UNEXPECTED INCONVENIENCES By Soren Tae Smith
CW: This piece contains graphic depictions of youth suicide and self-harm. Reader discretion advised.
Y
ou cut the cord yourself. It was midnight and he was twenty-five minutes old. The only pain relief you’d had was sucking ice cubes and warming your back by the fire. He didn’t cry when he came out—neither did you. A timeless moment looking at each other, he from the floor and you down upon one knee. Then you waited for the cord to stop pulsing and you cut it. You were careful. Everything was fine. I wish I’d never been born that would have been so perfect I just wish I wish. I wake up every day wishing I had died in my sleep— In the 1950s, when your own mother was born, not many of us knew what an exploding car looked like. Mainly soldiers and gangsters knew what a shooting looked like. You consider the stream of traumatic images and words he has been exposed to since he was a child. You realise he’s still a child, in the 2010s, when depression is a thousand-mile stare into a screen. Are we still eating dinner watching the Vietnam War live? What time is it? Fuses blown. We forgot to turn it off. Now how to reach him? I’m sorry, the person you are— Going to sleep wondering if he’s breathing and getting up to check (you used to do that when he was an infant). Going to sleep wondering again. Checking in your dreams. Buttering toast with a spoon. Finding blood on sheets even though he is a boy. The dark circles are back and he doesn’t talk. Where is it? Was it a tin lid? Was it the edge of the broken ruler? What was it? I can’t look after you anymore if— Well you’re not doing a very good job anyway, he says from his dirty sheet. The brown blood has sprinkled
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upon his bed in the night like emotional rain and neither of you know where the leaks are. Many mornings looking at each other, bewildered, as you stand in his doorway. He can’t get up. Losing your hair even though you’re a woman. The disappearance of tomorrows. Cooking meals without a knife. Lost keys. Washing out blood. Trying to work but I can stay home if you need me. Lunchtime staff rooms. Men in shorts talk sport. I’m sorry. The person you are calling is unavailable— Trouble with trains. To be caught between the metal jaws of two minutes’ delay at the station because the train has been delayed, because the announcement you can’t hear said something about a person on the tracks; to feel blood rush to your face because you think this is it, this is finally it, it’s happening— For the train to approach, inspected by you for traces of your child on the front metal, and to realise that you have become a train inspector for child-traces, and to find none, and to inhale and not smell death. Once you smelt it and you knew what it was, the train has been delayed, it was forty degrees and Footscray station reeked of roadkill, but it was trainkill and no-one talked about it, but you knew what it was. As the train arrives and slows, you see your face in the frame-by-frame of the windows, a face among other faces in the world. You hear laughter, plans, and you feel everything moving slowly in a soup of delays. You are calculating how many seconds it will take to reach his door and to what degree this delay has INCREASED RISK. To know or not to know? To be pulled apart by find out and look away. For the first time, after all these years, to come dangerously close to wanting to escape—and at the last second to have this thought swerve out of your way as you stare blindly into it.