Stray Bats Read online

  And she laughed, tossing the paw in her hand. At last, she said, smiling down on me, I have found someone properly useful!

  A Small Affair

  I had a tiny husband, no bigger than my thumb. He made himself, of walnut shell, a fiddle just his size; he strung a bow of sparrow bone with hair of my own head. He rosined it with finest dust that floats through sunbeams, and played and played his needling music. It stitched my days; it quietened all my doings; I crept about my chores, while he music’d on the sill, the thread of it between us.

  He gave me tiny children, almost too small to see. He tended them on the table, and I brought crumbs, and thimbles for their bathing. They grew and went adventuring about the house like moths, singing and calling to each other. Then each packed his tiny kerchief, her tiny sack, and set off to Outside.

  My husband died, old-aged, when I was still a girl-wife. Oh, my little love, his wisp of white beard down to his knees. I stitched him up in silk and put him in the churchyard, between the oak-tree’s roots where no-one larger would be buried.

  Then came men a-courting, to the rich widow, to the woman who knew love already. I married again, two fine full-heighted men one after the other; great children I laboured to give them, who slowly grew to meet us face to face, their every mood and thought writ large and clear.

  But my first love lies, bird bones in stained satin, in the oak’s shadow. His goods I keep in an ebony box, the clothing impossibly small, the silent fiddle and bow. And every autumn when the leaves start to blow, our grandchildren scale the doorpost and hail me, and bring me news of the giant world out there, its wonders, its terrors.

  Spring Visitor

  He arrived late, when I had shut up the house and turned inward toward sleep.

  By morning he had opened his ship; it was tilted against my field wall like a giant pot-lid and he was working at something behind the rim.

  I could not walk too close to such strangeness. I stood on my back step awhile, then went inside and doubled the bread mixture.

  He came to the door as the light was going. He was not quite a man as I knew men, but close enough, I thought. Our eyes were level, and our blood was warm, and we were both curious how the other lived. We attempted conversation; when we tired of that an amiable silence prevailed between us.

  I never looked closely at the vessel, the vehicle. He worked on it every day, crossing between shed and ship. The house was where he came for food and ideas; the dog and the lambs grew accustomed to him, as of course did I. He browsed from object to object through my rooms; I mimed and sketched explanations. He tried out isolated words with his strange mouth.

  For those few weeks leading into spring, no visitors came. I drove him to the Falls and to the lookout; he seemed to understand views. The workings of the utility amused him, that it was pinned to roads, that it must trundle along the ground.

  He had no more idea of farewells than he had of greetings. He left only a bleached circle of weeds in the field.

  He didn’t like to hold or be held close. Best was forearms’ length, where we could regard each other’s faces, try to read them and fail. His laughter was rare and thin. I could never begin to imagine what his eyes had seen.

  Dormitory

  Last night I rose from my bed, turned over in the air and pressed my back against the ceiling. Down below, the filtered moon- and streetlight split that sleeping stranger into selves, cards fanned in a hand, each from a different pack.

  Here was that baby bird, unconscious of self or sex and never to be enlightened.

  Here were two women. One was solid; she perspired, and sprawled in such abandon that only her sleeping saved her from embarrassment. The other curved, an ink-stroke in the sheets, fading and clarifying with the changing light. And neither was aware the other breathed. Neither saw me watch them from above. Neither turned or knew the man between them.

  He lay, a loose bag, discarded, a fug of puzzlement and sadness. It was out of him that this other of all the me’s, the one that rose, that saw, had withdrawn itself, only those moments past.

  Today I wake and find myself alone, with none beside, beneath, above, around me. But there’s a gruffness when I clear my throat, a chip of cheep-noise in my free-est laughter.

  Witches of a Certain Age

  Witches of a certain age are waking up

  mid-life, mid-cast sometimes. Birth and death,

  though more solemnly acknowledged every year,

  hold less fear, those borders over which

  they’ve ushered so many now, so often—

  the multitude become faceless,

  the raw edges worn away,

  the panic a distant memory.

  Days flit by like cards shuffled and passed,

  laid and read and shuffled again for the next fortune,

  all alike as people are, yet all fingerprinted with their own

  light, weather and speed of passing. Witches

  of a certain age are waking to the sound

  of their own voice—through the long dark hours

  it has spoken its spells without them. In their habit

  of tidying, of shatter-and-mending, of enlivening

  their own few square inches, their corner of the universe,

  they are waking before dawn to bear arms

  in the victory of this one day over eternal night,

  the turning out of each last trench of darker machinations

  into this moment of clarity, where they hold stilly, lightly,

  all that they’ve learnt and done and been

  between two handfuls of unborn awareness.

  Witches of a certain age—laughing as this

  lightness melts off them—are rolling onto their sides,

  planting their big strong feet on the cold floor

  rising from their pallets and reaching for their mounts and

  exiting by the window,

  freeing themselves of the earth and its fears

  and its constant striving to disarm them, they are speeding

  like stealth-ships over the edge of the known,

  howling with glee as the familiar falls behind,

  pouring themselves into the strangeness ahead

  in that enormity where they always belonged, having told

  neither client nor acolyte, coven nor priest

  only left as sign and spoor of their truest nature

  the saltpetre stink of their burning up—faster and brighter

  than human eyes can follow—that phantasmagorical fuel

  found only in witches of a certain age.

  To a Mentee

  There’s no money in this, mister, don’t you fool yourself. Doesn’t matter how hard you pander to the gentry, and scrape the coins and kind from out the poor. Who cares how much lavender and ambergris you cook up, how many old rhymes you water down with conquerors’ prayers and wreath around your assemblages? You’ll never be more than a rung above the average beggar.

  All that lore packed into you, tight as bound sheaves? It’s only in bed-time tales that that’s ever spun into gold.

  Unless you resort to balder forms of trickery, you’ll never live in luxury. There’ll be some reward—a first-born handed over in terror, a pie left on your step with the cook’s son fleeing into the fog, a crow that will let you woo it and turn up showily slaughtered one day. None of these will keep that other visitor, the wolf, from your door.

  The Evidence

  At the back of her drawer I found it, the cold wax doll of myself. I recognised my hands; my left was clutched at my chest just like that. I saw my indeterminate hair in those blobs, and the anxious push forward of my head. Did she hate me, or only coolly model what she saw?

  There were hairs moulded into the wax that could only be mine. The belly looked tampered with—maybe my tooth was
buried there that she’d so swiftly taken possession of, that time.

  I laid the doll back where I’d found it, pulled the drawer out farther and pressed down the clothing. Talismans lay across the drawer-back, every tiny gift I had ever carried home for her in my pockets—shells from Chancy Beach, that marble I found beside the cart-wheel in the market, the handkerchief, lace edged, with the violets stitched in the corner, the jar of pea-pebbles with the water that brightened them. All along, I saw, I’d been trying to appease her—all along, I’d been playing into her hands.

  The front door slammed. Her gaze locked onto me through floor and walls, and I knew she could hear my very breathing. Her swift feet mounted the stairs. Everything informed me as she came, so that as she appeared at the door, chin high, hands still among her skirts, I was throwing back the rug to show the pattern chalked and charcoaled there, the burn marks and the wax drops and the scatter of charred stalks.

  I had expected this to be my triumph. Instead, she became magnificent and careless before me, and I was filled with nothing but shame.

  Dragon

  The rope strained, creaking, with the weight. Eleven strong men and Big Beth, it took, to haul the thing aloft by Swordsmith’s pulley. Then there it hung, heavy as a prize steer, gaudy as a midsummer dancer—though its colours were fading as a trout’s do, and the fire had gone out of its eye.

  Smith with his stick poked the lolling black tongue aside to jam the jaws open. There were the teeth that had terrified us, in motionless row; Smith tested one with his callused thumb, dropped his arm, regarded the full hung weight of the dead thing, become un-monster, shrunk to mass, to meat, to relic.

  The blood broke out of its pool on the forge floor and ran for the door. Those closest stepped back, from the stain and the stink. Dying magic still has the thrill of danger in it, even as it fades. But it quickly corrupts the blood, and through the rot also came the tang of the hoard the creature had sat over, all these long years—stagnant wealth of metal and rare stone, unglimmering in that lightless cave.

  Smith took off his shirt then, knelt and reached up the throat. His face a moving picture, so that we encountered with him what he found. Up the throat and into the still scalding stomach. Men hissed around me at the thought of touching that muck. Then Smith calmed; his face went stony and his whole body changed, from exploring to withdrawing.

  The arm fell—like a branch, like a ham. We all reared back, crept forward, flinched again, bending, straightening, covering our mouths, shaking our heads at each other, or looking away to control ourselves. The skin was charred and blistered, but it bubbled also with whatever dissolves you inside a dragon. Stomach juice, and fire magic, dragon-wrath and contempt. It shimmered and soaked. It moved, too, a kind of recoil like a lightly stepped on grub. Even Smith’s big boy Davey had to steady himself with the rim of the waterbutt.

  Smith himself neither flinched nor grimaced. He went for the neck, slitting the flesh round neatly under the scales, parting it to hack at the windpipe and spine with a hatchet. Someone would want the head—the mayor, to mount it on the wall at the town hall, or perhaps the wife back home, wherever that was. It took more than one blow to get through the spine. The head lay on the forge floor, powerless yet undiminished. Those eyes had still seen what they’d seen, that mind and those teeth had done what they’d done.

  And then Davey, all business to show he’d recovered, took his butcher knife and opened the beast’s front. The steaming bowels slithered forth; he heaved the weighted stomach out on top of them.

  The dogs were moving all around us, excited by the blood, repelled by something in the smell. They circled, darting forward, ducking blows. Even now, when I think of Smith—so delicate with his hatchet blade, as if enough violence had been done that day—spreading before us what was left of the man who’d done this for us, it is always to the sound of the dogs’ whining, to the skitter of their frightened paws.

  Fritzel

  I will consider my K9 Fritzel

  For he is the sweetest of all companion droid prototypes

  3D printed from tweaked Thingiverse files of which he

  In his own way is a reflection,

  Insinuating his cumbrous, many-segmented body

  With hastily smoothed program hitches

  Between the chairs and table as

  Urged on by his excited assembler,

  He pursues the shimmying Rat™

  Taking to the curtain folds—and missing,

  Drops back, corrects, stands swaying, processing.

  He hears the remote’s commands through

  An embedded unit of great ingenuity

  A beautiful brain in a less-than-optimal housing.

  Questing for Snax™ and Rewards™ his

  Shining black “nose” makes a plastic hiss across the carpet

  While I his master fondly watch his over-engineered torso

  So pointlessly elongated, and his snuffling “personality”

  Of which I am unduly proud and pray

  That everyone will love him as I do

  That the public will print him from freeware by the million.

  Feejee Mermaid

  I never thought she would be so big. I suppose I was thinking of fish and of children, of beings overpowered by men. But she was Mam-sized. Glassed in, her features stretched and blurred, she filled her vessel almost completely, settled on her thick, gleaming tail.

  The family that had come in with me were gone to the next booth now, taunting the Manchurian Ape.

  Oh, she’s so ugly, the mother had said, relieved.

  Shame her arms are there like that, said the man, and the mother had slapped his sleeve.

  Has she got arms? had said the boy.

  Course she has, said his dad. What do you think those are? And he’d reached over the red rope and tapped the glass.

  Oh, how she’d flinched! Every part of her had tried to thrust away into water shadows, but she’d had no room.

  And we’d flinched back. The man said! hissed the mother. We weren’t to touch!

  The dad had shrugged.

  Muck stirred up from the bottom. It floated around the Mermaid’s face, past her unseeing eyes, into her mouth. Her eyes rolled up as if she’d fainted, then stared again. She breathed her small ration of water through slots in her throat. That was her only movement. She was just like a caught fish in a tub, keeping still to stay alive.

  Now they were gone and I stood alone, holding up my ticket-stub like a shield. Shrieks and roars came from next door, and the sideshow man yammered outside. And here in the canvas room, all around the glass-borne woman and the marvelling boy, the ghost of the great cold ocean swarmed.

  Peeping

  Tonight, the moon’s a flicked fingernail clipping, snagged above the dark flats opposite. The street’s empty—not even a cat strolls there.

  Last week, one of those kitchens was lit up like a stage. Two young beldams were vigorously cooking up mice—kneading, stirring, straining. A fey boy with calculated curls gathered their efforts into bamboo cages. Steam poured from a pot just out of sight, furiously boiling.

  Two floors up, a woman was taking out a man’s heart. That room was dim, maybe only candlelit. Her wet hands shone, rescuing the heart from the darkness inside him. He leaned back, mouth wide, and she trembled with laughter or horror—I couldn’t tell which.

  Now the cold has come through all my clothing. Dew touches my face. Across the street, featureless black window-squares, pot plants crowding forward into the new moon’s little light.

  Acknowledgments

  Pieces in this book were inspired by the following poems and are published with the approval of the poets or, where applicable, their copyright holders.

  “A Wind Age”—“Poem for Nina” by L. K. Holt, in Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray (eds), Australian Poetry Since 1788, Unive
rsity of New South Wales Press, Sydney, NSW, 2011.

  “Kites in the fog”—“She-oaks in the grey mist were roaring like trains” by Coral Hull, in Michael Brennan and Peter Minter (eds), Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, Fine Art Publishing, St Leonards, NSW, 2000.

  “Maiden”—“The Heron” by Nicolette Stasko, Black Night with Windows, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1994. Published with permission of Nicolette Stasko, c/o Curtis Brown Australia.

  “More Information to Help You Get to Rookwood”—“More Information to Help You Get to Rookwood (Email Subject Heading from Urban Sketchers)” by Carol Jenkins, in Xn, Puncher & Wattman, Glebe, NSW, 2013.

  “Sail Away”—“One Doll Less” by Jane Frank, Not Very Quiet online journal, , published 13 March 2019, accessed 16 March 2019.

  “Stray Bats”—“Stray Birds 1–10 (after Rabindranath Tagore)” by Lizz Murphy, in Mark Tredinnick (ed.), Australian Love Poems 2013, Inkerman & Blunt Publishers, Carlton South, Vic., 2013.

  “Shrunken Alice”—“I Am, I” by Jill Jones, in The Beautiful Anxiety, Puncher & Wattman, Glebe, NSW, 2014.

  “Flight to Loreto”—“My dream mother” by Beth Spencer, in Never Too Late, Press Press, Berry, NSW, 2018.

  “Familiars”—“Domesticated” by Penni Russon, “Eglantine’s Cake” blog, , published 12 January 2017, accessed 25 February 2019.

  “Shore”—“The Furthest Shore” by Nandi Chinna, in Swamp: Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain, Fremantle Press, North