He knew storytellers must build tension, something off kilter among characters, and his creations’ crises were at least partly based on some of his own earlier experiences.  His tendency was to disregard non-artistic privileged people’s ritualised pleasantries because he mostly found them about as interesting as mashed potatoes.  Aware of his own privilege, and criticism of his aloofness – he preferred ‘self-containment’ – he fancied himself as a fortress, with the unaesthetic, whose favourite subject seemed to be money, as vacant lots.  Muttering about square pegs and round holes, he also cited Schopenhauer’s porcupines, their need for closeness offset by the ouch effect.

On their adventurous way to the rural school bus stop, past the kookaburras’ laughing chorus in their leafy towers, his boys thrusted sticks into an ants’ nest on the shoulder of the road, whooping in delight as soldiers seethed out, ready to defend.  He imagined an authoritarian city, labyrinthine, dark mahogany, humming with malice, a scene from a modern movie.  A sharp scent like bitter incense lingered in the early morning air.  His wife, a medical professional, told him Jung said we each need contact with twelve people daily to maintain crisp mental health.  Devotees absorbed his writing, his flawed protagonists ever swimming against the current.  Closer to home, his characters’ guilt, their repeated mistakes, seemed to irk his kin, and others he knew, too close to the bone depictions that echoed what they chose to dispel.

During average days he saw his family, and, perhaps, one or two others.  His wife said waving to the bus driver counted as a contact.  He countered, without conviction, that he met many authors by reading their work.  Sometimes in night dreams he asked something of his unseen wife and she would advise him.  He liked the confessional poets because they were self-critical, sometimes duplicating his own bathetic behaviour, and poets tended to keep it brief, unlike some prose stylists.  The gap between him and the hoi polloi widening, he felt awkward about acting interested to flatter them.  Alert to his isolation, he was consoled that those ant antagonising boys were OK, recalled the joke about youth being Jung and not easily Freudened.

A neat freak, he clumsied their kitchen clock from wall to floor, unable to resist straightening it, batteries skating over tiles like absconding teenaged offenders.  That clock fixed with a rubber band, batteries recaptured, time back to its despot status, he daydreamed of its durability when the second hand moved forward again.  Later, absurdly, to the boys’ glee, he noticed the clock’s hours reversing, as if retracing the past.  What, he thought, if he wrote about time running backwards, and, worldwide, clocks behaved accordingly?  Cezanne said the simple things were the hardest to paint.  His writerly aim was to use Coleridge’s best words in the best order, but ‘telling it slant’ in simple tales of roiling real struggles, not speculative fiction.  Dirty, or Magic Realism?  An aficionado of Ray Carver, there was nothing magical about him, believing not every reader rated the prevalent literary rage.

Nine o’clock heading towards eight o’clock had aroused an idea of the perfect trip, age to youth, reliving languid nights on slow-moving trains, laughter, young love crying out, and music.  Social engagements dwindled close to zero, his phone only buzzed to life due to unwelcomed AdTech.  Even Google, ever eager to interfere, was ignored when he, an OCD, conducted his own works’ word counts.  Silence squatted on him like a succubus despite the relief of basking in the bliss of quiet time spent alone.  Trekking back, picturing the vignettes, the blows of his fragmented history, pondering less than ideal time-travel aspects such as the clarity of raw grief growing ever ghastlier, or nothing happening again and again, his enthusiasm waned until common sense interrupted conjecture like a police rap on the door.

Real time had done its slipping by quickly thing, a fact supported by his bathroom mirror glaring back so fiercely.  A return of yesteryear’s physique would be welcomed.  He was no longer young.  No longer young and foolish, he reasoned.  Most folks didn’t give a rat’s about his love affair with words, and he enjoyed vulgarity if humorous, so he prepared to socially re-enter the human race – i.e. mostly non-readers – and, trying to smile, work the rough fields of art’s denouncers.  Eschewing becoming a Sci-Fi mutineer, he would stick with social marginalia’s every breath battlers take narration.  Remembering a high trestle bridge train crossing, and his bathroom mirror, he danced alone like a dervish to the Sabre Dance’s sizzling glissando.  Then, slowing for age, he thrilled to the alto-saxophone’s Caravan, yearning for those far off languid nights ashimmer.

…

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, 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.