Fiction

When it became too much we would get up and walk the aisle, or Vivian would say perhaps we should sleep now. And we would hope that in the morning when we opened the blind we would be back in the gorges or the plains or the woods. We longed for quiet like fresh air, even though we never heard anything from the outside.

The morning of the day she gets to choose, Olivia catches the train from Central Station to Chatswood without cringing at the scratches on the grungy windows or the smell of old Maccas in the train carriage. She smiles at the Chinese man playing the violin in the tiled tunnel and pulls her cardigan close. Today, rather than having a Nescafé at her desk, she stops and buys a flat white from the new cafe beside her building, where the baristas have styled facial hair and blocky ink tattoos. Scrolling on her phone as she waits for her coffee, she feels a tap on her shoulder.

It’s not the ghost of the poet or his sad wife in the tower by the rushing water that we are looking for: sensation, awareness, presence. No, that’s circumstantial. It’s a bird, a rare bird we are hoping to spot to rewrite the truth of being there. We are searching for the ageless bird that opened its own cage and now opens the cages of other birds. The uncaging bird that won’t be trapped in a bird guide or a poem. 

There was nothing to it, really. We were in his kitchen having dinner when he asked me why I was looking at him like I wanted to kill him. That was exactly what he said: ‘Why are you looking at me like you want to kill me?’ I had to break it off right there and then. There was no other way. He was sure it had something to do with his kid. I said, ‘It has nothing to do with your kid’, but he wasn’t convinced.

They let us ride the deer. That’s the best part. The worst part is the deer trashing everything they can bite or stomp their feet on, but the best part is riding the deer. When the new deer-mates get here they don’t believe it. They’re feeding, watering and mucking out the shit but the perks are unbelievable, and it’s easy when they’re sedated – the deer, I mean. We got Abbie Folder shooting up tranq before her first ride and she just stumbled into a hakea bush.

It’s not easy, being on the road. The roads being what they are, and my companions always keen on finding something low-budget. Melchior is generally okay with a twin share, but Gaspar – another story. It’s embarrassing, standing there in your crowns at reception as Gaspar quizzes some poor desk clerk about whether breakfast is included and whether there are extra pillows.

I have been in this queue my whole life. We can faintly hear the murmurs of the person at the front, talking to the person in charge of whatever it is we are queueing for. Sometimes, from a change in volume or tone, it seems as if the front person might be about to wrap up their business and then I and everyone else who has been in this queue their whole life will experience what it is like to move up one place.

There’s some commotion outside the entrance to the suburban general practitioner’s waiting room. The manual sliding door of the converted weatherboard house is open, a woman halfway through, beckoning two children to follow her outside. They wince at the brittle, Melbourne-winter wind. She grabs one of them by the hand and they all leave together. Inside, a young girl screams. It is unearthly, primal, painful.

The hallway resounds with unfamiliar footsteps at dawn. Ella and Iris lie in bed listening to the sound. They look at each other in the murky morning light, both knowing it is a man. An unwanted man. The girls creep out of bed and poke their heads around the door, wanting to catch a glimpse of their mother’s new lover. He is scraggy and sleep-worn, his step uneven on the floor.

Aldo’s wings began to sprout when he was two years old. They pushed through the skin, little feathered extensions of his shoulder blades. His parents, Ralph and Rhonda, bound him tightly with bandages that held the fledgling wings tucked against his back. He found it hard to breathe as he played during the day but at night he was unwrapped. He stood in the middle of his bedroom and moved his shoulders up and down to flap his wings, but he remained anchored to the floor.