Wash Day

Tags

affair, Anya Riis, love, short story, story, tale, wash day, washing

“I’ve done something bad,” said Ruby, lying stretched out on the grass underneath the clothes line. She’d been squinting into the sun.

“Hmmmm?” said Lionel, as he bent and scooped another peg from the bag. “How bad?” he asked with a frown as he examined the neck of the shirts.

“Pretty bad,” muttered Ruby, turning on her side and picking at the lawn. She glanced up at Lionel again, trying to read his face.

“It’s got to do with you,” she finished.

The breeze picked up and stirred Lionel’s hair. He wiped his forehead and looked at the washing. There really is something in the snap of a piece of linen, flicked clean and pinched with pegs, he thought. There is something in the scent of wet, clean cloth that smacks of potential and the suggestion of what lies just around the corner. It’s neat. Ordered. Controllable. He sighed inwardly and looked down at Ruby.

“Do tell,” he said.

Ruby glanced away and prepared to speak to the lawn. In six years of marriage she’d never been able to master looking him in the eyes with her truths. She felt her eyes skid and flit, glancing him. Lionel waited. He was good at waiting.

“I’ve had an affair,” she began, taking a breath and faltering, her voice sounding robotic and far away.

There was a feeling like the sound when a stone falls into a pond. A reverberation and the air changed. Ruby felt her mouth go dry as Lionel gave nothing away. She couldn’t see his face clearly above her, framed by the endless empty haunch of blue. Now it was Ruby’s turn to wait. Ruby was no good at waiting.

The linen gave a satisfying crack in the breeze.

Lionel watched the washing circle, responding to the wind. ‘A washing line with neat whites aligned is something special,’ he thought.

Inside he felt the stone sinking into the cool pond depths.

“I know,” was all he said.

I dream

Tags

Anya Riis, bones, flat mouth, snippet, squat, tale, women

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.

Bottom of the Well

Tags

Anya Riis, Creative Writing, dream, falling, painting, pond, short story, sleep, tale, tumble, well

I can see you folded in on yourself like a sleeping winkle. You are bent like a pretzel, looking uncomfortable — but you are asleep, so there must be some degree of comfort. There is a shadow of consternation on your face, resting between your eyes and in the angle of your lips.

You are bunched. Crumpled. One shoulder juts out and up like a warning, holding the world at bay. A tangle of sheets might otherwise have been pleasant, but here they look more like swaddling or ties, binding you in a frustrated mess.

I look out the window, through the shimmered glass onto a dry garden of unforgiving soil. Inside it’s cool, but outside the day already begins to feel the harsh hand of heat behind it. It’ll be a few hours yet before the blowflies hide inside the porch and the dogs lie flat in a confused stupor.

You are asleep. So far away. I watch, looking for any movement in your eyes, like they do in books and movies. Apparently that is a sign that you are dreaming. REM sleep they call it. I imagine it is like watching a movie play out on the inside of your eyelids, and your sleeping body only has to settle back into its mental cinema chair and shovel in popcorn. I’m waiting for you to move your legs and arms like the dogs do when they see themselves in their own movies.

Fracture

Tags

Anya Riis, Creative Writing, fracture, kaleidoscope, short story, story, tale

Beautiful terrible. It’s always beautiful, and terrible.

Clack-clack, sway

Tags

Anya Riis, Creative Writing, mother, short story, story, tale, train

“I don’t know why you bother with him,” said her mother leaning over the bags that were placed between them. The reassuring clack-clack of the suburban train shuddered through Eliza’s feet as she frowned out the window. Outside frozen faces turned, bleached by sunlight, held for an instant then gone. Whipped trees. Lines of grass folding away.

Did You Know

Tags

boundaries, inner ear, love, short story, stirrup bone, tale

“The smallest bone in the body is the stirrup bone, located in the ear,” I said, while leaning against you and looking away towards the horizon.

“Is that so?” you replied, comfortably abstracted, occupied with something invisible in the middle distance.

“Yes, it’s the bone that quivers with sound and moves it from the outside of you to the inside,” I said. “I think it is a translator.”

“How so?” you said. “How can a bone translate?”

How indeed?