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I dream of stories that involve short, squat women who lean from leg to leg when they walk, as if their knees don’t bend. I think of them with sour faces and slightly blemished skin, arms folded across their chests. I see them plan to catch the bus into town, or turning to shout and gesture at recalcitrant doughy-faced children.

I see their angry meanness that started when they were 16, a sharp acridity that grabbed them when they were smoking Alpines behind the council toilets in the netball park. The anger never left them. It has since been joined with a sense of right and entitlement, a blank stare and a quickly raised temper. They swear hard like troopers, with black eyeliner drawn harshly under their eyes. They once read a magazine story that black eyeliner would make them look ’smokily dangerous’, but in truth all it does is narrow their piggy raisin eyes and draw attention their sloping mouths.

They smell slightly musty. Their scent is a tinny dampness overlaid with a sweet false note of watermelon from a supermarket brand deodorant.

I see them in Kmart clothing and leggings from Supre. They wear plastic jewellery that is meant to look like silver, but doesn’t.

They are the young-old with false nails that click like dead men’s bones.

They told her it was going to be easy.

‘Simple,’ they said, ‘like riding a bike.’

She’d only nodded at the time and didn’t dare tell them of her memories of pedalling while her dad held onto the back of her new two-wheeler bike with the pink plastic streamers flying at the handlebars, and him letting go, and her hitting the gutter and banging her pelvic bone hard on the bike bar.

That had hurt.

They talk about boys having tender nether regions, but no one talked about how the impact would make her eyes water and how she couldn’t tell her dad where it hurt because, well, all of a sudden she just couldn’t. Her underarms had gone all sticky and hot, and she’d refused to cry.

This was going to be straightforward then, was it? She wanted to believe it would be.

Everything had come kind of easily to her, she supposed, and this was just another challenge, or a setback, nothing permanent. Looking around the bustle of people in the cold, clean room who looked like they knew what they were doing, she felt a familiar sensation settle in her stomach like she was lying underneath three folded wet wool blankets.

She didn’t like the smile of that starched young woman. It was a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and she was holding her paperwork to her chest, marking it with a pen now and again. That concerned her, the pen marking. All of a sudden she felt old. Frail. Fallible.

But people go through worse everyday, she told herself as she ran her hand over her chestbone and breathed slowly through the panic. We all have to learn new ways of living and simply being. We are perennial survivors, she told herself. Doesn’t matter what you chuck at the human race, we still come through it like some nasty infection, just feeding off something or someone different.

The lights of the machine were coolly blinking, awaiting their instruction.

She noted her aged hand and clicked.

“Thank you for using internet banking,” the screen read. “Would you like to make another transaction?”

“She has a lunch date, and her life is all separate, and full of sunny-smelling skin and panty lace. I just have grisly fucken reality, uninvited with its smell of escalator motors and blood, and whirrs and beeps that suck away your shine. Dreams are so damn perfect, but reality just always tugs the other way.”

You ask me to define myself, and I am tongue tied. You look to me with expectation and all I do is fiddle with my fingers. There is this loud silence that passes between us, and you chew on the words, mashing and squeezing them into a pulpy mass.

But I do not speak. I find it difficult to explain.

This is because the words I have make little, if no, sense. I start to speak them, and when they are about to leave my mouth they turn to chalk. And so I stop, falter and about turn.

I believe I have been hooked with an enormous upholstery needle, sinking in under my ribs and coming out again at the base of my throat. When my chest cavity opened I felt a flock of birds escaping. Now, right now, I am held by that hook – complete with the choked sensation cutting off my air – and I am above the ground, arched back against the shining piercing.

You sigh at me, infuriated by my silence. More hurt than confused. You look to me, and throw your words towards me onto the ground. We both look at them. You want me to pick them up.

But I cannot.

I am ensnared in this hook and line, I want to say. I am thirled, wrought through and wrested above the earth. I want to tell you of the cool thrust of the metal hook, wider than my wrist that sinks through my flesh and leaves it again. I stumble over my thoughts of the hook that exits my throat, and run my hands over the soft nook at the base. It is so tender there.

Without the words from me, you sit with your own in your hands. I see you looking at them, turning them over and wondering at their perceived lack of power. You are seeking their faults, looking for their dents and scratches.

I want to run my hands over yours to say that it is not the fault of your words, none at all.

The tug of the hook is real and fundamental. The sensation of tow and suck is overwhelming, pulling me forward in a direction that I did not plan. The elegant bend of this hooked needle has a cold glow. The pain is bitter, but gives me a gasp of understanding and reminder. I hang from this hook, suspended and released simultaneously.

I know I need to say these things. I can see your face waiting for the words to be said. My mouth is full of chalk.

There is the burst of a sigh escaping my parted lips. My breath blows cold.

Drowned girl

I was thinking of you today when I was staring out of the car window. The rain was dribbling at an angle down the glass, spinning away hypnotically and pulled by motion. Don’t you ever feel for the drops? They join, merge, split and flow on and down and away. They come together, argue, separate, and disappear.

When I focus on the slipping slide of tears, I can never make out the lights and the road. The red rear lights become a blur and the black fold of road melds.

With my eyes out of focus I know I’m travelling just out of reach of that shadow. It yawns in front of me, opaque and still, like a mouth. I can change gear and check my shoulder, like I did when you were last in the car. I see the shadow shuttle ahead with its open invitation. It’s moving in time with me, keeping pace and knowing my breath.

You always thought I was a little weird.

I wanted to tell you that I think that the shadow is made of anticipation. My anticipation. I can feel it. It keeps skidding out of my reach in the rain. I talked to you about this the last time. It is that sense I have. The sense that tells me that my life is one beat out of time, half a step behind, looking out of only one eye. The shadow is the feeling I get when I think the party is happening somewhere else, and I’m perturbed that I’ve been sent to the wrong address. I remember you cocking your eyebrow and you thought I didn’t notice.

So I stopped at the traffic lights, wondering at the shadow that slowed with me. People crossed through it, walking straight into it like it didn’t exist. The darkness washed over them like a cloud over the sun. They stood in my shadow of anticipation. Lucky people. They knew something I didn’t.

But it’s all a bit silly talking about the anticipation now, well, since you left. Now all I have is this cloud, the one you’d call regret.

Out from his grandfather’s satchel

James took a pair of flying goggles

He stole out of the house

and down the path

to the street

Parked in the laneway

was a shiny red plane

the street lights glimmered off its surfaces

and it called out to James

‘James…

come fly me…’

so James scooted on board

popped the goggles over his eyes

and quietly turned the key

He didn’t want anyone to hear him,

but he needn’t have worried

The plane took off

silently, like a sigh

So there he was

high above the sleepy streets

in his butternut pyjamas

all prepared

he knew what to do

He flew low over the fields out of the city

and just missed the tops of the misty mounts

he waved at the bats

and raced the owls

till he came closer to his destination

It was a tiny place on the map

if you blinked you’d miss it

but James knew what to do

He put the shiny plane on autopilot

and took out his pencil

and his notebook

he switched on the convenient little light

that the plane had

and wrote these words

“I’m just above your head.

“I really cannot stay, although I’d like to

“I looked down and saw the light on

“and thought I’d let you know

“I’ve brought a message from up North

“She loves you

“She loves you

“and she wishes she was here to give you this message herself”

James rolled it up

around the marble he’d carried

and sealed it with the paperclip

and he dropped it down

It fell onto the roses

where he knew it would be found

Then James turned his plane for home

he was really very tired

So he put the plane on autopilot

and she flew him all the way home

inspired in part by Eveline Tarunadjaja

Amazing artist Catrin from Switzerland works with multimedia images, tearing them up and reworking them digitally. More of her work can be found at her Red Bubble address.