This Once Precious LIfe and Other Stories

this once precious life and other stories

jodi cleghorn

dedication

For Christina,

if you’d let me go with you to the supermarket that day, this might never have happened.

And Dave and Dylan,

for not begruding me this writing life.

epigraph

It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.

~ French Proverb

foreword

Nineteen eighty-six: The Challenger space shuttle blew up, Chernobyl melted down, Mary Oliver’s poetry collection Dream Work came out, big hair was in, and two shy, wide-eyed girls met on the Wendouree West bus on their way to school.

Jodi would get on a few stops after I did. I recognised something in her. In hindsight, I think it was a Molotov cocktail of pre-teen volatility that also broiled in me: excitement about the future, trepidation about our role in it, and a constant unease, an unfitting, like our bodies were strangers to us.

Over the school years and beyond we communicated sometimes daily, sometimes barely annually. We shared the stories of our lives and loves via giggle, phone, handwritten letter—so many letters—and more recently via social media. When I nervously messaged Jodi five years ago to say I was thinking of trying this fiction-writing thing, she was generous and warm. Come to the page every day, she said, advice that has kept me writing through these years.

This generosity underpins Jodi’s community of creatives. Some of us are never far away, in a sort of planetary orbit, some of us swing close and then far away, like comets (or buses!). All are welcome. Be it through her annual Post-It Note Poetry, her once daily cut-up poetry, or her shared writing practice, the lived message is the same—bring your beauty, bring your scars, bring your dread, bring your dreams, bring the mangled bloody wreckage of your broken heart, bring whatever it is you wish to bring. But always, come to the page.

In this collection, Jodi brings all this and she invites us as readers out of her margins, into her words, onto her page.

Fittingly for me, the collection begins on a bus. The vignette, 555 is an invitation to climb aboard, to sit with your apprehension and peer through the grimy window as the engine comes alive with the poetry of a moment in transit. What is left behind? What lies ahead? Leave your expectations at the depot. Forget all preconceived ideas about the route or the destination. Abandon all hope for a smooth ride.

This collection, written over decades, twists and turns through an impressive range of voices, themes and worlds. Its stories are provocative and transportive, diving deep into other minds and our own. There are vampires at schoolies, cricket on the beach, cassette tapes, mind control, space colonies, ghosts, there is even Santa—nice and naughty!

Here there be monsters, those we fear from our worst dreams and those that dwell in us. Here there is love and loss, the complexities of aloneness, the eye-roll choreography of the mother-daughter dance, the tightrope of control and manipulation that twists through generations. Here there is hope and resilience. But mostly, here there is humanity unfiltered, the beauty of what Mary Oliver called ‘this one wild and precious life’.

For those who trade or wade in story creation, Jodi’s tales about writing and writers cut to the bone. Nothing New To Begin lays bare all writers’ grief and devastation for their dead darlings. Closure snarls with a writer’s dry self-loathing, only to eventually be drawn ‘out past the offensive comments to myself in the side margin’. But perhaps most chilling is The Starling Requiem, which I read when it was first published in 2018. It haunted me then with its unreliable step-counting narrator, its sinister thought-police and the blurred borders of life, death, reality and imagination. Re-reading it today, however, with our literary tapestry facing threats from artificial intelligence and book-banning, Requiem has taken on a new dimension. For me this was a stark reminder that the best stories are alive—ever-evolving entities that interact with the world in which they are told. And a reminder that dystopian writers are the prophets of our time.

Many of these stories call for a second reading, not as an indulgence, rather as continuation of the story. Jodi’s skill in dropping the reader into a world is something few writers are brave enough to do. This is testament to the author’s restraint and to her faith in us, her readers. We are held, yet never mollycoddled, never lectured to. And in this way, we can enter the story fully, deeply, bringing to it our own experiences and drawing from it our own perspectives. We are invited to catch the bus, to make these stories uniquely ours in the reading and to enjoy our own Once Precious Life.

Marion Taffe

Melbourne, Australia

December 2023

VIGNETTES

tiny moments

555

In your dreams the buses appear out of the rain with only headlights to announce their arrival. Interiors unlit. Destinations missing from the space above the windscreens. A bus stops where you stand. A door wheezes open. The smell of wet dog, camphor and Mercurochrome rushes out to fuel your indecision about alighting. You turn, worried you are holding up those wanting to board. The station is empty. For a moment you consider staying, then decide it prudent to get on rather than linger barefoot on the wet concrete.

Where is your ticket? Fingers touch nothing but the worn cotton lining of your pocket. The driver ignores his newest fare and you walk down the aisle, between passenger silhouettes melting into the seats beneath them.

You keep your eyes fixed ahead. Hope burns deep for a vacant double seat so you won’t have to travel beside a stranger. And there … behind the rear doors. You slide across the carpet-covered cushion to take up residence by the window. The engine rumbles to life. An ozone blast of air has you reaching for your coat, only to find you left it behind, along with your bag and umbrella and someone you were meant to meet.

The doors close with a finality that says, nothing can be done now. You push both soles into the sticky floor; the metal indentations press back. The bus eases into the traffic and you know you shouldn’t, but you do anyway: look back, through the oily streaks to the platform …

… where buses arrive in clusters, as they are wont to do, appearing one after another at the end of the bridge. Destinations blaze through the drizzling night. They slow and pull into the platform, queuing in warm carbon-monoxide clouds, until they are gone, as quickly as they arrived. The static of strangers’ conversations, the hum of fluorescent tubes and the taste of rain fills the emptiness. Then another four buses pile in together. You almost miss the lone one, continuing down the road. Headlights on. Interior dark. Destination unknown.

In an illuminated gap between idling behemoths, behind the rain-slick window, you stare back at the platform. There, and a moment later, gone.

A friend tugs you in the opposite direction; warm fingers around your cold ones. For a moment you resist, then follow.

it could be

We look down into the disgusting mess.

‘It could be a maggot infestation or rabbit shit on white carpet?’

‘Who has white carpet?’

‘Idiots.’

‘That explains our mission brown carpet.’

‘For camouflage. I might buy you a rabbit for your birthday.’

‘For our undying commitment to retro.’

‘For undeniable proof of non-idiot status.’

‘For maggots and shit?’

Contemplation wells up in silence then slowly drains out.

‘Whoever was best friends first gets to clean it up.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘Well, someone reaches in and—’

‘I get the sink thing. How could either of us be best friends before the other. Best friends is like, a mutual thing.’

‘I knew I wanted you to be my best friend the first time we met.’

There’s silence. A proper silence this time. The kind that wraps you up and hugs you tight, even when you think you don’t need it.

It could be …

… we’re thinking of when we met in the bookshop. I followed your voice because it sounded like someone I thought I remembered. You had my favourite book in hand, talking to yourself, trying to decide whether to buy it. I dared to tell you, a total stranger, it was my favourite and you listened. Really listened. Later, it didn’t matter that you were ambivalent about the book.

It could be …

… we’re both thinking: at some point we are going to have to stop believing the sink will magically clean itself. Someone will have to remove the rice and the tea leaves. Scoop handfuls of it into the bin, then remove the filter thingo and use it to scrape out what’s left. And we’re not seeing rice and tea. We’re seeing maggots and shit.

It could be …

… we’re considering the cascade of events and the responsibility implicit in them. You know I boiled the rice and made it stick to the bottom last night. I know you emptied the soaking pot and its bloated contents this morning. You know I emptied the teapot on top to make a cuppa for us earlier. And then there’s the clincher: I know, you know, I would clean it out because you are the one who restored my faith in people again. I’d do this and so much more for you. You know, I know, you won’t let me.

oksana

The curtains moved in and out of the window. Breathing in the sickly-sweet scent of jasmine. Breathing out the stink of fresh semen and stale sweat. Robert lay tangled in the soiled sheets, clinging to the feel of her. Keeping his eyes closed to hold onto her perfume and the way she said I love you.

Oksana, more a mirage than a memory, shimmering across his nightly desert. Abandoning him to an intoxicated disorientation that compelled him to get up and pull back the curtains to remember.

The intersection unfolded below in a bitumen cross, where his apartment rose above one corner. Oksana stood below on the opposite one.

The same corner where they’d waited for the lights to change, loaded with poppy-seed rolls or croissants for weekend lunchtimes. Cheap wine sheathed in brown paper on Friday nights. Laughing, arguing and dreaming a bigger life in the space of red to green. Crossing, giddy with possibility.

In the dirty pre-dawn, she leaned against the signal box emblazoned with post-modernist-meets-urban-graffiti artwork. A cigarette burned between her left fingers. Each inhalation lit the end stop-sign red; a tiny illuminated dot traveling the same arc from her thigh, over stomach and breasts to her mouth and back again, like an IKEA test station for wear and tear.

His cock hardened as the burning end flared again. Her pursed lips around filter still too much for him. And she knew it. Her suntanned face turned upward, seeking him.

Oksana …

He closed his eyes and imagined striding across the cool hardwood boards to the apartment’s front door, unlocking the dead bolt and stepping out onto the thinning corridor carpet. He’d take the stairs at break-neck speed, two at a time, racing as he always did to beat her to the intersection; to watch her wander down the road, cigarette in hand, cut-off shorts clinging to swinging hips, oblivious to the cavalcade of male stares.

At the intersection, he’d quickly check in each direction and run, against the lights and take her in his arms.

‘I’m sorry,’ he would say, ‘for everything,’ and she’d smile, jam the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and use both hands to smooth his crazy hair, before dropping the half-smoked cancer stick on the concrete. Satisfied with her efforts with his hair, she’d grind the butt out with the toe of a scuffed combat boot, then take his head in her hands and kiss him with reckless abandon, tobacco ripe on her lips.

‘No public display of affection,’ she’d joke, breathless, fighting him off when the kiss threatened to engulf them both.

How the yearning nearly overwhelmed him. The scenario so utterly believable he almost left his window vigil to go to her.

When he opened his eyes, reality hit harder than a car traveling 85 in a 50 zone. Almost as hard as knowing she’d stopped in the intersection to heckle him as he stood yelling apologies down to her from his apartment window.

Laughter up the street distracted him. He turned back and, like every morning, she was gone, along with the chance to tell her they were both equally trapped, unable to cross to the other side.

From bed he watched the curtains breathe in and out. In and out. He inhaled shame and petroleum fumes. Exhaled jasmine and cigarette smoke. Choking on the stink of newly-laid bitumen below.

shipwrecked

She is shipwrecked. She is shipwrecked with loss. She is shipwrecked with loss on a foreign shore. She is shipwrecked with loss on a foreign shore once home to her lovers. She is shipwrecked with loss on a foreign shore once home to her lovers, only toes left kissing. She is shipwrecked with loss on a foreign shore once home to her lovers, only toes left kissing the hungry water. Toes left kissing the hungry water as she once kissed them. Hungry. Impatient. Insatiable. Toes left kissing the hungry water now frigid with longing. Toes kissing the ocean that stole her lovers.

She is shipwrecked with loss, alone on the tiny, black stones of this beach. Tiny black stones like geological punctuation marks. The sentence ends here. And here. And here. And if she gathered them all up. If she placed them on top of each other, fitted them together, she could end here. And here. A cairn to who she was. Who she will never be again.

So many places for her to end. And none.

She does not end here. Nor here. Here. Or here.

She does not end, shipwrecked on this foreign shore of basalt full stops. On the beach they once stood skipping stones.

Stones black as grief. Cold as the bed in the house on the bluff she will never share with either of them again. Stones so plentiful it breaks her heart.

She reaches for a stone thinking she will skip it across the white wash. Skip it over the waves. Out toward the deep. She will skip it across the deep. Not a punctuation mark. Not an obsidian arc. Not an end. Not a beginning.

She will skip a stone as coda.

Return to the place where they are already playing and singing and loving. Where they are full of life. And potential.

Return to where they are full of life. And potential.

Return to the point where they are loving.

And play not to the end but return to the coda. Repeat. Infinitum.

Keep skipping the stone.

Skipping the stone across the ocean, and follow it.

She will walk on water.

She will be her own resurrection.

Skip the stone and walk until she finds them. Inhale a lifetime’s oxygen then dive deep. She will dive deep to where they languish at the bottom and kiss their water-bound lips. Push air into their lungs; inflate them with love.

Push air into their lungs through water-bound lips and inflate them with love so they will rise.

Rise with love and live again.

Rise with love and hand-in-hand they will walk the deep, jump the waves, paddle through the white wash to the shore. They will cross the beach, climb over the rocks and follow the path up the bluff to the house with the bed where they made love. And she will no longer be alone.

She will no longer be alone, shipwrecked with their loss on a foreign shore. On a beach with infinite ending, but no beginnings.

MICRO & FLASH FICTION

brevity at its finest

she would be grass

Seven days straight it rained. Walls of water interspersed with the dark heaviness that hung from the sky. The dead lawn became a swamp laced with black lines from the postie’s tyres.

On the eighth day the rain stopped. Light and heat returned. Judith’s husband came downstairs, kissed her cheek, as if their tempest was nothing more than a cloud passing across the sun.

But they’d fought in squalls for years now: him wanting to leave, her demanding he stay. She could remember how her heart was before it dulled and fell apart. Before she forgot she had once been special. Been someone.

Before pride wrought a slow death of everything that ever mattered.

Before loyalty had washed her grey.

On the ninth day, green patches of turf appeared.

Grass was resilient, Judith thought. She would be grass.

On the tenth day she wiped the decades and dust from her suitcase. Set aside the memories of what might have been to pack only the necessities, leaving plenty of room for sunshine.

closure

You can find peace. You think so? I’ve looked. The supermarkets don’t stock it. It’s not listed on Amazon and Amazon has everything.

You can seek closure. I pull out my phone and type ‘closure’ into seek.com. There’s 263 listings. I show the screen and comment I’m not qualified for any.

You think you’re funny. Am I laughing?

You enjoy it, don’t you? People feeling sorry for you. I’m not enjoying this. Who would fucking enjoy this? Would you enjoy this?

You need help. You need to mind your own fucking business.

You have to do something. Fuck off!

I’m just worried about you.

The counsellor hands me a brand-new note pad.

I’m told you write. Use it to help yourself. And do your job for you?

Some people find it useful to get their thoughts out of their head. Maybe it will be helpful to you too. You can jam your note pad up your arse. I don’t need to spend quality time with my thoughts; I’m with them all day and all night. Going round and round so loud they drown everything else out. I want to get away from my thoughts. A long, long fucking way from them.

It’ll help you make progress. It’s just a fucking tick box for your job security.

I’m just suggesting. Leave me the fuck alone. Okay?

A blank page. It’s a metaphor, right? For a new start?

The blank page isn’t empty. It’s filled with bullshit, written over and over in invisible ink. Tiny, efficient script to get the greatest number of words per page.

Line after line: bullshit bullshit bullshit …

I’ve been thinking how the blank page is infinite in its nothingness.

A tundra sown with hopelessness.

A mockery of everything that will never be.

I’ve out-metaphored the counsellor. Pissed all over their positivity.

A dirty facsimile of myself

Eye roll. Rewrite.

The moon, a dirty facsimile of myself

Fuck. That’s bad.

Eclipsed, I hang in the sky;

And it gets worse.

But you know what, I’m gonna write bad. So bad the fucking paper will cringe and the pen will beg not to be guilty by association.

Tough shit.

Talentless, uninspired, bland, mediocre, boring shit. That’s what I write.

Shit that looks wrong. Sounds wrong. Feels wrong in the very act of writing it down. Shit that makes no sense. Shit that fills page after page after page. The literary equivalent of an oxygen-thief.

Shit is as shit does. (Wish I knew Latin.)

I write bad. It feels good.

Words drip from ink-stained fingers. They soak so deep into the paper they disappear. Exit out the back door of the page.

No final look over the shoulder. Don’t stop.

I hear them hailing a cab.

There’s something. Not on the first or the second or even the third page. The ‘something’ appears on the page that lost count. A half-truth, a pretty lie I might believe, crawling out from the scratchings, scribbles and ink splotches. Slipping out past the offensive comments to myself in the side margin.

Escaping like a victim from a basement cell.

Blinking in the sunlight.

I leave the poem folded on the kitchen table.

Eclipsed

A dirty facsimile of the moon hangs in the sky;

my sister self.

Shrunken and discoloured.

Without lustre or illumination.

Hidden in plain sight.

A call without response.

Overshadowed and overwhelmed

by what’s beyond Her control.

Only for now. For now only,

She whispers to me.

Tiny diamonds flare on the russet surface.

The return of my sister self.

A molten fracture in the sky,

audacious and expanding.

Bold and mercurial she rises

for all to see.

Pregnant in the night.

Beautiful and free.

As I will. As will I,

I whisper back.

no need to reply

Twenty-three mornings I’ve sat beyond the breakers at dawn knowing I have to come clean with Loz. It’s not like last time, but a lie’s a lie. I’ll ring her, a pathetic promise swallowed by the on-shore whipping up white caps. I’ll paddle in and ring her.

A set builds. I let each wave go by. Up on the cliff, the double-glazed eyes of the house stare at me in silent judgement.

I’ll catch the next set.

It passes. As does the next. And the next.

In the end hunger forces me back to the shore.

Flat on my stomach, arms paddling hard to match the momentum, I’m almost on the wave, when I hestitate and it bests me. Caught in the madness of water and sand, air exploding from my lungs, seconds stretch endlessly. Finally, my face grates the ocean floor. I tuck and tumble. Bare feet find sand and push upward. I break the surface, salt searing my throat and nose and eyes. Before I recover, I’m slammed from behind, hard. I struggle free a second time, gasping, and stagger out of the water spitting sand.

It would be so much easier to stay behind the breakers and pretend everything is okay. But easy won’t sate the gut-gnawing feeling I’ve had since Loz’s last letter arrived.

No lie slips by without impact.

I’ve invested no effort in hiding the letters; a re-run of Virginia’s divorce papers which also sat on the kitchen table next to the salt and pepper mills. I was never in denial of their existence, despite what Virginia spat when she confronted me because I still hadn’t signed them. Unlike Loz’s letters, I never lied and said they hadn’t arrived. I was just afraid to open them and see how Virginia had got around the irreconcilable differences clause and cited my lie as the grounds for divorce.

There is lying to protect someone you love and lying to save your own skin. Virginia never understood the difference.

The deck overlooks the empty ocean; nothing for a thousand kilometres. It’s what I thought I wanted.

I sit and force myself to remember Loz.

‘It didn’t start with a photo,’ she said, the first time I rang. The night was so still I imagined her voice carrying across the water rather than through the mobile.

‘Yes it did. I put that Kombi photo up, with me and Mick and whatshisname, his bloody mongrel of a dog, and you commented.’

‘I’d commented before that.’

She probably had as a friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook. The comment about missing longboards caught my attention. And kept it.

Aftewards, an echo of her ran through everything. Gave life a new edge. The ocean new hues.

How many nights did I talk to her out here in the fading heat of the day, drinking beer while she drank tea watching the sun rise?

‘One day,’ she said. ‘We’ll be drinking beer together.’

So I swapped my day and night because I could. I slept during the day, surfed in the afternoon and coded at night. The ocean became a second home like I had always wanted it to. Why I’d moved here.

I imagined sharing it with her. She imagined sharing it with me.

A late-afternoon storm settles on the horizon. Loz will be awake now. I’ve spent the day rehearsing the story in my head—not because I deserve absolution, even forgiveness—but because Loz deserves to know everything. How holding that first letter in my hand, holding something she too had held, filled my heart in a way I never thought it would again. I hurried up the back stairs and sat at the kitchen table to read with the kind of excitement I hadn’t felt in a decade. And the phone rang.

A security hack, emergency job.

I left the letter on the table.

Days later I surfaced.

The first thing she asked: ‘Did you get my letter?’

‘It hasn’t arrived yet. I’ll let you you know when it does.’

A lie is more than the sum of its parts.

Those place-holder words, intended to give me time, became a lead weight of guilt. The letter remained unopened. The second one arrived before I had a chance to move beyond the fears Virginia’s anger had seeded years earlier.

Loz never asked about the second letter. Or any of the others.

Places torn open by Virginia bled again.

Stupid piece of shit.

And I was.

I watched Loz let me, let her go.

I turn my phone on. It chimes incoming texts and I flick through the list, buying time I still think I’m owed. I tap the unknown number first.

guess ur 2 busy 2 notice L missing online. she died Thurs. hit & run. they say it was instant. how do u lose some1 u love in an instant? no need 2 reply. u kno she ended her emails w/ that so she wuldnt have 2 wait 4 for the piece of shit reply u neva sent.

Water and sand and refracted light come together when you wipe out. Terrifying seconds pass where you have no idea where you are. Your body screams for oxygen and you have no idea where the surface is.

February 18th, 2014

Dear Joel,

I used to think there was an unexpected freedom in unread letters. To know at the end of writing I’d be the only one to know of its contents. My secret, that I loved you, would be safe for a few more weeks. Now I think it’s the worst kind of invisibility, that I’m dying slowly with each word …

taping lydia

I imagine what Lydia would look like on the back of a milk cartoon

‘Don’t diss it,’ I say, hoping she won’t reach over and touch what’s sitting on the table in front of me.

‘Don’t diss it,’ she mimics in the high-pitched voice she saves especially for me when Mum can’t hear.

Jake promised it would be simple, but this seems too easy.

Lydia puts one hand on her hip and pushes a massive purple bubble out between her lips. It pops with a loud thwack. She sucks the bits back in, chewing like a cow again. Gross.

‘What is it anyway?’

Like she cares what it actually is.

‘A technological artifact,’ I say, glad the words come out in the right order and sounding proper.

‘Looks like junk.’

But I can tell from the way she’s looking she’s just a little bit interested in the thing Jake found buried in his Pop’s garage.

‘It’s not junk.’

‘Bawr-ring!’

‘Is not boring, Lydia.’

‘Is!’

‘Isn’t!’

My fingers hover over the PLAY and RECORD buttons, just as Jake showed me. They’re big and clunky, not like an iPod.

‘It’s not even plugged in, you moron.’

Jake assured me we didn’t need a cord or batteries. I don’t understand how it can work without power. I’d watched, fascinated, as he’d pressed the EJECT button and the lid in the middle of the machine popped up. How he’d slid the plastic thing his Pop called ‘a tape’ or ‘cassette’ into the slot.

Jake told me the one he put in had Leo Sayer written on it. He said Leo sounded like a man who was intelligent and talked a lot. Probably a misunderstood genius. Jake thinks everyone is a misunderstood genius—even Miley Cyrus. I thought Leo sounded like something from Disney but didn’t say that.

The one I chose had AC/DC on it. It sounded like a code.

We were careful when Jake walked me through it. He took out the tape before he’d even point to the PLAY and RECORD buttons. Never ever ever muck around pressing them, he warned me. Only press them down if you’re certain.

I’m not certain though. Mum always said everyone deserved a second chance. Even the baddest people. And Lydia definitely fits in that category, so I try especially hard with her second chance.

If Lydia fails the second chance—when Lydia fails—I’ll do it.

‘Say something nice, Lydia,’ I say. ‘Like, say you love me or you’re glad that I’m your little brother.’

‘You’re gay.’

Another bubble squeezes out.

I glare at her, remembering when I was little and Mum explained glaring meant staring meanly. I do it a lot at Lydia, behind Mum’s back. It doesn’t scare her though. Just makes her sneer—which means to meanly laugh.

The bubble explodes.

‘I am not a homo-sex-ual. And Mum says you’re not allowed to call me gay.’

‘So go dob then. Gay-bo. You so love Jake.’

‘I do not love Jake.’

‘Do so. You said you wanted to marry him.’

My cheeks get hot.

‘I was at kindy and mad because you told me I couldn’t marry Mum. I thought getting married was like being friends or something.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Why are you so mean to me?’

‘Because I can.’

They are Lydia’s last words.

Later, when I walk back to Jake’s house with the cassette in my pocket and the recorder in my back pack, I replay it over and over in my head, unable to believe it happened—just like Jake promised it would.

My stomach churns and I try hard not to run.

I swear it was a reflex, to press the buttons down. Just like when your knee gets hit with a hammer