I must say, and I really must for this is my own internal monologue, that the afternoons were certainly beginning to get cold.
Not cold as in quiet days of shivered toes jumping under the doona with a good crime novel, but the kind of cold that snaps grass into frost and adds a weight to the sunrise.
Builders, that I can only assume to have been squeezing the metaphorical blood from every single house brick during construction, had cobbled together my current abode with little more than a single layer of unmatched pebbles and a grout so powder-based that you could almost bake with it.
The whole house kept about its tired business with a certain audible whistle, almost similar to that of a choir of dying cats attempting to hum a discordant minor third.
Whatever wailing banshee trapped in the foundations aside, I had grown to become quite accepting of my little nest that bookmarked the end of Corden St and slanted so unstructually toward the right.
The uneven steps that tracked up from the lower road had seemed to be installed atop of some kind of soap infused soil and would fling random pavers out from under your step, if so ever found to be in a bad mood. This made things akin to carrying groceries up to the house quite a perilous exercise, and the life and death acrobatic feat of taking the bins out always injected a sense of danger into something that should really be benign.
I had lived in this house for some years and had quite recently been joined by an aunt of mine who had fallen upon a brutal form of financial poverty almost comparable to her own quality of character–or lack thereof. This very same aunt also unfortunately suffered the personal hardship of being too unpleasant to find any idiot desperate enough to marry her–bachelors of Petersham now collectively sigh in relief…
Silence became our greatest ally in the passing months as we developed a perverse game of not speaking to one another for an ever lengthening span of time. I remember one particularly enjoyable month where we managed to speak, to my estimate, but on a single instance; I imagined her during this time to be like a sleeping moth, entombed within the withered husk of her own existence, emerging only for toast in the morning and to bitterly glare at me during the evening’s tide.
A brief aside on the subject of our dusty winged insect friends, I recently had been looking for my wallet in a pair of pants and found about ten dead moths nestled inside the small change pocket. I’m unsure whether this is an allegory for poverty or the unfortunate results of a moth centric cult-massacre, sad really, no one should die in jeans.
I digress.
My aunt and I sat basking in a silence so dull that it somehow became perversely pleasant. Drawing an heirloomed teacup from the table I attempted to hold the fragile porcelain cup without it exploding into some kind of powdered chalk under my lightest grip, the tiny cup was of a flowery design and steeped within the expressive angles of what must have been a thoroughly drunk potter. Its shallow inside, bleached in that certain shade of pallid-brown decades of use inflicts on us all, held not more than a single drop of English Breakfast, such was its daintity.
The tiny ornamental cup was so unwieldy that it took my full motor control to prevent it from crumbling under the sheer weight of its own existence, but at least there would not be much spillage.
I sipped, my Aunt leered, it was a splendid tête-à-tête thatI may never choose to forget.
Meanwile from near corner of the loungeroom the radio softly played Brahms over the morning’s deafening silence, I quite enjoy Brahms there’s a certain unpretentiousness to his work that many of the other B’s within the classical musica universalis could never really attain–my eye falls to you Bizet.
A static intrusion! My house, as it were, seemed to be constructed just upon the edges of what I regarded to be called the tangential sphere of negative radio interference so this symphony was to be enriched by the brief modicums of the local horse racing–trotting across the grave my beloved Brahms. But, I chose to let it play on, as this hidden moment of beauty may have been the only thing keeping me from being drowned within the silence of my aunt and the whistle of my teapot house.
I must state an honest fact though, I do love this house, this reality I have made for myself.
The day by day progression of everything’s constant movement, like an escalator: it progresses, it changes, and yet you just have to stand there, trying not to get a shoelace caught as you ride upward.
Bohemia ego sum, May it all fall around me.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 