Speculate

by Eugen Bacon

  * * *

  True. I danced until dawn. We were hungry. Been hunting for kina roe all afternoon. A restaurant with kina on the menu might have served exotic fare, but it was closed. Even the markets sold fakes: if it’s the real thing every stall displays the stuff on silver platters adorned with labels featuring KINA in gold letters (price undisclosed). All the little orange tongues of New Zealand may be delicious, but kina roe is way above excellence. That is the only thing we agreed upon. I’ve tried a number of imitations. Flavorsome, though lacking that je ne sais quoi you find in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. I might head downtown, try the Rocks. Leave through them, and find my daughter whose eyes drew inward.

  Beware

  The exiting vehicle took me on the cusp of no different. It all happened in a wink, interrupting the clean road that denied wrongdoing. But the evidence in my vision told me of a collision and there was the skin, the largest organ on the human body, all flat in place of tarmac. Dragon spots on the curb, it was 40 degrees Celsius, 104 degrees Fahrenheit, led to charcoal toes of the victim who responded that grass may be greener, just not on the other side.

  * * *

  An exiting vehicle not only trimmed my line of vision, it brutally interrupted my life. I was off in a cloud of smoke generated by the latest bushfire, not the exhaust of my Volkswagen UP! on my way to replace a faulty frontal Takata airbag when a semi-trailer hit me sideways. It was 36 degrees Celsius, 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The force of the collision caused the faulty airbag to go off with such exploding force that sharp metal fragments shot out and ruptured the airbag inflator. My lungs burst. Heart stopped. Brain scribbled away on the emergency screen until you turned off the machine.

  It’s a beatitude

  Blessed are they with an endless fascination for fresh turmeric, for they shall receive a floral fragrance that stains yellow, oh, such levels of escapism. Blessed are they who sum up life where no one ingredient is complete on its own, for even flour needs milk or eggs or yeast to make it whole. Add ground ginger, black pepper—boiled and strained—honey and lime and good night spells in two ways. There’s a bed with no sheets or pillows, no place to rest, someplace to cry. An ivory ceiling with the memory of you. I listen to the sound of our disconnect: maybe it’s rugby or cricket, for sure it is not tennis—not ocher enough for you. The TV roars as I accumulate your lost scent and wait for your footfalls on the frayed carpet. Fair dinkum, blessed, am I?

  * * *

  Blessed are peanuts. For I’ve never been a finisher of fiction. I dig into dreams and surface into the bare realities of pantries and sour actualities of fridges. Today, I attend to the pantry. Attack packets of spices long gone dormant. Tarragon, cumin, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, paprika (mild, hot, smoked), herbes de provence, cardamom, basil, rosemary. Even the cloves have lost their scent. Out they go. On the lower shelf, I notice a row of vials filled with fresh chili, garlic, oregano, ginger, vanilla, sage, black pepper and turmeric. Sit at the table and allow the light to enter, not by accumulation, but accretion of figurative gestures. Consider the grain of the wood. Find those two peanuts you left when you raided the pantry for anything. Bless them.

  It is sizzling

  chicken thigh fillets on the hob. Pumpkin and pine nuts, cube size and ovals, carrot oranges and colors of cinnamon. Green beans and hock, a creamy risotto with pesto and blistered tomatoes. What’s there not to like? He dashes out for thyme and parmesan, behind him the sound of an empty house filled with fat relief under a knowing moon, and when he returns only a thin thread guiding this fragmented love to sun-like stars. A chance last night for historic coupling as the clock struck twelve, the side of the bed he’s not permitted to stay. Surely he knows this?

  But his boner says no.

  * * *

  His boner says no. The sun came out at full height in the woods after that scrumptious meal. Go away, sun-like stars, you say. Take back your bloody superiority and secrecy. We like it dark here in the singing tree. Oh, don’t worry. It’s not about love, sex, death. Sheer pleasure is when we turn on our torchlights and spot invisible hands and grab the petals strewn on artificial grass pillows that cause lullabies to lull. In the undergrowth, intact buds. Silence. And then, a clatter of gutturals and sibilants collapsing unto the absence of breath.

  On reflection he did not know

  how to put thought into words, to ask why his tears were polished apples carved from basswood, full of caraway seeds that fell to his hips. They were tears so aromatic and imbued with an earthy taste of anise, but there was no precipitation. Just an acid base that was richly oxidized and reacted with her elements to generate heat, but so slowly she hardly noticed. Truth is, his tears unraveled something, incited events into motion. On the fringe on a myth, she tugged him past the lobby, up the lift as he cried. They fell into the fug of a room full of rustic walls and baby trees lined on the mantel, as he cried. Sheeny woodwork from his eyes rained on the floor, crescent-shaped seeds pounding her stockings and his shorts. Are your tears psychic or basal, she asked as they shared a cigar in the afterglow of lost rain. Feathery leaves like beards on a wall shook on the balcony of their hotel. He said, Sorry? And fell fast asleep.

  * * *

  No. He did not know how to push thought into words. And sorry was definitely the word he could not use, let alone utter. He heaved the bin against his hips and legs and hauled it to the front of the yard. He stood unmoved in the dark where the path becomes lawn. Truth is, the yard may have been forbidden ground at dark and the wall would have made of the night a high fence but for the light in your window where he knew you would take off. On the fringe of the dark, he leaned into a myth. Lines of melted wax fell from the sky. White light turned dark. He stood with aching shoulders, wished sensational headlights away as he did, earlier, headlines, and dismissed the idea of logging into cloud. He thought of sleep.

  Random calls

  on satisfaction rates resuscitated the remembrance of a service provider’s last words on taking farmers into the future with high tech high performing gizmos, just months before sales collapsed, and it was personal and not measured, the fond farewell muffled by newer and brighter experiments, jets soaring from the ephemeral to unveil other modifiable risks that reminded me of my ex who was a dentist and a drummer. It is funny and sad. He drove an uber.

  * * *

  I hate dentists and drummers. They make the worst obsessive-compulsive statistics. And don’t start me on ubers. I had my bank account fleeced by one of them. And that was just for registering, not using (I wonder why they dropped the umlaut, for in some cases—and let’s not generalize—they are above all law). Funny and sad. As for random calls, I think a back-up strategy would be sensible. I hate hanging up on kids who make a living out of getting a commission. Perhaps we ought to relocate on another planet into the future with lower performing gizmos.

  The man in my bed

  Is a conversation with a shoe. Are you comfort or protection, fashion or necessity? You say you’re a boot, full of grip and stability—great for all weather. I say you’re not leather, for leather is breathable, it absorbs humidity, and what I feel is drowned. Then a pair of sneakers, you laugh, everyday wear, a great sport. But you break down easy, I say, and I’m growing bunions, so you can’t be sneakers, no flexible sole there. Crocs that what, you say, cool right here, ready for the beach. But you’re not light as a feather, I say. There’s no walking on air and sometimes wedge heels or lace ups counter the past’s frame and are uneasy to slip off. Then what? you say. Run, that’s what. Run! urge my feet.

  * * *

  I run away! Run! Run! He says I need you. I need you. He was never a good kisser. Love-making hasty and always in the same missionary position to the sound of François Campion’s “Courante la Victoire.” No adjustments, viewpoints to counter that past’s frame. I ought to wonder what went wrong, but look at the sky. There is an opening left of the moon. I am ready to tackle new options called matelot du
ciel, or let’s just say sky sailor, as the main character.

  The man on the street

  with a tawny head and a sleeve of tattoos, a big fella, he lives a voice activated life that speaks through his silence. The angle of his lean against the pillar at the bus stop, the nudge of his finger connecting transitions through his smart phone, the secret of his smile at a tweet or a gossip or a fact or a gizmo surrounds you with the noise of absence in scarlet pimpernel bloom. Speak, begs the garden of your soul as sand flows through the hourglass. Speak, weep your souls, too many of them now, for we are listening. And he says, “Ok Google, beatbox for me.”

  * * *

  Beatbox: a drum machine, a radio or cassette player used to play loud music, especially rap (thanks, Google). I feel completely alienated. I am a techno-retard not at all partial to vocal percussion, especially if it involves the art of mimicking drum machines using your mouth, lips, tongue and voice. Nor am I interested in vocal imitation of turntablism, and other musical instruments. Too old for hip-hop and hipsters. Definitely not my kind of poetic vision. Come to think of it, if it could be danced . . .

  Surprising things he owns

  A full-on bomb shelter in the left ventricle of his heart that encloses him from the nuclear explosions of anarchist women. A briefcase containing money, silver, watches and a dog-eared note that says: Save yourself. The portrait of an orange-tinted viper, white-lipped, making its debut at a royal tea party that marks the official birthday of a reigning monarch. A trapdoor to sanity across the river just beginning to turn emerald on whose floodplain he cooks naked but wears a flesh-colored apron within which he carefully tucks his three testicles.

  * * *

  A flesh-colored apron within which nothing is in working order. A pet magpie that sits on his shoulder and pecks at chunks of silence. Eyebrows like auto-reflexive question marks and eyes the color of amber when struck by sunlight. Long silver hair tied up in a tight knot at the back of his head. A PhD on flash fiction that discusses the form’s unique ability to create energy and engagement through patterning and omission, compression and connotation, line tension and sound intensity. A postmodern library lined with books he calls dissipative systems of high creativity indivisible of the embodied minds that read them. A jumping time piece. Crypto money in the gaps.

  Sorry for the false start, I suppose it’s autumn

  First thing each day my story begins with passive narration, like some distant documentary, both in first person and as a you-narrative. I lose him straight into an odorless sewer, no sign of decay or fusty smell, something, anything that could create methane and generate electricity that volts him up to curiosity that keeps us sweet. So he chooses to wade into platonic friendship and a connection that culminates in a blind date with the bestie’s girl in a bar. But at this stage . . . the first person or you-narrator doesn’t care. Six pages of it, or is it months or years, there’s cruelty or revenge in the Samburu Reserve and, like an elephant, I raise a foot over his body and scatter his bones.

  * * *

  You were born in autumn and so, naturally, hate spring. The scent of blackwood showering pollen. The air licked with gold where the buzzing of the bees deepens. The sudden opacity of it all. You run. Run away. Away from the visible and from the invisible. With the pollen clinging to your skin, the sun striking and the darkness beneath your feet settling. You are a living phobia. A fear of no consequence. Yet as eons pass in one beat of the heart, you hear the rustle under the trees. Taste the bite of death.

  Locating

  One way is the pull of a rug from under your feet, and you don’t see where to stand or go, there’s just war with gravity in a cloud full of riverbeds right there in your living room. One way is giving up everything and he gives up nothing and there’s no negotiation, just weeds of non-specifics and a common understanding that one of you is a loser. And it’s not him. One way is the rumble of wind from his body in the dead of the night, half a gallon of air condensed into toots of excessive flatulence; as he turns in his sleep, you wonder what forever tastes like.

  * * *

  One way is a march in the dark where bullets scintillate like rough diamonds and cut through the air, your feet taking you higher and higher up a craggy path. One way is a ferret burrowing through the flesh of fifty thousand million years of volcanic activity. One way is the soft crest of a hill where you lose your balance and wage a war with gravity. One way is a river of clouds closing its mouth on the moon, dousing the stars and soaking the night. One way is a bolt of lightning searing earth and sky. One way is eternal return.

  Life in monochrome

  Inside a prison that is an eternity, politicians are husks shriveled to gnomes trapped in ancient skin so fragile it breaks and a gruel of insides leaks to the grimed floor, offering up a gift of dying in a penalty of undying. If you listen closely, you will hear a faint scratching of nails long as a Komodo dragon’s on somber walls licked by a wash of tide and whispers from ashore in time after time after time inside the fossil tower on an island so unexpected, you are astonished anyone would go there. And if you work more characters into the story, you’ll find an important writ both fascinating and disturbing in the profundity of faces wearing evil pressed to foreheads never too revolting to dissuade the photographer whose shutter clicks to stir the silence unwashed in dust, framed in a picture.

  * * *

  Life in monochrome is a sequence of events with limited pictorial potential and no chronology. It is a procession of scenes. Leading the procession are defunct gods playing silent music. Following them are dinosaurs and elephants, tigers and monkeys, cheetahs and pythons, crocodiles and meerkats, bison and camels surrounded by human clones and avatars from different continents riding bird vehicles or seated in their mock-celestial cars propelled by the desire to reach inland seas or lotus lakes where, lulled by the wind, flowers and bushes dance, sing or play music, swirling and twirling as though there is no dawn. The procession strikes a balance between hieratic dictates, chaos and uncommunicable cacophony. There is no dramatic impact.

  Punctum

  The history of silence is a stranger by your rib, and your togetherness is something physical that remains an abstract. The lacking comes along with the shock of realization, a whisper of something stolen but you can’t put a shape to its value. Knowing in advance the types of nature versus nurture that no one will question speaks of eyes but no lips, scales inside a heart, not a wide brimmed hat full of hairpins. The system full of white silk and ribbons is compromised. But not obsolete in the punctum of flash fiction.

  * * *

  Some bodies can’t be put to rest: the history of silence is a haystack. This one holds a hairpin I lost five decades ago playing dress ups. It belonged to my great aunt, a milliner and the spinster of the family. She’d say come any time dear. And sure enough I’d be at her modest house in Malines every holiday. It was dark there, but immaculate. In her spare room were two bags: one full of fabric off cuts and one containing a white silk dress, a pair of blue suede shoes with bobbin heels, a veil and two hats. There was a cream bonnet with ruching and frills and a ribbon bow. There was a brimmed woman’s hat with stiff netting, smooth crown and indigo hatband from which a plume and a hat pin stuck out—my favorite. Picture me in white silk, high heels and veil. That’s how I lost the hat pin that matched the clip that holds the tie to the unnamed man in the photograph my great aunt kept on her bedside table until her death. The punctum of a too short short story.

  Hit and miss

  It shouldn’t come to this. Be still my pounding heart, it’s the who cares cup, play on. Time to arrest history, you heard it on the radio. I was always awarding a freebie, letting you back into the game. Losing hours of my crumbling life, years—the orchestra still playing. There was never a deliberate rule, but it was sunny here, cold there, so I became a protector as I got on. Not really what you do, but I did, forgive me for drifting, for being out of touch, for awakening and knowing
it’s lightly contentious, like hugging a singing tree. Who did the hitting?

  But we deserved the pain, right?

  * * *

  So the story goes. Bad, mad or sad, we were and remain Alices in Woundherland with big sad eyes straight out from a Blackman painting, pining for the moon. Just imagine doing the hitting. Counterpunch. Jab, cross, hook, uppercut, backfist. Throw in a kick for good measure. I reckon we can show them our mettle, don’t you? Oh, yeah. Turn into bleeders pretty quickly. Trouble is I can hear lawyers in the future of such a violent fantasy: We take this matter seriously and, as a consequence, are currently conducting our own internal investigation.

  They will be deemed not to have deserved the pain.

  Scorched

  They sat in emphatic silence, navigating chopsticks, nibbles, tweets and texts, as they connected with the rest of the world but them. Their eyes met over stone fruit brûlé and she lifted the green dragonfly cast iron pot. “Tea?” she said, as though he were a stranger from someplace in history, and it was repeating itself. He looked at her as though she had just slapped him with a whole fish.

  * * *

  Ah! La jeunesse. Expecting the simple joys of gastronomy when menus and picturesque locations never compensate for miscommunication or desire. The latter often confused with sex. She should have slapped him with a whole fish of the groper species, just that tad tired with white enamel, not vitreous, eyes and pungent smell. Had there been an end to the meal, it would have been soufflé au fromage, usually an entrée. It could have been well-risen and golden brown on the top, if only the chef had been briefed to prepare it in advance. He would have known, as one does from years of practice, to halt the process after the egg yolks were added. He would have kept the mixture in a cool place and added the delicately whisked egg whites (soft peaks) just prior to baking in a perfectly preheated oven. Stone fruit brûlé may have been coveted. Granted. It was definitely the wrong choice. Brûlé(e) for burned, singed, scorched. You get the picture. As for stone . . .