This week has been long and tiring. The weather has swelled into a heatwave. The first round of exams are quickly coming. The end of the month with all it’s ensuing deadlines looms – T-7 days.
Find following: a poem about water (content warning for mentions of drowning); a fragment about dystopia; and a character study of a couch.
Curious reading,
Alexei
water work
Penetrate the vortex,
Swirling walls
Cocoon and constrict.
Sink below the surface and
Drown, peaceably,
For a brief thirty second lapse.
A tiny chasm wedged open
To flood and consume the senses
A blanketing rush.
Divert the melt-flood.
Send it crashing down cliff-faces,
Tumbling down gorges.
Send it flooding out across wide plains,
Let the runnels swell into rivers and streams.
Everything joins the ocean in the end.
It isn’t the dystopian future
It’s the dystopian now
Couch tales
It’s not the most comfortable of things, the red bench seat that thinks it could maybe be a couch, in a different multiverse. The upholstery is starting to wear and the cushions are the kind of ‘high density foam’ that never really holds the right firm-soft balance for very long. But it’s long enough to stretch out on, and it’s near a window. That’s enough.
It’s had many bodies slumber on it, not a few fight on it, less make out on it. Sometimes a grudging teenager will think in the direction of studying on it, sometimes a stressed out uni student will pile it up with books and pass out on the floor next to it. It’s always had a soft spot for weary bones, not a qualm about weary hearts, and weary minds are welcome too.
There aren’t any stories of it tripping people it doesn’t like, or feeling like a perfectly squishy marshmallow to it’s favourites. It’s a perfectly ordinary piece of furniture. There’s nothing at all remarkable about it, except perhaps it’s age, and it’s perpetual state of slight disrepair. It’s a simple part of the environment, largely forgotten, though not truly unacknowledged.
The old lady from down the road who comes here every week; the young father with his now school-aged children; the go-getter corporate duo that came in from out of town and never left; the childhood sweethearts turned best friends from the local high school. The new family that just moved in, the tradies renovating that place around the corner, the old timers who really have been here for generations.
If it were suddenly to absent itself, it would surely be missed. But it isn’t and never has, though perhaps at some point it will, and so it is utterly unremarkable.
Alexei Vimpani 