mo Childhood friends. by Evlin DuBose Content Warning: Mental Illness, Suicide Ideation, Self-Harm, Blood, Violence, Sexual Assault
This is the story. Fog thickens the wintry town: fugue manifested in Katoomba. Moths flash like embers beneath the warm pub light, in tune with the muffled sway of music and din. She waits against the outer wall, bundled warmly and disturbed. Thousand-yard stare fixed emptily in the night. Her friend at last emerges with a loosely packed bag, and they leave for a haven — to crash on someone else’s couch. The others hug them, greet them, kiss them, the way of old childhood friends, and there’s much tea and talk (though none from her), and biscuits just for dunking. And stories, always stories, but mostly lies patchworked out of whole-cloth as they all just bloody try to distract her, and to catch her: their own falling knife. She won’t sound like them — she couldn’t. Her mother tongue was ripped out long ago. So they ask what she remembers, what common ground remains to stand on. What parts of us are still inside you? they ask. What was it like when you were whole? Mismatched patches make her character, half and half of everything: Australian American, men and women, patches of here and there. But she reckons there’s a look of here — familiar australiana. The look accosts from every angle, like echoes beating in the dark. A city look, a country look. No one, nor time, can shake it. The look: tawny tiles, painted doorways. Parquet patterns in the drives. Garden walls standing short and brown bricks smashed out of sea-rock. The splintered glass of dewy cobwebs. The scratching calls of rainbow birds. The prickle of a bottlebrush on naked skin, and rolling, endless power lines webbing deep into the bush. It’s mesmerizing. The look. Ancient, foggy, haunting history. She lost it when she left it. Her heart cries for a land that’s lost, for the blue river baked into a bed of gold, for the verdant hills and misty valleys, and roos watching from the green. But if you peer closely, you’ll imagine them — the faces looking out from the past. Between their trees, on their land — if you look today, you’ll see them. And you’re a writer. You see with words. But she’s losing them by the minute. Storm shorts the lights and rain rattles the windows, aqueous wash drowning the world, and she falls asleep beneath a scratchy quilt wondering how long the night is. Sleep, sleep, bury your moments in the dark and don’t dream till morning — but something bursts out anyway, bursts unbidden in her brain, and she awakens pierced by gems lacking cut or context. Bleeding memories...
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