Hard Land, Soft Death

 

It’s a hard land, you can’t die in summer, the heat bakes the earth so hard it will be months before anyone can bury you. And you can’t die in winter, the cold freezes the earth so hard it will be months before anyone can bury you.

So people here must live forever.

This hard land makes hard people. Lost travellers pass through, they seem soft, pathetic and fearful. They talk of soft things, oceans and trees and love, but their words fall on hard ears. 

These soft people can die at any time, they can be buried in the soft ground, mourned by soft tears.

The travellers return home, never speak of the hard land and try not to think of it. The hard people never speak of their visitors once they leave, they try not to think of them.

Parkstreet

Ko-fi

Was I A Good Man?

 

On the large oak table sits a small box that once contained a new pair of shoes. The photographs that litter the table must have come out of that box. The old man looks down at the braces attached to his trousers, lifts a picture of a young man wearing braces and standing in front of a shiny new car that looks kind of 1950s. He can't remember, but the man can guess who the young man is.

He doesn't remember anyone else who appears in the photographs. There is a woman, must have been his wife, young in some shots and older in others, and two young people who must have been his children. 

There are a couple of photos of a house, maybe he lived there? Most seem to have been taken on vacations, various people he can't recall standing in front of scenes he doesn't recognise.

The man somehow knows that he is dying. He wonders what sort of life he has lived. The photographs tell him nothing. None of the people in them are present to ask. Are they just in other rooms in this house? Or are they far away?

He doesn't know. 

Has the photographic evidence spread before him been collected by the prosecution or the defense? Is this a collage of time well spent, or of time passing?

A young woman carrying a tray, tea, efficiently places, pours, is about to leave when she feels she should say something. 

“Fond memories, sir?”

The man desperately wants to grab this woman, ask her just one question.

Was I a good man? 

Then he is distracted by the box and his last thought is about what sort of shoes came out of it.

Parkstreet

Ko-fi

Drinking Beer With Jesus

 

An English fellow, he had been working with A.I.D.S. orphans in Africa for six months, had landed in Sydney to prop up a bar, press the alcoholic pause button. He said he didn't want to talk about it.

Turned out he did want to talk about it. When I asked he told me there were only two qualifications required for the work he'd been doing. The first was the ability to hug children and mean it, and not just cute kids. Snotty kids, scabby kids, smelly kids, dying kids, they all knew when you hugged them and didn't mean it. The other required skill was the ability to employ a shovel efficiently.

Then we laughed. I remember him laughing loudly when I called The Simpsons The Simmos, he thought it was hilariously Australian. He had plenty of money, from what I could pick up he could have bought the bar with cash, but he allowed me to buy him a couple of beers. He knew I wanted to.

We stumbled down the stairs together, parted ways.

"There is only love and death", he said as he shambled up the street.






Parkstreet

Ko-fi

April, Tilbury Hotel, Woolloomooloo

 

Grape vine leaves falling 

Light, dappled through the trellis

Wine glass reflections 

Parkstreet

Ko-fi

Max Kreijn, titled Sydney, work used as a logo for The Tilbury Hotel in the 1990s.

Bob Really Was A Moron

 

Don't get me wrong, I liked Bob, he was a good guy, and pretty smart in his own way, but he really was a moron.

He tried to talk me into joining him on his fool's errand. In his mind he was offering me what he saw as an opportunity. All I could see was the opportunity to die.

Bob was smart, he really was. He'd found a way to communicate with another dimension. He tried to explain it to me, how he'd done it, but it was all beyond me. I'm not as smart as Bob was, but then again, I'm still alive. He excitedly told me that in this other dimension there were people, weird looking people, but people just like us. I didn't see that as a very good reason to become excited. If he'd told me there were people who weren't like us there I might have been interested in going along with him when he discovered a method to transport himself to this other dimension. Instead I joined him for a champagne toast and threw the switch that sent him on his way.

I heard the whole thing, Bob had also invented some kind of transdimensional radio, I think that's what he called it. The more I think about it the more I realise that he was smarter than I could even comprehend at the time. I heard him arrive, breathless, but in one piece. I heard him greet the first people he met there, he actually said, "I come in peace". I admit it, I was a little envious at that moment, hearing him say those words, for real, in another dimension. 

Then I heard him being beaten to death.

I threw the switch to bring him back, but too late. Before he died he whispered, bewildered, shocked, "why, why?".

"Because they are people, people just like us, Bob", I replied.

Bob really was a moron.

Parkstreet

Ko-fi

There Was This Moment

 

There was this moment. 

On a coach trip between Adelaide and Melbourne, there was this moment. 

We didn't sleep much the night before, our Hindley Street hotel room was icy cold, but there was this moment. We had to get up too early to make the coach departure, skip breakfast. Then the coach was late, but, you see, there was this moment.

Just when we thought we were out of range of the city radio station the driver twiddled his dial and found the country syndication, ensuring three more hours of talk radio hate. But you have to understand, there was this moment. 

At the green plastic inflatable roadhouse the coach spewed us into the only flavour on the plate was salt. And I put the salt there. But do you see? None of it mattered, because there was this moment.

Heading east, eventually the sun set behind us. At a small town bypass, we turned north for a while. The sunset was in panorama through the bus windows. I was debating waking her up to show her, the light hitting her eyelids woke her anyway. She looked at me and smiled then gazed at the glorious horizon show. The red and yellow light showed off every colour in her eyes, every shade in her skin, every tint in her hair. The coach turned back to the shortest possible route. She looked back at me and realised I'd been staring at her the whole time, then she snuggled back in, small enough to sleep in those seats, if she lay on top of me a bit too.

I couldn't see her face, but I could see she was smiling.

Finally we alighted in Melbourne, tired, cranky, hungry, smelly. A twenty minute tram ride home to St. Kilda. Dump bags, kettle on, check answering machine, tea and cigarettes sitting on oversized cushions on the floor.

She leaned forward and clicked the button on the old three-bar radiator heater on the wall. As it warmed up, it glowed red and shone on her face. 

That was the moment.

Parkstreet

For Jacqueline 

Ko-fi

The Newsreader Is Crying

 

The newsreader is crying. 

Nothing on his autocue says anything about crying, but here he is, weeping, his body jerking with the sobs he can't control.

No one knows what to do.

The director is in two minds. Should she cut to an advertisement? Or let this extraordinary scene run, knowing it will be on YouTube within the hour, making her news service the most famous on Earth for a few hours. She can't decide.

The cameras roll on. Like everyone else, she is stunned by the depth of the pain the news reader is releasing. She knows there is more to this moment than a highlight for a bloopers show.

At home, the people in their lounge rooms know what is happening. They've all felt the same way, at least once. The news, so much news. The weight of all that information feels too heavy some days. It's not just the content of the news, the disasters, the violence, the horror, it's the constant avalanche of news.

Storm after storm.

Landslide after landslide of news. More and more news.

It's not that it's the common person like themselves who is always wearing the bullets and the bombs and the famine and the torture, it's that someone is shouting it in their ear, poking them in the chest and making them listen, like some mass media drunkard.

The newsreader has simply had enough.

His stiff upper lip wobbled.

His authoritative stare lost its nerve, glanced sideways, accidentally saw what his fellow human does to their fellows.

He just couldn't read another word. So here he is, head on the newsreader's desk, wailing, keening for humanity, a tear for every news story he has read, every night, for years.

Everyone feels the load lifted.

The newsreader is speaking for us all. Giving us redemption, offering his tears for all the world. We can all go on, now.

The newsreader has sacrificed himself, his all important career, shown us the way. 

The news will go on, and on, we know we can’t change that, but now we know that how we feel is normal.

The newsreader is crying so we don’t have to.

Parkstreet

Ko-fi