking at an enemy. Security watched her walk through the displays, running her hands over the bedspreads, opening bedside table drawers, turning lamps on then off. She tried first one bed, then the other. Staff came up to her, wanting to make a quick profit then get her out of there as soon as possible.
 
She wasn’t going anywhere.
 
*
 
It had gone on for two months now. She would toddle in around 10 minutes ‘til close, find a bed towards the back of the store, near to where Security sat in his office, and fall asleep on it until the time came for him to wake her up. He would watch her silently, trying to figure out why she kept coming here. Up close, he could see the shadowy moons under her eyes; he could feel a tiredness that seemed almost overwhelming. It didn’t stop him from noticing she was lovely, and that she wore no wedding ring. She seemed sad and he badly wanted to help her, to alleviate some of her sorrow, but he wasn’t the sort of man who cured the problems of lonely women. He wasn’t handsome, or all that smart. Security was his name – his mother had named him for the gift she said he had given her – and now it was his job. He wasn’t the sort of man who entered a woman’s life in a mysterious and winning way, the way some men seemed to. So he watched her, watched her as she prowled through the aisles, never choosing the same bed twice, largely left alone by the staff now as they’d all become used to the bizarre pregnant lady who fell asleep in their store. He watched her though, and he saw that she held everything close to her chest, as though she had some cards she didn’t want anybody to see.
 
On this day though, things would be different. She had found a bed, near the back of the store and she lay down on it. She felt the cushioning beneath her back, felt the rough threads under her fingers as she traced lazy circles on the duvet. She decided this would be the place where she would spend the next hour. One of the staff members caught Security’s attention from across the store – pointing at the person next to them – a woman in a suit, pointing at the pregnant lady, then miming her own throat being cut. Security recognised the woman in the suit as Comfort Maver, the ironically named area manager who smacked fear into the hearts of several employees with her surprise inspections. Comfort claimed it was to ensure the smooth running of her company, but they knew better. These visits more often than not served to cut staff by at least two in any given store, and no one wanted to lose their job today.
 
Security approached the sleeping woman, tentatively as always. He had been waking her up for two months now, just before he left the store for the night. He would touch her lightly on the shoulder, and she would sit up quickly, dazed and happy, for a brief moment. Then a cloud would come over her and her shoulders would wilt slightly, like a flower who has been in the sun for too long. He would gesture to her to advance toward the doors. She never said anything, just blinked a few times, nodded, and left the store a little before him. He had yet to say a word to her.
 
“Miss? Excuse me, Miss? You need to leave.” The light tap on the shoulder didn’t seem to be working today. She was in a deep sleep. This close he could see the faint purple tracings of the veins on her eyelids, the slightly parted mouth with each breath she took. He felt a quietness come over himself as he watched her, almost as though he was trespassing on some miracle about to happen.
 
Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and without turning around, he knew. Comfort was there.
 
“What the hell is going on here?”
 
The sleeping lady sat up so quickly she might have been spring-loaded. Comfort’s voice did that to most people. She stretched and yawned, smiling at Comfort. Security nearly melted, and felt a trembling somewhere in his knee region. He had never seen her smile before.
 
Comfort wasn’t impressed.
 
Comfort turned to the staff member anxiously tagging along behind her.
 
“Why the hell was a customer asleep on one of our beds? Do you know how unhygienic that is? Do you realize that we are missing out on a sale right at this moment due to someone else not being allowed to test this mattress? You know the rule – ten seconds to a bed.  And you!” She turned now to face Security, finger pointed as though he was a naughty dog. “I don’t even know why you still work here. Slow and steady doesn’t quite win the race when you’re a security guard.”
 
The pregnant lady stirred, a pained expression coming over her face.
 
“It’s really not their fault, I’m so tired lately I can just sit down anywhere and fall asleep in a second. I’ve barely been here for a minute. I really think that-” Saying this, she had been struggling to stand up. Security hurried to help her, and she flashed him a brief smile. “-you’re being too hard on them”.
 
Comfort’s face turned the colour of the puce bedspread the pregnant lady had just vacated. She opened her mouth, and everyone braced for the onslaught. It never came.
 
“My water just broke,” the pregnant lady gasped.
 
There was an ambulance, there was Comfort screaming for someone to clean the floor, there was staff surrounding the pregnant lady, and there was Security, feeling awkwardly impotent, not knowing whether to fetch towels and pillows from the display racks or to run to his car and leave for home. The ambos were mentioning dilating and cervix and he wanted very much to not have the mental images he was coming up with in his mind right now.
 
Then, a hand. Outstretched towards him. Her hand.
 
“Come with me?” Her tone was hopeful, her eyes were watery, and in the harried frenzy going on around them, this moment was quiet. This moment was theirs. No one could touch it.
 
He didn’t even know her name, but he didn’t need to. In this moment, he was the sort of man who entered women’s lives in mysterious and winning ways. He loved her.
 
*
 
“Nothing? You have a baby girl. 10 fingers, 10 toes, doing beautifully.”
 
Nothing looked up, smiling as the little parcel was handed to her, squirming and pink and so tiny she couldn’t believe it. Security bent down next to her, staring in awe at the miniscule red face, screwed up and messy and so breathtaking he felt like the Grinch who realized the true meaning of Christmas – his heart felt too big for his body.
 
“She’s something isn’t she,” he spoke to Nothing in a voice only she could hear.
 
“She’s something,” Nothing agreed.
 
Security looked at Nothing, and for a moment he saw her as a baby, pictured little Nothing growing up alone, learning to tie her shoes with no one around to place their finger in the middle of the bow, and he saw her having this baby alone, always alone, for that is how he had known her. He vowed that from this day on, Nothing would never be alone again.
 
*
 
Nothing lived with Security for the rest of her life, and they named their daughter Something. They wanted her to know that wherever she was, whomever she might become, she would always remember that something could come from nothing. 

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Week Six Prompt: Food Memory

She owned a sauce company – Mama Rosa’s sauce company, to be exact. Well, her dad owned it, but her dad was kind of a dropkick, so it was up to her to run the family business. I met her out one night – there was a bar, there was alcohol, and that meant the night could last forever. She had an accent. She was beautiful. I was horny. I liked the way she said my name (Siiiiimon) making me sound like someone you’d heard of before.  She liked the way I asked for her number.
 
I didn’t even wait three days to call. Her voice was even, unsurprised – as though this sort of thing happened to her all the time. I asked her to a movie – she had a different idea.
 
She taught me how to make pasta – the real kind, from scratch. The closest I’d come to this before was a packet of maggi noodles – I’m more a meat and three veg kind of guy. She showed me how to fold the dough, using a speck of water and a tiny bit of salt, mixing my hands in with hers, lightly touching me on the shoulder to show me what to do next. I learnt how to thread the pasta machine, big hands clumsy in their motions, more used to tossing a footy around then spinning dough, turning and turning like the gramophone my granddad used to have. The pasta didn’t play a tune, but she put the radio on and we danced to our own music anyway. We got flour in places people shouldn’t ever get flour. Weren’t we the cutest things you’d ever seen?
 
My first bite – the flavours knocked me for six; there were olives and mushrooms and basil and tomato, so much tomato I nearly couldn’t breathe, but it was the best kind of not being able to breathe in the world. Suffocatingly hot; it was delicious. With that bite, fork held up to my mouth, grinning at me wearing nothing but an apron, she ruined my mum’s cooking for me forever. 
 
She took me to restaurants – Italian, always Italian – she showed me how you knew the food was good before you’d even tasted it. She taught me about colour, she taught me about smell. She had this weird idea that everything you saw or smelled or touched or tasted was yours, your very own to keep, bottled up inside of you, locked up tight so that no one could get at it but you. I told her it wasn’t healthy to keep things bottled up inside of you, but she laughed at me. She laughed at me a lot, and I used to smile because I liked hearing her laugh.
 
“She’s passionate,” I said to Jason when he asked me why I liked her. He had this look on his face I couldn’t work out, but I didn’t have time. I was too busy confusing feeling scared with feeling invigorated. She was a volcano about to erupt, she was an avalanche the second before it begins, pulsating with a tensile energy I couldn’t get enough of. Sometimes, I used to just watch her, watch the way she did things. I saw the quiet tension that bubbled beneath her skin, the tiny expressions that crossed her face when something annoyed her. I used to imagine that all those bottles locked away inside of her were quietly simmering away; boiling over into everything she said and did. She didn’t like it when I watched her.
 
Sometimes she was exhausting – she’d had another fight with her dad, she’d gotten drunk or high or both and called me up. “Why can’t you come pick me up?” she’d say. “My dad’s kicked me out.” Never mind the fact it was 6 in the morning and I was already at work, picking up extra hours because she’d been sick the week before and had needed me. “You’re never there for me. And now you’re going away and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
 
She moved in with me the week before I went on my trip. I had booked it months ago, before her, before the Italian and the best sex of my life. I was going with Jason, we’d been planning to get out of town for ages, go somewhere no one knew us and just chill out. “I don’t get it,” she’d say, and move to sit next to my roommates Dave and his girlfriend on my couch, trying to punish me for being neglectful.  Suddenly she was everywhere, in my kitchen, in my bathroom, in my bedroom, trying to make me stay. She cooked me a meal the night I left – lasagne – and there were candles and wine and she was wearing her apron. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting. It’s just. You’re good for me, you know?” She looked up at me from her plate, tears in her eyes. “Sometimes I just get scared about what might happen if you’re not around.” I held her and told her not to worry, told her she was beautiful, told her everything was going to be okay. That night, sitting on the plane, I truly believed that.
 
Three weeks later I returned home, and she met me at the door with a plate of handcooked ravioli, little mouthwatering pockets I’d never tasted before. We sat at the table together, her watching me eat. There was a long silence and then, she told me with a look I’d never seen her use before.
 

“I slept with Dave."
 

When I was fourteen, I’d been hit in the balls by a footy kicked by someone with terrible aim. I had gone down then, body wracked with the slow pain that throbs its way from the inside out, making you feel sick somewhere deep in your stomach, winding you from the shock of it all. This? This was worse than that.
 
Later, I realized that look on her face was sorrow; she was sorry she’d hurt me, sorry because she’d warned me and I hadn’t listened, sorry she cared enough about me to feel bad about what she’d done.
 
I don’t eat Italian food anymore.

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Inconceivable

Have you ever wanted those five seconds back? Just those five seconds? Like the moment when you reverse into a pole because you weren’t looking, or when you stub your toe on the bath, or when you’re talking about someone and they walk up behind you?
 
Lyn knows how that feels. If she had been more careful, she wouldn’t have tripped. If she hadn’t tripped, she wouldn’t have fallen. If she hadn’t fallen, she wouldn’t have lain on the floor at the bottom of her stairs for two hours, calling out to a neighbor with a voice that grew weaker with each passing minute, waiting for her husband to come home.
 
In Australia in the 1980’s, there was a huge push towards awareness of domestic violence. This was a good thing, because it meant that healthcare workers (who are often the first people outside the family to see the results of such violence) felt more comfortable in asking the tough questions.  It also meant, unfortunately, that sometimes they looked for something that just wasn’t there.
 
Lyn’s husband came home and he could barely see the digits on their phone through his tears. Lyn comforted him from where she lay on the floor, knowing that right now he needed her.  “Come on baby, just focus. Just do this for me, and then I want you to go pick the kids up from soccer, they’ve been waiting.”
 
Lyn’s husband wanted to wait with her ‘til the ambulance arrived, but Lyn wouldn’t hear of it. She kept picturing her boys sitting on the curb in the darkening night; soccer ball under one arm, their tiny faces hopeful as each car drove by. She couldn’t bare it (it turned out that a kind mother had taken them home with her own boy; she knew Lyn wouldn’t be late to pick them up without a good reason). The husband nodded and kissed his wife. He made her more comfortable with a pillow and a blanket, and sped off to find his boys.

The ambulance arrived. Lyn was lying there, alone, bloodied and bruised. They couldn't believe that a husband would leave his wife for any reason when she looked like that. They decided that Lyn was the next poster girl of domestic violence. They refused to take her in until she admitted that her husband had done this to her. Lyn begged them, and it was only when her husband arrived home with her boys that one ambulance driver said to the other, “Come on mate. She needs help. Let’s just take her in.”
 
At the hospital, they inspected Lyn, searching her all over. Bruising covered her back, dried blood pooled on her forehead where she had smacked her head on the stairs. They looked at her; so tiny, so young; so obviously, in their eyes, a victim. “You need to tell us the truth. This is a safe place. Did he hurt you?”
 
They refused to scan her when Lyn didn’t give them the answer they were looking for. The husband took Lyn home, and the fresh-faced idealistic resident folded his arms across his chest, watching them. “I’ve just changed her life,” he thought, and he felt good about it.
 
Slowly, Lyn’s body healed, but not in the way it should have. Bones fused where they should never fuse, torn muscles never worked the same way again. She learned to live with the pain. She began to gain weight. She saw doctor after doctor, each looking at the initial report from that night in hospital, each seeing that the resident had written that there was no obvious injury, and therefore no need to scan the patient.
 
She was diagnosed with depression and subscribed painkillers and anti-anxiety medication. Sometimes, if Lyn took enough, the agony stopped for a little while. She saved the really good painkillers for special occasions, like when her sons graduated from high school, or when they got married. On those days, she was able to sit without pain and just be a mother. On those days, she cried because she was proud.
 
One day, her therapist moved away and referred Lyn to a friend for her continued treatment. Lyn was excited to meet him; he was a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist looked at her, looked at her records and decided to send her for some scans, just to see if this patient who had been labeled over the years as a hysterical liar who likely suffered from Munchhausen’s could possibly be telling the truth. Maybe, he thought, she hadn’t ever been given the benefit of the doubt.
 
Twenty-six years after Lyn fell down the stairs, Lyn got her scans. She was immediately referred to surgeon after surgeon, all of whom said she weighed too much for the surgery to be a success, until one surgeon said yes. He’d give it a go. He said she had one of the worst backs he’d ever seen, and after this he’d need to look at her neck, her hips, her knees and her ankles.
 
I met Lyn when she was recovering from her fifth surgery.  I went in to take her blood pressure. She was happy. She was grateful. She told me her story. I had to leave the room to stop myself from crying in front of her. There was no place for how I felt about what she’d been through in her life. When a person is that vulnerable, bearing scars from surgery in places no-one should ever look, looking up at you with tearful eyes and matted hair and no make-up and hooked up to machines with tubes coming out of them every which way, telling you they’re grateful, you cannot fall into pieces. You suck it up. You hold back their hair, you wash them, you feed them, you take away their pain and you listen to them. 
 
Later that night, I called my dad up and told him her story as best I could without bursting into tears. He’s a doctor, and he nearly vomited when he heard how she had been treated. I asked him how this could have happened, how it could be possible that here in a first world country with excellent healthcare and fantastic standards could this be possible.
 
“Oh love I don’t know. That’s…Some people just…slip through the system, I suppose. She was just one of them.”
 
Sometimes I think about Lyn, and wonder how she is now. I think about everything she’s gone through, and I hope her and her husband can do all the things they wanted to do together but couldn’t because Lyn was too damaged. Sometimes I think about her grandkids, and I hope she can lift them up without pain.

Sometimes I think about those five seconds, and how different everything could have been. Just those five seconds.
 
 

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