Three Fragments - by Cameron Hindrum
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Fragment I
I leave my house and its warmth and get into my car. I hope that it starts first time. My car is like a tired old man who still wants to be useful—sometimes it’s capable and sometimes it isn’t, but you keep it around because it’s full of stories. I remember going to see my great-grandmother when I was a child, and she thought my father was still a fisherman even though at that point he had not been near the water for very many years. He would return to the water long after she died. In her old room, my great grandmother smelled like soap; she reminded me of flowers long kept in a vase that still hold their shape, flowers with a quiet ghostly scent that remain beautiful when they are dead.
I start the car and the old man listens and my great-grandmother is sitting next to me, holding flowers in her papery hands. The flowers are growing and eventually they occupy all of the interior of the car. Their scent is what fills me from within, lighter than air. The car is still going but the door opens and I am lifted up and out, and there is all the sky.
I think about this as I drift calmly over the Southern Outlet. And I think that soon I will buy my wife some young flowers, crisp with promise and absence.
Fragment II
That was us, running.
It was dark and after the eating. They were all standing around, beers and all, laughing, talking shit. Don’t know what time.
We were in the big yard at the back of the station when we heard it. The Christmas barbie, all the volunteers and families and kids, the two full-time blokes. They moved the two big red tankers to make room, out on the street with the little bushie tucked up behind one of them like a patient puppy. Us kids were playing a half-arsed game of cricket out the back under the floodlight from the corner of the roof.
Can’t describe the sound. Tyres locked up, a squeal harsh in the darkness, a soft crump, metal hitting metal like a full stop at the end of the squealing and glass breaking. We all looked around, at each other and out to street. Someone’s droppin doughies, Ginger said, and Towel hissed back, shut up Ginger. The way there was the long desperate scream of the tyres and then the thud and then nothing. Fuck me, we all froze. Just for a moment.
Ginger was batting and ran first, back through the shed and down the wide driveway out onto the street. Didn’t take long for the adults to cotton on and by then we were all running, them trying to catch up. Someone yelling, fuckin stop em!
But they didn’t. Eighty or a hundred metres up the street, back towards the shops. Little dark white flatbed truck had pulled out in front of a motorbike, had two blokes on it. Slammed into the cabin. One of them was across the other side of the street, looked like he was hugging a tree and the other one was hanging from the shattered window of the truck by an arm. There was blood and oil and shit all over the road. I could see it in the poor white streetlight. Nothing moved. Silent night.
No one said a fuckin word. Then someone pushed me away.
Fragment IV
My eyes are not as a woman’s eyes
—John Shaw Neilson, ‘The Loving Tree’
I was told not to go near the house of the old woman, tucked away from earth behind the thick line of trees at the old end of town. The town of my childhood is not the town you know today. The things that made it rich are gone. Silent people live there now.
But this is not what I wanted to tell you. One cold afternoon I defied my parents, as all children eventually do, and walked towards that end of town. I wanted to see the old woman. Why should I be kept from her? Mother and Father had strange ideas but I wanted to see for myself. Under the sky that distant afternoon, I walked towards her.
The line of trees had been planted too close together, not long after the war. You might never have known a house was there. You could see nothing of it from the town road. Just trees, vast sentinel things now, silent and close to each other, trying to reach the clouds.
I walked towards them carefully, as if they might shift and start reaching for me. Giant things. I remember the soft grass under my sandals, cushioning me from unknown earth. The grass was long and I could feel its icy fingers scratching at the skin of my calves, reaching for the hem of my long skirt. One of Mother’s creations. The leather straps of my sandals were soon wet, sliding against my feet like polished glass. I took careful steps, many of them, wondering whether I should be counting, watching the waiting trees. I felt, finally, the voice of the old woman.
Come. Let me see you.
Beyond the trees, there was no house. ▼
image: Michael Yuan
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If you enjoyed Cameron’s work, you could also read his arts feature, Stepping Back from The Edge.