October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
By Brandon Graham
I consider myself an attentive father. And I know my daughter; I know she has a big heart. So when she made friends with this big fat girl who has two big fat parents I asked “Who’s that?”
My daughter answered “That’s Jackie? The other kids were picking on her and I thought she could use a friend.”
I said: “You ever think there might be a good reason the other kids were picking on that big fatty? Huh? You listen. You’ve got to quit hangin’ out with that Fat Jackie. And I mean now. Or her loser-stick will cling to you from now all the way through High School. Now you don’t want that, do you?”
“No,” She said.
“That’s my girl,” I told her.
I think we really dodged a bullet there.
October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
by Brandon Graham
The phone rings.
I know it’s my wife calling before I even look at the caller i.d. She calls everyday at the same time.
The phone keeps ringing. Even though the receiver is right by me, I let it go. On the fifth ring I pick-up and say “Hello.”
“My heart doesn’t feel right,” she tells me. “It keeps racing and I can’t catch my breath. I feel like I might pass out. I just wanted to let you know so when I die you can tell the doctor what was wrong. Also I was thinking you should keep the house when I’m gone; because we have a lot of good friends in the neighborhood. Plus the kids really like their school. Also church is near by and Reverend Chandler is great in a crisis. He’s just great. You will need all the help you can get. There’s a supportive network for you and the kids right where you are. Tell the Reverend I want to be cremated. I liked the eulogy he delivered for that nice old lady with the facial hair. Tell him that; but not the facial hair part. And play that song by the Cranberries. You know the one.
I really think you should keep the house. I am serious about that. Not to mention the burden of trying to find a new home, and put our place on the market and pack and clean and unpack and decorate a new house. You are not great at that stuff. I’m just being honest. That is not your best type of thing. You would already be grief-stricken, of course, and then all that stress piled on top; it would be too much. You would get irritable with the kids. And the kids will need you to be as patient as you can. This sort of tragedy is hardest on the kids.”
She stops talking. But I don’t say anything.
“Well, what do you think?” she asks.
I say “I will take that under advisement. But really, that will be a decision for me and the new wife.”
My wife laughs and says “You’re so funny,” because she thinks I’m kidding and she likes when I make jokes.
I knew she’d laugh. But I’m not kidding. Not at all. I’m dead serious. Not only that, but I don’t think it would be so unbearable if she died. It would be a lot of work. But you know – everyone likes a fresh start now and then. And I think I’m due.
October 2010 | back-issues, fiction
by Ashok Rajamani
Characters:
Arun Patel
Greg Atkins
Mr. Wills
Patel Family
Atkins Family
Setting: high school in small-town Illinois
Time: present
Arun Patel and Greg Atkins are best friends at Bluefish High School, a commonplace small-town high school in a commonplace town in Illinois. They are eighteen, in the senior year.
Greg is a dumpy, plump, pale Irish American. Arun is a stunningly handsome, dark-skinned Indian American. Cue scenes of Greg standing up for Arun, who is taunted mercilessly by his classmates and given names like camel jockey, towel-head, and sand nigger.
Arun and Greg dream of becoming famous, world-renowned actors. Arun, however, has the talent. Greg does not. Both hope to go to NYC after graduation, and attend Juilliard. The school’s final theatrical show is announced their senior year: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
The two chums cannot wait to audition, and know they are made for these roles. The far-more talented Arun, however, believes he is right not for Tom but of the main character, Huckleberry. After the auditions, held by the school’s frumpy middle-aged drama teacher, Mr. Wills, they are told that they will likely get parts, and would find out the results a week later. Although Mr. Wills does not specify what the parts will be, his demeanor (winks, smiles etc) suggest that they have won the lead roles.
Arun’s parents, like most parents of Indian descent, want Arun to give up his foolish dreams of being an actor, and do something “important” like becoming a surgeon, engineer, or IT man.
When they discover that Arun has the chance to play a major lead along with his friend, they change their minds and throw a party with Greg’s family. Both sets of parents are delighted. The party, held at Arun’s small house, is a vibrant scene that evokes an embracing of Indian culture by contemporary White America. Here, at long last, Arun and Greg have gotten their parents’ permission to pursue their dreams.
Come Monday, Mr. Wills calls them into his classroom to personally tell them which roles they won. With delight, he tells Greg that he will playing Tom Sawyer! Arun is delighted, knowing that he has won the lead role! Observing Arun’s grinning face, Mr. Wills reassuringly tells
Arun that he has an even more special part.
Last scene: the play’s opening night performance
Greg is giving, as expected, a bad performance as Tom Sawyer. Arun, onstage, is rowing a boat. But he is not playing Huckleberry; a nameless young blond White boy is playing the lead role. Arun, instead, is playing Jim. The Runaway Slave. His dark brown skin has been made-up to look even darker in the bright lights. ###
Ashok Rajamani is a writer and artist living in NYC. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including South Asian Review, Catamaran Literary Journal, and 3am magazine. His memoir, BRAIN KARMA, will be published by Algonquin Books in 2011. For more info: www.ashokrajamani.com.
October 2008 | back-issues, fiction
by Philip C. Breakenridge
Beams of hazy sunlight stroked Christopher’s skin as he took his usual place at the window. The gently rustling drapes, a melancholy shade of mauve, fingered his thighs and calves carelessly like an inattentive lover. Peering out over the newly awakened city, Christopher inhaled the fragrance peculiar to a late spring morning in Vancouver. A lush, green aroma rich with the pungency of Japanese blossoms and lilac bushes clung to the air. Christopher closed his eyes, timidly inviting the quiet of the early day to wash over his nakedness. He envisioned what was ahead and shifted uneasily in the rigid wooden chair.
Christopher’s eyes flicked open, his body tensing. The familiar silhouette darkened the window across the way.
Suddenly, Christopher’s stomach churned painfully; a bizarre combination of reticence and excitement wrestled inside him. An icy tremor resounded through his body as his quivering hand crept up to explore the firmness of his own chest. It was still difficult for him. Christopher’s right nipple hardened under his fingertip’s chilly touch. He twisted it between his thumb and forefinger, conjuring a delicious sensation of pain. The sharply shooting twinges of agony freed him, releasing him from a disobedient body. Christopher’s escaped self hovered above, a shadowy apparition gazing down on a vacant shell.
Christopher felt the stranger’s anxious presence in the distance. It was time to begin.
Fiery streams of water consumed Christopher as the last traces of the morning ritual swirled down the shower drain. Numbness washed over him as he pondered the repulsiveness of being touched by hands other than his own: hands that had molested the bodies of other lovers, hands that had sweetly mussed the fur of filthy, dumbly-devoted house pets. The oversized washcloth resting on the edge of the tub invited him to scour away these thoughts, a foul grime slick upon his skin. He gripped the washcloth tightly, scrubbing until his pale, freckled skin flushed an angry red.
Exhausted, Christopher slid into a heap on the shower floor, swallowed by a thick, dank blanket of dewy steam. Consciousness slipped away from him.
The boy raised a bruised hand to block the sun’s fierce rays. The colorful shorts set his mother had placed out for him that morning glimmered in its bright beams. A tepid summer breeze danced on the backs of his spindly legs. He squinted, scanning the expansive greenness of the backyard. His eyes refocused as the formidable man came back into view.
His father crouched uncomfortably ten feet away on the meticulously-manicured lawn. He wiped away copious beads of sweat from his crinkled brow with a meaty, calloused hand. A sigh of exasperation escaped his mouth, unresisted.
“Okay, Tiger. This time I wanna feel it burn right through my glove.”
The freckle-faced boy grasped the baseball clumsily. He struggled to wrap his delicately boned fingers around its shape.
“Here it comes, Daddy.”
Using a madly hurled overhand pitch, Christopher threw the ball with all the might a six-year-old could muster. The boy’s miniature physique lunged forward as the fervent force of his throw sent him tumbling to his knees. For an instant, he cowered on all fours waiting for the call.
“You still throw like a girl. Get up. Let’s do it again.”
Christopher stared down at the grass wishing its fierce green blades would wind their way around his body and pull him down into the cool soil. Droplets of childish determination welled up in his eyes. They had been at this for four hours and he wasn’t getting any better. He was still a sissy.
“C’mon. Get up. Only girls give up.”
His father ran his hands through a coppery-colored brush cut and smiled smugly. His boy would thank him for this someday.
“I’ll show you how it’s done. I’ll pitch it to you. You catch it, then throw it back to me.”
The little boy stood up and brushed flecks of dirt off of his grass-stained knees, feigning the bravado of a major league player. He swallowed hard and braced himself for the impact of his father’s pitch.
“Are you ready?”
Christopher tugged at the ill-fitting leather glove that engulfed his left hand and nodded. His father didn’t hold back.
The force of his throw seared into the boy’s chest, throwing him onto his back. Christopher lay on the grass, winded, gasping for any faint wisps of air he could smuggle into his lungs. A raucous cough rattled his chest, bringing up with it a ghastly mixture of blackened blood and spittle. The putrid liquid oozed from the corners of his pink mouth and dribbled onto his chin. Christopher stared up at the awesome summer sky, a deliriously beautiful palette of soft blues. Its radiance mesmerized and comforted him as he floated upwards to embrace it.
Suddenly, the blackness of his father’s stern expression fell across the heavens, darkening the magnificent sky like an ominous eclipse.
An hour passed before Christopher felt composed enough to leave his sodden refuge. Stepping out of the shower, he wrapped a plush towel around his narrow waist. With a sweep of his hand, he cleared the bathroom mirror of steam. His estranged self stared back at him as he ran his water-pruned fingers through an untamable mass of wavy hair. The sun had already turned it a shiny carrot-red. The murky blue pools of his eyes reflected back a sad vacancy.
The stranger had been coming every morning for over six months now. Christopher hated what his dark visitor made him feel. The detached connection that came with being watched was something Christopher both craved and despised. He was losing himself, a casualty of a sordid inner conflict. His carefully-constructed guise slowly peeled away, exposing a pinkish, tender sensualist flesh. Christopher craned his neck, bringing his face closer to the mirror. He poked at the finely etched lines tugging at the corners of his eyes. Maybe he was better off lost.
Christopher stared out into the faintly glowing blackness. The night air had an edge that prickled the flesh of his exposed chest. The pearlized buttons on his finely-tailored dress shirt were all undone. Its crisp cotton shape billowed on the breeze. Christopher summoned all the energy he could and directed it towards the shaded window. His eyes cautiously scanned the prodigious high-rise that looked especially foreboding after dark. The cold, grey building gazed back at him, its scattered illuminated suites forming a menacing grimace. Christopher focused on the dimly lit apartment across the way. Nothing happened.
He knew it wasn’t time yet. The shared addiction was precise and calculated. Christopher slid the frosted glass door back into place, shutting out the night.
Morning slowly crept up on Christopher. He awoke from a restless slumber and took his post earlier than usual. The familiar anxiety embracing him made the wait excruciating. Tiny beads of perspiration blanketed his body causing him to shiver slightly in the crisp morning air. A distorted collage pieced together with visions of other mornings just like this one spun in his head. The endless effort given to resisting the perversion of his own thoughts wore him down.
The masculine frame stepped out of the shadows, bringing Christopher to his senses. The stranger was already aroused. Christopher closed his eyes and laid back in the chair, balancing himself on the very edge. He gently ran his hands over the expanse of his chest. The stranger liked this – Christopher felt his approval. He lowered his hands, examining his rippled midsection with probing fingertips. He moved deliberately, pausing to feel each section of taut abdominal muscle.
Growing impatient, the stranger looked over his shoulder, into the black of his abode. Christopher gave him what he wanted. The stranger watched intently, fixed in the moment by an eerie stillness.
Christopher’s body convulsed with the force of his climax. He lay trembling, listening to the hurried pant of his own breath. He slowly peeled his eyes open. The stranger was pleased. The dark figure vanished into the obscurity of his apartment. Christopher was alone.
Christopher peeked through the sad drapes. Two dreary and vacuous weeks had passed since the stranger had stopped coming. The desertion had caused something inside of Christopher to short circuit, making the maintaining of his make-believe daily life unbearable. He was a fraud, a disconnected being, an unlovable abomination. Christopher had stopped leaving the apartment a week ago. The sour stench of his unwashed body grew thick upon the stale air inside. A dense, coarse stubble had claimed his smooth face. He ate only when the growlings of his belly demanded it; sleep came to him infrequently, in dreamless and gloomy waves.
Christopher’s robe slipped into a neat pile on the living room floor. He slid the balcony door open and stepped out into the midday rays, the sun’s brightness assailing his dulled eyes. He hoisted himself onto the wall of his balcony, his bare feet gripping the rough concrete ledge. Christopher closed his eyes and inhaled calmly. The thought of erasing a mistake was strangely soothing to him.
Christopher leaned forward, letting go of his balance. He simply let go.
June 2008 | back-issues, fiction
by Philip C. Breakenridge
He’s a scarecrow set against the blackness of my backyard, a lanky figure trapped inside the small square of yellow emanating from the porch light. His scarecrow mouth puckers in a guilty little grin. Time for the awkward goodbye.
A mass of tousled, honey-colored hair hangs loosely around his face. It’s stuck to his forehead in places, clinging to the moistness of his skin – a product of our romp. He never takes a shower or stays the night. To do so would cross that unspoken, invisible boundary.
I hope she smells me on him.
The door clicks shut and I listen to the grumble of his car coming back to life. It’s taking him back to his relationship, his house by the sea. Leaving me in my dingy basement apartment.
I turn on the television and its fuzzy, throbbing glow fills the disheveled bedroom. It’s the only thing that hasn’t left me. As long as I keep up with the cable bill, it can’t.
I play with the brass screw he had pulled out of his pocket earlier. He had built a fence around [i]their[/i] yard today.
“Is it okay to want you so bad?” I had asked him.
“As long as you know that my heart is taken,” he had answered. “Can we put the porno on now?”
He left the screw on my night stand as a reminder. I twirl it between two fingers and think about all of the ‘attached’ men I’ve fucked this year. Wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. Like all the others, I provide him with what his insignificant other won’t – dirty, noncommittal sex. A release from the boredom of monogamy.
Tonight he lost control and came all over the sheets. I roll around in his genetic cast off like a neophyte Madonna strung out on stardom. At least I have part of him. Before he left, he told me that I’d always attract abusive, unavailable men, that I was too internal, too intelligent.
What the fuck does he know?
May 2008 | back-issues, fiction
by Suvi Mahonen
The man stood waiting with his back to the desk.
It was dim in the room. Pale light struggling through the small barred window fell onto the tiled walls and floor. The shelf opposite the desk was stacked with dressings, rolled bandages and a large, rust-coloured bottle of iodine, to disinfect caning wounds.
I tried to swallow. Bile pooled at the back of my tongue but my throat was too dry to get rid of it.
The man took out a little notebook and pen from the pocket of his khaki shirt. His black fringe hung in limp strands over a forehead that was pitted in the middle with a bullet-hole-shaped scar. His dark eyes were sunk in deep hollows beneath twitching eyelids.
I searched his face for any acknowledgement of what he did, why he had me here. He remained expressionless.
‘Please step on the scales,’ he said.
I shivered even though it must have been at least thirty degrees Celcius.
‘Leave your shoes on.’
Warm sweat dribbled down the back of my neck as I stepped onto the scales in front of me. The man leaned forward and started moving the little metal weights that slid across the bar.
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
I turned my face away, clenching my teeth hard. I stared at the narrow examination bed. At the locked medicine cabinet. At the two guards standing watch by the door. And finally I came back to the scales.
The man clunked the last weight into place and stepped back for a moment to make sure the beam stayed even. I blinked. I’d lost more than ten kilos since coming to this place.
The man wrote my weight down in his little notebook. It was all very scientific. They used a system devised by the British in 1888 called the Official Table of Drops—bloody Peng had told me that.
‘It’s a manual for working out the length of rope,’ Peng had said. ‘It depends on your weight.’ He’d stopped by my cell, uninvited, after the pardon board rejected my appeal. ‘If the rope is too long, it rips your head off. Too short, you strangulate.’ He put his hands around his throat and made choking noises.
‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Step down now.’
I stepped off the scales. My prison coveralls, damp from sweat, chaffed at the rash on the inside of my thighs.
The man closed his notebook and nodded to the guards.
‘You have any questions?’ he asked me.
I shook my head; I couldn’t speak.
‘I will see you tomorrow morning,’ he said.
I had no choice. The man was my hangman.
‘A Malay, a Thai and an Australian were on death row. The warden gave them a choice whether to be shot, hanged, or injected with the AIDS virus.’
Khee Boon occupied the cell on my right. He was a Singaporean who liked telling jokes. He only saw half his audience—those prisoners facing him in the row of cells opposite—but he spoke to all of us. Shouted conversations in Mandarin, Malay and English babbled between the bars. You got used to it.
‘The Malaysian chose to be shot. He died instantly.’
Khee Boon paused.
‘The Thai chose to be hanged. He also died instantly.’
I waited for the punchline.
‘The Australian said he wanted to be injected with the AIDS virus. So they gave him the needle. He fell down laughing. The warden wanted to know what was so funny. The Australian said, “You’re so stupid. I’m wearing a condom!”’
Everyone laughed. I laughed the hardest—until gagging on an inbreath, I realised I was crying.
Steel clanked as a cell door rattled shut. Restless inmates paced and sweated through another miserable afternoon, and in the guard’s office, the television yabbered in that high-pitched, whiny dialect I had come to despise.
I was sitting on the edge of my straw-filled mattress that lay on the ground, knees to my chest, playing Seven Devils Solitaire, one of the hardest solitaire games to win. Floor space was limited. Some cards were even arranged half under the bars to avoid the brown metallic water trickling from the leaking tap. I’d tried playing the cards on the mattress, but the stacks kept tipping on the hard bulges.
If I won I’d get a stay. My starting layout was promising. I had an ace of diamonds. I picked it up and moved it to the right near my foot. Spongy chunks of skin peeled in the cracks between my toes. I couldn’t resist the urge to scratch, to kill the crazy-making itch. Blood came away on my fingers. I went bare foot in my cell to try and keep my feet dry—tinea lurked in every crevice in this festering row of manflesh—but it was too humid. My feet were never dry.
Six of spades. I couldn’t use it. I put it on the waste pile and took another card. The game wasn’t going well. In a way I was lucky. I didn’t want to live here for the rest of my life. Every day the air was heavy with the stench rising from the open toilet hole, the mosquitoes at dusk, and the moans and mutters of men at night that never gave you peace.
Five of hearts! I had a chance. What was the point of trying to kid myself? I didn’t want to die. My hopes rose and fell like an imam praying.
Guards. Their heavy boots grinding into nubs of course concrete sounded threatening in the closed dimness, hard and unforgiving. One of the guards stopped outside my cell. Usually they counted us four times a day. Today they were checking on me hourly.
He nodded and strode off, slowly running his baton along the bars. Tonk, tonk, tonk, tonk.
I turned back to my cards. A king. I was going to finish my goal piles. I had to get an ace. One card remained in the stock pile. If it was an ace, I lived. If it wasn’t, I died. I picked it up and held onto it for a second. I still had hope. I turned it over.
Joker.
The cobbled alley was walled in on both sides. A strip of sky divided the buildings; light flashed off jutting gutters, below that, grey.
Rod stood with the man at the back of the Chinese restaurant. The smell of fried duck, steamed rice and burnt garlic came from an open door.
I went up to them, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder. I knew there was no-one behind me; I was being paranoid.
Rod gestured towards the man.
‘This is Thanh.’
Thanh was a thin Vietnamese man in his late twenties with a small mouth and tufts of moustache sprouting around flaky lips. He wore rumpled black clothes—T-shirt, skin-tight jeans—and thongs in the middle of winter. Lizard tattoos coiled around his wiry brown arms. As he glanced at me, he raised an eyebrow, as if appraising my value before I was sold.
I took a step back; the heels of my Nikes struck the edge of the gutter.
Thanh reached into his pocket. He shook out a cigarette from a battered box, lit up, then crushed the box back into his pocket without offering a cigarette to us.
He looked at me again, then grinned, blowing smoke in my direction.
‘So you want fast cash?’
I turned away and cleared my throat to cover the cough. I could hear the street outside the alley, the idling and revving of inner city traffic, someone shouting, and the long hiss of a bus’s air brakes.
I looked back at Thanh and tried to concentrate on what he was saying. Details. How much cash he would supply; who would pick us up from the airport; the mobile number for a go-between in Kuantan who would facilitate the exchange; our flights back to Melbourne; and our fee for the job. Rod and I were going there together, but we’d return separately to protect the stock in case we were busted.
‘How long will it take?’ I asked.
‘Less than a week.’
‘What if we’re caught?’
Thanh laughed. ‘No-one ever gets caught in Malaysia.’
His laugh made me uneasy; I knew he was lying.
I didn’t want to be here any more. I should’ve been at home, studying for my exams. It was cold, but under my shirt my chest felt hot.
‘Let me think about it,’ I said.
Thanh’s face turned hard. He had eyes that told you not to fuck with him. ‘Let Rod know by tomorrow.’
I looked at Rod. He was busy studying a crack in the wall. Rod was my best friend; I’d known him for years. He’d got into serious trouble, and he needed this job. I’d agreed to help him, but now I wasn’t sure. The whole thing felt wrong.
I turned and started walking without bothering to say goodbye. The alley seemed to stretch further than before. My legs felt numb, like they’d been sat on for too long.
I wanted to go home. I could still back out; Rod could find someone else. I had to study for my TAFE exams. Eight months to go till I finished my course.
Rod made it home.
It was a grimy, windowless room with mildew staining the once white-painted concrete walls. Cigarette burns cratered both sides of the vinyl counter where prisoners stood talking to their visitors through the grille. The air was a taxi-driver’s armpit in peak-hour traffic: steamy and rank.
As always, my mother was there, waiting. Her hands gripped the steel bars; the expression on her face was eager, pained.
I scuffled over to her, my ankles tugging against the leg-irons that reduced my steps to an awkward little waddle.
She reached through the bars.
‘Benny.’ Then she started to cry.
In a way I was glad that she wouldn’t have to come here any more. The constant travel between Australia and this bumcrack part of the world had left her both broke and wrecked. She’d done everything she could to get my sentence revoked: paid for extra lawyers, harassed Federal Parliament, written to the Queen, given interviews to a media grabbing story after story about the young white man about to be hanged in an Asian jail. Now, I wanted her to rest.
She put her hands on my shoulders and tried to hug me. Our faces scraped against corroded iron. I whispered Sorry.
She squeezed me hard before letting me go. After a moment she searched in her handbag, pulled out a small white Bible, and placed it on the counter.
With a fierce smile she looked up at me.
‘We will see each other again.’
She meant in heaven and I nodded. I saw the desperation in her pulpy eyes, punctured cheeks, and the deep troughs around her sad, downturned mouth.
‘Next thing you know,’ she said. ‘You’ll open your eyes and see Jesus.’
I tried to hide my doubts as she spent most of our last visit talking about heaven. I didn’t want to take away from her reliance on God. It comforted her.
She wasn’t always this passionate about religion. A strict childhood loaded with rules had driven her to rebellion. By seventeen she was pregnant with me. My father was never around. I never knew who he was. Once, when I asked her, when I yelled at her to tell me, she said she wasn’t sure. After I was born she gave up drugs and eventually got a job. But it wasn’t until a house fire killed my grandparents that she returned to the church.
Now the church was all she had. She had no other family.
‘Look after yourself, Mum,’ I said towards the end of our allotted time. ‘You got everything ready to fly home?’
‘The people at the high commission are helping me.’ Then she started crying again.
I reached up with my shackled hands and touched her face.
‘I’ll be all right,’ I told her.
Her bottom lip blanched as her teeth bit down on it.
‘I love you, son.’
The back of my throat hurt. I wanted to say it back. I knew it was what she needed. But I couldn’t get the words out.
A guard tapped me on the arm.
‘Time’s up.’
My top lip curled into my gum. No chance remained for me to say it. Not with the hacks there, listening.
‘Do you really see heaven as a tangible place?’ I asked.
We were sitting on the hard slab of mattress in my cell, our backs against the knuckled wall, my feet bare, his sandal clad. It was dim but never dark on the row and in the fluorescent light coming through the bars I could see him nodding his head in that earnest, measured way he had.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you ever doubted?’
He was honest enough to hesitate. ‘We are human beings. We all doubt from time to time.’
That might have been true. But now was not a good time to have doubts as I sat here beside him, listening to the sound of sleepless inmates stirring in their beds, the muffled television in the guards’ office, and the steady tick … tick … tick of the metal clock. My guts felt like they were being twisted over a lemon squeezer.
I was terrified.
‘I don’t think I’ll make it.’
Father Cheng thought I was talking about heaven. He turned and looked at me with his lopsided eyes. ‘Remember John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son. So that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.’
Father Cheng had spent a lot of time with me over the last few months. He knew my struggles well. The shame. The fear. The heavy ache of remorse. He never judged me, never challenged the different beliefs I held, never felt it relevant to question me about my past. He was a genuine friend. We talked about a lot of things, not just religion. Some of my most comforting times in prison had been during our long conversations about sport. He talked badminton; I talked Aussie Rules.
‘I still have doubts, though.’
‘Then you’re in good company. Jesus’s own disciple Thomas doubted.’
I smiled. I was grateful for Father Cheng’s support, that he was here, spending the night with me in my cell. His duties included accompanying Christian death row inmates to the gallows.
When I asked him how many men he’d seen hanged, he refused to say. He simply put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You don’t need to fear death’.
But of course I did.
I sweated under the glaring floodlights. The smell of old vomit hung trapped in the air between the rutted cement walls and the low ceiling above me. Across the corridor, a hose lay heaped under a copper tap, with a wooden broom and an upside down metal bucket beside it. No tap was in this cell, only a small drain, to wash away the waste of past men.
From where I sat on a plastic chair, the only piece of furniture in the cell, I could see the gallows door. Steel shanks bordered the archway over the tall stone entrance. The door was metal plated, with rivets around the edge and a thick iron bar that was bolted across the middle.
Two guards stood outside the holding cell. Their shadows shifted across the notepad on my knees.
I was trying to write a letter but I was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the pen.
A loud clank made me jump. They were testing the trapdoor. We’d all heard the sound before, reverberating down the row on the morning of an execution, telling us the hangman had pulled the lever, or the gear as Peng called it.
I looked back down at the notepad again. I was nearly out of time. This was my last chance to write to my mother. To give her words of comfort. I wished that I had told her that I loved her when we’d said goodbye. I hated that I hadn’t. I wanted to write it down—tell her I loved her, let her know.
The pressure in the block was building. I heard the raised voice of a guard in the distance, the cough of a nervy inmate, and the metal gate at the end of the corridor clanging open and closed, open and closed.
I bit the skin on the inside of my cheek; blood oozed over my tongue as I forced myself to write.
Dear Mum,
I wanted to thank you for all the things you’ve done for me. None of this
is your fault. I’m sorry for the shame. I want you to know how much ——
In the charged air, the scraping sound was loud, harsh, like something heavy being dragged over concrete. I looked up. The gallows door was opening. Light from the death chamber arced out across the corridor.
I stared at the widening gap as a guard pushed the door towards the thick stone pillar. The guard bent down, then drove a stake into a ground socket to secure the door open.
He straightened up again, then moved to one side and stood at attention.
The row became silent as the hangman and his team filed out through the gallows door.
A moan that I wasn’t ready rose halfway up my throat.
I hadn’t finished my letter, telling my mother that I loved her. But I couldn’t keep writing. I had to stand up. I wouldn’t face them sitting down.
I put the notepad on the ground and got to my feet.
The execution team stood on the other side of the bars. The guards wore military uniform, their green pressed shirts tucked into high-waisted trousers, pistols at their sides.
Father Cheng was there as well. The expression on his face was sad, the time for smiles over.
I looked back at the hangman.
The same twitch was in his eyelids, the muscles in his face were drawn. His fringe was damp and shiny, combed neatly to one side. I remembered the bullet-hole-shaped scar that I saw on his forehead.
‘Benjamin Pearce,’ he said. ‘We have a warrant for your execution.’
I held myself still as he read out my hanging order. I stared at the steel bars in front of me with their flakes of rust, their tarnished grime. I thought about this life I had ruined. My home. My friends back in Melbourne. My mother. My dear, unselfish mother. As the hangman finished reading, I said a silent prayer for her.
The hangman turned and nodded to the guard standing beside him. The guard stepped forward with a ring of keys in his hand and unlocked the cell door.
The hangman stepped inside.
‘Ready?’
First published in ‘Verandah’ in 2007
