The Long Quiet
by Elizabeth Tan
After ‘Waiting for Happiness’ by Nomi Stone
Some days you simply vanish—some time after you scoop fresh sand for me or after you pour my biscuits; I’ll be licking crumbs from my maw, tonguing myself clean, and then, oh: the house has sighed into a new shape, your smell quieting; and perhaps you did call goodbye to me, perhaps the lock flexed—perhaps you were still perturbed from when I stepped across the reluctant landscape of your body and breathed in your sleeping face—but, well, perhaps love is a spectrum of irritation, perhaps love is rubbing you with the pink crack of my mouth, perhaps love is a sneeze. I jostle my bells, walk ting ting ting through the corridor; I watch the front door as if I could re-hear and re-smell you leaving, and then, well, I forget about you for a bit.
The outside is clamouring with cicada and butterfly and bird and sometimes I want to be there, but that is not to say that in here the warm bristling vessel of my own body isn’t perfect. This is satisfactory, my spine rolling on the cold tiles, my tail curling around a thought and flicking it away. I visit every single corner of furniture and sniff it twice and slick my cheek against it, and if it’s a particularly great corner I’ll slick firm enough to peel my jowl back gently to the gum: this is the way to honour a great corner.
Things are always succumbing. Our shelves of books bowing in the middle, lengths of twine stretched across paintings’ backs thinning on the nail. The fridge magnet that clasps the wedding invitation sliding floorward. You, collecting creases in your neck like the rings of old tea inside a mug. How beautiful it is not to disappear from the world alone.
I am not a Thing like these Things. I am not the astonished agony of a fly caught between the curtain and the window, thrashing against glass; not the dead leaves keeling off your ficus. I am brighter than blood, more robust than these doomed midges flying too close to the sundew’s limbs; I twist my body out of trouble, spring like a cunning trap. Everywhere I shed brilliant fibres, fastening like spores to cushion and carpet and curtain; they assure me of my eternity in this place, laced forever with my scent.
I attend my favourite corner again, the dining table’s corner, furthest from the window; I must stand on a chair to reach it, can only touch it when the chair is tucked under the table and angled just so. Its walnut edge is bevelled, buffed smooth by my repeated honourings, the grain of the wood as fine as the stacked leaves of a book. That same singed smell, a turning-to-ash smell, tempered by the oil of your fingertips, the snag of clothes, old breakfasts, impatient sponges, my own dander nestled in the crevice.
Today I uphold our pact and do not climb on the tabletop, but—oh—there is yesterday’s mail, the corners fanned out and peeking over the table’s edge. I stretch my neck so I can touch each one, thorn-sharp, squashed-ant smell. These corners are not as sturdy as the table’s corner; two envelopes topple to the floor, plastic windows crackling. I am not a Thing like these Things either.
You can create an entire taxonomy of things according to what happens when they fall from a height.
In the long quiet, the muscles of the house lengthen; twigs snap on the roof. I rest on this chair beneath my favourite corner and make my body into a bowl of sleep. I cradle it all within my curvilinear self, the sum of the house’s little succumbings, the stitches of upholstery slackening, enamel peeling, carpets exposing nerves, fractures increasing on tiles, seats of chairs—including this one—buckling. My dreams caress them, the lagging clockhand, biscuits softening beneath feeble cardboard tabs, the lost grain of rice that will one day be caught in the broom’s sweep, switches that will roll out of their sockets, bar of soap rubbed to a sliver, symbols smoothed off calculators and keyboards and microwaves and remotes, all these things conceding and conceding.
Awake when the postal worker’s motorcycle hums in the driveway.
Awake as a new collection of corners falls into the slot.
Asleep when the motorcycle returns to its place in the flickering texture of noise, the constant murmur-gurgle of the refrigerator, the thin high-pitched note that spools out like fishwire from every dormant black screen in the house which I think you might be too old now to hear.
Plants archive sunlight. Old scratch marks on cupboards and chair legs glimmer, incandescent seams of some rare and precious mineral.
My body is all sinuousness, all preparedness, all manoeuvrable coil; even the steeples of my ears can flatten and flex and swivel and fold. When I sleep I am telling this body that it is good, that it deserves a thousand great corners to slick. I dream of morsels in gravy; I dream of a panic of feathers under claw. I dream of stretching my spine, and then I do it. Yawn, citadel of teeth.
I dream of the midge drowned in my water bowl.
When an insect falls from a height, there is no drastic alteration to their essential properties; they will hit solid ground in an unbroken scramble of limbs. When I fall from a height, my descent is controlled: my body turns to elastic; my landing is tidy and entirely intentional. But you—there are far too many bits of you that crack, that spill. You are so large with vulnerabilities, unscaffolded by the brilliant instincts that preserve my own survival, your blood sleeved in the thinnest and slowest skin.
When I am worried about you, I return to my favourite corner; I honour it again and again. Something about the way a corner nicks you, indents you with its little pain; something about the way it whisks off tiny shards of you. Something about the way it signals the borders of its Thingness, the way it bravely upholds the fiction of its solidity.
Corners are not thoroughfares or portals; they are not openings or possibilities. They are a culmination, a consensus of trajectories. When I am with you I give up some of my eternity—I skim off a little bit of it, peel it back to the gum—so that the two of us may culminate. A fixed point, the best and most perfect corner, conceding to the gorgeous apex of ourselves.
I anticipate but do not wait for the sun to stripe the floorboards, the fidget of the key in the lock—breaking the long quiet with your noisy pigment, new rhythms of odour; you’ll fumble out of your shoes and I’ll hoist my tail and come ting ting ting to meet you, zigzagging, brushing my flank across all the lively corners, each new hour thrashing into astonished existence; and did you know there is a corner high above us, a pristine corner, one which has not yet collected one flake nor hair of ourselves, no skerrick of sweat, no whisker, no stitch of saliva, a corner whose little pain we’ve yet to feel—lift your face to it.
Elizabeth Tan is a writer from Perth. Her first book is the novel-in-stories Rubik (2017); her second book is the short-story collection Smart Ovens for Lonely People (2020), which won the 2020 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.
