As we slide into autumn in the northern hemisphere, here are some new songs to curl up in the cool to:
(c) Joanna Rubery 2017
1001 words: The First Tomorrow
When the sun rises, we’ll see the first tomorrow in the world.
“We on East Cape time now!” says Tane, our driver, as we leave the teal and turquoise Pacific for a track dotted with the scarlet splashes of pohutakawa trees.
“No seatbelts!” mutters Hettie, turning the map upside down. “And where’s the lighthouse?”
“It caved in,” says Tane, “So we stop at Ronnie’s place tonight.”
The two Danish hairdressers glance at their phones as we rattle along, but we lost the signal somewhere between the sulphurous smoke of Rotorua and the glistening slate of Lake Taupo.
“Sorry,” says a bass voice behind me, “You said Regis Palace, ja?”
“Nah, mate,” says Tane to Heinrich. “Ronnie got a farm near Tokomaru. He says we can stay one night, maybe two.”
They did say this was an “informal tour” of the North Island. So far, we’ve delivered the post and had tea with Tane’s mum.
White Lies
[I belong to an online writing group, and each month we write a story with a theme and a word count. This time, we were asked to write about ‘White Lies‘ in exactly 2500 words.]
I knew something wasn’t right when my mother stopped abruptly by the kiosk, clapped her hands lightly, and said, “Let’s have an ice cream!”
I looked up at her, squinting in the summer holiday sun.
“Ice cream!” shrieked Peggy in delight, and tried to spin around, but stumbled.
I caught my sister’s arm, and said, “We’ve only just had breakfast!” but my mother was already clinking coins over, distracted. Somewhere above us, a seagull began its harsh, halting cry. With a cone of whirled white in her hand, my mother glanced up.
“Be careful,” she said, eyeing the gull, “Or he’ll take it. – Wait!” she added, as I reached out, “Ladies first.”
Peggy took her ice cream, and bit into it with relish. Her eyes slid closed, and she swayed a little, humming.
“Patience is a virtue,” murmured my mother, in a far-off voice, handing me the second cone. I watched it coming with indifference. My tongue stung of metal snow.
My mother didn’t seem like my mother today. At breakfast she had sat in silence, tearing her napkin into tiny shreds. I’d taken another slice of toast while she wasn’t looking.
The Last Haiku
I left you behind
And flew to the mountainside.
You were waiting there.
© Joanna Rubery 2017
Nine o’clock
Cicadas all night
Screaming at the lack of light
Where the forest was.
© Joanna Rubery 2017
Tasting Tokyo
I’m expecting fans, futons, and formalities, but on arriving in Japan, I’m not quite prepared for the food.
In an izakaya – crowded, wooden, smoky – with a local journalist, Hiro, I grab a fistful of what look like crisps, and find in my hand instead a cluster of small dried fish heads. On cue, the earth seems to shimmer beneath us.
“I think I’m feeling phantom earthquakes,” I tell Hiro, as he offers me chicken foie gras on a chopstick. It’s indescribable.
“Maybe it’s the subway,” he says kindly.
Or maybe it’s my stomach. I try raw horse, which is paradise on a plate, followed by crackly chicken cartilage, which is not; spilled brains, which turn out to be roe; and a whole small fish battered in tempura.
“Do I eat everything?” I ask my host, eyeing the fish’s scaly tail.
“Even the bones,” he says, and shakes a pair of maracas left on the table. A waitress materializes, and presents us each with a small bowl of soup.
“What’s this?” I ask. There’s an odd kind of meat floating belly-up in the middle.
Hiro consults his electronic dictionary, and shows me across the low table:
guts
rectum
shitbag
It takes a long time to get the soup down after that: chopsticks aren’t much help with tripe. As a consolation, Hiro orders small pieces of butter, for dessert, and a few sticks of bamboo. We wash it all down with sweet potato spirit, and the earth seems to shimmer more than ever.
Japanese has many untranslatable words, including kuidaore, or to go bankrupt because you’ve spent all your money on food and drink. But in a country where I’ve tasted the most delectable and the least palatable food of my life, it might just be a price worth paying.
© Joanna Rubery 2017
Spilt Milky Way
The night’s light-speckled
And freckled with ivory
On indigo silk.
© Joanna Rubery 2017
Why I Do What I Do
Sizzling black peppercorns on the burnt streets of Phnom Penh. Sun-spangled sapphire stretching off the Sardinian shore. The swish of a hundred swirling skirts at midnight in Arequipa, the sharp sting of wasabi on my Tokyo tongue, the salty force of a six-foot wave knocking me off my feet in the Tasman sea: travelling sharpens the senses, catapulting you straight into the unknown (and quite often the uncomfortable) without a seatbelt. There’s nothing like the shock of the new to make you look at home again with different eyes.
For me, it’s the unexpected moments on a journey that sear my heart and stay with me the longest: waking on the night bus, in the thinning air, to see all the stars in the universe trailing down towards the stony sand of the Atacama desert. Breathing in the mingle of five spice, flat whites, French fries and falafel on the cool streets of New York. Watching children tumbling out of church to blow bubbles like clear blossom through the apricot-stained alleyways of a small Spanish town.
But if it’s the moments that transfix you, it’s the people you meet who pull you in: the receptionist in fizzing, fairy-lit Hanoi who wants to matchmake you with passing hotel guests (“Honeymoon suite still free!”). The shoeless, switched-on ten-year-old in the shade of Angkor Wat with his canny sales pitch of “one drink for you – and one for your driver.” The tiny wisp of woman in black who shares your table in the sandy sprawl of Lima and tells you, between spoons of chicken rice, she’s returning from her husband’s funeral. The Italian soldier who recites solemnly, in the spring sun, his hand-on-heart recipe for “the best way to eat pasta”. The New Zealand surfer who stops you on the sand, bare-footed and golden-haired, and asks joyfully, “Are you saved?” The elderly Japanese man, worn with age, who shuffles over to tell you he once, many years ago, “go Rondon. Albert Haw. Ve-ry beautiful,” and starts conducting an imaginary orchestra. The Polish tour guide, who begins with the tale of the town’s war-torn history and ends, as the candles burn down over the cobbled square, with her own.
I’ve lived in seven countries so far, and I’ve long been writing stories inspired by my travels for an audience whose most common question is “Where are you going next?”
Where am I going next…?
I’ll tell you when I get there.
[Adapted from an article written for the LATAM airlines travel writing competition, March 2017]
© Joanna Rubery 2017
least said, soonest ______
Torn. Broken. Shattered.
Ripped apart, and then stitched up,
Peace by shredded peace.
© Joanna Rubery 2017
The Shower
[The challenge this time was to write a story about a Shower in 53 words.]
You left me high and dry beside a waterfall. I stripped under the spray, scrubbed you from my skin with bitter grit, rinsed you out with bottled feelings, filed away your dead love, trimmed my overgrowing dreams, plucked my courage up, and washed my hands of you in the water under the bridge.
© Joanna Rubery 2017