A place to stand
We need a setting for this story, but nobody can afford a garden anymore, there’s Covid in the bars, and the seas aren’t safe to swim in. The chateau by the mountain was unprofitable and fell into disrepair. The sports fields aren’t fit for use after the floods. Where do we go, but our apartments and our offices in the next room?
We need a setting for our story, but let’s forget it for now. They say all writing is about loss anyway. Summer fading into autumn. Cherries giving way to feijoas and nashi pears. Why do we like that? Loss. Is it a gratitude thing?
My first stories were set on the road. It was appropriate then, a setting representing the transience of youth but where do we have to go now except, maybe, the past? Childhood was a time of sharks in shallow waters, beestings and grass burn.
So, say we just got done playing football on the school fields, sipped warm water from the metal fountain as the bell rang to return to class. Say we settle in on a sheet of newsprint so as not to get mud on the carpet and listen to the opening lines of Tom Sawyer.
Or perhaps our protagonist is wealthy, with a garden big enough for some character development, conflict, crisis, resolution, a motif or two. Think Katherine Mansfield or Marcel Proust. Or perhaps the world is altogether different. The sun stills sets and rises, and the bougainvillea still flowers in spring but other than that the world is altogether different.
Okay, if the bougainvillea gets to stay and inhabit this strange new world, the kōwhai should too and with them the tūī. Those sea anemones that close around our fingers in the rock pools are otherworldly enough to make the cut and I’ve always been a fan of cinemas, snow, and the concept of grace.
The people we love go on living, obviously, but nothing else looks the same. It’s a new year and we never were much good at writing what we know.
Kim Fulton is a poet and fiction writer from Aotearoa. Her work has appeared in journals including Landfall, Mimicry, Poetry New Zealand, and Daisy Cutter. Her first book of poems, I kind of thought the alpacas were a metaphor until we got there, is out now.