Talking to Auntie

Something is on your back doorstep and you don’t realise how big it is. With her cataracts removed her grey slacks have turned blue and her stories become slanted when my mother walks in the room. Plunger Pat, Shine Ryan, Birregurra Bill She slips into a church that smells of onions a man who dined with his mother instead of his wife each night. Like hot tea filled to the brim I’ve inherited a world that doesn’t guarantee the present. In a kitchen bathed with light she offers me dry biscuits another blind auntie smiling beneath her cataracts. I feel like I’m cutting my throat if I don’t eat some potatoes each day. I ask for stories and she gives me facts so strange, they must be fiction. Everything she owns is moored to memory passed around to the music of footy commentary. Do you want another cup of tea? No, well you’re not a tea drinker then. I was thirteen when she gave me a cigar behind the Hummocks at Killarney Beach. Her skin is wrinkled as a farm in Tyrendarra his enlistment at lunch a soldier settlement in Tarrone a brick veneer in Koroit. Like entries in a farmer’s diary her stories shadow Aboriginal history. She lives between the friends who have died and cards each fortnight. Making do collapsing after two beers on a hot afternoon.