we live like dolphins

I remember the black man on the aeroplane telling me about being a black man in a white world and how all white men eat their blanched bleached food and their white bread and wonder how and why their shit can be brown when they and everything they eat and touch is white, and he told me that even if all the white man ate was rice, even if all the white man ate was office paper, even if all the white man ate was bleach, His shit would still be dark with dead blood, manured blood, because no matter what, white shit is always full of blood.
School’s off for the year, and December lies ahead of us, a month of long evenings, and tonight in the barbecue’s dim firelight the night heat sounds like cicadas, and the cicadas sound like heat.
My father is sitting beside me, half pissed, talking through his homebrew. Life is a moving moment, he tells me, a here and now with neither past nor future and at any given moment all we have to our name is whatever is ours in that here and now—the words we are speaking, the strength of our limbs, the space that we occupy, the air that filters through the lungs, the footprints trapped beneath the soles of our feet—but not those left behind. And maybe memories—memories too, but he’s lost a lot of memories.
He tells me this is why he’s not afraid of death, because by his reasoning, death kills off only one moment’s worth of life, just as the hand of a clock would, by moving to point the next second. History deletes itself, he says. Every moment dies when the next begins. Death is no worse, he says, than the fact of time itself.
He says he understands the reason for the world, and for the universe (but he admits he doesn’t understand the science of these things). Then he tells me the meaning of life, the purpose of existence: existence has no purpose.
I watch him, and I wonder what the moment is that now forms his existence. I wonder what the moment that now forms my life is made of. I feel nothing. My life isn’t made of moments.
He has drunken eyes like blurry glass.
Death takes nothing from us, he says again, adamant, because it’s already gone. Its already past. It’s dead. History deletes itself, he says, repeats himself. History deletes itself.
I listen to him, but I don’t reply, thinking of the nights I lie in bed and shake awake because I can’t forgive myself for things I did to my brother and my primary school enemies and ants when I was a child and other ghosts of guilt I can’t forget, and I feel like all the instants of my life have gathered up thronging and humming in my head, and I feel sure death would put an end to the lot of them.
The night water looks gentle and sinister, like black bile glittering down the great duct of the stormwater canal.
I’m drinking strong spirits, hot and clear, venomous, white.
There are some trees round this place that are hundreds of years old and they’re dark and strong and they smell like deep damp cupboards—and my father loves their touch. When I grow old, I will grow pale and weak and I will have no smell, like paper.
My father’s hands are uncertain and smell sweet like black medicine. And meanwhile that black river smells like heat and reeks of the brew that everything surely boils down to in the end…
I throw handfuls of damp earth on the flames to lower them.
When I was a little boy I buried my brother in the wet dirt and he couldn’t get out, he was just his head, and he yelled at me ‘I’m the king of the castle,’ and I was the dirty rascal, standing over him, dirt all down my nightshirt, and I could have kicked him, but I didn’t, and he won.
My graverobber mother unburied him. She smelled like coffee.
My mother is huge. When we were conceived we must have been lost inside her. I wonder what it is my father saw in her strange muscular body, what signal bid his desire welcome.
Cowards who take on small prey. All men are such, says my father. Excluding himself.
There’s something sullen and subtle in his face, while he’s talking.
I went to the beach once with my mother and my aunt, and my mother looked like a hard huge hillock, and my aunt looked flaccid with fat, she looked like something out of Seurat, all that pointillated cellulite. All my mother’s fat is gristle.
My father’s drunken syrup-coloured wondering voice has descended into his throat and he’s muttering the usual bigotry, and I ignore him.
He took us to the town where he grew up, the old property, and made us swim one the beach there, in the midday smoulder. I drowned in that heat. I remember everything circling. The water lice. The pressure of the sun upon the current. The weight. Blood deadened in my eyes and ears, my jaw jammed as I struggled, my cramped feet clamping for a hold in the water. The water lice visible, swimming like moths round a lampshade, a barrell of light.
My brother brought me back to the surface. You’re all right, he told me, he told himself, you’re all right, he was saying, you’re all right, all right, he kept telling me. He said breathe, he said, breathe, he said breathe.
We swam to the strong shore.
My brother told me that my mother told him that there was another child, a daughter—she would have been our sister—but she drowned in her own fluid.
My father has never mentioned this to me. He doesn’t mention anything, now, he’s silent. The spider we’ve been watching has built half a web, and I flick it away with my fingers, and soon the spider starts again.
In my room, I have a mosquito net hanging around my bed. I’ve never fallen in love. My brother has. So many times, with so many girls. Over and over again. He says it feels so good, I should try it.
I dreamed once: they wanted me to dance.
We were in a clearing, and they were all in masks. Their voices were so sonorous and deep that it made my guts rumble, it made me wobble and jig.
They wanted me to dance, the women wanted me to dance but I wouldn’t dance, and I thought, They are going to step on my head. I saw their pedalling paddling flat fleet, in canons of increasing unmeaning.
These were people familiar with disease. They were the familiars of disease. The invisible episodes of death flickered behind their features. One of them leered near and held my by the neck (she was painted a dead yellow and had a single flat breast) and the other two pushed the birdmask onto my face with its alabastery beak that smelled so lifeless. But of course, they have the plague, I thought, and I forced the mask off my face and the fingers out of my eyes. It would have been wiser to wear the mask, but I didn’t see it that way.
I died that night. I always sleep badly, when I sleep deeply. My dreams are always drowning me.
My father is making some guttering drunken chucking sound. I'm helping him. The hours have mounted around us. We’re drunk, we’re delirious, obliterant, the feeling deleterious. We have deleted ourselves.

I remember the black man on the aeroplane telling me about being a black man in a white world and how all white men eat their blanched bleached food and their white bread and wonder how and why their shit can be brown when they and everything they eat and touch is white, and he told me that even if all the white man ate was rice, even if all the white man ate was office paper, even if all the white man ate was bleach, His shit would still be dark with dead blood, manured blood, because no matter what, white shit is always full of blood.
School’s off for the year, and December lies ahead of us, a month of long evenings, and tonight in the barbecue’s dim firelight the night heat sounds like cicadas, and the cicadas sound like heat.
My father is sitting beside me, half pissed, talking through his homebrew. Life is a moving moment, he tells me, a here and now with neither past nor future and at any given moment all we have to our name is whatever is ours in that here and now—the words we are speaking, the strength of our limbs, the space that we occupy, the air that filters through the lungs, the footprints trapped beneath the soles of our feet—but not those left behind. And maybe memories—memories too, but he’s lost a lot of memories.
He tells me this is why he’s not afraid of death, because by his reasoning, death kills off only one moment’s worth of life, just as the hand of a clock would, by moving to point the next second. History deletes itself, he says. Every moment dies when the next begins. Death is no worse, he says, than the fact of time itself.
He says he understands the reason for the world, and for the universe (but he admits he doesn’t understand the science of these things). Then he tells me the meaning of life, the purpose of existence: existence has no purpose.
I watch him, and I wonder what the moment is that now forms his existence. I wonder what the moment that now forms my life is made of. I feel nothing. My life isn’t made of moments.
He has drunken eyes like blurry glass.
Death takes nothing from us, he says again, adamant, because it’s already gone. Its already past. It’s dead. History deletes itself, he says, repeats himself. History deletes itself.
I listen to him, but I don’t reply, thinking of the nights I lie in bed and shake awake because I can’t forgive myself for things I did to my brother and my primary school enemies and ants when I was a child and other ghosts of guilt I can’t forget, and I feel like all the instants of my life have gathered up thronging and humming in my head, and like death would put an end to the lot of them.
The night water looks gentle and sinister, like black bile glittering down the great duct of the stormwater canal.
I’m drinking strong spirits, hot and clear, venomous, white.
There are some trees round this place that are hundreds of years old and they’re dark and strong and they smell like deep damp cupboards—and my father loves their touch. When I grow old, I will grow pale and weak and I will have no smell, like paper.
My father’s hands are uncertain and smell sweet like black medicine. And meanwhile that black river smells like heat and reeks of the brew that everything surely boils down to in the end…
I throw handfuls of damp earth on the flames to lower them.
When I was a little boy I buried my brother in the wet dirt and he couldn’t get out, he was just his head, and he yelled at me ‘I’m the king of the castle,’ and I was the dirty rascal, standing over him, dirt all down my dress, and I could have kicked him, but I didn’t, and he won.
My graverobber mother unburied him. She smelled like coffee.
My mother is huge. When we were conceived we must have been lost inside her. I wonder what it is my father saw in her strange muscular body, what signal bid his desire welcome.
Cowards who take on small prey. All men are such, says my father. Excluding himself.
There’s something sullen and subtle in his face, while he’s talking.
I went to the beach once with my mother and my aunt, and my mother looked like a hard huge hillock, and my aunt looked flaccid with fat, she looked like something out of Seurat, all that pointillated cellulite. All my mother’s fat is gristle.
My father’s drunken syrup-coloured wondering voice has descended into his throat and he’s muttering the usual bigotry, and I ignore him.
He took us to the town where he grew up, the old property, and made us swim one the beach there, in the midday smoulder. I drowned in that heat. I remember everything circling. The water lice. The pressure of the sun upon the current. The weight. Blood deadened in my eyes and ears, my jaw jammed as I struggled, my cramped feet clamping for a hold in the water. The water lice visible, swimming like moths round a lampshade, a barrell of light.
My brother brought me back to the surface. You’re all right, he told me, he told himself, you’re all right, he was saying, you’re all right, all right, he kept telling me. He said breathe, he said, breathe, he said breathe.
We swam to the strong shore.
My brother told me that my mother told him that there was another child, a daughter—she would have been our sister—but she drowned in her own fluid.
My father has never mentioned this to me. He doesn’t mention anything, now, he’s silent. The spider we’ve been watching has built half a web, and I flick it away with my fingers, and soon the spider starts again.
In my room, I have a mosquito net hanging around my bed. I’ve never fallen in love. My brother has. So many times, with so many girls. Over and over again. He says it feels so good, I should try it.
I dreamed once: they wanted me to dance.
We were in a clearing, and they were all in masks. Their voices were so sonorous and deep that it made my guts rumble, it made me wobble and jig.
They wanted me to dance, the women wanted me to dance but I wouldn’t dance, and I thought, They are going to step on my head. I saw their pedalling paddling flat fleet, in canons of increasing unmeaning.
These were people familiar with disease. They were the familiars of disease. The invisible episodes of death flickered behind their features. One of them leered near and held my by the neck (she was painted a dead yellow and had a single flat breast) and the other two pushed the birdmask onto my face with its alabastery beak that smelled so lifeless. But of course, they have the plague, I thought, and I forced the mask off my face and the fingers out of my eyes. It would have been wiser to wear the mask, but I didn’t see it that way.
I died that night. I always sleep badly, when I sleep deeply. My dreams are always drowning me.
My father is making some guttering drunken chucking sound. I'm helping him. The hours have mounted around us. We’re drunk, we’re delirious, obliterant, the feeling deleterious. We have deleted ourselves.

I remember the black man on the aeroplane telling me about being a black man in a white world and how all white men eat their blanched bleached food and their white bread and wonder how and why their shit can be brown when they and everything they eat and touch is white, and he told me that even if all the white man ate was rice, even if all the white man ate was office paper, even if all the white man ate was bleach, His shit would still be dark with dead blood, manured blood, because no matter what, white shit is always full of blood.
School’s off for the year, and December lies ahead of us, a month of long evenings, and tonight in the barbecue’s dim firelight the night heat sounds like cicadas, and the cicadas sound like heat.
My father is sitting beside me, half pissed, talking through his homebrew. Life is a moving moment, he tells me, a here and now with neither past nor future and at any given moment all we have to our name is whatever is ours in that here and now—the words we are speaking, the strength of our limbs, the space that we occupy, the air that filters through the lungs, the footprints trapped beneath the soles of our feet—but not those left behind. And maybe memories—memories too, but he’s lost a lot of memories.
He tells me this is why he’s not afraid of death, because by his reasoning, death kills off only one moment’s worth of life, just as the hand of a clock would, by moving to point the next second. History deletes itself, he says. Every moment dies when the next begins. Death is no worse, he says, than the fact of time itself.
He says he understands the reason for the world, and for the universe (but he admits he doesn’t understand the science of these things). Then he tells me the meaning of life, the purpose of existence: existence has no purpose.
I watch him, and I wonder what the moment is that now forms his existence. I wonder what the moment that now forms my life is made of. I feel nothing. My life isn’t made of moments.
He has drunken eyes like blurry glass.
Death takes nothing from us, he says again, adamant, because it’s already gone. Its already past. It’s dead. History deletes itself, he says, repeats himself. History deletes itself.
I listen to him, but I don’t reply, thinking of the nights I lie in bed and shake awake because I can’t forgive myself for things I did to my sister and my primary school enemies and ants when I was a child and other ghosts of guilt I can’t forget, and I feel like all the instants of my life have gathered up thronging and humming in my head, and like death would put an end to the lot of them.
The night water looks gentle and sinister, like black bile glittering down the great duct of the stormwater canal.
I’m drinking strong spirits, hot and clear, venomous, white.
There are some trees round this place that are hundreds of years old and they’re dark and strong and they smell like deep damp cupboards—and my father loves their touch. When I grow old, I will grow pale and weak and I will have no smell, like paper.
My father’s hands are uncertain and smell sweet like black medicine. And meanwhile that black river smells like heat and reeks of the brew that everything surely boils down to in the end…
I throw handfuls of damp earth on the flames to lower them.
When I was a little girl I buried my brother in the wet dirt and he couldn’t get out, he was just his head, and he yelled at me ‘I’m the king of the castle,’ and I was the dirty rascal, standing over him, dirt all down my dress, and I could have kicked him, but I didn’t, and he won.
My graverobber mother unburied him. She smelled like coffee.
My mother is huge. When we were conceived we must have been lost inside her. I wonder what it is my father saw in her strange muscular body, what signal bid his desire welcome.
Cowards who take on small prey. All men are such, says my father. Excluding himself.
There’s something sullen and subtle in his face, while he’s talking.
I went to the beach once with my mother and my aunt, and my mother looked like a hard huge hillock, and my aunt looked flaccid with fat, she looked like something out of Seurat, all that pointillated cellulite. All my mother’s fat is gristle.
My father’s drunken syrup-coloured wondering voice has descended into his throat and he’s muttering the usual bigotry, and I ignore him.
He took us to the town where he grew up, the old property, and made us swim one the beach there, in the midday smoulder. I drowned in that heat. I remember everything circling. The water lice. The pressure of the sun upon the current. The weight. Blood deadened in my eyes and ears, my jaw jammed as I struggled, my cramped feet clamping for a hold in the water. The water lice visible, swimming like moths round a lampshade, a barrell of light.
My brother brought me back to the surface. You’re all right, he told me, he told himself, you’re all right, he was saying, you’re all right, all right, he kept telling me. He said breathe, he said, breathe, he said breathe.
My brother told me that my mother told him that there was another child, a daughter—she would have been our sister—but she drowned in her own fluid.
My father has never mentioned this to me. He doesn’t mention anything, now, he’s silent. The spider we’ve been watching has built half a web, and I flick it away with my fingers, and soon the spider starts again.
I hang a mosquito net around my bed. I’ve never fallen in love. My brother has. So many times, with so many girls. Over and over again.
I dreamed once: they wanted me to dance.
We were in a clearing, and they were all in masks. Their voices were so sonorous and deep that it made my guts rumble, it made me wobble and jig.
They wanted me to dance, the women wanted me to dance but I wouldn’t dance, and I thought, They are going to step on my head. I saw their pedalling paddling flat fleet, in canons of increasing unmeaning.
These were people familiar with disease. they were the familiars of disease. The invisible episodes of death flickered behind their features. One of them leered near and held my by the neck (she was painted a dead yellow and had a single flat breast) and the other two pushed the birdmask onto my face with its alabastery beak that smelled so lifeless. But of course, they have the plague, I thought, and I forced the mask off my face and the fingers out of my eyes. It would have been wiser to wear the mask, but I didn’t see it that way.
I died that night. I always sleep badly, when I sleep deeply. My dreams are always drowning me.
My father is making some guttering drunken chucking sound. We’re drunk, we’re delirious, obliterant, the feeling deleterious. We have deleted ourselves.

~Apotheosis~

There were seeds in Vera’s eyes. Brown seeds flecking the blue.
She made three recordings of her voice that day. The first was a simple voice test: she read out a passage from a tale of two cities, a book she had not yet finished. Mee mee my mo, she then said, over tape hiss. Mee mee my mo. Mee my mo.
Her son hovered behind her with a face that was hopeful and sly, then asked, “Mummy. Mum. What are you doing?”
Vera looked up. “I’m making a time capsule,” she told him, “For you.”
Her eyes held her son’s. He looked like his father. She remembered the night she first met that invisible man. He was so gentle with her that it was cruelty. He embraced her as one might a giant ming vase. And the son was conceived that same night.
Vera did not feel like porcelain. She felt like an earthy crazed amphora.
Me my mo. Mee my mo.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m playing it back. I’m seeing if it worked.”
The tyranny of hope. She remembered how she had longed for a daughter. She remembered her son born, normal. She remembered the umbilical cord lascivious winding purple like the Eden snake.
Everywhere Vera ever walked, even in her own house, even on thick carpet, she felt as if she were walking a frail and fractured case of stairs. Balsa wood, brittle, ready to snap and shatter, betray her, falling through to the very end of it. And yet she would climb them, knowing they’d cave in—climb them, under the great weight of her wings.
“What are you doing now mummy?”
“Now I’m reading aloud.”
The anchor plunged, through fathoms plummeted, and drilled into the dead water of the motionless sea. There were criminal winds. The weather a tense bitch.
The woman had only one lung. Sometimes it burned and hurt. She was going to die.
The lung. She liked to call it her wing.
Her son stood looking confused. She pressed the stop button, stopped recording, and looked up at him again. “I sometimes feel criminally gifted,” she told him. And then, in confessional mode: “I named you after my husband. But you were another man’s son.”
The book shut its trap on her fingers.
Sex with the water god.
She lay with a look of fear and patience on her lips which smiled now more with courage and conviction than with courage and deceit.
He was standing there, swaying, watching the underexposed dripping of his artworks, the slow and photographic blood. The surgeons hands on the potter’s wheel.
There were seeds in Vera’s eyes. Brown seeds flecking the blue.
But why would you cry about that? The past doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why it’s the past. That’s why it’s the past.
“Oh mummy. Mummy don’t cry.”

maybe it is the myths we are forced to live with and live within that make even the most apparently ordinary and gratified life start welling with incredible tragedy. perhaps it is because we are bound up in the infinite sadness of comparison that always we will ultimately fall on our knees gasping and gulping back sobs wondering how we drown still breathing.