What happens to the stories we write that don't have a place to go? The ones that don't make the competition or the anthology, but still have something to say about something...I created this page for stories otherwise homeless, that nonetheless have something about them I like. Even if imperfect. After all, everyone deserves a place of their own.
Beauty amidst the ruins
His finger traced her tousled ash blonde hair, touched her brown eyes and rose lips. Caressed her petite pointed nose and creamy, slightly flushed cheeks. The pink rose lying on the table in front of her contrasted delicately with her white, almost transparent short-sleeved dress, like pale rouge against ivory skin, radiating an ambience of sweet innocence. With her hand resting against her chin, elbows on table, she gazed at something beyond, as if she were dreaming of him.
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Norm knew she was just a drawing, a pretty sketch by a clever artist, but he loved her all the same. He decided to name her Rose-Maree, and placed the postcard back inside the top left pocket of his pea-soup jacket. He wondered how many postcards were in his collection after two years of sending them to his family. Surely there must now be hundreds. But he just couldn’t part with Rose-Maree. She reminded him that fairness could still exist in this world.
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“God I’m sick of this war, mate. Sick of everything about it.”
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Norm nodded to Blue, sitting nearby smoking a cigarette, in silent agreement. He’d met Blue at a recruitment depot in Sydney, a lifetime ago it seemed, and here they still were. And early tomorrow they’d be back in the thick of it, on their way to the town of Bray.
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The sun was setting, turning the horizon into a bonfire. Razing reds, broiling oranges, glowing yellows. Norm took out a different postcard from his haversack, one of a French nurse, a brunette. He began to write.
21 August 1918
Dear Mother,
Everything is good here. Do not worry. I hope you and Father are also in good health.
I am watching the sun set. It’s not a wonder that such a sunset can exist in war, but that war does not collapse in shame before its exquisite beauty.
Your loving son,
Norm
*
There are no days of the week during war. Once days had a meaning, like Monday the first of the working week, Saturdays for a game of footy or to catch a film. Here the war organises space and time, even more so than sun or moon or clock. You were in the trenches or in the camp. You were attacking or you were defending. You were fighting or waiting to fight. You were on the move or stuck in the mud. You were alive or dead. War sought to colonise your senses too. The stench of dead horses. The sounds of a whizzbang. The burn of mustard gas on your skin. The loss of compassion, sensitivity traded away for the callousness of survival.
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Today was one of moving and attacking.
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The moon still shone as they marched to the valley, on their way to take the German trenches. Norm briefly put a hand against his pocket to check that Rose-Maree was still there. He could hear the crunch of the woods beneath his feet, every snapping twig putting him on edge – was it his men or had they been found by the enemy? The company was counting on him to lead them through this never-ending hellhole. He knew he had to stay alert.
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The sun began to rise and so did the morning mist. A shot flew past his ear. A sniper.
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“Jerries! Jerries!”
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The men, moving to hide, moving to attack, stirred up dust from the too dry ground, where it mixed with mist and smoke to distort their sight, a shroud of flying dirt. The sun glowed orange through the clotted air, its sharp beams piercing through as if bayonets through curtains. Norm was briefly reminded of that day at the village church.
12 October 1917
Dear Mother,
All is well and I hope all is well there.
Today I wandered through the small French village at which we are encamped. Fritz has recently been through and many buildings are damaged. But it is fascinating how even destruction has an aesthetic. I walked past a church steeple, part of it laying as rubble on the ground, smoke still hovering in the sky. As I watched, the sunlight broke through the clouds, the fragmented golden rays aiming straight at the steeple. It was as if God himself had created a path of light from the church to the heavens, to remind us that one day this war would end.
Your loving son,
Norm
It was only a small group, on reconnaissance perhaps, but Norm knew there would soon be more. They had taken few hits, so the company continued their journey towards the valley. The sun was getting higher, and so was the summer heat.
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Norm knew that soon they would be sprinting over open valley ground, littered by bodies from each side. That shortly there would be no more trees to provide cover, only the infinite dust and smoke, even while Germans shot at them from woods and copses.
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Then the attacks resumed.
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“Gas! Masks! Masks!”
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Their luck held, the attackers not following as the company ran like water through the gully away from the firing and towards cleaner air. The heat was now stifling in their woollen uniforms, and Norm almost wished for the coldness of winter.
23 January 1917
Dear Sis,
I’ve sent you six more postcards, so please put them into the album. There are some beauties in there, all bought from villages in France. It must be quite the collection by now.
It is winter here, but don’t worry I am warm enough. It has been snowing, and that is far preferable to the rain and mud. In fact, the snow makes everything more beautiful, softening the war with a sprinkling of icing sugar, covering the blackness with a layer of white. And on days when the sun shines, even the trenches sparkle.
Take good care of yourself.
Your loving brother,
Norm
As their target came closer, so the attacks increased.
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“Captain, we’re getting low on ammo.” It was Private Johnson, from the backblocks and barely out of boyhood.
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Norm nodded, while yelling instructions to the men. Hand grenades were coming at them. Blue, standing in Norm’s line of sight, caught one with his hand and went to toss it back. But he was too slow, and the grenade went off near his head. That was the end of Blue’s war then, thought Norm. There was no time to think anything else. Nor for a moment of silence amongst the explosions, yelling, and groans.
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Norm fell to the ground to escape artillery fire. It was such a horizontal life, of creeping and lying and ducking, this war, whether out in the woods or down in the trenches. To stand erect could mean instant death. He could still see the enemy officer through the sparse trees, waving his arms and shouting instructions. Norm took aim, fired, and the officer fell to the ground. The remaining soldiers scattered, jumping into a nearby narrow sap. Norm instructed his men to keep on them, throwing their last grenades directly into the sap. Eventually a hand and handkerchief emerged from the hole, painted with red and waving. “Komrade, komrade,” came their cry.
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They captured the remaining Germans as they emerged from their underground world, and gained three machine guns and a large number of rifles. “There’s your ammo, Johnson.”
*
Norm surveyed the remnants of his company sitting inside a large crater, exhausted, many injured, after playing their part in taking the enemy posts. Washing down bully beef with schnapps the Germans had left behind. He wondered about his fallen men, whether stretcher-bearers had reached them or the woods and valley slopes still claimed them. Like poor old Blue. The schnapps tasted good, but all Norm really wanted was a hot cup of tea. And some of his mother’s homemade jam. His eye was caught by an abandoned, broken tank sitting in the wounded landscape like a misplaced sculpture.
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Suddenly Norm was back home, visiting Bronte Beach. Dirt became sand, the tank transformed into cliffs jutting out at the end of the beach. He was sitting on the grass, eating melon and lemon jam on freshly baked bread, surrounded by family and friends. Watching the moving sea as wave after wave rolled in and crashed, flattened into foam, then retreated.
18 May 1916
Dear Norm,
I hope you are well, my son. Father has had a bit of a cough but is now much recovered.
I hope this food parcel arrives in one piece. It contains a tin of jam, the kind you like, and some soda cake baked by Mrs Jones, who you’ll remember is our neighbour on the right side. She passes on her very best wishes to you and all the boys.
I do hope this war is over soon and you can come back home to us all.
Please look after yourself.
Your loving mother.
Norm took Rose-Maree out from his pocket, gently kissed her.
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The Coastal Lamentation
Standing at the edge of the sand covered cliff, I gaze at the rocks and stones, piled upon one another far below. They seem like chocolates in chaos, tipped by giants out of tin boxes and over the uneven ground.
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The wind catches my hair, blowing strands that briefly obscure the view. The edge of the land snakes its way into the distance; its dark embroidered border of rock contrasts with countless shades of green and gold, protecting the muted citrus colours from the encroachment of royal blue. Vanguards of outlying rock cause travel weary water to suddenly stop, to shatter into pieces of white. Humbled, the sea begins a stealthy retreat, only to eternally try again.
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The air is like breathing in light and clarity, a joyful change from the gloom and dank of the hospital from which I’d just emerged. And our house was little improvement on that. I think about the report, that one from the Board of Health, about its findings. A three-roomed brick house in a terrace, very small, fair structural repair, moderately clean, connected with sewers. It was unclear whether they were judging its structure or passing judgement on me. Moderately clean. What’s a mother alone to do, with children to watch and still needing to pay the rent? The house and neighbourhood very poor, and much occupied by factories. Where else were we supposed to live, but in a neighbourhood of many just like us? Where the rent was cheaper and the streets dirtier. One or two rat-holes in a floor, no signs of present infestation, and no history of observed rat mortality.
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Were they trying to blame me?
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I brush captured strands behind my ear, meditating upon the sea, wondering what it would be like to be in it. My mind wanders further back, to that time, over two decades ago, when those waters had first carried us to these untidy shores. The Cuzco, perhaps it was, with its cargo of exhausted but hopeful escapees from the Isles. We had married in Edinburgh, aged barely 19, leaving that land, in which our ancestors had found refuge from the great old Irish famine, to make a different kind of life. Going to a young city where we could remake ourselves into something a bit grander than a boot merchant or miner or servant. And there was nowhere newer or further than the ancient Antipodes to start that transformation, to change the luck of generations.
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We had borne the Southern Ocean storms, the deprivation of air and light when hatches were battened, the constant rolling and rocking. The fleas, the cockroaches, the smell of makeshift privies and the unwashed. And death. But endurance was the price to pay for a new life, for a better future for our future children, we’d reminded ourselves.
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And it had begun well. A home on the edge of the colony at Sydney. He found work as a legal clerk while I mothered the growing number of children. And then, and then. Within fourteen years the colony was almost a nation and he was gone. Claimed by the consumption. So, the wasting disease, the white plague, had also made the journey across oceans, biding its time to ruin our plans, as if the heavens resented our arrogance, the belief we could determine the course of our own lives. Leaving me alone to watch over four from five children in this land being made for white men. Well, now it’s three from five.
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I remembered all the coughing and spitting in steerage, and wondered.
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I turn, wander back towards the hospital. On the way I stroll among the tombstones, run my fingers over carved granite, minor monuments to lives that were no more. A little one with scarlet fever, another who came for gold and found smallpox instead. At least the dead can enjoy the view too.
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Uninvited visions from that night begin to return. It was only weeks ago, but simultaneously feels like days and years. My Stella, she had called out, not long past midnight, shaking with the fever, shivering with cold, the sheets damp with sweat. Then she collapsed into a stupor, and we all thought she’d gone. The lady doctor called it a coma, said she must go to a hospital. But then she came good, sat up in bed, seemed recovered. I’d fallen to my knees, thanked Our Lady for answering my prayers. But a few hours later she was dead in the bed. The authorities used strange words like femoral and mesenteric and inguinal and haemorrhages and bubo. How could one, I wondered, be strong enough to walk from our Chippendale terrace to the Belmore Market and back without a care one day, and then be so ill as to die in just days?
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My illness took a different path, not long after we buried her. Lifting a heavy box, feeling the pain in my groin, finding the lump. The subsequent fever, the vomiting, coming back to this lonely place, one to which, after the burial, I’d hoped never to return. I thought my time too was done, comforted only by the thought of seeing my girl and my beloved again, along with the babe lost so long ago. But that was not to be. I was still weak, but well enough to walk, at least for a short while. At least to here, in the quarantine place at the edge of the world.
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Best to get back soon, though, before the nurses begin to worry that I’ll catch a chill from the sea breeze. I look over my shoulder, up the slope, past the leper huts. I shiver, pulling the shawl tighter across my shoulders.
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At least I’d had something of a life. I’ve seen Glasgow and London and Naples and Port Said. Felt the movement of waves beneath my feet, loved and dreamed and survived the pain of loss. Poor Stella was only 16 years old with everything before her. She hadn’t the chance to make her own stories, to have her own adventures. Too busy taking on responsibilities, helping me pay the never-ending debts, cleaning up after the boarders. Working in the factory down in Ultimo, lining boxes with paper and lace to deliver colourful confectionaries to those with a different kind of luck.
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They’d disinfected the house. Like we were the vermin, contaminated and corrupt. Contaminating and corrupting.
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I walk towards one of the more recent graves. A nondescript rectangle, headstone-less, bounded by stones gathered from nearby. I pause briefly on the way, pick a few blooms of golden Guinea Flower, then lay them inside the rectangle. Yellow was Stella’s favourite colour. Said it was like tasting sunshine.
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Instinctively, I too lay inside the rectangle, in the dirt, curling to hug my knees. I fill my hand with dirt, watch it fall between fingers, like a grainy grey waterfall. This could’ve been me. I could be lying under this very earth too. Together we could have lain forever in this place of abandoned beauty.
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We’d tried to escape from history, from class and poverty and catastrophes, like the Black Death. Why had these plagues stowed away with us, destroyed our imagined utopia? Old demons creating new nightmares, colluding to make my family and life and dreams into smaller things.
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The breeze sounds like her voice in my ear. Mama, mama, please take me home now. For just a moment, I hear a heartbeat in the ground below, hold my breath. But then I remember the nearby crashing waves.
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A tear emerges, falls onto the flower, rolls into the dry earth.
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