LITMIR.BIZ

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at just the right place.

      Henry stood on the edge of the non-functioning fountain (nobody seemed to have cared enough to turn it back on again after the easing of a decade of water restrictions) and held his hands to the sky. Waiting.

      The heavenly host played a few more notes, allowing stragglers to catch up. But no-one else heard. No-one else stopped to look towards the heavens. Well, one or two people, but they were checking for potential rainclouds. In Melbourne, you could never entirely trust the forecast.

      A few people cast a curious glance at Henry, but the daft bugger in his jeans, hoodie and dark sneakers looked more beatific than dangerous. Perhaps his case had been found in his favour. One jogger gave him two thumbs up and a congratulatory grin.

      The heavenly host gave a little sigh, looked at their sole audience member, shrugged and figured that maybe Facebook hadn’t really been the best way to send invitations to this particular party. Still, there was no need to blame Henry the Pure for being the only one with manners enough to notice the call.

      With a beat of their wings, the host created one hell of a downdraft, which collected Henry and then drew him up.

      It was startling at first. Henry kicked his feet, trying instinctively to stand on solid ground. His shoes fell into the puddle of water lying on the base of the defunct fountain. He waggled his socked feet, then decided it was quite pleasant, this flying business. Grinning, he let himself be lifted.

      Nobody noticed.

      Henry got to heaven and found himself the sole occupant of a significantly more dull than expected paradise.

      The remaining inhabitants of the Earth didn’t notice that Judgement Day had been and gone. They each went on being the embodiment of good and evil, heaven and hell, god and the devil, in their own personal way, as they’d done ever since they’d been given the gift of choice.

      Only one person ever missed Henry. Daisy had loved her brother but frankly found him so impossibly perfect that she felt inadequate. Away from his oppressive saintliness, Daisy felt she wasn’t such a bad old stick. She was kind to animals and the elderly and bought The Big Issue. She was good and supportive friend, and though not perfect, she made an effort to be kind. If heaven had been less rigid in its spiritual dress code, she might have heard the call.

      But rigid it was, and most people are flawed, and really, the vagaries of heaven and hell had never really had that much impact on daily life on Earth, the in-between place where devils and angels were part of the same clay that made everyone else.

      In the end, the heavenly host withdrew entirely from earthly affairs, and valiantly tried to hide their disappointment from Henry that Judgement Day had been such a fizzer. Words were definitely going to be had with the marketing people.

      And the world? It went on, being good, bad and indifferent, depending on the predilections of its individual inhabitants, as it always had.

      LOST AND FOUND:

      WANDERLUST

      He assumes it was an accident. He assumes it was drunken forgetfulness, or frustration with a blister, or something to spite the original owner of the shoe.

      He tells himself it was not knowingly cruel.

      It’s cruel, all the same. Somehow it’s worse that it’s only one shoe. One garish purple boot, made for striding confidently in the world. A statement of sorts. I wear sturdy footwear, for the road I walk is long and hard; but I wear my footwear purple because fuck you, that’s why.

      The shoe rests against his own feet. He sees it in his peripheral vision, stuck as he is with his gaze forever drawn upward, his mouth in that moue of astonishment.

      When he first reached this town, with his two equally gormless, equally impressed bronze friends, he was astonished. He was impressed. Now he’s just here. All the time. Every day. Staring at the roofscape and wondering what else he’s missing. The people who pass him talk of other things. A river nearby. A tall gilded tower from which they can see way out to the ocean. (What is an ocean, he wonders? The closest he can understand is that it’s vast like the sky and wet like the clouds: the moon on storm clouds is his understanding of ships and seas).

      Other people speak of even stranger places. Sand and forests and cities with great bridges and snowfall. He doesn’t know what those words mean, but they sound wonderful.

      He longs to go. To bend and snap his metal feet from the concrete and take a step. Take two. Three and four and to see a new angle of those rooftops, a new street, who knows, maybe that river (a ribbon of dense cloud on the ground, he wonders, is that what it looks like?).

      He longs to move and to discover.

      Instead, one purple shoe leans against his own cold feet and reminds him that his wanderlust is futile. All he can do is stand and gawp and wait for the world to come to him, and hope that their exotic words like pyramid and bridge and mountain and free will one day make sense.

      WORDS FAIL

      For my nanna, Bessy Harris

      The collected words

      Of all the languages in all the world

      Can’t capture you

      A few can describe the way you smiled

      And the scent of your skin

      Nouns and adjectives may collide

      To approximate your voice in all its moods

      Or the picture of you

      Standing at the crest of your back yard

      Feeding the crows

      But these are merely sketches

      The outline of a woman

      But hearts speak another language

      and have a vocabulary of laughter

      patience, joy, humour, tears and endless comfort

      Not limited by mere words

      Our hearts are fluent in you.

      LOST AND FOUND:

      PLOT BUNNY

      She is small, to hold so much rage in her. Small and ferocious and so, so tired. She had to dig her way out, and her with no bones, no muscles, just cotton and stuffing, weeping all the while.

      Dig she did, though, and she found the sky again, and now she seeks something more. It will take a long time to find it (to take it) she has no doubt.

      But revenge is patient, yes it is. Revenge has time enough. A dish best served cold, they say. Has no use-by date, they say.

      It’s a long way home, but that’s all right. That will give her time to think, to plan, to plot.

      The days and weeks and months she’ll spend wending homeward will provide so much careful, burning time to decide which of them to punish – or punish first, at least – and how best to share with her enemies how it felt.

      How it felt to be seized in hot, hard jaws and taken away.

      How it felt to realise that Beloved Little One didn’t raise a squeak of protest, being too enamoured of the splash of low-breaking waves on the sand to notice or care that the Beast was in motion, Bunny in its mouth.

      How it felt to hear Uncaring Adult say in a bored, peeved tone, ‘No, Cheezle, put Bunny back; bloody dog,’ as ineffectively as a cat protesting, with no real interest, the closing of a door.

      How it felt that no-one came to her rescue.

      How it

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