Fiction

I came across the painting of the eagle by chance. It was hanging in the display window of this gallery I sometimes visit and a small group of children were standing on the footpath pointing at it. It’s like it’s going to die, one of them said. It is falling. We are all falling, one of the children said. But no one takes the bait. It’s like it’s going to end up in a million pieces. Kaboom, the first child said, slapping his palms together and exploding them for effect.

It was the first anniversary of her father’s death and Angela was drifting in a world between magic realism and romantic fiction. She shut the massive front door of the elegant mansion behind her as she set out for the office, descending the steps to the pristine gravel drive that was lined with urns of flowers and writhing marble statues.

Also, yes: we know the lighting could be better. But this isn’t Hollywood – it’s an elite dojo/school hall and neither we nor the school can spend our limited budgets on something so insecure as good lighting. And what are we going to do, have our hair sprayed? Are we going to dab on theatrical make-up? Are we newsreaders?

At first, the zoo seemed like a place of freedom. The woman drove with the infant in the car – liberation, leaving their suburb – when the autumn mornings were crisp, melting to summer-like noons. She’d purchased a membership on that first visit. Now she’d been four times – got her money’s worth, she told herself with an inflated feeling of achievement. On the first visit, her son did not seem to see anything. She pointed out the giraffes, from a distance, and some wallabies. He’d stared with expectation at a tree or the sky or at her pointing finger.

‘Name for your order please?’ The girl behind the counter has no idea what she’s asking of me. She is young and hip and so sure of herself that she only displays half a name on her badge. I remove an AirPod from my ear to speak. ‘Bri, is it?’ She eyes me and I take it as confirmation that I pronounced her half-name correctly – like the cheese. Bri, short for virtuous Brianna. ‘Bri, how about you take my order first. Then we’ll be slightly better acquainted and I’ll feel much more comfortable giving you my name.’

She didn’t know whose ashes they were. She didn’t know if she should feel sad or what, but she’d tell herself to sing. And sometimes play the piano keys. Behind her, a bay window gave onto the district. The sun rose over the houses and the lush, pretty gardened streets and the people there and their unthinkable lives while she sat, singing. She sang to the urn on the bookshelf in the morning as the light gushed through the window and glinted in three-starred spots on the dull metal of the urn. The urn. The ashes she didn’t know.

Banh mi crumbs fall onto my keyboard – a petri dish of despair, skin flakes and granules of instant coffee unlovingly dispelled from the side of my slack jaw. If Hansel and Gretel were to find the office worker on their lunchbreak, they’d only follow the stale breadcrumbs up the cinderblock lift and find me swathed in my sheets of data and formulas for timesaving and cost-cutting. In this reprieve – where my availability blinks yellow (be right back) like I’m stopped in traffic – I consider the big questions.

The gastronomic temple Grub made headlines a few years back for serving Sydney’s bored pleasure-seekers a Mediterranean dreamfish that caused diners to hallucinate for several days. Since then, Grub opened bookings once a year, an event earmarked in the calendars of a thousand stressed PAs, and the prices grew if not prohibitive, then as gluttonous as the clientele. Like Grub, when Dave called triumphantly from his study that they had secured a date in the summer, Mira was hit by a maelstrom of reservations.

Jeremy had less than an hour to get everything in place before the museum opened. God, he was tired: up all night worrying about whether they’d chosen the right font for the labels. He tapped his Apple Watch: time for one more scan.

She came to see my parents about milking our goats. Have you ever milked goats, my father asked her. No, she said. My mother got down the medium good china for her cup of tea. She looked like she preferred a mug, but she took the little cup and saucer, held them in her outdoor hands.