Spotlight on Seniors

The Rainbow: 

By Tina Xiaolu Fan

Hag-seed III: These Our Actors

“But real life is brilliantly coloured, says another part of his brain.

 It’s made up of every possible hue, including those we can’t see.

 All nature is a fire: everything forms, everything blossoms, everything fades. 

We are slow clouds…” 

 Margaret Atwood

Iris Wang

Yarra River, Melbourne, Australia

The darkness was incomplete, and so was she. 

A ghostly white moon hung at the centre of a navy canopy, surrounded by a corona of fading yellows rings. The soft rays gently reached its fingers through the window of a lonely apartment, illuminating every crevasse, every corner, every imperfection, though there weren’t many. The smell of Pine-O-Clean was overwhelming in the corridors. The place was spotless, but it was obvious it was just a place, not a home. Where once there hung frames of children waving goodbye to their parents at the school gates, there were now blank walls of pristine ivory white.  Where once there were red and gold paper cranes hanging from the windows, there were now thick white curtains that choked the light from outside. Where once there were three chairs seated around the kitchen table, there now were two. 

Yet, the city outside burst with life and exuberance. Supernovas of fireworks exploded across the city with all the colours densely packed inside a luminous array of light. Eyes widened with awe as raucous laughter and a smell of gunpowder dissipated through the humid air. The smell of sweet, crunchy tanghulu and acidic bergamot leaves followed, creating a honey of flavours and scents. Kids gripped tightly onto their mother’s shirts and onto red packets filled with money in their chubby hands. They cheered as mythical lion dancers coursed their way from Federation Square along the banks of the Yarra; the syncopation of the tanggu, cymbals and gongs matching their elaborate steps. CRASH! The crowd erupted into cheers as the lions perched themselves on top of two slim marble pillars. The scales on their costumes shimmered like stars, illuminating the streets with all the colours of the rainbow. 

Iris winced at the uproar and drew close the curtains, blocking every burst of light, every colour, every reminder. She sighed as she slid back to her cleanly pressed white sheets and pressed a gentle kiss on Billie’s forehead. It was long after sunset, yet the celebrations had only just begun. 

“Ma, why is everyone so noisy tonight?” Billie asked as curls fell in ringlets around his soft eyes.

His almond eyes were warm pools of chocolate and chestnut, an exact copy of his father’s. If she swum too long in his gaze, she would start to sink; sink deep and eventually drown in a memory she tried to erase. 

“It’s xing nian…” she began as her voice melted into the shadows. 

Billie couldn’t speak much Mandarin anymore. It’d been years since she’d celebrated with him; the traditions had long been forgotten. 

“It’s Lunar New Year” she sighed as another trail of light exploded in the air, illuminating the corners of the window. 

Streams of maroon and gold flashed across the room, beating back the darkness before they fell on an oak frame on the bedside table. “1991 – Wo de Xing Nian” was engraved in silver on its surface. Her eyes crinkled and for a moment, the darkness had subsided. Smiles blossomed around the crowded table, like seeds of spring as they emerged from deep slumber.  A little girl sat at the centre, slurping ribbons of hand-stretched noodles and spraying sesame broth across her cheeks.  Her mother gently ran a handkerchief along her skin, laughing at how silly she was. Flowers were woven through the little girl’s braids. Chrysanthemums, lilies, and irises painted bursts of lemon yellow, cream and lilac across the dark canvas, like pinpricks of light cascading down the night sky. Kids gripped tightly onto red packets in their chubby hands and cheered as their parents set off fireworks in the backyard. Each person bathed in the warmth of the honeyed sun, in the richness of culture. But the photograph, like the smile she once wore, had faded like a flower. Her gaze pierced through the faded memories, and she wilted. 

The light had dissipated into the shadows; broken shadows of who she once was. 

She tore her eyes away and ran her fingers through Billie’s curls, humming the melody of “twinkle, twinkle little star” as he dozed off in her arms. She’d tried to erase all memories of Billie’s father. She’d scrubbed day and night. She’d taken down his paper cranes. She’d painted over the walls, but she couldn’t paint over the hole in their family that he had once filled. She’d spent so long erasing that she had erased a part of herself, and a part of Billie. 

She scanned the room as her eyes adjusted to the night. Blank walls. Blank sheets. They were as blank as she was. The emptiness creeped its way through the room, through a dark prison until it enveloped her, and she drowned. Guilt. Shame. Fear. They washed over her in giant waves as she struggled to reach the surface. Her world and her consciousness faded with every passing moment. She longed for his warm touch. She longed for his soothing voice, telling her it was going to be okay. She longed for the fireworks, the colours, the lights; things she had deprived herself of for too long. 

Billie’s life couldn’t fade like hers. No, she wouldn’t let it. He would know how to speak the language of his ancestors. He would know where he came from. He would know who he was. 

She would start now. Things that were broken, could be formed again.

She slipped out of the sheets and shifted Billie’s head off her arm and onto the pillow. Her heart thumped against her chest unnaturally as she drifted into the kitchen. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, trying to calm the dizziness in her brain as she reached towards the curtains. 

She closed her eyes.

Things that were broken, could be formed again.

Her fingers brushed against the velvet fabric before she pushed them away, flooding the room with all the colours of the city. It was blinding.

Iris opened the windows and for the first time in a long time, she admired the city below. Soft yellow rays reached down from the moon and onto the streets below, illuminating every family, every smile, every flower. Waratahs, daisies, and forget-me-nots lined the pavement, decorating the streets with bursts of scarlet, cream and indigo. Little children munched on crunchy tanghulu as their mother’s wiped away the sugar on their lips, laughing at how silly they were. Each person bathed in the comfort of each other’s company, in the richness of culture. Tomorrow, she would take Billie there with her. It was her way of honouring his father.

The Bees:

By J Denman

Along with the rest of our helpless world; and, O, if you could, you would, where lovers walked, sell off trees and not give a flying f**k for the muted mausoleums of the bees.

Carol Ann Duffy

Bumblebee

A leaf whispered. A bird whirled. A creek wrinkled. The valley sunk into the land; a giant footstep from a forgotten history. Swathed in ancient timber and basked in honeyed sun, the valley embedded itself into the surrounding landscape; elms, pines and ashes sheltered the cushioned grass and slow twinkling creek. The faint humming of bees was distinct in the gentle aura of the forest. The moss crowded the air with its earthly aroma. Rather than overpowering your senses, it lured them in, wending your ears to the softly whispered songs of robins and finches. It eased your skin into the mellow tickle of the autumn breeze and opened your eyes to the harmony around you.

The bulldozer smashed through the tranquillity. Like a tank on a battlefield, the bulldozer careened through the valley. Steel and fire and men. The bulldozer: an artificial yellow bubble causing relentless destruction in a natural sea of lush green. A haphazard trail of torment preceded it as it zig-zagged through the greenery. 

In the bulldozer’s cockpit, there sat a man. 

Buttons beeped and levers slid, as his body moved to aid the bulldozer. Proudly stitched into the left breast of a sterilised and unwrinkled yellow and black jumpsuit, was a name. Laurie. 

Laurie was encased by an air-conditioned control box inside a lush valley filled with a cool autumn breeze. The beeping and whirring inside the box mixed with the soft hum of sterile, cleaned air creating a stark and utterly man-made environment. Laurie worked systematically. Day and night, he tirelessly steered the small yellow bulldozer in an attempt to clear the bothersome obstacles that inhabited the area. Other operators worked in other bulldozers, but none could fell as many trees or clear as much land as Laurie. Not just any operator had his name stitched onto his jumpsuit. 

Laurie had worked in many smaller and less comfortable bulldozers before this one. He particularly despised the cabriolet-style cockpits. They let in the dust and the wind; exasperating additions to an already tedious situation. Through unerring toil and tireless focus, he had risen through the ranks of operators. Now, a glass barrier stood between him and the valley, creating a artificial box that represented his unquestionable work ethic.

On this particular day, the company had wanted him to start an hour early. Always the model employee, he had arrived an hour and a half early, ready to begin the precise operation of the bulldozer. In the hurry to leave the house something catastrophic had happened. Laurie had forgotten to drink his ritualistic coffee. As such his day had been tiresome, filled with an endless longing for his bed. The humdrum monotony allowed for far too much daydreaming.

His consciousness began to reach far back into his mind. The mellow touch of the air-conditioning reminded him of the six-month training program, housed in a concrete block, cooled to an exact temperature, ensuring complete attention from trainees. The slow rocking movement of the cabin mimicked the swaying train-ride of his commute through a city of steel beams and empty humans. Even the beeping of the controls reminded him of the synthetic plastic toys that whirred and buzzed throughout his childhood. Gazing through the glass barrier, he saw the rolling hills, ancient trees and flitting birds; all separated by a transparent plastic film that didn’t allow a whisper of the autumn breeze inside. Laurie wondered how the wind would feel on his skin. A low droning sound acted as white noise, lulling him into a daze.

“They’re calling us in for the day, Laurie. Report back to the garage.” He was pulled back into the present by the drawling voice pouring out of the intercom.  

Mechanically, he began to turn the bulldozer around to face in the direction of the garage; a large complex of corrugated iron sheds that housed the bulldozers when the men commuted back to the city. A drone operator had once filmed the return of the yellow machine to the squat garage, capturing Laurie’s retreat from a birds-eye view. The footage had distinctly reminded him of a black and yellow bumblebee returning to their hive after a hard day’s work. Not many bumblebees lived in the city. Laurie liked bumblebees.

The bulldozer was stuck. In his daydreaming about bees Laurie, had been careless when turning the machine and it was snagged on a piece of timber. Although loathe to do so, he was required to manually remove whatever was snagging the bulldozer.

He stepped out of the control box.

The cool breeze softly caressed Laurie’s skin, like a mother’s warm embrace. A leaf settled. A bird cooed. A creek shimmered. In the hours surrounding twilight, the valley rested. The honeyed sun dipped below the horizon, leaving behind long shadows and amber light in a picturesque “adieu”. The grass softened, mimicking the soft blanket of night, coddling the valley in susurrant sounds of a sleeping forest. The earthly smell of pines and elms lay thick in the air, pushing the valley into a slumber. The bumblebees hummed, returning to the hive after a hard day’s work. 

Drip. Drip. Drip. An amber honey dollop fell onto the log just as Laurie began to move it. He stopped and stared. Peering up he saw a cloudy honeycomb hive; the source of the humming. Bustling bees flitted around the timber branches. The mellow autumn breeze overcame the sterilised air-conditioning that seeped out of the artificial glass box behind him. A memory of a soft green field sprouted itself in the forefront of his mind. A trip to the country. The absence of the city. The sound of humming bees filled his ears.

Decades of concrete and steel and men dissolved in front of him, replaced by the crinkling of a leaf. The cawing of a bird. The cascading of a creek. And the humming of a bee.

Laurie looked around him and saw the forest for what it truly was. A mausoleum; a silenced tomb filled with busy workers. He was an executor and the bulldozer, his axe. Something needed to be done. Unless someone gave a flying f**k, nothing was going to get better. 

He commuted home that evening vowing to never return to the valley. But he would. He had to. He would return and fight. He would destroy the company that was destroying the world. The bees needed a guard. They needed a protector. The important little things always do.

‘Bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.’ 

Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees

Blue Stone John

By I Edmonstone 

History is a little man in a brown suit

trying to define a room he is outside of.

I know history. There are many names in history

but none of them are ours.

Richard Siken 

On 12 East Windsor Street, Blackheath, Boston there was a slight vibration occurring on the ground. This was not an earthquake, nor someone going too fast in a vehicle, this was coming straight from the Blue Stone Jazz Club, from the bellowing noise of too many saxophones and a cacophony of blissful hollers. Slicked back hairstyles and freshly polished leather shoes shimmered in the dim coloured lights, enjoying their furtive freedom. This was their world, the world of liberty and nonconformity, of one Friday night to escape from whatever unhappiness they ran from in real life. The music twisted and turned, building into an infinity as the night went on. In every nook and cranny of this room life was crammed with might, any sadness buried deeply under the rotting wooden floorboards. Every foot tapped the ground, every drink was sipped and spilled, every cheek blushed and brushed, and every smile crammed with the exhilaration of rebellion. Each soul in the room was filled with the distinct feeling one may only discover on a Friday night in a forbidden Jazz club, except for one man in a brown suit, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a stool. 

John was not the sort of man to break the rules, he was a strict follower of all the new government impositions. He believed the banning of alcohol was probably best, he had seen far too many drunks make a fool of themselves on a weekend. Prohibition, that is what they had called it. The returning of order to the world. When old buildings were knocked down and replaced with concrete blocks, he thought that this was what had happened since the beginning of civilisation, that this was how the world progressed. The twenties were going to be different; it was the dawn of a new age America and the future was near. John had values, he believed in keeping things clean, in doing the right thing and following orders. He had been taught that this was the way one was supposed to live. It had been proved to him, amongst the rubble and rotting corpses of fields long decimated by shells, orders were what had kept him sane, what had kept him alive. John didn’t like his life, but that was beside the point. Once you have seen bodies splayed across bloody fields, once your best men have been slaughtered like lambs for dinner in front of your very eyes, joy slips silently out the door. People become just one more thing that can be taken from you. But one day, John finally gave in to the niggling feeling in his heart telling him how grey the world looked. How sometimes it felt like all the life had packed up and moved away to somewhere more colourful, how sometimes he wished that he could do the same.

This is how John ended up with an address in his hand, investigating this particular vibration in the ground. John might be described a forgettable man. Maybe he wouldn’t be described at all. But as soon as he felt the vibration, he was determined to make this night something to remember. The entrance to the Blue Jazz club was inconspicuous. Clutching his piece of parchment paper, John scurried down an alleyway, following the faint noise of music. Creeping down a set of moulding stairs, sick with dampness and imprinted with thousands of shoes, he finally found one big wooden door. Blue Stone Jazz. 

The door to the club had one big sign nailed to it, 

If you want to see the future 

Don’t look to the sky

Anything past the horizon is invisible 

Look to the music instead, 

And find any future you want 

He pushed gently on the door, and suddenly, it was as if he had found where all of the life had moved away to. An explosion of noise, colours, laughter and music, washed over him in a fanatical red haze. Quickly closing the door behind him, he scurried to a bar stool. A straight-laced, no-nonsense man of God. That was who John was. Until now. Entering this room was making him question the foundations upon which he build his whole existence. He stood quietly, enthralled by what he was seeing.

Although John would never admit this, he felt fear creep up on him every day. Like a wild beast it would follow him around, on every corner, on the way to work and on the way home, it was always there, whispering: What are you afraid of? The truth was, John was afraid of everything. Of loud noises. Of living pointlessly, of spending his life writing at a desk and becoming a decrepit grey face with wrinkles with but no stories or wisdom to go with them. He was afraid that the joy that had slipped out of his life all those years ago would never knock on the door again. 

He sat anxiously on the edge of a stool, thoughts whirling around his head. Years of grey had taken bits of life out of him, slowly, but surely. One tragedy after another had whittled away at his soul, until his very incandescence had been taken away. The music washed over him, note after note, and he began to tap his foot. Could he really do this? John wasn’t sure he had ever danced before. What if someone saw him? Somewhere in his mind, five words echoed around, find any future you want.

John took a breath. 

He enclosed his hands around a scotch glass that had been placed in front of him. He brought it too his mouth, and suddenly he tasted it. He tasted the first fiery kiss, the smoky light of a bar, the colour of a world washing back into him. It wasn’t the scotch that was doing this, it was the rebellion of it all. The very notion of breaking the rules, it was enthralling. It was a liberation. 

John stood up, took a sharp inhale of smoky air and let his body slowly shuffle to the music. He let go of all the ties around his wrists, of the stone wall in front of his heart. He let go of his past, and he grabbed the hand of a stranger, twirling her around and watching the club lights illuminate her cheeks. It didn’t matter that he was just a little man, in a little brown suit, trying to define himself in a soulless world, because suddenly, he had found the colour he had been looking for.

To breath the air of youth, and to sing the songs of the free. It was beautiful. Joy had knocked on the door, and it was… remarkable.