That winter in this cold rusted iron and weathered brick coastal area we scrounged firewood from wrack to heat our rental above the bike repair shop.  Liking the traffic’s background noise, I embraced our stringent circumstances, the way this accentuated moods of hope and longing.  You don’t need an expensive hot air balloon trip to enjoy a great experience.  When I switched our lamps off to save money, the streetlights’ shafts angled through our windows, it was really more for the spell-like atmosphere.  Over-confident, I brushed aside your assertion that I believed myself inviolate deceiving readers, by telling you a long-winded intellectual joke about proper nouns and the Man in the Moon as a skinny sly trickster who picks his nose, words as the writer’s shield.  Through the only window cleaned I watched what I dubbed The Marketplace, Schumann, or Elgar, playing softly, while you kept your own counsel.  Strangers’ hot breath became cartoon speech bubbles for dialogue, sometimes shouted: joggers, couples, cops, a busker, belligerents in a fracas, the slow woman laden with shopping bags.  Once, a sudden bang, a calamitous road accident, its ensuing silence ominous.  When they stepped within range, faces haloed by neon, you said I snared them like prey.  I memorialised their actions and appearances in those prize-winning stories fermenting in my mind.  I knew you felt invaded when friends asked about your roles in my masquerades, and what made me tick.  Had they never researched anything?  Picking out similarities between characters and us, they expected those narrative events to be based on ours.  I laughed when you said you told them some published writers are boring fantasists to live with, and make crap money.  Did that make me the prey then?  Driving away from revisiting our old haunts that look too upmarket now, where my heart felt squeezed by those draped windows, I miss what is lost.  Was that shabby place all that I loved?  I have become one of my own sorry characters, don’t you think?  Your look implies little wonder, an eyebrow lifted.  I still wake in the middle of the night from dreams where you are always my companion, to jot things down, and I remember to be kinder like you suggested.  That woman overtaking my gradually slower driving now stares hard at us.  Was that a sigh?  I sense your warmth close by, patiently nourishing, hearing my updates yet again: how I forget things and curse the pernickety printer, and my computer’s glitches you could always fix.  I laugh and weep, glasses misting, the road ahead a frightening blur, knowing how luck comes and goes, sometimes before we realise it.  I want our time to spool backwards, so, your lovely arse coming towards me that afternoon, but I lament your stillness.  In this nullity you don’t even reach across, touch my arm.

…

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.