Risk

She was no ordinary hitch-hiker.  Late 50s, greying hair dragged back into a ponytail, she looked out of place on the empty Maniototo roadside.  Curious, I pulled over and rolled down the passenger window.

-    A bit hot to be walking today.  Where are you headed?

She smiled and shrugged.

-    Not sure. Where are you going?

 The accent was a languorous Southern States drawl.

-    Wanaka.
-    That works for me.

I popped the boot for her pack. She climbed in beside me, stowing a small Aztec carryall at her feet.

-    Thanks. I sure do appreciate this. I’m worn slap out.

I put the car in gear and looked over my shoulder.

-    We're getting a real Indian summer.
-    I reckon.

I waited for a campervan to pass, then accelerated back on to the road. Dry gold paddocks stretched to the horizon, dotted with round bales of hay, pink-wrapped like little girls’ gifts.

-    If you don’t mind me saying, you’re not the normal hitch-hiker.
-    I hope I’m not the normal anything.  Trying to escape normal life, truth be told.
-    Normal life being?
-    Corporatisation, academic game playing, funding cuts, doing more with less. Sorry you asked?
-    Not at all. Sounds like quite a story. What’s the alternative?

She reached down and unfastened her bag, extracting a small pink ball.

-    Magic. Storytelling.

She enclosed the ball in her left hand, blew on her fist, then opened her hand, now empty.

-    Wow, very impressive.
-    I’ve always loved this stuff. Waved a pencil like a wand before I could hold it right.

She retrieved the ball from her shirt pocket and continued to roll it around in her hands as we drove.

-    I’ve done tricks and made up stories as long as I can remember.  I love it more than pretty much anything.  Left my job to do this, for a few dollars or a bed and a meal.

She swiveled in her seat and looked straight at me.

-    Life’s short. Sometimes you have to take a risk.

I glanced at her and turned my eyes back to the road.  We drove on, me pondering risk, while the disappearing and reappearing pink ball flashed in my peripheral vision.

-    I need to make a short stop in Alexandra. Do you mind?

We slowed at the 50 sign, passing the motor camp and the fall of the land to the Manuherikia.

-    You know what, this looks nice. I might get out here.

I pulled over just before the War Memorial on the roundabout.

-    Can I buy you a drink? An appreciation for the ride?

For a moment, I was tempted.

-    Thanks, but I’m expected by 5.  Good luck with the magic.
-    So far so good. It’s all around. Maybe you’ll find some too.

I watched her in the rear vision mirror as I pulled away, shouldering her pack and pausing to choose her direction.


Rosemary McBryde

March

At last, some consistently sunny weather has arrived here in the deep south.  In response, the Artistic Director has decided that the starter for March is "That Indian Summer".  Looking forward to your stories of 300-500 words in response to this lovely idea, as usual to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com, by 31 March. Happy writing.

Going Home

I remember Mom calling me home from the friend’s house down the road where I used to play as a child.  She would stand in the driveway, clap her hands and  spread them wide open for me to run into. And I did. I ran all the way down the street into her arms.

I also remember the day my brother called me in Australia, to tell me he was finally marrying a woman about whom he could truly say he worshipped the ground she walked on and could I come home for the wedding.

For this man, the call came as an uncontrollable shaking. Unrecognisable as a call.

Eventually though he was reminded so much, he was finally asked what he wanted. “Peace. Composure. To be a nice guy.”

Would this be enough to get home?

One day he suddenly looked up, wide-eyed with wonder and asked “What is that vibrating light on the ceiling?”

She wanted to say “home!” But how could she – or anyone – know. Only he could see it.

Another day he looked at the doorway of the hospital room and wistfully muttered, “I’m going to miss this ol’ lake.”

So it was not surprising that soon after, he followed the call. They at least liked to think of it all as a call home, and the whole process a slow run into what they hope is a parent’s open arms. Or maybe to the lake. Where-ever he eventually went to roost, they hoped it is a home of peace and composure. Because he was always a nice guy.


Jasmin Webb

Paying the debt

They call it – Anthony knew – the law of karma: what goes around comes around, for each action there is an equal reaction, the chickens come home to roost.

It might have been Aesop – or Malcolm X – who said that evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost. It seemed to Anthony’s tender heart that there were few things less like an evil wish than a hen. Maybe hens were remote little dinosaurs with scaly legs and beady, snake-like eyes, reptilian and unforgiving, but they were also, surely, fluffy and spherical and even Jesus H. Christ – who was a dab hand at the old metaphor – could think of nothing more maternal than a chook: ‘how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not’.

Anthony had included Biology in his stage-one university studies. The day that he realised this had been a mistake was in the Biol-105 ‘lab’ – the day on which each student was given an egg.

The course was called ‘Biology and Man’ (on the first day of the course, the professor had told the students proudly how he had earlier seen off the angry lesboes from the English department who came to complain). Perhaps only a man would think what they did that day in Biol-105 worthwhile.

Step by step the professor guided the class through the process.

Each student chipped open his or her egg and carefully extracted the speck at the end of the yolk and manoeuvered it into the warm saline solution on the microscope slide.

Down there you could see some kind of rhythmic pulsation. An ever-slowing movement. Another drop of warm water and it sped up.

A chicken two millimetres across has a beating heart.

This was education? Over in the Classics department, folks were discussing Plato!

In all the time that this process took, it had not occurred to Anthony to wonder how it would end. He waited at the end of the class for the explanation of how to get the chookie back into its protective egg. The explanation did not come.

The eggs went in the bin; the hens went down the drain.

Literally, those chickens would never flutter up into some embracing tree to roost with quiet, contented, evening murmuring. Figuratively – that’s some bad effen karma to be paid off, dude.

Twenty-four years later, Anthony was crossing the courtyard of a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. The sign read ‘ninety bhat’ – a little over three New Zealand dollars. He bought the little wooden cage of tiny songbirds. Smaller than sparrows they were – four small and bewildered imprisoned birds. He carried the cage through to in front of the huge statue of the Buddha and slid up the door of the tiny prison. A moment’s hesitation, and out they flew – the four of them together describing a vast arc up and away into the blue sky.

‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’


Barnaby McBryde

Anticipation of a funeral

I’m trying to imagine you there, working out at what point it happened.  Would it have been when you were nineteen and you cruised out to the outer bays, in some way attempting to blend in to life on the peninsula, merging with the shades of deep tan and brown of the bracken and tussock of the hills that loomed large over your life?  Or was it as you drove the road over the tortuous twisting hill, the raging summer sun beating upon you as you returned to your sanctuary on the flat with the cabbage tree outside the back door and the sound of the sea just past the pines where the campers gathered in the summer?   No matter, somewhere, sometime, in that continuum where you loved and lost and loved again, the beautiful sun, which sometimes glistened upon the water far beyond where the land’s fingers dipped into the Pacific, danced upon you for just that minute, that hour too long and left its destruction.

A fair-skinned, fiery redhead, Ireland may have been a natural fit but you made your home among the locals and they would tell you of their day’s tales as you pulled a beer or nudged two nips into a spirit glass.  The truth is I can only imagine the prior years.  My friend John breathed the same peninsula air for a while as he (and I, for one summer in 2005) did the rounds of that same camp amid the pines emptying rubbish bins and taking bookings.  That’s when I came to know you, larger than life, the complete hostess who introduced me to the concept of roasted lemons and the addition of Thomas and Bob the Builder into the November fourth alliance.  That beautiful and serene bay where you made your home but a place not unknown to the provocation of the crust’s disruption which had been known to send the Pacific cascading up the valley. 

Right from the start you had insisted that I meet your good friend; the two of us in separate spheres, each dealing with our own problems.  Meet we did, and our journey rises in an eager and hungry five-year-old whose life thrives and thirsts as your own wanes; him cruelly unaware of his existence owed to your insistence.  The cruelest of ironies.

We’ll return to that bay again and again to draw pictures in the sand and stare out at the ocean.  He will be the kid under a campervan-adorned sunhat, coated in zinc, whiter than a seagull’s breast still wondering what all the fuss is about.

For Sharron.


 Andrew Hawkey

Courante

I sit at the piano keyboard, reading through the Courante from Handel’s Suite in D minor. It’s a single page long, 40 bars, played moderato. There is white space, the music typeset generously so that the regular form of six quavers per bar, with spare minim and crotchet harmonies, appears to float on the paper. It’s far from Chopin’s frightening black waves, Lizst’s towering chord progressions or the relentless semi-quaver counterpoint of Bach.  Handel is spacious; minimalism before the word was invented. Only the lightest of touches is needed to bring the score to life.  I can hear what I read; simple ascending patterns, musical logic and moments of poignant beauty.

My hands touch the keyboard.  In the first bar, I stumble on a simple five-quaver phrase.  In the second bar, I run out of fingers to play both the melody and inner harmony.  By the third bar I’ve forgotten the key signature and play a graunching B natural.  I stop. 

Once, I learned to play the piano.  In the days before bike helmets, I pedaled the short distance to Mrs Sorenson’s for my weekly lesson. I glowed with pride at the row of neat ticks down the page of my theory book and played my pieces well enough to avoid her disappointed tone. Then freedom! Whizzing down the slope of her driveway, back home to television, a turn on the swing or seclusion with a book.

What would I say now to nine-year-old me, sitting alone at the piano in the cold front room? Half an hour of intended practice more and more often dwindling to ten minutes, five minutes, or none.   Did she care when the lessons were stopped?  What did she know of synaptic pathways and brain plasticity, of muscle memory? At nine, can she even imagine being 54 and recognising a lifetime of loss in the score of a simple Courante?


Rosemary McBryde

February

Several of our writers are hen enthusiasts and in recognition of the significant contribution that hens have made to the English language, the Artistic Director has promised several hen-related themes this year.  February is the first, with the starter being 'Home to Roost'. Feel free to interpret any way you like - inclusion of a hen in your writing is not compulsory! (Oh, and it's the Year of the Rooster if that helps.)

Send contributions of 300 - 500 words to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 28 February. Happy writing!