***Editor’s Pick***
The first time she saw him he was standing guard over a small bundle of blood stained white feathers in the middle of a busy suburban road. Without thinking, she slammed on the brakes, bucketed over the gutter and on to the nature strip, leaping from the car and waving her arms like a traffic cop. Vehicles swerved around her, horns shrieking disapproval. In an instant she gathered him into her arms and somehow, against all the odds, made it back to the nature strip.
‘You poor old bugger. That was your mate back there wasn’t it? No point you ending up the same way, though I expect you may have preferred it.’
The big white sulphur crested cockatoo repaid his saviour by pecking her viciously, drawing blood in at least four places.
‘How am I to get us home in more or less one piece?’
After a moment’s thought she grabbed a sweater from the back seat and unceremoniously bundled the bird up in it, tying the sleeves to keep it secure.
‘The bloke who had the house before me kept budgies so there’s a bit of a cage I can put you in. Horrible bloody things cages but till you settle down and I check you over, a cage it is.’
She gingerly unwrapped the bird on the kitchen table checking for injuries. Her attempts to dodge angry thrusts from beak and claws were not always successful.
‘Come on then mate, give me a go. You’ve had a shit of a day but I am doing my best to help.’ She frowned, ‘That wing looks a bit wonky, ouch! Bloody bird! It’s broken, but I can’t see anything else wrong with you. Now it’s into the cage with you while I attend to my wounds.’
Sometime later, its wing skilfully splinted, the cockatoo squatted at the bottom of the cage, bright black eyes following every movement she made. It had made some inroads on the parrot mix she had offered and had had a drink.
‘Tough old sod, aren’t you? Lucky for you I’ve worked for a vet. Be right as rain soon and then it’s back to the bush for you.’
She had always felt some affinity with the raucous sulphur crested cockatoos, she loved their larrikin ways: stripping blossoms from trees seemingly for no better reason than it was fun and how they managed to manipulate the rubber seals out of the street lights to make swings which they used with all the skill of circus acrobats.
There was another reason, too. All her life she had been nicknamed Cockie, the hooked nose, the shock of blonde hair, the raucous voice, the small dark eyes …
The wing healed slowly but the bird soon had the run of the house and garden. They spent hours together, the big white bird and small bird-like woman. She talked to it as she had never been able to talk to anyone or any thing before and was more at peace within herself than she had ever felt before. As for the cockatoo, it more than held up its end of the conversation squawking and chortling contentedly as it followed her about.
Local kids and neighbours were quick to notice the likeness between them. ‘Hello Cockies! When you gonna fly?’
Then one day a neighbour remarked she hadn’t seen the woman or the bird for a few days. The car was in the garage, the letter box overflowing. The police were informed and all the usual checks made: bank accounts hadn’t been touched, mobile phone not used. Weeks turned into months, a distant relative came to sort out the house, the mystery deepened. It was assumed by most she had fallen victim to foul play. They had searched everywhere but nobody thought to look up into the towering gum next door, where the pair of particularly large sulphur crested cockatoos busy preparing a nesting site may well have given an enquiring mind some food for thought.
Ed: We really enjoyed the warmth of this story, and the way it didn’t end the way we thought it would, with Cockie’s body being found inside her house. We thought the ending was very creative and a really fresh slant on the old concept of there being someone for everyone.
Wednesday 21 November 2012
Angelita
Bob Edgar
Wentworth Falls, NSW
Why did you leave us Angelita? You blessed us with your life for two hours, your eyes so blue and pure, as to fuse our souls with yours. So helpless you were, and yet able to wield such power.
Your mother and I had yearned for the day when we could hold you in our arms. That day came and went, followed by another day ... then another.
You left us ... you were taken ... you died a peaceful death and returned to Heaven. No matter what words are used, they are hollow ... heartless.
We anticipated a lifetime of love and parental devotion; we were given two hours.
We blame no one, and yet we blame everyone.
But never you, Angelita. For a decade now your love and power has bound us.
‘Have another,’ we are urged. ‘It will help to heal.’
For fear of losing the two hours, we don’t want to heal.
So we listen, softly smile and lie.
‘Maybe next year.’
SANDS Australia provides support for people dealing with the loss of a child by miscarriage, stillbirth or early newborn death. For more information visit their website at https://www.sands.org.au/
Thursday 22 November 2012
A Sentimental Cynic
Pawel Cholewa
Glen Waverley, VIC
The most frightening and simultaneously liberating thing I can imagine is the sensation derived from absolute and complete loneliness and isolation. I have experienced such a moment. Trapped in the void of my own imagination and excessive thoughtlessness I found a critical and pivotal form of transcendental clarity. What if there was such a thing as eternity and it was accessible from the arch of the brow and the scope of the mind? And yet there I was, lying sprawled across the floor of a room – the physicality of the situation was real, lucid – and I realised that if I attempted to step outside its doors I would float into an endless vacuum and I would be totally alone and my actions would have absolutely no consequences, and I would become and enact my previous lives, up to and including the most recent in which I had animalistic qualities that I now fail to adequately grasp. Yet I now have total familiarity and reciprocal appreciation for the potentiality of these possibilities. And I was immersed in silent contemplation, and there was so much peace and clarity in this isolation. I began to writhe violently on the floor, and engaged in all the rigid-less and residually resonating bodily movements and behavioural motions that would either be deemed unfit, or unnecessary, or unreal or impractical in everyday life. There are actions like this. There are movements like this. The body has the subliminal and subconscious capacity to move of its own free will, and when it does it is devoid of any other responsibilities previously committed to the ego or by the ego, or vice versa, or to the confines of the earth and the upside-down topsy-turvy shelter of the ground beneath the souls of our feet.
The body is malleable and permeable and has the ability to be liberated by the mind’s insidious concentration – to become another organism: a seal, a lotus flower, an organic parasitical insect hovering over the rooftops and treetops and mountaintops and yoghurt tops of the containers, tinned cans, atmospheres, ultraviolet rays streaming from the neon lights and hidden messages and fetishes and uncontrollable impulses that are contained and limited by reason, or in other words logical and systematic restriction of the wandering ghost of TIME and IT.
And thus, I am aesthetically free in the centre of this room – this kitchen smoldering of crystalline clarity – in the centre of the universe in which my actions and bodily behaviours have no other consequences but are made primarily for the purpose that they are MADE and that is all. They serve no other function and that is settling. For it is rare to behave in a way that does not dictate foresight or reminiscence or hindsight or nostalgia – it is rare to behave in such a way that simply fulfils the purpose of IS and DOES and nothing more. And I am satisfied and content in this room with walls and if I do choose to leave through THAT door in the corner I will enter THAT vacuum of space and that is my personal derogative. That is my impulse – my choice.
Yet I notice that there is someone else physiologically present in here and he is pouring orange juice, and he is pacing and marching powerfully. Power-marching and pouring juice – these are the fruitful juices of our quenched labour; self-sufficiently satisfying and reciprocating the vitamins and minerals evident in this fantastic room with a doorway that leads to infinite self-satisfaction and SPACE and TIME. The duality becomes clear: action and reaction – onward forward momentum and speed.
I peered out of the window in the room. The sky appeared to be moving, though it may have been the room itself, or perhaps time in a playful projection of sky and stars that occasionally dance around and explode into an image of ultimate infinity, and what some saints or mystics or believers might refer to as God, who was reincarnated in the night sky, stemming from a cluster and combination of bright shining mythical lights glaring and projecting their past tens of thousands of years into the future and into the current contemplative contempt-filled contemporary world. Stars – they are the real philosophs – the time travelers of future incomprehensible destinies that we simply cannot fathom – our potential is too unrefined to compete with such grand forces of grandeur that live and breathe and swell and implode in the restlessly racing night sky.
Yet my dreary eyes continue to wonder and anticipate the future and all other future generations yet to come and churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory, for mankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.
Yet we shelter ourselves and themselves and yourselves and all selves that are mimicked and mimed and translucent and adjacent to their own sense of self. This room – this cluster of collective experience and truth and ‘Dharma’ and IT and TIME – as insightful as it all may be it cannot be enacted or produced in any artificial way. It is too unreal, too unorthodox, too strange and alien and foreign and unpredictable. Our collective selves cannot REALISE the now. It is too much of a frightening thought. As frightening as the ironic fear and timidness in which I initially approached the trajectory of this projection room. It is frightening and liberating. Simultaneously, of course. But it is reason and logic that will always be victorious. Those sinners have a firmer ‘understanding’ of the realities of perception and its rigidity as something that is ingrained and anchored and clawed into the now-frozen streams of our conscious mind. And so we continue to shelter our ‘selves’ in our erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence – a continually restless battle between mind and matter and what actually matters in the mind.
Friday 23 November 2012
Predicate Etiquette
Demelza
Taroona, TAS
narratorAUSTRALIA Volume Two Page 5