Tag Archives: short story

Pearly Blacks

First published 2018 with Sweatshop in The Big Black Thing: Chapter 2

When the wind has finally brought her home from her play in the sun, my sister stands confidently in her chubby little frame upon the living room table and begins to dance. Knees bent, bottom jutting out, she moves side to side in a simple Latin two-step, eyes closed as though she is in silent meditation.  

I peer at her through a crack in the living room door. The smell of fried beef mixed with onion and fresh tomato fill the air and I pray to our Spanish-speaking God (who has a furry face and large brown hands) that Mum doesn’t see me hovering around the living room door ajar. Spying on your sister isn’t a good enough excuse to have the house smelling of Saltado.

I try to pick out the music in her head. Something our dad would play on repeat, a Susana Baca rhythm where Susana summons the Afro Peruvians to a call and response amidst a strumming charango. My sister holds her hands up to the sky and tilts her head back. She is in the throes of laughter. And balanced on the outstretched palm of her right hand, a rotting, black little molar sits defeated – silent and unmoving. I remember how long it took for that uncoordinated hand to be able to finally catch and throw, hit and slap. Now it is chubby and completely still. The molar stands upright as though it has placed its roots in my sister’s hand and sprung up from her sweaty skin – a black thing clawing into her like a beetle with spiny legs. This is no accident. For months, I’d seen my younger sister carefully brushing all her teeth with the same love and dedication, except for a single molar in the back left-hand corner of her mouth. My grandmother, who we only ever call Abuela, cursed my sister for neglect, and swore at her in Spanish before taking out her dentures for a torrent of toothless abuse. This display was meant to frighten her, ‘Look what you will become – a witch without teeth, una bruja sin dientes’, but all it seemed to do was strengthen my sister’s resolve.

Mum won’t admit that Abuela knows something is afoot before her. Once she finds out about my sisters’ rotten tooth, she will turn to my father. ‘It’s all that lemon with sugar you let them eat.’ She won’t admit she has the recipe down in her cookbook, a simple way to please us kids. Good Mums don’t glue their children’s teeth together with sugar, and she’ll go to the grave denying she ever did.

Mum would cut the lemon in half with the big knife from the draw, with that dexterity and command that told the world she owned the kitchen. The lemon would stand face down, waiting for the sweet, white granules to be measuredly poured beside it. The trick is to squeeze the lemon slightly when dipping it into the sugar, so that the juice breaks through the flesh, and the sweet stuff sticks faster. Then it’s clenched-up faces and eyes rolling into the back on your head and sneaking more sugar onto the plate until the juice of the lemon is gone.

From the upside-down room at the other side of the house, I can hear my Abuela crying. Since she arrived from the other side of the world smelling like leather and talcum powder and I wonder if she always smelt that way. The foot of the bed blocks the door to the upside-down room so you can never open it all the way; you have to stick your head right around to say hello. If you lie upside-down on the bed, head facing the window you can see the jacaranda flowers falling from the sky. I imagine my Abuela lying on her bed the right way up, her small, shrivelled body stretched out so that she is touching the window frame with her alpaca wool socks, even though it is summer. She has no interest in the purple flowers – she is waiting to be comforted, waiting to hear that she was right about my sister’s tooth all along. As though my mum has heard her weeping, the sizzling from the Saltado gets louder – she starts the stove fan.

Eyes on my sister, I am concentrating all my energy on her chubby little fingers squeezing the tooth in triumph. The door squeaks. My sister stops, looks me straight in the eye and smiles; her blood-stained canine smile. But there’s a reason why you shouldn’t smile and dance at the same time. Dancing is not for celebration – it’s for mourning. Susana Baca and her African troupe could tell you that.

I watch my sister, legs spread, pigeon toed, and bottom out, ready to go again. She shuts her eyes, the rhythm in her head starting over, still smiling. I see it before it happens. The tooth slips from her fingers and she scrambles to catch it. She falls hard, face on table. I hear frying from the kitchen, crying from the upside-down room. My sister lifts her curly head up and as she does a shower of perfect baby teeth fall to the floor. I imagine the brown handed God contemplating me from above. I laugh, relieved – the falling of my sister’s teeth will mean I’ve stopped her from falling somewhere worse; from her bike, from the Jacaranda or into the water that she is just learning to tolerate.  

a self portrait

I looked through the window and there she was: hair curled, hat on, blossoms protruding from her ears and pollen sitting on her eyelashes.

When I met her that day I realised I might never know what it was like to miss someone ever again. She was the mother and the gardener and the maid and the sister I had always imagined.

Somehow, in between all her coming and goings, we managed to forge a friendship of mutual respect. I was curious but shy and although I never expected for her to confide in me without invitation, she scribbled short, sweet notes for me on pieces of crumpled paper and then flattened them out and folded them before putting them into my palm.

“I can’t tell you who you are” she once wrote and I cried silently upon reading it. Later, when I was fiddling with the piece of paper, I noticed that scribbled on the back of it was another line. I can’t repeat what it said because I have long forgotten, but my chest hurt from laughing and I had to make a night time herbal tea which half knocked me out but at least calmed me down.

There she was. I saw her through the window.

The last time I needed her to be there she had already left and all I had of hers were blossoms that she discarded on the pavement. We had danced together in sleep and found each other among spirits but after she was gone it was as if I forgot my how to sing and all I had to console myself with were the bits of paper she had scrawled her uncertain wisdom onto.

I adored her but she left me. I think of her when rain pours onto the pavement but I can’t see which cloud is releasing it. And then I smile when I remember that it didn’t rain during all that time we spent together. The window I look out of now has a different view, but all I see is the shadow of her curls.

Stolen

First published 2011 in Sydney University Literary Journal Hermes

This is the summer I remember the most.

The melons had grown large and my sister and I hid together in the shade for hours on end, navigating our way through the ripe flesh of the watermelon and sucking all the sweetness out of the white rind.

We spat our seeds under the orange tree and laughed at the idea, laughed and hoped, that one day a large bulbous melon would poke its head through the soil disturbing the stubborn roots of it’s neighbour and the orange tree, alarmed and embarrassed, would fall.

“And no more oranges – only melons!” We sung.

This is the summer I remember the most.

My father decided he wanted a garden. A real garden. Not an accidental garden. (An accidental garden is something adopted from the owners of the house before you. Fruit bearing trees – no work required). My Dad wanted a garden of his own. A garden that would die without his steady working hands.

This is the summer.

The first thing that grew in our real garden were accidental pumpkins. They came from the compost bin, at night, when everyone was sleeping. The vines snaked out into the lawn and took hold in the soil. And then a few weeks later, we spotted green bellies, pregnant pumpkin bellies, unashamed and lying in the sun.

The pumpkin vines stayed the rest of the summer. They moved from the abandoned compost corner into the middle of the yard and stole our playing place. Only the dog ventured out to tread under the leafy hospital beds that housed expectant mothers. Our father forbade us to upset them. He was proud of his first “real” produce.

This is the summer the rats came.

They came in droves and feasted in the shade of the vines, cackling drunkenly, pointing and name calling and teasing the “gardeners.” They spat seeds at each other without any desire to reproduce, re-fertilize, or regrow the stolen veggies.

By the time our father hacked away at the vines, the swollen pumpkin bellies had been torn to shreds. Only a few orange stringly remains were left – oh and the hard shells. That was the rats laughing at us.

My father kneeled over and cried.

My sister and I watched him from the shade.

The rats watched him from the shade.

That was the summer they came.