The Memory of Water

¹⁹ A BAD WIZARD

Francina is still AWOL and my house is chaotic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together without her. The anarchic state of the place reflects my state of mind: spiralling. I know that I should start cleaning but I’m surrounded by such dark energy that I’m finding it difficult to feed myself, never mind pick up a dustbuster.

Eve’s violent death is sitting in my chest, hot and cold and heavy. With this come the mental Polaroids of the funeral: Eve’s toad-skinned aunt, the mute man, warm whisky in a teacup once my glass was shattered, pain, a bag of frozen peas, and rubies on green grass. Mixed in are the foggy memories of Emily’s funeral: being suffocated by the hot floral nylon dresses of well-meaning friends, the cloying sweetness of lemon cake icing, Mom, blank, looking like one of her Vermeer paintings. The smell of the over-polished timber pews. The chocolate-box picture of Em, blown up and framed for the ceremony. Dad looking like he should be the one in the coffin.

I realise that I have been standing in one spot for a very long time, staring at the state of the kitchen in some kind of zombie trance. There is just too much stuff. Too much mess. Too many memories.

I need to get out of the house. In an act of desperation I hit the tarmac in my designer running gear that I bought a year ago and have never worn except to try it on.

I stretch my calves on the grass verge and can’t help feeling like an idiot. Like someone who is pretending to be a runner. While I pretend to warm up my ankles I see the little Munchkin again. Isn’t that what they call the singing midgets in the Wizard of Oz? I think of how I am like the wizard. Orchestrating the show of my life only to be revealed as a fraud and a bad fraud at that.

Dorothy tells the wizard that he is a bad man, to which the wizard responds something like,”A bad wizard, but not a bad man.”

I fear that I am the inverse. Or worse, that I am bad at both.

She meows at me, narrows her yellow eyes. The base of her tail shakes like a rattlesnake. I know now that she won’t let me approach her, so I just keep still and try to appear non-threatening, which is relatively easy when you’re wearing Polyshorts.

She meows again and minces towards me. I crouch with caution. She is within stroking reach but I resist the temptation. She blinks at me. I narrow my eyes at her. And then she is gone, tail high in the air, as if I have bored her.

I ease into the run, with Sylvia chiming in her encouragement for every kilometre I reach. We are officially living in the future; I know this because my shoe talks to me when I run. She tells me how far I’ve gone, whether I’m running fast enough or not, and always congratulates me on my longest run or fastest time. If I was really dedicated I would plug it into my computer to log my runs and then I would have a graph of my performance. It’s straight out of the sci-fi comics I used to read as a kid.

On the mental rim of the memories of the funerals there is something more painful. Too intense to think about. For a moment I think that I am losing the battle and that the throbbing stuff will come crashing through, but in the end I win and it recedes. It is grey, stifling, acrid. I try to push it back as far as it will go, but I can tell that it is only a matter of time before it will break free and swirl through my body. It makes me run faster. My lungs and leg muscles burn, but it feels good.