by Charlie Nash
I call a warning, but too late. The snake rears and hisses with a desiccating breath. It sucks my eyeballs dry, and the green men’s bodies wither, falling in piles of autumnal red. My chest is a pressure pain that demands hurt repaid. I grab a deck chair. The tommyknockers surface under the snake, but they won’t make it.
The snake rears. I shove the fairy tray on the chair and swing a rake at the water creature’s head. I hear angry shouts from a green man: I’ve gone beyond the front line; all defenses are behind. A snake whips black around my feet. The native violets crunch under my hip, and then all I hear is rustling. The ground whips past as the creatures drag me to the water. Then I smash my head on a rocky crop and the stars go dancing: overhead in the sky and underneath in the still water surface.
I wake in the cold and dark. At first, I think I’ve left a window open. Then I find damp soil instead of a mattress.
I can’t rise. A fleshy weight presses my legs. Dark eyes hover over mine, and beyond, I see an arched neck. The shadow snake is coiled about my thighs, my jeans wet underneath.
“Lay still,” says the snake between tiny, threatening breaths. My muscles clamp against my will. The water creatures creep in, murky depths and obsidian edges. I smell the stink of still water.
“Why do you help them?” rumbles a different voice, as if the Earth has spoken.
“Yes. Why?” repeats the snake.
The question wrenches at my chest and puts rocks in my throat. It takes my mind to the edge of some abyss. I see the weeping willow silhouette the full moon, and below, the moon and tree repeated in the dam surface. The edge between blurs; I clutch my head, spinning, spinning.
“Is it not enough you bring them here?” The snake, again.
“Who?” I croak, losing the abyss. I am dreaming, perhaps. Just dreaming.
“White fellas like you, the small ones, the savages.” The Folk.
“They need water and you kill them, of course they fight back!” I think I shout. But the blood feeding my consciousness is thin and angry. I want to tell them that the Folk are older than humanity, that they watch our lives and dreams. That they only fight for water; water these creatures could share.
The snake’s lidless eyes catch the edge of dawn, as if the night has disappeared. The water beings become lenses bending time and light: red, orange, yellow and green shimmers. I feel as if hours have passed, perhaps decades. I panic.
“Let me go,” I plead.
The snake slides away and my body responds again. I scramble to run, but I stop: my jeans are red with blood. I stare as the wounded snake coils herself into a dam-edge puddle, shimmering like an oil film.
“You don’t see,” says the snake. “You fellas sink your roots shallow and live with your bad dreams …”
The snake points its tail at me, rattling like dry bones. “… now you’ll see.” The words melt with the reed-whispering wind, and could have been nothing more. The water creatures sink, receding before the sun. The tendrils of night dissolve into nothingness. I’m lying by the lake, its surface still, a wad of al-foil and bootlaces bunched in one armpit.
This feels like the end of a bender. My head certainly hurts. I rub a tender spot at the crown, then pat down my jeans. They’re wet and muddy. I could have just fallen in the dewy grass. I run to the house without looking back.
The Folk are euphoric, having thought me lost. But I stalk around the farmhouse, unsettled. The rooms are spick and clean, but I smell rum. The past night sinks into the weirdness between dreams and memory repressed. The house is too bright, the hour too early. I close my door on the Folk and fall on the covers.
It’s afternoon when I get up, bad tempered and sore. The Folk flock to my door, eager to share in my story, but I’m not in the mood and push them away. They scatter, but then hang at the edges of vision, glancing, observing, and for the first time, that makes me mad.
I want to be alone. I pace around the kitchen. If there’d been mess, I’d have cleaned to get my mind off things, but the Folk have done it all. I look at my study books, still strewn on the rug. I smell rum again, stale and lingering. It turns my stomach, so I go outside. The Folk don’t follow, now. Hanging baskets sway gently from the roof beams. One plant has dropped a runner into the turf. Its row of glossy green leaves makes a track through the native violets, spoiling the mat of purple nodding heads. I see another runner, and another. They crisscross the violets, erasing the crisp edge; I follow them past the shade and into the sun where, finally, the silver grasses take over.
This bothers me. I stalk around the house. Across the road, an estate fence runs unbroken into the distance. The urban edge.
I twitch my shoulders, wanting space. And that’s when I go towards the billabong lake.
In the scrub, relief replaces anger. I cover the hundred yards in grass-swished steps. In the light, the dam surface is a mirror reflecting the sky. No sign of creatures. I pause at the willow-licked edge, then climb the hill beyond. My socks gather spear-grass and the sun beats until my breaths are heavy. I flop down on the rocky ridge and take off my boots.
When I was five, Dad worked away and we lived at the farmhouse. I would come up here just to see the vast horizon, and imagine he wasn’t far away. Then, the farmhouse stuck out of naked scrub that rolled in every direction. Now, it’s a pock abutting a sea of tin roofs. And I notice other things now: shaggy hedges escaping from the estate, cane toads rustling in the dam reeds, the smell of Lantana in the air.
I snatch at the spear-grass. The barbs tear tufts of sock-flesh, and released, float inland, away from the suburbs. My mood sours. The distant city seems a great fungus, feeding, growing. I feel a foreigner for the first time.
I turn and stare the other way. The land curves into a basin, holding a cluster of snowy-trunked gums. Muted colors: gray-greens, dusky pinks and ochre. That’s how I can see the stuff that doesn’t belong. The lime head of prickly-pear, the bright leaves of a Chinese elm. I push my eyes with the heels of my hands. The world is tilting over and leaving me behind.
Finally, I lie back and stare at the sky. Sometime, after the lorikeets go shrieking overhead, I close my eyes.
I dream it is night again, and the land is formed of creatures. They are silent as they move, both time and substance. They are rock tumbles become waterfalls, regathering as still pools. They rise from the billabong, larger than the sky, muddy water coursing with serpentine rainbows. Closing.
A twitter snaps my eyes open. An Indian mynah skips by. It twists a sleek head, brown and orange, and a word drops onto my tongue.
Invader.
I scramble up. It cocks its head, then darts into the scrub. Unafraid. Here to stay. And something unfinished inside my head completes. The sun is already down, and the night air creeps up the hill, promising danger. The lake is a dark hole, and I know the creatures are rising again.
I stumble down the rocks, wanting to be home. There’s a light on in the farmhouse. But back on the low ground, the estate lights align and I lose the path. For a few seconds, the world spins—lights, dark, lights—then, a splash.
I run blind. The lights bob and silver grass whips around my feet like hands trying to pull me down. I pump my arms and pray for pavers. Finally, I see color: the hanging baskets, and the farmhouse—roof, veranda and door.
Color. Everywhere.
A qualm bursts through my consciousness.
I hit the brakes still within the violets, and ease my foot back from the pavers. The Folk line the patio edge. And the gutters. And the roof. Thousands upon thousands, a swarm. The silver grass winds around my ankles. But it’s not a snare, now. More like a hand that saves you from a fall.
Tommyknocker vibrations course through my feet. The green men and the sprites are a heaving ground cover. The air moves as they inhale and exhale as one, Folk with no edge at all. Their posture says I am not welcome; I am not what left this morning. That I know secrets no one should know.
Behind me, the creatures rise with the full moon.
Just enough light to see the nightmares I know I’ve seen and forgotten: the Folk’s razor teeth and cruel black eyes. Their ears cut to points, their battle-scars, their cruel smiles. They are opportunists, magic weavers, manipulators, and make glamour to hide it all. They look into my heart and they know I have seen. If I was a child they would trick me and I would forget. Or if I didn’t, they would change me for another. But I am grown now. I’ve seen.
I can never live among Folk again
I am in no man’s land between them and the creatures. I want to dissociate, to castle like a rook. But I can’t claim neutrality. The Folk are ours, we brought them here.
I have a vision then: a hard, future-reel that knocks me to my knees. The tommyknockers will break through the violets. The Folk will drag me down under the turf, or, in pieces, into their hiding places in the walls. They will feed me to the Lantana spilling out into the scrub. And they will push the creatures back and back, until the advancing edge reaches the end of land and there is only legend left.
There is nowhere to go. I don’t belong in this country, the land of the creatures. But they are the ones holding against invasion.
I pick up a tree branch, hard and gnarled.
Night is coming. It is time to fight.
Parvaz
Some days, when the alley streamers snap in the breeze, and I smell the upper atmosphere come down to mingle in the detritus of these shops and stones, I sit in this chair and fester an evil longing for what can never be again. My shoulder aches where the bone healed amiss, the wasted muscles clamped. Remembering my body stuffed into this human form, my treasures broken down and sold. And the one who both saved me and chained me.
The bells ring from the shop door. A woman is there, framed in the doorway. A shock of ebony hair, a silhouette of arms and hips.
And desire stirs, low down in my brain.
She approaches tentatively, as if she smells something that makes her nervous, as if it is too dark for her to see. She moves like a hunted thing, making my spine tingle and my leg muscles burn.
I rise, silent, and watch her from this doorway. Her fingers moving to the glass case nearest, her eyes flickering to the side, lingering on the jewels. She has the sway of a princess. She wears loose culottes like a veiled dancer. An exotic thing that lived in the palace, perhaps, when I lived in the mountains long ago. My desire unfolds until my mouth is dry, my neck sore from the clench of hunting muscles, but I won’t allow more. Above her shimmering pants is just a T-shirt, her features too light for a sultana. Besides, there would be questions, and I need her to pay.
I show myself, and she jumps a fraction, which sets my heart racing, pupils expanding, the shop with its cases and old wood and silken drapes suddenly blooming in spectrum shift. The detail floods my consciousness: a mouse lurks in the far corner, thinking himself unseen; beetle bodies on the door lintel, their rainbow shells dull; dust and wood polish and earthly things. Cloying. And my plodding, human brain tries to give it all meaning.
I’m overcome and stagger, strike my knee. Pain sends the human brain away and brings me clear. The woman rushes over. I smell her relief, and her perfume; she sees an old man, a weak man. She has dismissed what scared her only moments ago. But I am neither old, nor weak, nor a man, and she smells familiar … of blood and feathers.
She helps me aloft the floor. “Goodness, are you alright?” she asks. “Do you want me to—”
Just a small stumble, a slip! I protest, allowing my hand to linger on her proffered arm. My own skin feels strange, but her form underneath it familiar. Bones in meat.
“You have beautiful things,” she says, allowing the moment to pass. She moves to the cabinets. I slip into the counter and shadow her interest.
She stops by the middle case. “These here.” She traces the outlines. My gaze is steady even as my heart is twisting in my human chest, seeing what she is seeing. These are brooches, all wings. Wings half-furled, wings in glide … and below them, feathers in silver and gold and platinum. All my treasures remade.
She sighs. “Birds,” she says, as if this conveys something. I say nothing. So many customers begin this way.
“I love birds,” she continues. “Such freedom. I’m sure I’d love to be able to fly. To be so carefree. Is that why you make these?”
Her gesture indicates the shop. She already knew of this place, perhaps. From a friend, or by reputation. The odd jeweler down the little side alley in this big, ugly city, where every piece is a wing or feather, or a beak. But she is mistaken—of my reasons, and what she sees. No, I say, but softly, and she pays me no attention.
I hope that she will pick quickly, but she lingers as they always do. I rub my shoulder, and look out the window. She moves across the shop, but I still smell the feathers on her skin.
“I have a bird,” she says softly, when the silence becomes uncomfortable for her.
Ah, I say, though I mean it explains how she smells and not because I am interested. She is waiting now for me to ask what sort of bird it is, but I do not care. Instead, I ask what she is looking for.
“Something,” she says vaguely, browsing distractedly, until she looks in the cases opposite. Her turned back brings me a memory, though it should not. A cave, and that smell of blood and feathers. I have been too long in this body, and yet I can never leave.
When I look up again, she is gone. The door is closing with its cheerful chime. I turn the latch and flip over the sign. Parvaz is closed for now.
I numb the human in me with spirits and perch on an old chair to go over my books. My savior—my jailer—is due his fee. There is enough for this time, but not yet for the next. I glower at the closed shop with its cases, its propensity to attract customers. Its position beneath the perfect and unattainable sky.
Two weeks pass and I sell only a little. The customers like the jewels; they come to the shop from the tent markets outside, happy and pleasant; but they do not like me. My mood matters, and I work on improving it, like the helpless living thing I am. That desire to live is what got me here. I spend half a day mulling on this, then I improve.
I am surprised and annoyed when she comes back. The girl with the ebony hair and the preyish ways. I rub my shoulder, wondering if she could know my thoughts. She hovers in the doorway while I stare. She looks different, though I know it is her. She has changed her hair, perhaps.
“Hello again,” she says. Advances two tentative steps.
You were here before, I manage. I stand behind the counter, feeling my human self all thin and fragile. As if I could crack my skin like an eggshell and emerge again. I fix on her, then realize I am not blinking. I have to remember to do that. I do it twice. Slowly. She seems to settle.
“Do you make custom pieces?” she asks. She blinks, too. Her eyes are very green. The flesh around them is soft. My hands clench against the wood. It takes a long moment to recover. I apologize and lie: ask her to repeat herself. I am not sure what she has said.
She does, but as I form the word no, two thoughts clash together. The first is that this is a sale. The second is how little money I have for the djinni.
And what he will do to me if I cannot pay.
So I nod. She smiles, a tiny movement at the edge of her lips. She is nervous again; she feels exposed. I see the pulse at her neck and wrists. I wish she would leave.
Do you know what you want? I ask. I rub my jaw with the back of my arm, and it feels odd. Smooth where there should be feathers.
She is already turning to go. “I will do a sketch and come back?”
Relieved at the distance, I nod. She is gone again. The smell does not linger long, but my shoulder is itching now.
I go to the back room and pace about my chair, scratching. My eyes fall absently on the ledger. I strain my good shoulder, searching my back with my paltry nails. I find a lump.
I seek the tiny relief room with its mirror. I undo the buttons and pull my shirt away. The scar wraps my arm like a strangling snake. I pull the wasted arm fo
rward. Something is there, its tip protruding through my skin. I think of burrs, or parasites.
I snatch the fine pliers from my workbench and close them about this thing. I tug. It comes loose with a sting I’ve known before, and I thrust the offending object up to the light. A white feather, a bloody quill. I lose my grip and the pliers fall. The feather floats to the pale porcelain sink, where it sticks, fanned and wetted. I hold myself, shivering, as the blood creeps pinkly into drops.
She comes back in two days with a white sheet folded in her hands. She looks different again, hair piled high on her head, her neck exposed. I try not to look further, but retreat into my human brain, the one that thinks of how to handle tools and work metals, and not about how to hunt, or how to rip out a slender throat.
She unfolds the sheet and pushes it across. I look down and the picture shudders in my vision. No, no! I cannot make this!
She sees my expression. “I’m sorry, the drawing isn’t very good,” she stumbles. “It’s a necklace, you see?”
I do. I see the curve of the band intended to grace her neck, and erupting from the side of it, the motif she would have me create. The rendering is so good, it could fly off her page.
I cannot make this, I say, pushing the paper back towards her. I hope to convey that I have not the skill for such a design, though I do. But this thing is too large, and renders an image the djinni forbade me to make.
Her big eyes are sad. “Oh please!” she begs. “You’re perfect for it. No one else can make it!” She gestures around the shop, as if to remind me that I make wings and beaks and talons already. But never a form complete. Never that. The djinni would have me.
“How much do you need?” she says quickly. And this is the critical moment. I have not sold enough this month. The djinni can have me anyway if I cannot pay. I stand there, in dithering silence, my fingers moving like inch-worms against the glass. I tell myself I can stop work before the size is too large, that I can tell her I cannot do it later. I will sell other things to make the payment, and destroy this piece without finishing it.