Gone home.

Mistress

It isn’t so bad, really. It’s like when an old girlfriend comes to visit, one you had a passionate affair with for years and years, but it was never quite love, just necessity. Just fucking and a shy smile as one or the other of you walked away. At first, you are shocked simply to see her, standing there on the doorstep in the pouring rain. It was not something you ever expected. You spend a while just staring, coaxing the swirling memories to take shape, become whole, and her present form grows slowly more bedraggled, upset that you don’t recognise her. But then you do and it all comes back like spit in the wind, you pull her inside and throw your arms around her, tighter and tighter, feeling like you need to swallow her body, fill yourself with it. She kisses you gently, a light kiss of greeting, of remembrance, and then you have that taste on your lips, and history moves through the nerves of your face, down your neck, into your spinal fluid, outwards into your being. You repair together to the sitting room, open a bottle and spill it into the glass, and a few moments pass like that as that strong copper smell slinks into your nostrils and the liquid begin to move. And you look at her and smile, move a little closer to her on the couch until your thighs and shoulders are gently touching. The old records come out, ones that, only months ago, you had seriously considered selling, or merely discarding. She grows gradually more amorous, the warmth grows deeper and the scent stronger and soon enough the glasses have been set down and your clothes cast aside and she moves all over you, each touch deeper than the last, drawing more of it out, sucking out the horror, releasing it. It was always an abusive relationship, for so long, but you finally understand how much you missed it, how much you always needed it. You think, if only this had gone on for a little longer, it would have all been sucked out of me, that filthy sick parasite would have been emptied. But no, there was always a small measure that you realise now, as she touches you, had only grown and grown, or manifested itself in inappropriate incarnations, things over which you had no control. There had been a pressure, weighing it down, and now that’s gone, and here’s your answer. Your body grows slicker, your heart beats faster, your hands begin to tremor, and you finally see that this was not something that could ever be stopped, this deadly, disgusting romance. You thought that by now, after all that beauty, you would have the strength to resist her, but the beauty decayed and she had always been there, scratching at the back of your mind, pinching you behind the eyes whenever you saw those things that reminded you of her. She returned. You wake in the morning and look down at her and you are disgusted, but you’re not letting her go again, not until one of you is destroyed, or both. The disgust makes you thrust into her again, again, until you are spent. Even after she leaves, to give you time to rest, her lipstick is still on your skin. Part of you now, forever.

No One Wished To Settle Here

I do not recognise any of them, but we search the old house together and watch as the shadows come alive and begin to spread heedlessly like liquid. The structure moans as we make our way within it, and I predict collapse. While they study one of the faded tapestries I go back downstairs, through the dust, gently locking the door behind me. I hear them whispering to one another, and to me, calling me back, though they don’t know I’ve gone. I feel the need to turn back, to be sure they are trapped, but bludgeon it, too terrified of catching their eye. I make my way down the path, through the gate, breaking into a jog, pausing only when the house is far behind me, my throat constricting, and I cough harshly so that things spill out of me, writhing and expiring in the dirt. I try to remember what their faces looked like. Soon a ghoul, hunched over and chattering, waylays me on the cold country road. He demands gold; I tell him I have none. We talk for a little while. When excited by one of his stories the ghoul will grab you by the wrist, as if to keep you steady beneath the energy of his words. His tongue reminds me of a fat, juicy leaf, and as he draws the blade slowly across my throat I watch it move about in his mouth, forming reassuring sounds. I barely have enough strength left to reach into his belly, wrap my fingers around something warm. A vibration in my spine causes the dream to end and I wake to find that my hand has slipped between the fins of the oil heater by my bed. I stay there, wishing to melt into it.

Conqueror

Two men come to take my things. “You've been here for a while, uh?” the first of them asks and I shake my head sadly, no, been away for a long time. Just got back. “Not much of this can be salvaged,” the second man tells me and I say I know, and that it's okay. They pick up one of the heavier pieces and work by painful inches to get it in the truck. I don't offer to help. “If we take it all, you'll be left with nothing,” the first man says eventually. I look at him and it takes me a few moments to understand. Oh, yes, I say. Yes. They keep moving the stuff, putting it in the truck. Some of it I hardly recognise, but I know it's mine. “You're going to miss it?” asks the second man. I shrug. I really don't know. They are moving until the sun sets and then, like that, the truck is full. I go over and touch one of the pieces at the back, one of the first installed and now one of the last loaded. I feel how cold it is and then quickly it begins to warm beneath my palm, brightening, and I feel an electricity, it causes me to close my eyes and lean my head back slightly, and sigh. Then I take my hand away and the object goes dark again. The first man is at my side. “I have a glass jar,” he says, “With a tight lid.” I nod. They drive off over the horizon and I look down at the jar for a long time, afraid to pick it up. But I do and then I carry it back inside and sit down on the bare floor and look around at the hollow space and concentrate on my breathing. I roll the jar around slowly in my hands and I wonder how long it will be until I dip into it, touch the thing softly with my fingers for a little while, put it back. Something inside me begins to hum a tune. I put the jar down and push it as far away from me as possible, but the song doesn't grow louder like they tell you it should.

Old Man

I saw an old man today standing on the footpath. Standing there the way you imagine an old man to be standing there, dressed exactly as you would expect: scuffed brown leather shoes with black socks with diamond shapes on them, grey trousers, a white shirt and dark green tie with a burgundy cardigan over the top. Navy blue jacket, the shoulders lightly dusted with dandruff. He seemed a kindly old man, somebody's favourite grandfather, the sort of old man you could have a small sherry with and him tell you about his adventures. Just listen to him as he talks, stopping more and more frequently to catch his breath, his voice rolling away. He would tell you about how his wife died ten years ago because the cancer ate away her liver. Approaching him, I knew everything about him: he still lives in the house, the first and only they ever had, but has moved from the bedroom they shared together into one of the guest rooms, sleeps on a single bed – it used to belong to their youngest, so long ago – with one ancient pillow on it, his favourite, but bad for his neck. A picture of his wife on the wall and another framed on the bedside table. An alarm clock set to 5 in the morning but he's up long before then anyway because his legs have begun to hurt. A glass of water and perhaps a handkerchief, and the bottles of pills, endless bottles. He has kept her clothes in the wardrobe so that sometimes, when he feels lonelier than usual, he can shuffle into the bedroom and open the door and take a long breath with a blouse or jumper near his mouth and nose, to remember her gentle perfumed smell.

I knew that he sat in his cane chair in the sunshine some afternoons, hoping the phone would ring.

As I got closer I heard him saying something, which I soon recognised as a verse from scripture. In his hands he clutched a prayer book. I looked at his hands and then slowly up his hunched body to his face. I saw a face filled with a type of terror I had never before imagined, an vile fear so powerful that it almost took shape in the air about him. Nobody else noticed, but I did. It was a fear that had been with him since he was barely a child, a fear that had grown sickeningly and relentlessly the nearer he came to death. It was a diseased fear, a lousy fear, an underserved fear. It was a fear caused by the one thing that he thought was providing him solace, terror poured into his body with every early morning communion. A thousand confessions, but no small whisper of comfort in return. Every horrible thing that ever came his way he accepted, took it for penance. Prayers every night for all those living and dead, and for himself nearer one than the other, offered up to emptiness. I saw it and it hit me hard in the stomach and I sat down a little way up from him, close to tears, and couldn't look at him again. I wanted to go back and slap the book from his hands, shake him by the arms and tell him "no, no" and then embrace him and let him scream it out, but it was too late. The poison had already done its work.

Bluebirds Do Not Sing In A Garden Such As This

Let us fancy together that the human spirit – by which I mean a person's essential character, rather than some venerated insubstantiality – is like a virgin garden-bed, a closed system, prepared with all the nutrients that it shall ever have or need. It may seem a witless maxim, but presently I find it very useful.

Pretend further that like all flora, composed of the same elementary particles yet so dissimilar between kingdom, species, and strain, so too are all sensations and thoughts and states within our own mental bodies. All the building material was already there, the proper vitamins and fertilizers, balanced alkalinity and acidity in the soil, enough water and sunshine, and all it needed was for us, through action or inaction, to plant certain seeds, resulting in certain structures which we would then tend to, or not, as we decided. We would never have to worry about the environment, because that would be unchanging – our only focus would be on the growth itself.

With these resources, the decision is left to us to install certain plants and flowers. If we are good gardeners we know that plants of the most beautiful type and appearance – these are metaphorical plants, of course, beautiful in essence, not merely because they please us aesthetically – can thrive in precisely the same conditions as the thorns, the brambles, the suffocating vines. So we choose not to plant and nurture those species, and instead introduce only the finest specimens. But the material there, remember, fuels and nourishes a petunia just as well as it does a stinging nettle, and if we be bad gardeners, we do not tend to our children so well, and we leave the garden to care for itself. It is so very easy for the dangerous seeds to get mixed in with the good, and the next time we look, there is no longer any evidence of the roses or the orchids, and instead the whole thing is overgrown and choked by crawling weeds. For the weeds, like misery, have evolved into powerful creatures, and they can easily usurp a garden that is not properly tended to.

Soon, once we have permitted this miserable condition to advance to a certain stage, it is far easier to merely leave the garden to its own devices, and before you know it, nothing good is left. A little longer still and you forget that the good had ever existed at all, you forget what it looked like, what it smelled and tasted and felt like, and in your confusion you begin tending to the weeds instead. Not only do you care for them that need no care, for they will flourish regardless, but you remember what it was like to be in the garden, to work there, so you plant more and more horrid and poisonous things, until the whole is overwhelmed by a darkness that you keep cultivating. And when one lovely green sprout struggles to the surface, the sprout of a sunflower, you see how much it depends on you, when all the other plants are so strong and self-reliant, and you are amused by it, and you toy with it, perhaps even pruning back the thorny undergrowth that threatens to corrupt it, to give it a small chance of flourishing. But you know it is doomed and are angered by how weak it seems and once it no longer amuses you you stop chopping at the weeds around it, and you let it be strangled, and die. It's only natural. After all, why should something so incapable, so reliant on your doting, be permitted to flourish, when the other plants seem to manage so well on their own?

Bluebirds do not sing in a garden such as this.

The Queensland Government On: Vegans

(I will write later and in more detail on the Queensland Government's systemic anthropocentrism, but for now wanted merely to give you a teaser of what to expect.)

Unfortunately for the 3.6 million cattle, 4.4 million sheep, 81 million chickens, 660,000 pigs and further millions of horses, camels, kangaroos, emus, bees, crocodiles, aquatic creatures and other NHAs annually exploited and brutalized (sorry, I meant “produced”) by Queensland's $10 billion “food and agribusiness sector”*, it should not surprise us that the Queensland Government considers veganism:

- “an extreme 'cult' diet” (Queensland Health, Child, Youth & Family Health Clinical Procedure Manual, 1996)

- “a bulky diet with a limited range of food” (Queensland Health, Vegetarian Diets For Children Fact Sheet, 2005)

I am not sure what Queensland Health means by “a bulky diet” (perhaps they think we eat trenchcoats), but “limited range of food” is a patently ridiculous assertion, failing to take into consideration such things as fruit and vegetables (with those alone you have enough material to make yourself a unique and varied meal for pretty much every single day of your extended vegan life), and then of course wholly discounting the myriad herbs and spices used to enhance the flavour of such meals. This is before we even get into the endless manufactured vegan goods such as soy products and “meat substitutes” (though since vegans do not consider meat a food, it is difficult to imagine why they would want a substitute for it, since the recipes rarely call for “cardboard substitutes” or “gravel substitutes”).

The Vegetarian Diets “fact” sheet (I'm sorry to keep using so many sarcastic quote marks) also goes on to say that “B12 is only found in animal foods”. This is not merely a ridiculous assertion but an outright lie. B12 can only be synthesized, I suppose you could say, by particular prokaryotes (that is, bacteria and archaea) that occur naturally in and around and upon just about everything and at all times. Technically speaking, you could lick your keyboard and run a very good chance of sucking up some delicious B12. What I think Queensland Health meant to say was that B12 is only of sufficient concentration in animal foods, and this is certainly true, but it's only in animals because they have been eating vegetables containing the bacteria and archaea responsible for manufacturing B12, and their bodies have been storing it. It's basically the same as the protein argument. All vegans need to do is make sure they eat food fortified with B12 (most vegan cereals and non-dairy milks), or pop a supplement every once in a while. No big deal. (Vegan B12, incidentally, is derived directly from the primary, rather than the secondary, sources.)

*The Queensland Department of Primary Industries does not of course make any of the above-mentioned figures particularly easy to find, but they are there if you dig a bit.