the last few just a clearing out of things that were hiding in 'drafts'. more and more in there as a kind of constriction passes over. a snake slowly convulsing as it digests something. something something unseen.

perhaps something that feels large because it is quite small and poisonous. but stop trying now, stop trying to be big and great and able. stop trying to move them around. they fall down and sleep. and all become the grass and the calcium in the earth. butterflies fall into patterns of dust. patterns fall into piles. piles fall into the space of a former sea.

lost my bearings. just wanted instead to not move those characters. strongly this, that they could simply be there.

where was that? father moving closer, holding down the electric fence with a stick. angry and also grinning, excited. a dog, there's a dog going crazy with excitement, barking up at his legs.

and there she is with the rifle in the mouth

"a line has two sides" (Oblique Strategies)

Once we (only half-conscious of this) left her in oak tree out the front, calling out (did you hear something? imagine if the ladder fell! imagine if she got stuck up the tree!) while we danced, stupid as we could, to her records, Onwards Christian Soldiers, blasting through the living room, rattling the Philippine carved nativity scene. Maybe because I was with an adult I thought we couldn't be naughty, couldn't be doing any harm.

But the oak tree was older than that. And the cactus garden, huge, the dilapidated greenhouse full of "fairies" and insects; the row of she-oaks that burned down one summer - fire engine, alarm.

the girl has clumps of minced meat, a bag of seeds, and she moves from cage to cage pushing handfuls of these through the bars. she tips her head up, flips her hair away from her eyes and looks at me. hard light here in the clearing. she's what - 40? around that. I see it. it's not a child's figure. I see the muscles on her arms, & through her nightie, the shape of her thighs. it's a dancer’s figure, something like that. her hands are threaded with muscle.

the sables quieten down one by one as they eat but by the time the last is fed the first is growling and huffing again. the father hauls a hose around from the back of the shed and aims it at the animals one by one. they dance against the jet of water, bite at it, whine and leap. shit peels off the cage floors, off their paws and out onto the earth.

through this I stand quietly. I can’t say if he’s seen me or not. I’m waiting for that moment. water runs across the ground from the cages towards me, dead pine needles carried on its surface. it pools round my feet and I feel my shoes turn cold, then the wetness leaks in. when it comes, I think. when it comes I will know what to do. far above, the birds lift the netting by great force of upward beats. their wings close and they drop. he drags the hose away again and disappears.   

help me get them back in the shed, she says. I pick up a pair of cages. the animals thrash. I take them back into the dark, stinking shed. there’s enough light to see the gun is hung up on the wall, suspended on two nails.

what about that? 


no one's ready. we need a buyer for the pelts.


I briefly consider taking it down and smashing it against the side of her head. 


I thought you were younger.


I did used to be.


But not when I held you. why were you there all night? I thought I could do something for you. 


she yelps, then laughs, pulling her hand back from a cage and sucking her finger. I can't see what happened - there's no visible blood and the sable looks unexcited. Listen, we do need an investor, she says. You staying for a drink?


I stay for a drink. The officers are already at the table, drinking. The father - the husband? - is sitting on the pile of clothes she'd left on the floor, working over an account book in the dim light. Turns out the officers know a buyer, someone with a missing kid who is willing to pay more than the pelts are worth.


We can help him, they say, and Klein taps at the death certificate sitting under his glass. It's an okay deal. 


My phone rings. it's mother. She's been left alone all day, can't believe she's been left alone all day. I tell her it's okay, I'm not far away, just over at the summer house, and everything is fine. She reminds me to pick up the rent. It's doubled this last week, she says. Tell them that. It's high time.  

The moon is up when I walk back through the garden. The moon pours light onto the closed eyelids of the trees, and from their eyelids through their fingers and ringing to the ground. The shots begin before I reach the new year citruses, and they come every four or five steps, keeping me in a kind of march till I reach the road and silence falls, still as a kind of ringing, which stays in my ears all the way home.

"The we is always positive, the plural you is a possible ally, the they has the face of an antagonist, the I is unseemly, and the you is, of course, superfluous." Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood - via Judith Butler "Giving an Account of Oneself" (diacritics, v 31:4)

"As we ask to know the Other, or ask that the Other say, finally, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction, and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the Other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it. If letting the Other live is part of a new definition of recognition, then this version of recognition would be one that is based less on knowledge than on an apprehension of its limits. In a sense, the ethical stance consists in asking the question, "Who are you?," and continuing to ask the question without any expectation of a full or final answer." Judith Butler "Giving an Account of Oneself" (diacritics, v 31:4)

we were at that long suspended walking bridge across the nape of the valley. we walked out onto it and into the wind, which cracked the mesh plates beneath our feet and rippled our wet shirts across our backs.  foliage shook below, that wind coming in from the straits, from the sea, pushed up away from the hot land, disturbing what it could of the surface of filaments and moving on, unable to get close or make anything cool but the tips of the leaves and the cracking mesh plates, steel and flexible to the pressures of the whole, and us, our wet backs. A crashing in the branches below; macaques.

at the half-way point the gates at the far end became visible. still closed, locked. we waited, cast around for signs; far below an assistant appeared and began gesturing. there was a delay. some business had not been resolved at the beginning of the bridge; the gates would not be opened at the end. it was signalled to us that we were to wait. the staff could not solve this today; they were going home. maybe other staff would be sent to sort things out.

the sky softened. the trees below us turned from brilliant green to a gentle grey. we leaned against the balustrades, we wandered back and forth - back towards the northern entry, now locked too; back towards the south. the wind picked up and the bridge took on a slight sway. we gazed, and eventually we sat down on the mesh plates in the swaying. we placed our heads upon each others' bony shoulders and we waited.