binding in the journal.’
‘You’re a conscientious minstrel,’ said Guy, dropping a light kiss on her gloved hand.
‘One of us has to be,’ she teased, but her mouth had dimpled in a smile.
Author’s note: The poem about ‘Silence’ that Will reflects on is Le Roman de Silence, written in the first half of the 13th century but not rediscovered until the 20th.
LOST AND FOUND:
THE SOLO RAPTURE
When the Rapture came, only Henry Smithfield noticed. Everyone else was too busy just living their flawed lives.
Henry, a paragon of virtue in a tarnished world, heard trumpets and looked to the sky as he walked past the Federal Court of Australia on La Trobe Street. To his left was the court building, all imposing glass and concrete with its brightly coloured entryway, and the rather less glamorous concrete fountain. Over the road to the right was Flagstaff Gardens, filled with morning joggers, tai chi classes, city dwellers taking their city dogs for a run on the green.
To tell the truth, Henry was a bit smug that he was the only one to notice the call of the angelic host. He thought it more than a little ironic, too, that the call had come while he was part way between the halls of justice on one side and a former cemetery on the other. The final judgement was coming at just the right place.
Henry stood on the edge of the non-functioning fountain (nobody seemed to have cared enough to turn it back on again after the easing of a decade of water restrictions) and held his hands to the sky. Waiting.
The heavenly host played a few more notes, allowing stragglers to catch up. But no-one else heard. No-one else stopped to look towards the heavens. Well, one or two people, but they were checking for potential rainclouds. In Melbourne, you could never entirely trust the forecast.
A few people cast a curious glance at Henry, but the daft bugger in his jeans, hoodie and dark sneakers looked more beatific than dangerous. Perhaps his case had been found in his favour. One jogger gave him two thumbs up and a congratulatory grin.
The heavenly host gave a little sigh, looked at their sole audience member, shrugged and figured that maybe Facebook hadn’t really been the best way to send invitations to this particular party. Still, there was no need to blame Henry the Pure for being the only one with manners enough to notice the call.
With a beat of their wings, the host created one hell of a downdraft, which collected Henry and then drew him up.
It was startling at first. Henry kicked his feet, trying instinctively to stand on solid ground. His shoes fell into the puddle of water lying on the base of the defunct fountain. He waggled his socked feet, then decided it was quite pleasant, this flying business. Grinning, he let himself be lifted.
Nobody noticed.
Henry got to heaven and found himself the sole occupant of a significantly more dull than expected paradise.
The remaining inhabitants of the Earth didn’t notice that Judgement Day had been and gone. They each went on being the embodiment of good and evil, heaven and hell, god and the devil, in their own personal way, as they’d done ever since they’d been given the gift of choice.
Only one person ever missed Henry. Daisy had loved her brother but frankly found him so impossibly perfect that she felt inadequate. Away from his oppressive saintliness, Daisy felt she wasn’t such a bad old stick. She was kind to animals and the elderly and bought The Big Issue. She was good and supportive friend, and though not perfect, she made an effort to be kind. If heaven had been less rigid in its spiritual dress code, she might have heard the call.
But rigid it was, and most people are flawed, and really, the vagaries of heaven and hell had never really had that much impact on daily life on Earth, the in-between place where devils and angels were part of the same clay that made everyone else.
In the end, the heavenly host withdrew entirely from earthly affairs, and valiantly tried to hide their disappointment from Henry that Judgement Day had been such a fizzer. Words were definitely going to be had with the marketing people.
And the world? It went on, being good, bad and indifferent, depending on the predilections of its individual inhabitants, as it always had.
LOST AND FOUND:
WANDERLUST
He assumes it was an accident. He assumes it was drunken forgetfulness, or frustration with a blister, or something to spite the original owner of the shoe.
He tells himself it was not knowingly cruel.
It’s cruel, all the same. Somehow it’s worse that it’s only one shoe. One garish purple boot, made for striding confidently in the world. A statement of sorts. I wear sturdy footwear, for the road I walk is long and hard; but I wear my footwear purple because fuck you, that’s why.
The shoe rests against his own feet. He sees it in his peripheral vision, stuck as he is with his gaze forever drawn upward, his mouth in that moue of astonishment.
When he first reached this town, with his two equally gormless, equally impressed bronze friends, he was astonished. He was impressed. Now he’s just here. All the time. Every day. Staring at the roofscape and wondering what else he’s missing. The people who pass him talk of other things. A river nearby. A tall gilded tower from which they can see way out to the ocean. (What is an ocean, he wonders? The closest he can understand is that it’s vast like the sky and wet like the clouds: the moon on storm clouds is his understanding of ships and seas).
Other people speak of even stranger places. Sand and forests and cities with great bridges and snowfall. He doesn’t know what those words mean, but they sound wonderful.
He longs to go. To bend and snap his metal feet from the concrete and take a step. Take two. Three and four and to see a new angle of those rooftops, a new street, who knows, maybe that river (a ribbon of dense cloud on the ground, he wonders, is that what it looks like?).
He longs to move and to discover.
Instead, one purple shoe leans against his own cold feet and reminds him that his wanderlust is futile. All he can do is stand and gawp and wait for the world to come to him, and hope that their exotic words like pyramid and bridge and mountain and free will one day make sense.
WORDS FAIL
For my nanna, Bessy Harris
The collected words
Of all the languages in all the world
Can’t capture you
A few can describe the way you smiled
And the scent of your skin
Nouns and adjectives may collide
To approximate your
