Many things: Artist, Explorer, Historian, Thinker –

More aesthete than athlete,

You are everything but a jogger.

Breath quickens, pace slows,

Feet take a voluntary redundancy,

And you shift down

Into those numerous other vocations.

A cockatoo, battered grey

By the elements of prehistory,

Glides over treetops, pterodactile death rattle

Rasping at rooftops.

A haggard paperbark staggers towards you,

Flayed skin and wiry hair, his groaning

Has cracked the footpath

With the weight of the years.

You dodge a bird

On the wire above

And hear with satisfaction

The glutinous slap behind you.

Cross a cemetery of colossal stones

Dedicated to pioneer settlers,

And to Commodores who died of arrow-wounds.

Moss clings to time.

You catch a dog’s sodden tennis ball

Bounced off some pyramidal headstone,

Fetid but endearing,

Like a dug-up Snoopy.

Heave it back to the heavens,

Pivot homeward,

Dragging your feet

To a jog once more.

Two decaying gum leaves bottle the light

In final, brittle remembrance of a day.

Soon, you are breathless again,

But refilled with something else.

Isabelle knew that they both knew what was going to happen, so she’d ordered a coffee and fled to the bathroom. Backing out already. But then, really, he was always ignoring her, commenting on other girls, pretending she was too much; that they were going too fast. He was always careful to let her know he had other options, preferences, things and girls to do. And that he didn’t care about her, of course.

Comforted, Isabelle had gone back out and declared, before she’d even sat down, “This isn’t working – I don’t want to go out with you any more!”

Harry looked momentarily flabbergasted, and Isabelle, realising she’d yelled across the crowded courtyard, quickly sat down. The waitress brought her coffee over. As she poured in the milk, she felt immeasurably better. Cheerful even. Maybe they could stay friends.

Isabelle looked at Harry – his face was blank. Then he sighed in exaggerated relief and said in a sing-song voice, like he’d narrowly missed a car while running across the road to hug her, “Well, thank God for that.”

The rest of the conversation was pleasant enough. Harry’s nonchalance miffed her a little, but it was far better than the scenes most boys made. Isabelle felt that she’d done what she needed to do.  She finished her coffee, and told him she hoped to see him soon. She left her guilt and her jacket behind.

The waitress brought Harry an open-faced sandwich cut in half. Just in case Isabelle came back for her jacket, Harry waited a full ten minutes before he started to cry.

Checking her phone at unintentional intervals, five minutes go by again. No word. Not that any was expected.

She eyes the top shelf. Self-control was never her strong point.

Scanning left to right, she stops at her closest friends Jack and John to reminisce, all the nights they’d kept her company, rocked her to sleep.

The whirl of the ceiling fan that threatened to decapitate the crowd – with every shaking turn seemed to rock her into a meditative state. She didn’t even notice the stranger walk into the bar and until he spoke up to offer her a drink. Without a glance at her suitor she offers a mechanical response, ”Jack and coke.”

There was always next Monday.

She looks up and is greeted with a sheepish grin; she imagines that beneath the nest of a beard covering his mouth lies a perfect set of teeth.

She offers a cheers, he offers his name; she takes it, but doesn’t give one in return. Silence was always easier – she had a tendency to embark on verbal diarrhea anytime she opened her mouth.

The stranger had provided an unexpected distraction from her inbox vigilance. 20 minutes later. No word. Not that any was expected.

Looking back at him she notices his tired eyes glowing with warmth. “Evelyn…T for short,” she finally offers without explanation.

He extends his hand.

She takes it.

She had forgotten what it was like to be held, even by a hand. She returns his smile, if only with her eyes and sets back to her drink.

The condensation on the glass triggers a flood of memories: the time they lay in bed all day using the rain as an excuse; only moving to roll on top of each other, smothered in smoke rings and smiles.

He had perfect teeth.

She loved that first about him and everything else drove into her like a high-speed train.

His soulful laugh; his silent repose; the way he thought, like no one else she’d ever known, provoking her to match wit, stirring her curiosity.

These memories flowed through her like a lethal injection, sharp pain then numbness. She shakes her head so as to physically remove them.

Staring at the lonely ice in the bottom of her glass. She turns to address the stranger.

He’d gone as inconspicuously as he’d arrived; causing her to reach for his glass to confirm that she hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

Lunacy was not a welcome ailment on her current list.

Currently, she suffered from a broken heart. She hated the cliché, having always prided herself on being stronger than the masses, or if not, at least more logical.

Her father had taught her at a young age, logic beats everything. If she had paid more attention growing up she might have realised that he’d never been in love.

It hadn’t been the first time that cupid had steadily aimed his arrow her way but she was always quick on her feet and could run faster than anyone could chase. But him, she never saw him coming.

He wore an invisibility cloak -

She relished in the idea of an easy friendship, not having to put her best size 11 un-manicured foot forward, removing the filter from her un-lady like mouth and letting her crass and sometimes uncalled for opinions run a muck.

He took them on like bullets.

The love seeped in through the everyday routines that brought them together, as fate loomed above pulling and tugging on their marionette strings until arms were nearly touching.

Seasons rolled under them and before the first frost, one clumsy hand found the other. Wine drunk and filled with intention.

She scans the room for another free round. Buries her phone deep into her purse and removes her wallet. “Another. Double.”

The barkeep concedes with a heavy sigh. This was his business but of all the troubled souls perched on stools, hers was the hardest to feed.

She knew the pain of resisting the feelings and never imagined that it would multiply tenfold when she set them free, pouring out like prisoners through a broken gate.

All the words that she’d allowed to slip off her tongue, thinking he would catch them and hold them close, that he would feel them and give his own back. She sat cringing as they played through her head.

She returns to her drink, resisting the urge to reach into her purse. It wouldn’t take x-ray vision to know. No word. Not that any was expected.

She knew now and she’d known for some time. He was a figment of her imagination, as tangible and real as any physical thing, but for his spirit, his heart; the one that broke through and intertwined with hers. Every notion and memory of him felt both real and imaginary.

She shakes her head again. The memories remain.

The day they met, how she’d mistaken the lurch of her stomach muscles for indigestion, when now she knew it was preemptive panic. An intuitive sign to turn the other way and run like hell.

The day he showed up at her door greeted with the same flashing smile and joyful skip towards his arms, which hung and remained loosely by his side.

“Something’s happened…I’m sorry…I have to go.”

The words hit like daggers, aimed with precision at her chest cavity stopping her heart dead. Mid-beat.

Just like that, he was gone. Erased with words.

Releasing all restraint, she downs her drink and orders another, the desperation in her voice sprays over the bar and the barkeep doesn’t hesitate. Digging into her purse she pulls out confirmation.

Five years, 57 minutes.

No word. Not that any was expected.

1

It was habit that you kiss your palms together; make Him a finger pyramid with your hands. The steeple One Clap built. Talking into His suggestion box, the slit formed by the joints of your thumbs pressed together.

Dearest God, the porno is over.

But there’s no pearly gates… just one big chest of drawers, out of sight in every direction. Infinity’s container lined with eternal rows of varnished wooden knob-handles. Each knob evenly spaced at one thousand metres apart. In Heaven, measurements are made using the metric system.

You’re floating nude and there are no clouds, only screaming ribbons, flying and diving. Each swift movement accompanied by a raspberry blown sound.

You bob in front of a knob-handle thinking it’s as big as a face. The knob feels cold when you press your fingertips against its glossy hardness.

A bolt of pain strikes your gut. You recoil. Curled up foetus-like, you float backward. With your head, arms and knees tucked into your abdomen, you look like a dead prawn, ripe to peel and eat. You think you can see the pain in your stomach as the berserk pulse of a strobe light.

Your buttocks tighten then release a fart, a long squealing fart. Now the pain is a bad smell. You stretch out and feel your hand down the gap in your backside. You stop at something protruding from your anus. It should be hurting because the thing is as thick as a pole and freezing cold.

No such feeling.

Running your hand along its icy, bumpy length, it becomes apparent that the thing tapers to a sharp point. Straining to look at your own arse, you see that you’ve farted an icicle… in Heaven… after your old age.

^{1 et al. is a Latin phrase meaning “and others” or “and elsewhere” and is used to denote unlisted locations or to stand for a list of names.}

Despite not having earlobes, Hogan blogs.

She, facing backwards.

We, nothing to do, watching silently,

Entranced.

Line by line, vector by vector,

Her face is filled, spackled, rendered,

Coloured, guised and disguised

With strange, sharpened tools

And a small, shuddering, compact twin.

Line by line, station by station,

The train carrying her backwards in time.