The long way home

Deb Jowitt

 

Tonight, the coast road is awash, the narrow margin between land and sea lost to high tide and heavy rain. I drive slowly, picking my way through trails of debris, knowing I still have the creek to cross before I get home.

The naked world is roaring, water brawling like a wild beast. I can hear the grind of boulders rolling with the pull of the flood. By the dim light of my phone, I find the narrow jarrah beam wedged bank-to-bank, a fallback footbridge for times like these.

I overstayed my shift tonight to sit with a man death mocked for months. Just before one he roused, then quietly died, his hand held in mine.

Lightning flashes; loose sheets of corrugated iron shoot skywards before bucking back into the darkness. I reach the far bank, my feet on solid ground when thunder booms. My wet boots slip on the slick mud, and my phone skitters across the stones.

A volley of rocks falls from the bluff above. More are bound to follow. I reach out for a hand, but there is none. My leg is broken. Badly. If I can’t move within the hour, the bitter cold and wet will set my flesh hard.

I’m earthbound while a man so recently grappling with a ruined body is free to fly above the storm. I imagine him waiting to help me leave this turbulent world and reach again into the flailing air.

About Deb Jowitt

The one who didn’t get away

Sara Crane

 

Carolin fell off a dun-coloured horse and hit her head on a stone. She didn’t die.

Freya couldn’t shelter under the outcrop of rocks during the storm. There was a bird’s nest. A dull-eyed gull glowered at her. She retreated.

Esther shielded her eyes from the sun as the camel paused by the rock face. She was sure they had passed the same place before. She tried not to panic.

I am trying to gather together the threads of my sisters’ stories. To lure them back.

My mother’s debts ensnare me. Keep me awake at night. I dream of another life when I can go on adventures. Sail out of sight of land. Not be a steadfast and resourceful son.

Grimly I make a small pot of porridge. Brew a strong pot of tea. Sit by the stove and ruminate. The old cat stirs and I rub her back with my big toe. I need to find socks.

There are postcards on the fridge from Egypt and Africa and somewhere, that could be anywhere. I am the one who didn’t get away.

I love this house. The garden. The bush. The closeness to the sea. The joy of holding a space my sisters can return to. Our mother extended the mortgage. Took the money. Took off.

There is a diamond ring in my back pocket. Left over from my younger romantic self. I could always pawn it.

About Sara Crane

The kismet of stones

Heather McQuillan

 

On other days the stones play backdrop to poetic water, an apron of trees, or peaks and heavens, but today they are cast in the leading role. This tumbling of unnamed extras has been swept up in grinding tectonic plates, deposited lithic fragments made conglomerate under pressure, then set free. Amalgamated in grinding glaciers, where fractured veins bled quartz, pressed between frozen water and frozen earth, then set free. Pounded by turbulent waters, abraded in a braided river, rough edges removed, grating, grinding stones deposited, weather-beaten, wind-scored into sun-baked relief, into turbid grey ovals, flattened just right for a man-child to skim across the lake. Set free. They sink to the applause.

About Heather McQuillan

Archaeology

Mark Stevenson

 

I’m glad to be alone for once. In the amber dawn light of the desert, I hone in on the layers of rock. Pink, umber, bronze. The gritty chuck, chuck of the tiny hammer on sandstone. I apply myself, singly, to the task. What might this stratum tell us about the earth, about ourselves? With each percussion, a puff of dust spills, flakes crumble as I investigate the margins of a soft nidus. The hammer-note brightens. Some harder substrate.

Dab, dab with the brush now. My world narrows down to a single inch of dirt. Is that a shape I recognise? I persist. Dab, dab. Gently now. Something is emerging…
An eye socket.

Gradually, I uncover her. A skull looms, packed with earth. Nasal bones, the septum broken. The L-shape of the jaw. I hold my breath…

A row of teeth. Her mouth stretched open, a silent cry across centuries. If I could only hear her. Hollow eye sockets, vacant and accusing. What did she endure? Disappointment.
Dismay. Sacrifice?

My own struggles dwindle by this touchstone. Yet beyond archeology, we share our biology. She was a woman, like me. I reach out. Touch her. A tooth falls into my hand.

A footfall behind startles me.

“Found anything interesting?” he asks.

I pop the molar into my mouth. Washing it around like a jagged pebble, my tongue investigates the smooth surface, the sculptured grinding-plate. Sequestering her tooth inside me, I frown at his intrusion.

About Mark Stevenson

Guts and guitars

Tui Bevin

 

The copper lay in the rock, that lay in the mountains of Bougainville for millions of years until it was the locals’ karma that the copper was discovered. One of the world’s biggest deposits even.  Before long a mining giant created the world’s then largest man-made hole. As well as producing copper, gold and silver, the Panguna mine generated 60,000 tons of rock-slurry waste every single day. Waste destroyed the environment and the mine destroyed communities. Unrest festered. Erupted. Ten years of civil war followed. The mine closed. The Papua New Guinea military fought; the Bougainville Revolutionary Army fought; the Bougainville Resistance Force fought; and secessionists fought; dividing families and laying waste their land and future. As it is said, violence begets violence. Ten thousand died from bullets, starvation, and disease, others say fifteen or twenty thousand. Half the people were displaced. Fourteen peacekeeping missions failed, then they asked New Zealand. We sent the first mission with women, the first with guitars, haka and waiata instead of guns. Twenty-six years after the Burnham Truce there is still peace, even if the abandoned mine continues to weep blue water laced with toxic copper. If only this cautionary fable was a fiction, but alas, it’s not. There were knights in shining armour though – blessed be Brigadier Mortlock who had the guts to send soldiers with no guns.

About Tui Bevin

Rock solid: a ballad of bruised balls whereby karma is an ice-cold stevedore

Janean Cherkun

 

Those shorts are mega big, so square and thick. The shoulder pads enormous, yet shapely. The suspenders both at top and bottom: stretchy, Velcro-ended. Bits anchoring to other important bits!

You look awesome, man. Yes, I do like your team name. Sounds a lot like Boomers, that’s funny. Put this protective box on though, don’t let ‘em knock you in the bollocks. Not that we have need of those any longer. Safety first. Away you go. Show ‘em who’s boss!

No point stuffing hosiery in there, attractively or otherwise (no one can see) – oh … the box doesn’t feel quite right? No matter. Discard that ill-fitting plastic avocado, but only for the duration of your big boys’ tournament.

This weekend you’ll get hit in the tender regions with a hard-flying puck though, won’t you darling. What odds, and why did we not put money on this?

Now that’s an illusion … as if you had only one of those things we don’t mention. Although you are mentioning them – quite a bit – to everyone. The strange configuration, that’s the swelling like. It’s certainly odd. Nope, autumnal colouring’s not normal, not even slightly. Use the Arnica, sweet. I didn’t say use the whole tub of Arnica, dearest.

Calm down mate-o-potato, your veg are going to be just fine. For now we have ice packs and tripillows and a wheat bag.

Yes. I will buy you a new box off the website if you tell me the size. And this time please be accurate.

About Janean Cherkun

Fifty thousand years ago, a tree wept here

Alex Reece Abbott

 

Working against the odds, after the gold rush, all the diggers believe they’re only one good find away from changing their luck forever.

Ivan’s brothers swear he’s got the touch. She steps aside. He kisses the filigree gold cross on the fine chain around his neck, holds her lucky gumspear, closes his eyes. Oče naš, koji jesi na nebesima! Sveti sew ime tvoje!

She only knows a few words of Dalmatian so far, but when he makes the sign of the cross, she knows he’s having a word with the bloke upstairs.

Ivan’s a lanky bugger, so the gumspear’s the wrong size for him, but he’s gentle as if he’s holding a divining rod, head tilted, an attentive, shrewd tūī.

Within … maybe five minutes … he toggles the gumspear, then checks the joker. He gives her a wink. She digs out a rock the size of a man’s fist from the mud.

Missionaries found kāpia on the shore in the early 1800’s. Thought they discovered it. Dismissed it as glass and rocks. But scrape off the rime … she can’t really describe it … Honey. Butterscotch. Amber … more simple and more complex – more varied than that.

Kāpia is its own thing. Hold it to the light … the things revealed to you … fronds and flies and insects – history trapped and sealed forever. There’s days when she’d love to seal her entire past in a beautiful nugget of kāpia and bury it deep, leave it hidden, a rock undisturbed for a thousand years. She’s hiding too, trying to make money from another’s tears.

About Alex Reece Abbott

Crossing

Sue Barker

 

She grew up on honey sandstone laid down around a harbour’s edge. A peninsula village in a city where her nuclear family hunkered down, layered into their red-brick house, surrounded by lush gardens and silence. Her parents were suspicious of the outside world. They read good books, watched bad TV and discouraged visitors.

He grew up surrounded by volcanoes, tuff rings and lava flows. He was all hard smooth edges. He swam, he ran, he climbed, he whispered Maungauika, Takarunga, Rangitoto, Māngere.

“I want them all,” she whispered back.

“You don’t know them. You don’t know me,” he laughed, kissing her forehead.

I don’t know anything, she thought. Her childhood had been planned activities: guides, ballet, art, music. She gleaned what she could; sieved through the push-up bra, the clove hitch, the bully’s pinch, the minor key, the love-bite necks, the lying tongues.

“Come across the sea to my place,” he said.

She followed him to Maungauika, chasing through the tunnels, sitting astride canons yelling “What invaders?”  They climbed to the top. “Takarunga,” he pointed west. “The hill standing above, but Takararo, the hill below, gone now, the scoria quarried away.”

Scoria?

“To Māngere we go!”  Sun-baked dimple rocks once ancient gardens, now full of basking skinks.

Ah, scoria.

He left Rangitoto to last. From the summit the harbour city spread in a shimmering lava cloak.

“Sky-blood, erupted 600 years ago. A warrior footprint here preserved in volcanic ash. His journey, my journey. Little darlin’, you need your own journey.”

About Sue Barker

Mortification

Harry Allard

 

It wasn’t much to look at – a dark, ashy deposit on the dirt, about the size of a dinner plate. Marc scrutinised it from a deep squat that hiked his suit trousers halfway up his shins. He sucked air in through his teeth.

“It rained last night. So must’ve happened this morning,” he said. “I wonder if it hurts.” He looked up at me and grinned. I didn’t smile. I was wondering if it hurt, if the unlucky source of the stain had time to be frightened, or to feel their transmogrification into a fine grit.

Marc produced a sample dish and brush from his jacket pocket and delicately swept the powder up. He pocketed it. What was the point in another sample? It was carbon. Plain old carbon. From the core of a star, the bones of a mountain, human skin. Who knows.

Perhaps the sooty stains had nothing to do with the missing people. All those people. Every day it seemed there was another, and all the statistics and profiles and think pieces and theories in the world failed to find the connective tissue, a single thread to pull on. But you can’t map what you can’t see, I suppose. There was that feeling, the feeling that something was going irrevocably wrong, an untethering, the sensation that we were all being borne off into blackest night. Had they felt it too?

Marc stood up and stretched. “Another one bagged and tagged,” he said. “Pub?”

About Harry Allard

Acts of love

Ruby Appleby

 

Throwing rocks at your lover’s window to snag their attention is not as romantic as the movies make it seem. A poorly-chosen stone even slightly too big or too jagged can leave wisp-thin fissures in the glass, and the resulting spiderweb – testament to your idiocy –summons a wry smile from the other side: “Now look what you’ve done! Why didn’t you ring the doorbell like a normal person?”

Sitting glumly on the doorstep in wait (“I’ll be down in a second, okay?”), it becomes increasingly clear that the movies are just propaganda for hopeless romantics. All they do is spread the false idea that acts of love are tidy and simple, when in reality there is so much that can go wrong. Toting a boombox to your girlfriend’s front lawn sounds easy in theory, but what if you drop it or disturb the neighbours? Pelting her windowpane with rocks to get her to come down may seem playful and affectionate, but what about the cracks in the glass?

Then here is your love at last, smiling in the doorway, dimly lit from behind and looking for all the world like a vespertine angel. Hell, even failed acts of love come from the heart. Sometimes the trade-off is a chip in the windowpane for the sight of her behind it, with hair mussed from sleep and bleary eyes that soften at the moment of recognition.

About Ruby Appleby

A rock to crash on

Hellie Hadfield

 

Day 12. A meditation app tells me to let go, that thoughts are like pebbles in a stream, weighing me down. Don’t worry, it says, your body will heal itself. It hasn’t met me yet, I think.

Day 35.  I try to make a cup of tea. The jug is a marble simulacrum I wield weakly. I am the anti-Galatea, turning slowly back to stone.

Day 57. A friend visits. It’s good to chat and laugh and feel normal, if only fleetingly. I relish the connection, even as my cheeks flush. Even as my head tightens. Even as the lights become too bright and our laughs become too loud. I manage to keep up the appearance of normalcy until she leaves, and then I crawl under an electric blanket and hibernate for a week, basalt receding into lava.

Day 58. I wipe the morning crystals from my eyes. Slowly I sit up, assess my body. Leaden limbs – check. Flu symptoms – check. A pounding head – check. A nauseous dizziness – check. I lie back down, my week ahead an obsidian tunnel.

Day 90. My boss calls. He’s sympathetic, but can’t hold my job any longer – with no idea when … if … I’ll return. I say I understand. I say thank you for his patience. I say thank you for the opportunity. This is not my first rodeo. But halite tears run down flushed cheeks.

Then arms of granite wrap themselves around me, with a whisper: “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”

About Hellie Hadfield

Catalyst

Abra Sandi King

 

From the North I smell blood, singing through the heart of a dog. He wants to chase a scent, my scent, but he is on a lead and his owner is headed North-West.

My nostrils tremble as a new presence carries in on the East wind. A woman has entered the field, and she is coming this way. She is looking toward some trees in the distance, hopelessly unaware of random deaths of insects beneath her shoes. Of lives all around her, watching her. We want her to go away. We want to breathe again.

She treads on my burrow without seeming to notice, smashing in the entry.

She is close to me now, too close. Fear rushes my body, immobilizing me. I press myself against the ground until I am part of it.

Her foot crushes down on a dandelion plant. The aroma makes my stomach growl.

Even though she’s walking straight towards me, she doesn’t see. Her body appears bigger and bigger the closer she gets. Her giant shoe skids across a rock, and now her massive body is falling over me – suddenly my legs move, bounding away, digging a new entrance and bolting down to safety.

I rest in the cool earth.

I hear her crying. She calls out for a long time.

Her sounds stop.

At last, she begins to crawl away, dragging herself across the grass, away from me. The promise of dandelions still lingers in the air. My mouth is watering.

About Abra Sandi King

Fisherman’s Rock

June Pittman

 

Mere hated morning milkings.  Her feet’d go numb with cold. If she complained, her father made her stand in piles of steaming cow dung. Today it was raining!

Her older siblings had all left home. There was only Mere and her mother to help, but her mother wasn’t well.  Mere thought she was getting smaller and smaller; shrinking.

Mere’s mother loved fresh fish, and fish head boil-up.

 “The juice makes me feel better,” her mother would say.

Mere preferred fishing off Fisherman’s Rock to milking.  While she waited for the fish to bite, she’d let her thoughts drift.

Once, when she was away with the fairies, her line tugged so hard Mere nearly got pulled off the rock!  She had to cut the line!

“Perhaps it was your tupuna coming to check on you Mere”, her mother had said.

They’d laughed, though Mere quite often felt that she wasn’t alone when fishing.

After milking, Mere rushed up to the house and grabbed her fishing kete. The tide was almost in. Rain meant the water would be warm. Ideal for fishing.

Pushing the kitchen door open she yelled, “I’ll bring you snapper for breakfast Mama!”

There was something odd about Fisherman’s Rock that morning.

Mere could see bones strewn everywhere!  Long bones, short ones. Segments and shards.

She shivered. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. Mere turned and ran home.

Echoing through the valley, her father’s voice cried out “Aue…….! Aue……! Aue…….!” His cries confirming what Mere already knew.

About June Pittman

Hold on

Finn Williams

 

She stands before the boulder. At nearly 20 metres high, this would have been an easy climb in her younger days but that was before the cancer, before the divorce, before she spent 10 years tumbling out of control. Only now had she found something to hold on to, a desire to live again. She checks her laces are tight, rubs chalk onto her hands and grabs onto the nearest handhold.

Finger by finger, toe by toe, centimetre by centimetre, she crawls her way up. The surface of the boulder tears away at her neuropathy-ravaged fingertips as they search for the next available fissure. She wishes she had bought new shoes as the cracked rubber soles of her old ones slip and scrabble for grip. She looks down at her progress, disappointed to see she was barely off the ground, but doesn’t give up. To give up now would be to give up on everything.

She pushes on, past anything she thought she was still capable of until her hands feel the flat top of the boulder. With one final howl of effort, she pulls herself up and collapses, gasping for breath, her body pinned down by exhaustion. On her ascent, she had felt subtle changes in the rockface. Some of her favourite handholds had been eroded away, new imperfections having taken their place. The boulder had changed, remoulded by the passage of time, but it was still here. Despite everything, so was she.

About Finn Williams

Musings of a rock

Stella Weston

 

Things change. The consensus on the cutest degree of jean tightness, the people they walk their dogs with, the dogs they walk.

Isn’t it funny what you learn from just looking and listening?

I enjoy it from down here, the looking and listening. Funny, until she sits on the bench and flips me upside-down. I wasn’t particularly conscious at that moment, wouldn’t have listened if she wasn’t now rolling me under the heel of her converses, scuffing them further, and talking about how ‘this place is a bloody closed system.’

I enjoy the occasional snippet of philosophy. I’ve heard enough to know that a closed system refers to a test tube, or the universe – things that don’t allow transfer in or out.

It doesn’t apply to here.

Here is beautiful – my expanse of green, even if people say it is getting too dry and the trees whisper of cyclical rhythms and the need for flexibility.

She rolls me underneath her other foot.

I suppose here is small, insignificant – not the kind of place that provokes panicked chatter about the kind of chaos people seem to worship, seem to crave.

Where is the satisfaction in sentience?

I am satisfied, sitting here.

But the trees say they are not trying to escape their roots, or even hide them, they just want to reach higher.

About Stella Weston

Ruby

Desna Wallace

 

Winter snow begins falling, just a few sleety showers at first but it soon settles and the woman, watching from her lounge window, begins to smile. She throws on her coat and gloves, reaches for the pink and purple striped box that sits always on the shelf beside the television and gently removes a soft, pink, woollen scarf. She rushes out to the middle of the back yard and begins with a small ball of snow, rolling it, adding more and more snow, shaping arms, body, and head, until at last, in front of her stands a small child made of snow. Gray stones from the driveway become eyes, dried hydrangea leaves form a smile. The scarf is the last, but most important piece. It is placed lovingly around the snow child’s neck. She names the snow child Ruby, as she does all the snow children she builds. She talks to the snow child. She talks all day, all night and all through the next day too. On the third day the sun nudges itself out from behind clouds and both the woman and snow child begin to cry. By the end of the fourth day there is no trace of the snow child.

The woman returns the scarf to the pink and purple box labelled Ruby, then sits by the window waiting for the next snowfall.

About Desna Wallace

I never got to Graceland

Jeff Taylor

 

I’ve found the old guitar with his picture glued to the back, and remember how I’d always promised myself a pilgrimage to the shrine that bears my name one day. But it was never to be.

His dreamy voice, crooning from our transistor radio, seemed just for me, and I’d pestered my father to buy his records and teach me the guitar.

“You only need three chords, Gracie,” he’d said, his arthritic fingers struggling to demonstrate them on the battered twelve-string. Just before his stroke.

The King’s voice resonated non-stop from my turntable, thrilling me while I practised. My fingertips became calloused and ridged from the cheap strings.

His songs soared every night in my dreams. I dreamt them in class too, Mamma scolding me as my grades wore down like the needles on my overworked discs.

I saw the love in his eyes for Lisa-Marie, and stuck pictures from magazines on my bedroom wall of them together in their mansion. My own heart strings strummed with uncompromising love for him as I sang his songs last thing and first thing.

I see, now sixty years later, there’s only ten strings, and I hope I can still tune them.

My granddaughter, Sophie, has musical talent, so I will show her those sets of simple chords my daddy taught me. And I’ll tell her how, when I was her age, the King of Rock was in my dreams every night.

And maybe one day she’ll make that journey for me.

About Jeff Taylor

Nothing soft to say

Bella Sexton

 

From the treehouse, we watch your brother stalk the playground. Trench coat, Windsor sunglasses. He is cut straight from a horror film.

The air feels too still. Your expression is too alert. There isn’t enough space here.

Your brother picks up a small rock, turns it over in his hand. Slow and deliberate. Stands up, draws back his arm.

There is a quick whistling. I stumble, snatch at the air for balance. Laughter echoes up to us, sharp against the quiet.

Your eyes are steely, fixed on something unknowable. I look down at my arm, throbbing and pink. Smile without teeth, lips pressed too hard together.

The air feels compact around us. I try to think of something to distract you, but there is nothing soft to say. There isn’t anything soft here.

About Bella Sexton

She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister

Sherryl Clark

 

She stood in the middle of the lounge room, dancing by herself, eyes closed. Every time the music stopped, she put another record on. Everyone else had long since given up dancing, drunk men hovering around the barbecue like blowflies around a plate of chops. Women in the kitchen, talking and drinking wine.

“What’s her problem?” one woman asked.

Her friend said, “She just loves music.”

The voices filtered through, and she thought, Yes, music saves me. Like I have a taut guitar string inside me, and music twangs it, makes me feel alive.

She laughed at the word. Twang. She’d be calling herself Dolly next. No, not Dolly, Suzy Q. Someone who could sing and shout and punch a man right in the face if she wanted to.

She should go and drink wine in the kitchen with the others. But the music had hold of her, and she hugged it back, pulling it close, letting it fold around her, ripple through her. She was water, flowing over pebbles and boulders, roaring into a cascade, the guitar solo carrying her …

A hand grabbed her arm, pulled her sideways.

“Why do you always do this?” he hissed in her ear. “Making a bloody fool of me. Get your bag, we’re going.”

She followed him out, the song trailing after her. “… from which there is no return …”

About Sherryl Clark

Still standing

Averil Robertson

 

At exactly age forty, Elle struggles along the Crater Rim track in the Port Hills. Her feet are leaden, weighed down by two decades of unarticulated hope. She knows from Facebook – the small-town gossip column of their generation – that he, like her, is single. Will he remember, though? Those days after uni, when they hiked here so often, delaying acknowledging that neither of them knew what was next, were long ago.

Elle gets to the rock, hardly believing it is still standing. Her hand reaches out, the rock’s lichened chill steadying her as she edges to its south side. She looks down at Lyttelton. Lazy afternoons at Wunderbar, pretending they were single and platonic, before heading to bed at one of their flats. And yet, at some point they just … stopped.

Elle settles among the tussocks, leaning her back against the rock. The pressure she’s let build around this moment, scheduled so far ahead, bursts from her in jerking sobs.

Elle startles awake when a hand slips into hers.

“You came.”

“You came.”

She starts to cry again. “I thought … I worried the earthquake had taken it. And then it was here but …”

Jamie shakes his head. “I come here, every year.”

“Why?”

“To remember. To, um, to hope.”

She frowns. “But today you were—”

“I couldn’t face … if you weren’t …”

Elle laughs, wiping her face. “We’re ridiculous.”

“We are.”

They stand. As Elle passes the rock, she pauses, touching her fingertips to it.

About Averil Robertson