WesterlyMagazine

‘Witold’s Realm of Form’ by Emma-Grace Clarke

This short story by Emma-Grace Clarke was published in Westerly 69.1 and we’re thrilled to make it freely available for everyone to read here on the Editor’s Desk.

Emma-Grace is a writer and bookseller based in Naarm. She lives a quiet life with her dear housemates. She won the Grace Marion Wilson Competition in the nonfiction category in 2022. You can read her work in Writers Victoria Magazine, Fiddler’s Green, Aurealis Magazine and other publications.

Witold’s Realm of Form

December 12
The ute carked it on the drive in to hut 4.12. I called the rangers at the Bowali Office, and they’re sending help (why they insist on mumbling over the phone is beyond me). We’re on the cusp of the wet season and most of my drive here was punctuated by the bloated animal corpses scattered along the Arnhem Highway. I think the rain muddles them. There was a young kangaroo with its abdominal cavity burst across the dark bitumen. It was right in the middle of the road, and I watched some dark-haired-side-part-in-a-rush-can’t-stop woman run over it, smearing innards into abstraction. I pulled over and used my beat-up shovel to roll it into a grassy ditch. You’re meant to pick them up from both ends because if they’re over-ripe and you’re not careful they’ll fall apart like brisket.

The car only lasted an hour after the clean-up, and I had to walk thirty minutes to get here from the broken-down truck. I ended up doing three trips to the truck for my supplies. Disaster!

I am not writing this notebook altogether seriously. I feel that everything around me is very different and difficult, that there are solutions to my issues that I can’t see and remain ignorant to. I don’t know. So, my volunteering over Christmas will have to do, some meditation in solitude and silence. No medication. I refuse! What could be better than the bush? Personally, I could ditch and elude more effectively by switching off my brain completely but that’s far off.

December 12 cont.
Started reading Middlemarch. God poor Doreathea! Dusted the hell out of the place, it’s a pigsty, whoever was the ranger here before did a terrible job of keeping it clean.

December 13
Bored as shit. Me—one hour. Me and birds—two hours. Me and dirt—three hours. So on.

December 14
Went out to measure rising water levels—higher than last year. Even out here in the bush, I can see the iridescent slick of oil on the river water. I watched kingfishers dip in to drink and hunt without being able to warn them.

Today, the twisted metal limbs of a crashed-out Honda Jazz floated past. Hanging from the rear-vision mirror was a bronze buddha, who blinked sleepily every time the car bobbed. Its eyes were dark jade. I plucked it out of the car along its slow journey for Sylvie to place upon her desk of trinkets.

I am thinking about Sylvie and Julie a lot, hope that they are getting on okay without me. The mental space left untouched by Sylvie and Julie is consumed by thoughts of my mother, sitting at the pokies, aglow in the early morning, unaware of the world. I am now thinking about driving on a highway, one in 100,000 glinting vehicles, all moving together along strips of night. I am very tired.

December 15
Telecommunications and electrics down due to storm. Got the generator on. Beans for dinner.

December 16
The water is choked with yellow Styrofoam that gathers at the bloated river’s edge. Strange things are coming along the churning water way, tires, pastel faux-flowers and what seemed to be a half-chewed pram. I hope the flowers are from a wedding. I guess I also hope they weren’t for a wedding, maybe they were thrown away—heartbreak! Drama!

Standing at the edge, I plucked from the water a serpentine belt for an industrial fan, its black rubber worn through in places. I wrapped it around my arm, as a Roman would wear an armband. Maybe it was connected to the Honda from a couple of days ago. Perhaps, when the car settles further downstream, it can excise the rest of its fuel canister into the water, before being overwhelmed by crawling vines, or, if it remains submerged, it can become the home to fish, providing shade and shelter.

1550 hours: I have something awful to relate. A body has come down the river and I think it’s been in the water a week at least. I dragged it up the bank and now it’s sitting by my rotted front door. I can tell its sex (male) and maybe its age (early twenties or teens). The hair is very dark and long, filled with stubborn debris which includes a crumpled Twisties packet which I removed (there were no Twisties inside the bag). I feel terrible. I cannot contact anyone. I can see his shoulder through the screen door even now as I sit at the desk and write.

December 17
Mother came to me in my dreams. She was selling bruised fruit (passionfruit, royale gala apples and plums) at a colourful stand and the sky was grey and she fainted into my arms when I came near. How strange.

I feel uneasy this morning as if an eel has slid into my stomach to lay eggs. So, I have named this corpse Witold, to ease my eel-y nerves. In the night he must have fallen, as he now lays slumped across the threshold on his side, staring out at the passing water.

I drink the cheap bottle of gin I brought along and Dorothea invades today as Witold blocks my way to the outside. Neither are of help. Dorothea reminds me of myself too much—her illness and mine being that we are at odds with desire and will never find true satisfaction in any cranny—

December 18
Sick. I cannot read yesterday’s entry. But I will leave it, as a recording of truth. Ugh. Blegh.

December 19
I have rested for the morning. I am passionately reading my book, I love Ladislaw, Middlemarch’s outcast—he has been sent away to unknown shores. There’s a detail about him, that when he visits houses to talk he lays upon the carpet, speaking to the ceiling about philosophy and politics, sometimes art. I struggle with the arts, but I can’t deny that I find him completely attractive due to this passion.

1600 hours: I have brought Witold inside. I cannot continue to leave him in the rain.

December 20
The birds have begun to howl in the night. It leaves me anxious. Witold sits in the corner and I catch myself looking at him. I am freezing in here. Ha! It’s a fridge. Good for bodies.

December 21
I do not think they are coming. I have been melancholic all day. What a drag. It is a bad sign; evil is about us. I hear the water rush without end, nothing ends, and everything is noisy like a preacher—Baptist of course.

Witold has become swiftly indispensable. I feel a pinch of regret for this man—I have whittled him into the precise tool of my musings from the broad brushstrokes of personhood. But I don’t think I am to blame entirely.

The outside is becoming its own ramshackle village of decaying debris, constructed by the tireless river, that creates lean-to grottos of plastic against the tree trunks. It is its own story of the people further upstream, but that tale is not mine to tell—only to discern. What a horror!

December 22
I visited my mother in the hospice of the Royal Darwin before I came here. It was not a swish place. Honestly, I thought she should have been at home, except her jaw was swollen, and chewing caused her such pain that they fed her with a tube. She was completely immobile except for her eyes, which zipped about the room, lingered on the IV drip and what I hoped she perceived to be my face. Witold at this moment looks far better than she did and one of his eyes has nearly fallen from its socket, holding on by the thin whims of the optic nerve. She whispered things, but even when I leant in close I could not hear her. She has been dying for many months. But the doctors say she will go on dying a while longer.

I had left her, as all animals do when one of their pack is set to expire. What a demon!

December 23
There are whispers coming from the bush. Witold watches, his head craned right round to the trees. His arms look like their branches—grey and gnarled.

Nothing else happens. The water pulsates.

December 24
Eternally the same thing. I went outside and measured the rise of the water. I will return the data and it will bear a terrifyingly boring result—the world is ending in minute, tessellating ways. I checked the recording units and cleared the microphones of dirt. A gaggle of cockatoos watched me, their black beady eyes frightened me, and they screamed.

My afternoon has been spiked with violation. Nothing is happening. I have given up hope. I have enough food to last a while. I will take stock and ration—it feels vaguely exciting. I wonder if those boys stuck in caves across the world thought, at some point during their ordeals, ‘some Hollywood director is going to make a movie about me’. I hope my director is not James Cameron.

December 25
I know the day occurred and that is all I will say on the matter.

December 26
It has crossed my mind that he was a person before corpse-hood. That he had a life—in a way, he has one now. Past lives are distant and mythical. I suggest that people who are cremated have maybe the least fulfilling bodily life—but then again, they float through the air…do they? Or does the ash just settle and get buried? The whole body (and I’m talking about bodies without formaldehyde), gets chucked into the ground or, in this case, the river, and is given an inner and outer life by its surrounds. The interior is an orchestra of gas when all the inner bits (organs, muscles, blood vessels etcetera), break down and bugs join the party. In the outer realm, you’re metamorphosing into a skeleton, a slow revelation, and if you are lucky (like Witold) you can visit places, engage with creatures as an object, food source, ghostly thing and so on. My head feels like it could bust from the potential legends of Witold, both from his past and from his future, beyond our meeting. I checked him over today, found wounds—he had sustained injuries to the back of his head and gashes along his lower legs.

Silence must bang around in his body. The eerie quiet of his distant realm that mutely intensifies itself—the still play of his body that occurs after death. Would it be best to pull him back outside and let the water do its silent work?

Today, I spent thirty minutes poking at my teeth, another thirty digging in the mud before getting my wellies and going to the recording units again, checking them for faults. One had been completely ripped from the gum it was attached to and now it sits beside me as I write, next to the rubber serpentine belt. Good lord I want some vermouth, something exotic in my mouth.

The rain has quelled.

December 27
It feels as if time is meeting me in only the pauses of my day. I am going mad, there is no doubt about it. I have pulled Witold outside again and he left a brown calligraphic streak behind him. I took a cloth to it with some vinegar left from another ranger, but it has done little for the stench.

I walked the thirty minutes to the truck that has been partially swallowed by the rising water. I sat in it for most of the morning and imagined driving away, laying my hands upon the steering wheel until my legs started to ache after being submerged in the cold for hours. In the evening, I measured the water levels (again ugh!) and watch the midges tap against the surface (Nutcracker style) before buzzing away.

Do not believe them, when people talk about the beauty of the bush. It is a lie they have made up!

December 28
There are bright green shoots around the hut, Mitchell Grass at a guess, but my botany is a bit crap. They peek out of the mud like the heads of fish (think stargazey pie from Cornwall), gasping for food from above. The water is only a few metres away from the door. But today I am feeling calmer without Witold in the house. There is chilly guilt, of course, as the morning brought a discovery; something took bites out of him in the night (from his left arm and lower torso, which is a shame because it looks like he had a nice tattoo, navy-like, with the sexy lady in the striped bikini, now she’s only a head—no tits). To hide the new wound I wrapped his arm in the rubber belt I found in the water. He must be a tremendous bouquet for the local scavengers.

December 29
I have heard from the rangers after testing the comms—they’re sending someone.

The issue is this: I do not know whether to tell anyone about Witold. If he ended up here, maybe that is because he wanted to. I know it is not a social thing to think but I do not believe that thoughts should be social—they are easily slapped back in the public sphere, but when you are alone their potential blossoms. I could bury him or toss him back in the river. He can be someone else’s problem.

December 30
I was retrieved and so was Witold. Our separation is surprisingly painful. He rode in the tray of the truck for most of the drive. I did not see the road, just imagined him rolling about in the world of death, which is gibberish to me…and ferment.

December 31
I am cold today. All day it’s been the same. I sit in my mother’s apartment with all her sheddings: photos, her worn ID tag for WorkPac where her face is stretched like a funhouse mirror, tissues (used and unused mixed together, the grub), a greasy remote control (and so on and so forth like the rest of us).

A man threw himself from the top of this building about a year ago—he worked at a bar down the road and his manager tried to talk him down. He just walked out mid-shift apparently. It surprised me, the way she had spoken about it. She’d essentially hissed. We came across the manager at the park only once, and my mother asked to leave. There’s something to that, but I never thought to ask.

When I looked down to the pavement, I saw in an open gutter just beneath the window a green tree frog in a nest of dead leaves. She blinked contentedly in the light rain that pattered against her skin and when a drop of water went near her eyes she closed them as if sleeping. She blocked most of water that rushed through the pipe, her fleshy body became a useless weir, and water splashed down onto the pavement below. I opened the window to reach out and touch her, but to my frustration my fingers were not long enough, and her golden irises disappeared behind the expansion of her pupils as she slowly looked towards me. When our eyes met, she froze, no longer moving with what I assumed to be pleasure in the water. Her toes fanned out, getting a greater grip upon the slick metal. I didn’t want her to run. I felt that, if she were to leave, I would cry. I took myself away, closing the window in hopes that a membrane between us would be enough to calm her. But I was not brave enough to check that she had remained in the pipe.

Tomorrow I am to be questioned about Witold, which I am nervous for, but any possible involvement in his death would be explained away by his decay. I think about him all the time—nearly more than my mother. Witold feels like a light but constant print upon the soft sand of my consciousness. Out the window I can see the unravelling bushland, the tendrils of which become gardens and hedge rows and the embarrassing little gnomes that dot the garden of number nine down the road.

January 1
I am horrified. It is as if the sludge of my thought has fallen from my ears. The hiccups of my recent days, the accumulation of thought have all come to very little. The police came and they were disengaged and alien in my mother’s apartment. There was no missing person report for Witold as no one was looking for him. Bringing him back was a mistake. The police were as good as statues and these statues I had to feed tea and biscuits for unknown reasons. One of the two asked for a Diet Coke, which felt like an extreme imposition. They asked me a bit about my work, and they were glazed in the kiln of environmental indifference, I suppose, as they did not listen. They left shortly after, without taking my phone number, though one gave me his own with what I assume he thought was a sly or flirtatious wink.

How is it that he is explained away so easily? That without record his death has become so miniscule? I miss Julie now, so desperately. I called her after the police left, hearing her voicemail: Hi this is Julie, you’ve called me. Congrats. I’ll get back to you, hopefully. Text is better though. Bye.

I called again straight away, the dial tone clicked over to quiet breathing on the other end, and I slowly took the phone away from my ear, placing it upon the coffee table among the tissues and wrinkled magazines. She was there, I could feel her and the wretched distance between us, the expanse of time, our meeting and parting that became flooded by affection or yearning. I wanted her to say something but when I went to think of words they became straggling pieces of ashy solace—anything that could be said would be impotent in the face of our previous meeting. I hung up, slowly reaching out to the screen, hoping that she would say something to prove that the bloated stagnation of our silences was not my imagination. I sat there a long while after as the phone screen went dark.

When we were together, it was as if her emotion was orbital and mine circumstantial, sublimated by her desire that curled across our little universe. I think she resented that I became so little and then I came to as well, eventually, and blamed her utterly. I lost her and little Sylvie, all that was dear, for no good reason. All of it was just coming to dislike each other, all romance ebbed away returning to seed, where I secreted my desire that love would bloom again.

January 2
I visited my mother this morning, her bedsores had become infected, and the nurses turned her, exposing her pink and yellow flesh. I was frightened of her. Her breathing was strange, she was less than I remembered her, reduced to minor functions of the body. It was sad to see, too hard to watch.

I remember her as her function, my mother. When I came home from school she was always in the garden and she would bound over the hedge to hug me, her thin hair whirling, her breasts swinging like bells, and she would hold me tightly because she was strong.

I am mostly angry that this is happening to her, of all people. At the bus stop on Mitchell Street I got close to an old lady who had a rat-like dog in a pram, and I nearly knocked her lights out. Right there, in public. Fuck old ladies—the healthy ones especially.

January 3
I am at the riverside. The brown water surges past, fat with rain and whitecapped fury.

God and piss!
What is to be said, between a daughter and mother? Stay silent with the dead. That is best.

January 4
She tried talking today, when it was very early, and the light was very weak. I leaned against her chest, her lungs plunked with liquid and stuttered painfully. Her voice came out, as oil comes from a dying engine, and dripping into my ear were confused questions: Possum? Sweet-thing, where is Ian, my husband…? Mum? Can you hear me? Eh eh shh shh.

Before she fell out of lucidity, her pupils dilated, our eyes met and I reached out to her hand which she pulled away, sliding it painfully up to her shoulder, grasping it with the other as if she had been burnt.

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