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Australian Gothic
Movotti
Posts: 7,774 Member
- It is hot. Sweat runs down your neck and makes your back itch. Your shirt sticks to your skin. “It will be winter soon,” people say wistfully. “The weather will turn.” The weather does not turn. The sun blazes overhead.
- You walk barefoot on concrete until your feet burn and crack. You keep walking on. You are strong. You do not know where you are going, but you keep walking.
- “Beware,” they teach you as a child. “Beware the spiders. Beware the snakes. Beware the crocodiles. Beware the emus and the kangaroos. Beware the trees. Beware everything.”
- “Nice day for it, isn’t it?” people ask. You are not doing anything. You do not know what it is. But you nod and smile and say, “It is.”
- There’s an old man who lives in a small town in the middle of nowhere. “Bloody tourists,” he says. There are no tourists, not here, yet he curses them still.
- “I remember the bushfires a few years ago,” says someone who has lived in a city all their life. You do not tell them that there are bushfires every year. There are bushfires now. You can smell the smoke. You smile.
- Tony Abbott is on tv again, speaking robotically. You wonder what he has done now. His image ripples. You see scales instead of skin. You change the channel.
- It is winter. At last. You ask the teacher to turn on the heater. “It gives off toxic fumes,” the teacher says. “We have to open the window above it.” She turns the heater on, opens the window, and the temperature of the room drops by five degrees. “One day the department of education will replace the heaters,” she tells you hopefully. But you know the truth: the toxic heaters will remain.
- The bonfire blazes. You stand in a ring around it. “Tell a scary story,” someone begs. “Alright,” you say. You take a breath and utter the dreaded name. “Pauline Hanson.”
• there is a spider on your wall; you look closer, and it has a human face. it tells you it’s name is dave, and offers to pay rent. you kill it anyway. you have learned not to fall for their lies.
• whenever it storms, the power goes out. the phones go out. the water goes out. your mother goes out. she does not return. it is dark and someone else is in the room with you. they are breathing very loudly. you cannot see where they are.
• you try to catch a train. there is litter all over the train floor. trash on the seats. filth coats the walls. the walls are made of garbage. the train is a garbage heap, yet someone it still moves. none of the other passages seem to notice.
• in the summer, you hear bats outside. the bats hear you, too. you hide, as best you can, praying they do not find you.
• the prime minster is a lizard-thing wearing a human skin. it intends to kill us all. you know this. everyone knows this. you do not talk about it. you are not sure how you know it. you are terrified.
• “the weather is lovely, isn’t it,” everyone says, as bushfires burn outside. firefighters are appearing out of thin air to combat the blaze. there are thousands of them. they aren’t enough. “Lovely,” the people continue to say. “Lovely.”
• there are always tourists everywhere. none of them are from other countries, but they are not from this country, either. you never find out where they come from. you never find out where they go when they leave.
• old men sit on their verandas with sharpened sticks, muttering about the new zealanders, and war. you have never actually seen a new zealander. you aren’t sure if they are real.
• hundreds people in the streets are brawling. they appear to be on two clear teams. one team screams “AFL.” the other screams, “NRL.” they are killing each other. they say they will not stop until the supreme sport is determined once and for all.
• you go to the beach everyday. the beach goes to you. the beach says it loves you and only you. you know it is lying. it says that to everyone. you continue going everyday.
• winter is a myth. everyone knows this. the weatherman tries to convince the people otherwise. the weatherman is made fun of by a mildly humorous newspaper comic, and is never heard from again.
• the television is bad. it is awful. it is sickening. you watch it every night. you want to stop, but you can’t.
• “everything here is on the coast,” you tell a traveller from overseas. “there’s nothing inland. Nothing.” you hope it is enough to stop him from going inland. if it goes inland he will find It. no one can ever find It. if they do, everything will be over.
- everybody notices the strange, everchanging weather. nobody mentions the change of month. nobody acknowledges autumn.
- cyclists start wearing ice cream tubs. pedestrians don their sunglasses. you protect ourselves from the birds, but never fight them. they were here first. you know your place.
- the ground is so parched that it trips you just for a taste of liquid. any liquid will do. there are more scabbed knees in the summertime.
- the warnings of ‘road slippery when wet’ makes you wonder what happened on this road to call for such signs, and why you’ve never heard of any incidents involving such conditions on the news.
- nobody stops the train for the kilometres of bushland and desert towns that the railway line runs through. nobody wants to know what would happen if the train stops. somebody is waiting at one of the stops. the driver ignores them.
- the beach is flocked year long, no matter the weather, despite the heat. the coast is populated. the desert and deserted in the centre of the continent is never talked about. you live in silent fear, worried what lives in woop woop will eventually reach the coast.
Anyone else entertained by Australian Gothic?
2
Comments
I still like the irony though.
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