FARRAGO

There’s a voice, and suddenly everything around you comes into focus. You see a hand waving insistently in front of your face.

“You okay? You need some air?”

— Don’t try so hard to be profound. It’s annoying.
— I’m writing how I feel.
— You were eating a chip when you had your first kiss. Okay. Gross. But the chip is not a symbol, Miranda. You don’t feel it flaccid, lukewarm, lodged at the back of your throat as you speak and especially when you remain silent. A potato is not the patriarchy. Anyway, what is this supposed to be? Is it a poem?

This was the umpteenth time I’d had this conversation. I’d spent the last three weeks facing off against a faceless corporation who had come to embody all the frustrations of my metropolitan existence. You were forced to deal with an army of foot soldiers who had a perfect, practical defence of plausible deniability. They met my rage with phrases like “my hands are tied” or “I am on your side”.

Sometimes the sunlight would seep through the curtains and spread itself across the fabric. It covered nearly every inch of space in my grandmother’s house. I’d gaze into the specks that hid amongst the woollen carpet, hoping for a glance of the possibilities that lay below. It used to be red.

Though he wears a rich coat burning brighter than the sand of any desert, the twinkle in the lion’s amber eyes has long since faded.

You heard the music before you ever saw it, although I suppose that’s regular.

I hauled my shopping bag up higher so the cans would dig into me. My briefcase balanced me out just nice.

In Footscray now; people in soft-focus and wrapped in silk. Asphalt melts, sticks to my boot.

Together we fought with the magpies over the best places to find food, and we huddled close in the cold at night, watching for cats, and we would sit in the swaying branches of oak trees, peering down at the neat rows of dark-bricked human houses, the rectangular sections of grass bordering them, the great black wasteland roads where monstrous cars roared by.

Jess’ logic was that a towering, six foot Nigella Lawson in my kitchen would shame me into action.