Fiction

It all started with a panther head. Woodrow and Wyatt both worked at small tattoo parlours old enough that they used to cater exclusively to youthful World War II soldiers, who got tattoos to help them cheat death or to tell the story about how they had just cheated death.

In front of Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs, an older woman is pinching a younger woman’s right nipple. Another woman is photographing them. The women are clothed. They are obviously imitating the painting but it is unclear if they’re culture jamming or creating a memorable moment for themselves. Other gallery-goers wanting to study the painting hold back, wondering, disturbed, intrigued. Some wish the women were naked like the two foregrounded women in the painting taking a bath, washing down whiteness with the king’s blessing.

She was not moving. This tram, the one half full of sickly pale commuters in the dying afternoon light, hadn’t moved for a few minutes. Everyone else had already registered it, the stillness, the flatness. Heads turned, people looked up from their phones irritably. They weren’t at a stop or lights, just halted in the middle of the road.

A flicker caught her eye and, heavy lidded, she gazed at the twilight shadows dancing on the bedroom wall like a portal to a more ethereal world. Time had become morphine-paced. Perhaps it would be best not to tell Daniel, she thought sleepily. But what if he came across some tiny piece of incriminating evidence and she wouldn’t be there to explain it? Daniel must have been in while she dozed. The bedside lamp was on. He had been so loving these last months. Her mind floated, landed. Was honesty really the best policy?

Two works to “sing a song of exhaustion” and to lament this country’s “lust for smoke”.

Dorothy Porter never went anywhere without a volume of poetry. Whether to the local coffee shop or to Antarctica, a book of poems – often several – travelled with her. Reading poetry was among her greatest pleasures and her greatest blessings. It was also one of her great passions. Dorothy lived with passion; she believed it to be an essential component of a rich and creative life. And the greatest of human passions was love. From her first collection of poetry, Little Hoodlum, published when she was just 21, love presented itself as an irresistible topic.

At first her thoughts carried her along – where would they go for dinner? But soon they grew quiet, as if she were nodding and smiling while slowly slipping out of a dinner party and into another, quieter, room. Time began to slow, the past and future folding themselves into the present. She was letting go of something that anchored her, but she felt no loss.

So once I came across a bird trapped inside a large blue cage and I was struck immediately by several things. The bars were the same blue as Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome. I had a particular penchant for Klein and knew the shade immediately. Also the bird had unforgettable piercing black eyes, a broad pale beak and wore a charming black beret on its head, not to mention a sweet red and white gingham dress. Do you think you could open this cage for me, the bird said, doffing the beret.

When I was 11 I used to have this recurring dream where I was trying to buy a 1982 Datsun Sunny from a lady in Taroona. You know how these things go. One minute you’re curled under your doona halfway through the fourth Deltora Quest book, then your eyelids start developing a weird gravity of their own and then, gently – I’d be standing there atop the driveway, looking out across the river, fugue-like, and then I’d look down and see it – this little angle-boxy car parked diagonally across the front of the garage.

Maybe I make it big, maybe I don’t.

Maybe I score the goal or maybe I hit the post.

Maybe this goes somewhere or maybe it does not.

Maybe my future lifts the family or they cannot lift their heads in public.

Maybe I am filled with dreams and that is all they remain.

Maybe my destiny is greatness, maybe I rise no higher than the ground.

Maybe I have more money or maybe the money stays the same.

Maybe I leave my friends or I am the one left behind.