limb one

My sixteenth birthdaypasses throughme unknowingly. I have my head in a dumpster when I find a newspaper with the date on it:28 April 1972. Four days have passed since the garden shed. Or is it five? Six?

Happy birthday to me, I say.

I wonder how the day passed through my parents. Strangely, imagining that they had cared is so much more painful. I realise that hate and love sometimes come wrapped up and intertwined.

I fish from the dumpster two brown bananas and a cookie tin. Prying the tin open, I find, to my sheer joy, Arnott’s assorted biscuits. They’re stale, but I don’t care. As I shove the first into my mouth, I can’t help but laugh at the irony. My mother, too, would have thrown these away, never allowing anything to go stale in her kitchen. It’s mothers like her prematurely throwing things out that allows for daughters like me to survive.

I crouch down behind the bin and ram biscuit after biscuit into my mouth, barely chewing, so they form thick wads in my throat. Down the alleyway, a girl walks past in her school uniform. She turns her head and I lean into the shadow of the bin.

I think of school. Chalk words and diagrams on the blackboard are already beginning to warp and fade, becoming memories of a memory. Yet the feeling of being in the library, surrounded by shelves of books, feels achingly fresh. When I remember that the book I was reading,Orlando, will now sit on the shelf indefinitely, half-finished, I am overcome by grief. In these half-known truths, there are endless endings, and I mourn the open-ended ending of everything I ever knew. Perhaps that’s how endings happen. We like to think of full stops and final pages, but so often the book is forgotten or lost, leaving us on a half-formed thought with nothing to close the

A rat scurries past me. I shriek and jump to my feet, looking back down the alleyway. The girl is gone. Just like that. Off on her way to school.

When I wake in the afternoon, I pick up my biscuit tin and walk. Down the alleyway. Along the street. A school bus turns a corner. More school kids. I feel a pang of anxiety because, once upon a time, the school bus was the only place I found it difficult to survive. School was fine. I was good at school, excellent even. Surely good enough to get a university scholarship. I paid attention in class and handed in my homework ahead of time. A teacher’s pet. A nerd. A freak, because I spent recesses and lunches in the library, alone. Reading poetry and writing, thinking one day one day one day. The school bus was the twenty hot, sticky minutes that bookended each day. The time when I sat, sweaty, telling myself if I was quiet, maybe they wouldn’t know.

DidIeven know?

I remember how nothing necessarily felt wrong, until it suddenly felt right. How I’d kissed a boy at a school dance and thought, well, that was something. How I was high off the nerves and mistook the feeling for excitement. How it wasn’t until I kissed her, down by the creek, all murky water and mangroves, that I understood.

I exist,

otherwise.

That I felt out of time because everyone else’s was circling forward, while mine was beating backwards. The library and the classes and the school bus and the dinner table all became a kind of dream that I sleep-walked through. At night, when I would meet her in the garden shed, I woke up.

Like seeing a painting upside down, trying to make sense of it. Appreciating it, even. Until the painting is inverted and the image becomes crystal clear. Now I can’t even remember what the world looked like before it made sense.

Another school bus is approaching. It’s this easy, I think, to obliterate oneself. I take a deep breath and step forward off the kerb.

The bus driver slams on his horn. I jump back as the bus whooshes past. The driver shakes his head at my stupidity, then continues down the street to a future I will never know. A half-known truth. A story with endless endings… I can’t go back for fear my father might kill me. Or for fear that he might not?

When I picture the alternative – going home, brushing over, pretending none of this ever happened – I think, Iwouldrather die. Going back into the upside down feels utterly impossible.

So, I stick out my hand, out of time, thumb up, backwards, until a ute pulls to the kerb and a man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth winds down the window. Where are you going? he asks. I think of the furthest place I know from here. Brisbane. He says, I’m heading west. I ask, can you take me to the highway? He shrugs. Sure, get in, and reaches across to unlock the passenger door. The cabin reeks of yellowed smoke. Thanks, I say, closing the door. He pulls away from the kerb and tells me his name is Steve, then jokes that his missus would kill him if she saw me in his ute. I ask bluntly, why? Not because I don’t know, but because I think it’s a stupid thing to say. He laughs, the sound bubbling in his throat. He says something about my black eye, but I’m not listening because his eyes are sliding all over me. I tug at my shorts, stretching the fabric so that it covers my knees. He reaches across and pulls my hand away. The