Twelve Years and Three Hours Away
Those dry summers, a hot stove. Touch the element once
and yank back before it burns.
She would walk to the dams and hunt for quartz;
those boulderous, craggy chunks of veined earth.
Big enough to split someone open. Weighing her down as they loyally carried them. To leave
them behind
would be a betrayal.
My placenta still under the cherry tree, child-body lying on the trampoline.
Maybe I’ll go back and dig it up, swallow it whole and find out what’s been missing all this time.
And then wish I hadn’t done it.
I remember the old swimming pool, green with algae and envy.
A plush carpet for curling toes into and digging in heels, but it’s water, so you can’t.
Puppies on the swing set, squirming in her lap and wriggling away from her. She clung on
anyways. Sorry, puppies. She’ll grow out of it.
She gave their mother her name – Cloudy,
because her fur looks like clouds, don’t you think –
and now Cloudy’s baby daughter cannot climb the stairs, all these years later. Little Coco is old and tired and she sleeps all day.
We love you, baby
She liked to curl up on that dusty rug and read the stories Jenny kept for her, old-fashioned
picture books which blur together now.
She’d trace the dent in the wall at bedtime and dream of monsters in storm drains. Give him
your hand next time.
And Anger, a tall man. She thinks the house is fairyland, a memory of a dream of a movie she saw once, but it’s not, it’s not.
Fear comes
like he always does, eventually,
(I guess he made the drive)
and slips down her throat into her stomach.
He’s with her at the dinner table and he’s with her outside in the dark. Badger’s there, pacing the kennel with violence under his skin. He bites, or so she’s been told. Does he bite you?
He/Badger/Fear tells her that even inside that womb, she is still mortal.
The water that flowed from the taps was colder than anything. We are alive, we are both alive, it whispered into her hands.
Going down the long dirt road, everything irradiated heat. She would take off her seat belt, her robin-heart bursting with pride. Almost too much to stand.
Clouds of dust rose and fell like tiny empires.
Years later, the last place I saw Jenny was cold. Cancerous, it smelled like the colour mauve and a stranger.
I touch the stove again just to be sure, just to feel the burn.
Written by Beatrice Upton-Oettel.
Beatrice is an emerging writer currently studying at the University of New South Wales. She enjoys dreams of all shapes and sizes and is an avid film enjoyer, poetry reader, and olive-eater. She has only had two serious ambitions in her life (being an writer or, briefly, becoming a Barbie doll), and is currently digging up that pesky placenta she mentioned earlier, so can’t really talk right now, sorry!