She crouches beneath the nectarine tree, picking the windfall among a chorus of worms and rats who also fought for the flesh. A breeze shuffles the plastic bags tied to the branches, a flutter of spectral scarebirds that turn white as they met the sky. The fruit is still hard, green, weeks from ripeness, dewy and cool.
"Too early," she murmurs.
"You're so impatient." Her father's semi-joking criticism. The nectarine doesn't fall far from the tree — he is rustling among the branches to steal fruit.
"Please don't," she wails, embarrassed. They are in country Victoria, picking up a kelpie pup. There are orange trees on the long drive to the farm sheds bright amongst the crisp yellow grass. He plucks the oranges anyway, runs a fingernail through the skin and splits it in two, offering one to each daughter. The juice is warm and sweet-sour and their faces pucker. He picks another, eats it with mock gusto, or perhaps just ordinary gusto. It is hard to tell.
In the late summer, they are on the hot Great Ocean Road while he throws apples down to them. The girls scream as the fruit breaks over the asphalt and they tumble the caught apples in their t-shirts and then onto the crimson back seat of the Holden. Mum rolls her eyes but they know she will make pie.
She ignores him and picks up the secateurs to snip a wind broken twig. Her hips ache as she stands. His voice follows, rustling amongst the pointed leaves, his finger wagging at her like the branches disturbed by blackbirds and swarms of wrens. "You aren't getting any younger."
They were running down the road with the kelpie close. It has no choice—her father barks at her to heel. She has her yellow shorts on and her legs are brown. Her lungs burn, but she runs uphill to please him. "You gotta keep moving," he says. "I wanted to be a PE teacher." He races her up the Bells Beach stairs and always wins. Plank challenges on the Persian rug. Warrior pose, focus sharp. "Take a lungful of that sea air!", he shouts. "Salt water fixes everything!"
At his bedside, he takes his last painful, moaning breaths. "What happens after?" he wheezes. "All this time, I never thought I'd die."
She crosses the yard, brushing dirt from her knees. The monstera’s leaves curl like green hands, cupping the cracked tiles of the courtyard. In her grandmother’s garden, turtles amble under the cool foliage. Their shells are painted - they align like a testudinal flag.
"I can't smell anything," her grandmother says.
She tells her that the wisteria smells like passionfruit. The monstera doesn’t fruit in this cool part of the world, but they do in her grandmother’s garden. "Here," the old woman says, handing her the fruit. She doesn't know what to do with it.
"Put a strawberry in each container," her grandmother says. The girls throw misshapen red berries into the stewed apricots they had picked that morning, from a tree where plastic bags snapped like bird wings. Mosquitoes bite, and vinegar-soaked cotton balls soothe the sting. They sit in the sun house where pots of dieffenbachia and spider plants catch the sunlight on shelves of dusty glass. That winter, the apricots will sit in margarine containers on the bench, the ice defrosting, warmed in the microwave and dolloped with ice cream. Compote was a foreigners word, as is strudel.
The water wraps around her body, cold and insistent. She strokes out, letting the pull of the tide take her further, where the light loses its sharp edges and the hot sky blurs.
"You should be more careful," her father says. "You aren’t getting any younger."
The dirt from underneath the nectarine tree rinses from her fingernails and is eaten by fishlings. A stingray flies beneath her.
"I know."
"You never listen."
The waves ululate. The salt stings the barbed wire cuts on her arms. She can hear her father’s breath beside her, his hands breaking the surface, pacing even strokes, the water parting the black hairs on his forearms.
"I thought you’d die here," she whispers. "Not in bed."
A pause. The sound of water moving. It laps against her board. The rail lines smooth.
Then: "So did I."
The forest floor is damp, the air thick with pine. Wally steps carefully, eyes scanning for the telltale mounds among the fallen leaves. The round cap of ceps. She listens to the birds. She wonders how different Australian forests are from Ebersberger, the dense and ancient woodland where mist clings to the trees like children and the fallen needles have been gathering for centuries. She prays to the cathedral columns of fir, beech, and spruce.
She is not sure she is happy that Ludwig is back, but that is the echo of war talking. He has been gone for some time. She has two small boys to feed. Hans, the youngest, is mischievous, like the mushrooms he loves. She plucks chanterelles which will be fed to a watery soup.
"Oma?" she says, and the moss shakes her hand solemnly goodbye. She watches her dead grandmother walk down the path and disappear. She does not yet realize that the old woman will follow her to Australia and sit at the edge of her garden, darning a threadbare sock, as she ties plastic bags to the apricot tree. "Be resolute," her oma calls sternly.
The woods startle. A brown doe looks at her and winks. "You need to be strong," she says. As she exits the forest, the animals form a line. A lone fox bows its head.
"Goodbye, Walburga," they whisper.
She ignores them and instead listens to the more sensible groaning of the trees, whispering what she needs to do to survive.
"You always know where to look," her grandmother says. She smells Schwarzkopf hair spray and China Oil. They both have headaches. Both of them think of men who did not support them and tire them in unimaginable ways.
She closes her fingers around the stem, twisting gently. It releases it's telltale citrus scent. "You taught me."
A hand on her shoulder—light, fleeting. Her breath catches on the wind that shifts through the trees. She never once said "I love you" back. But there are other ways, she supposes, to love a granddaughter. A wallet full of notes. A backpack. An insistent piece of advice that she needs no man to survive. In Berlin, she sips a beer and writes a eulogy. The sun shifts across the page. "Vielen Dank, Nana" she writes at the end of a eulogy, aware of the poetry of it all.
At night, she sits at the kitchen table, grating potatoes until their juice runs grey, soaking them in cold water, squeezing them in a tea towel. Handfuls of parsley and fresh eggs. Wood blewitts from the gum forest where the cows wander. She’s not allowed to trespass there, but her grandmother climbs the fence first, the barbed wire piercing her ghostly skin. She is very old, and her skin is like paper, slicing easily. Wallabies nod at them from a safe distance.
The smell of oil warming in the pan fills the house.
Her grandmother’s hands, green with parsley from her turtled garden, move over hers, ghosting the motions. "Kartoffelpuffer must be crisp, not soft."
"I remember."
Her father leans against the granite island bench. He is enthusiastically drawing something on paper while she dollops the potato mix into the pan.
"You do make a mess," he says. "How did you learn to cook so well?"
She laughs, forgetting she is alone. She turns the heat down because she wants to please him, wants them not to burn. The edges crisp nicely. She checks tomorrow’s surf report.
"Coming, Dad?" she asks.
They are seated beside her, whisperinh in her ear, walking with her through the trees, through the water.
On the paper is a drawing of the patio she has been struggling to visualize. The angle of the roof, the size of the poles, the stylistic features - it makes sense now. If she can find the money, perhaps they can bring his vision to life.
"Are you cooking mushrooms?" he says. "I am starving". She tells him to be patient.
I struggled writing this. My intention was to create a kind of magic realist piece, where dream and reality blend. I would have liked to have more fantastical elements, but I think I succeed a little with the two ghosts that intertwine in the woman's life. It's not that hard to understand the woman is me. I didnt realize my grandmother would appear but it made sense as I moved back and forward in time. I tried to create a dream like, haunting state where memories and reality, the present and the past, become confused. Such is grief, trying to find your footing in an altered world. Sometimes you don't think about it at all. Sometimes the dead crash in. Image created in Chat GPT - Dad would be insulted at the portly middle as he was always very fit but I ran out of my daily credits trying to generate an image. The woman in the woods should also be younger - Nana came to Australia with two very young boys in toe. One can spend too long on things.
Also, I had no idea where to drop my post. Everytime I put this kind of content in a writing community I'm told off for some reason or another, asked to add photos of remove photos or give up a percent of rewards or hand over my second born grandchild so if you could point me to a welcome, warm community that accepts this kind of writing I'd appreciate it!
Tagging @owasco, as she wanted to read this from my concept comment the other day. Not sure if I quote pulled it off.
💕💕💕
You have left me in tears.
When I first started reading this, I thought "This needs to be edited. I can't tell what is going on." Then I understood! Memories are time travel. You were there, they were here, I could then go happily, skippingly, along with you all. I have taken this same walk a great many times.
This story is wonderful. Not finished perhaps. But wonderful.
No one would chastise you in freewriters community, or ask you to do anything differently. There are few large curators rewarding that community at present though, so the rewards are less. Still, I feel an enormous gratitude to them.
thank you for your beautiful story.
YES! You nailed it - and perhaps I kinda did too, if you understood it. As I said last week, I was trying to use a similiar structure to the novel I'd read, which I found confusing at first but then as I understood how it related to his larger theme, I found it interesting. I love experimenting with structure like this as it pushes me out of my comfort zone.
Of course, it needs further editing, but you know what HIVE stories are like - sometimes it's better just to publish and be done with it lest you spend time on something no one will understand or read haha!
Thanks for reading, and pushing me to writing. I didn't realise I could post in Freewriters - I honestly don't need the chastisement. I wish some other communities just had a white list so I didn't have to bother with that. When you have been around a while you expect to be trusted.
Writing doesn't get high rewards on HIVE, I can finely admit. We do it because we love the process - and of course engagement from our writing friends xx
When I read
I was thinking you and your Dad.
I think that there is always something magical with seeing a stag posing with his antlers.. so very monarch of the glen.
It is hard to write about magic and the reality of grief blending as one! However, grieving is a process that we have all been through to various degrees. Being a Silver Blogger you are more than welcome to write here, it could be cathartic.
Thankyou! Yes, it's definitely Dad in character. we are so alike.
We have a family of white stag in the national park down here - they are elusive but when you spot them in the fog in Autumn early in the morning it's like you've been blessed.
Thanks so much for being so kind. I love the Silver Bloggers - not least because it was my idea haha! So glad Lizzy took the stag by the horns, so to speak!
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