She remembers landscapes, the history of silence loud in horses wearing blankets in a lush green farm near the Yarra Valley rodeo no longer in use. Vision remembers scent, the car’s “sweet lily of the valley” in a fragrance leisurely releasing from a hung freshener on the indicator stalk of a custom-made dash.
K steered with one hand and fiddled with the radio, his eyes off the road.
“What’s in your head?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
The color of words was gray in the stereo on full blast as the car whipped into Wandin and its white and yellow flowers near a graffiti-walled toilet named Lost Trains.
Nothing in the mood was changed inside a community park where the car pulled up, or near the parking machine labeled FRAGILE. NOT IN USE and goons had wrapped it in cling wrap so it couldn’t swallow coins.
The camphor-scented bar that was also a restaurant across the road hosted a waiter with the body of Apollo and a face both devils and angels would love.
Vision avoided both, the body and the face, knowing K’s caliber of jealousy. She focused instead on the waiter’s voice when he took their order of a flat white.
“Murderers have killed for less.”
She looked up startled to have spoken her thoughts out loud on the waiter’s constricted vocals, but K refused to notice.
“Are we fighting?”
He still didn’t answer but his silence never left the table or the saucer or her heart—it lurked everywhere it could hurt.
Vision dipped her thoughts in K’s coffee and sought for answers buried in dates and resentments in the muddied froth.
As the waiter busied himself shining glasses, a ruby-haired mermaid winked inside a framed photo of an island and a coal-dusted tower reaching for an otherworld along the wall.
She remembers the locating.
One way is a bell miner’s tink, sweet and musical, just before sunrise and finishing on a hiccupping note just after sunset. One way is the poet’s limerence, verse upon verse in gravity and circles, black-billed gulls in smoking puddles on the burned sand waiting for the whitewash in rhyme. One way is wintering in the northern hemisphere while the patios in the south grow hot and hotter, the flies zang as opposed to zing, beating at heat until they collapse, and Vision, sunstruck in Sailor Falls, said, “I do,” to an excerpt.
One way is albums and camping and everything in between that sirens warn against in songs full of rain. One way is the rumble of wind from his bum in the dead of the night, half a gallon of air condensed into fair dinkum toots. As he turns in his sleep she wonders about forever.
One way is the road to Lost Trains and locating that you’re dead.
She remembers the enduring.
His was the kind of jealousy that vomited a sizzle of green, silent as an ogre but just as mighty. It was no surprise when just days ago he reminded her: “Twenty-five years.”
“What?” She lifted her eyes from the manuscript and its proofreading mark-ups, but his face was a wall.
“All gains make for nothing.”
She raised her palm in exasperation, presenting him with the animation of an oak that wore the portrait of an old woman with cross tattoos on her face, each line of ink shaping a history of stumbles.
If K saw it, the portrait etched in air, he said nothing. Or perhaps he was immune to her gift of the preternatural, or was it simply to the characters in her manuscript?
In the worlds of her stories there were systems and plots to deal with green-eyed monsters, but in the world of K ... She wondered what he saw as gains in their shared years and why they would make for nothing.
His suspiciousness of her beauty or her literary triumphs or both had the eye of an osprey spotting fish in a lake, the giant bird swooping with talons stretched, shaking water off its wings in slow motion and soaring skyward with the fish secure in its grasp, all the way to a feeding perch where a hungry beak tore into pink flesh.
Only in hindsight did she understand that twenty-five years was a milestone, the landmark of a dying, a dawning of the day he would shape out her beating heart with a kitchen knife to quell his need to possess.
She feels the writing.
She wrote herself into the story and transported her spirit into a quokka. She did consider a selkie but rather liked the furry macropod and its ebony button nose and jolly temperament, despite the selkie’s shiny seal coat and superior gentleness, let alone the advanced swimming. The quokka doggy paddled out of the manuscript, just as K finished the carving.
The critical incident response team, all sirens, arrived in a panel van blinking orange and blue. As K cradled Vision’s disconnected heart somewhere on a blood-bathed floor, the quokka opened the door, shook its head at the bewildered response team and said, “He was not a mouth.”
Men who rage out loud, the talkers, they are harmless. It is the silent ones ...
But Vision was not a mouth either.
She relives the dying.
She allowed herself to feel each slice of the blade, and was still thinking long after the response team arrived. She wondered what the team might do next, if they understood the precipitous nature of unwisdom that had already sprayed Sailor Falls in the lead-up to the new year. What with gangs raping shops and residents, lotto megadraws going unclaimed and sexual abuse scandals hitting yet more politicians, would one more slaughter make a difference? Such was the world of detachment, the response team arrived and saw and departed, without doing a thing.
She determined that, unable to keep what the team had witnessed—not the blood-soaked floor or a husband holding his wife’s beating heart, but the sight in Sailor Falls of a quokka that spoke human—one siren in the incident response team might write an anonymous op-ed without getting a stint in the psych ward.
The history of silence was loud in horses wearing blankets in the lush green farm near the Yarra Valley rodeo out in the warm rain.
Unpunished and uncuffed, K had wrapped her in a shower curtain, hauled her out the door and lowered her and a spade into the boot of his car where her blood crystallized into gemstones.
Her quokka sat next to him, riding shotgun into a wail of cicadas soaring in circles etched in daylight, bothering the landscape now quiet after the response team chased down a different emergency. Vision was not surprised when the cicadas fell aground as dogs, and they ran away barking at K’s approach to the boot. She considered that they, too, were her animal spirit.
He buried her right there in Wandin and its white and yellow flowers near a graffiti-walled toilet named Lost Trains.
The end?
Not quite.
Turns out one siren in a whole team did write an op-ed.
The quokka watches K’s life in monochrome inside a prison that is an eternity, the husk of him shriveled to a gnome trapped in ancient skin.
If you listen closely, you will hear a faint scratching of nails long as a Komodo dragon’s on somber walls licked by a wash of tide, whispers from ashore in time after time inside a fossil tower on an island so unexpected, you’d be astonished anyone goes there.
And if you work more characters into the story, you’ll find an important writ both fascinating and disturbing in the profundity of prison house faces never too disarming to distract the photographer. The shutter clicks, clicks to stir the silence unwashed in coal dust scattered over a short story with an old woman full of cross tattoos on her face, where a ruby-haired mermaid winks in the shores of what bodes inside a frame.
Originally published in The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories (Meerkat Press, 2020)
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