Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Hard boots scrape across gravel and she hears them in her sleep. Every day. Sometimes in the background and mostly peripheral but they are always there. They were there in the throbbing old broken bone in her foot that was never seen to and healed incorrectly, even after in middle age she has major surgery to correct the congenital bunions that compound the broken toe. The toe that he broke. With his boot. In the gravel. A hot day in Adelaide, summer 1972.
Every day, even though she wakes up and cuddles her little dog, breathing in the fresh green air of the rainforest.
One day, she knows, it will all eventually fall away but today she wakes and it is there. Hard and vicious in the morning light like a drunk when the ugly lights come on. No flaw, no detail left unexposed, lurching up close and demanding to be faced. On this day all the green serenity of the forest cannot flay its oily hide. Because of that she will hold it at bay by hunkering down, let it be an elephant, a raging snarling rabid dog that she puts on a chain. But the chain is always long enough for her to feel it’s breath on her ankles as it stretches on it’s tether, encroaching on her personal space, to where she can always see and feel it’s glaring starkness.
Because of this she fled. And because of that so many things began and were and are, that would never have otherwise been.
I am one of those things, and as such so is the rest. My daughter, her grand daughter. The cycle of life continues. We are a babushka, one inside the other inside and another but we keep on growing and producing and changing and there is always a story. A reason. Until finally we reach a moment, a space in time where we are weightless and able to consider the long line of mothers and ancestors that have come before us, who still exist in our stories and in our bones. Fragments of stars that sun and water and some kind of energy created by life’s longing for itself transforms into the next generation.
But today she will hunker down. Today is not the day to feed that dog. Another day will come and the sharp edges of secrecy will recede. The devil he loves secrets but she’ll not let him win.