Tsetsol

Small dense clouds drift quickly below the higher wisps. They appear to be moving in opposite directions until he allows the tops of the buildings to orient him.

Haze then lightning. Afternoon succumbs to evening - deep slate gray and cobalt. The storm comes across the plain. Moisture makes itself known to the woman’s skin and electricity cuts sharp through air that had been like damp hot wool all day.

Dull satiety and indifference. Mind is blunted - behind the eyes - above and behind the forehead. She observes thoughts coming and going hoping to hook some sharpness from them.

“What is god?” “Oh mate.” He and his son are sitting on the edge of the verandah looking out across the dam at a line of scrub. He looks down at the boy’s profile. “Where did you hear about god?” “On the two-way. I dunno who was talking. I dunno the band.” “Well some say god’s like a superman and he lives somewhere we can’t see and you have to do what he wants or you’ll be punished.” The farmer is an anarchist at heart and an atheist. “How do we know what he wants if we can’t see him?” “That’s what the priests are for.” Silence. “Some say, and I think they’re closer to the truth, that god is inside us all and that he’s nothing more than the ability we have for love.” Silence. “Others say god’s another word for the world or the elements of the world like water and fire and earth and he or it doesn’t have anything to do with us. It’s just there like the dirt’s just there.” “What is love?” The farmer stands. “Wait a minute while I get a beer.”

“Where does the sun go?” “To the other side of the world.” She is pricked by the bad faith of her explanation. Her daughter seems satisfied and this pricks her again. “Actually the sun doesn’t go to the other side of the world. The world spins around and the sun stays in the same place. Well it moves too but slower than the world.” She is satisfied. Confusion settles itself on the girl’s face.

“Infinity is less a theoretical idea than a moral experience.” Less is the wisdom of this - not one or the other but both - but more one than the other. He re-reads the line. And moral is the idiocy of it.

The color of the evening sky deepens to meet the darkness seeping up out of the earth. The old woman sits on the steep verge behind her hut and watches. She measures time in this way - from the sun’s fall at one point on the horizon just to the left of the great pine to another just to the right of the mountain and back. From a low quick glide into cold darkness to a long voluptuous drop. Her face is tanned into the meat. Her hands are knotted and strong. She has no use for hours.

She slides the pages from the desk. She believes that she is cleaning in order to begin again. It satisfies her for a moment but then she is struck by the aspect of self hatred in the gesture. She leans to her left and stares at the fallen paper. She searches for a wound or a bruise.

Love could be there he believed in the heavy liquid dirt sun or in the soft breathing of wind in wheat. He worked in the paddocks from dawn until the collision of dirt and sun. He watched this event carefully each day and found endless variation in the repetition. He imagined love constantly and dreamed it each night. It took the forms of his experience - elemental, burnt orange, red, dry.

Desolate - mournful - the light. He watches a bank of screens connected to security cameras. His shift is almost over. The monitors compose an abstract mosaic of the city that makes his first steps onto the street awkward.