Wild Greens

Wild Greens 4, no. 9 (July 2024)

Expanse

Welcome to the July 2024 issue of Wild Greens

Apple Pie

by Amy Nanette Glin

Glass Waters

by Holly Rose

Desperado Dreaming

by Ian C Smith

They bought a second-hand caravan with annexe, canvas cots, folding chairs. On weekend trial runs he, his wife, children, and dog, camped on the green fringes of outer suburbs where he obstinately tackled crosswords trying to self-educate. Those unspoiled spots are now grids of streets occupied by the following generations of hopeful families. Practised, they booked their first summer holiday at Emerald Lake. An ornamental body of shallow water under a dwarfing sky with no fish, no tide, nor flow, overlapping laughter, a nonstop hubbub of splashes, shrieks, and sunburn, was sublime for their youngsters.

An escapee from a love-starved childhood, he rented an unheated room in a stained-brick city, a stark haven where the cracked light fitting trembled each time a train’s rumble reverberated below him. Tyres whirred along bleak streets with an acrid odour: petrol, rust, coal smoke, and cold damp soil, the air often the hue of impending storms. Still a juvenile, he would smack his alarm clock off when it woke him early for hated low-paid drudgery. Sometimes he would be late after drifting back into further escapism, sumptuous dreams.

They had scrimped to buy the cheapest block on their monotonous new streets of suburban sprawl. A lone tree on their site, a mature pine, was spared when their area was cleared for housing, so, copying observed parenting, he attached a plastic swing to a lower bough. From bricks left by the builders half-buried in hardened clay he constructed a barbecue by guesswork that did its job before eventually splitting. He also wondered about his unfathomable dreams, and what his future self would think of the heft of all this when he lay dying.

Before that holiday, flushed with accomplishment after replacing his car’s worn-out brakes to save labour costs, he had started a new job a little awed by his audacity following a trial after applying with no experience or training. At their lakeside berth he rose early, the campground’s silence ethereal. Finished reinflating floatable toys, he drove in burgeoning light, elbow out the window, the extra miles to the mill, traffic sparse at first, singing along to his radio remembering street kid days’ wretched loneliness. He couldn’t know that freedom of the road’s thrill one day when they would set off to drive hundreds of miles on a real adventure.

He found that rented room after living like a desperado on criminality’s razor’s edge when he slept in an empty skip, lighting candles in the remembering time before sleep’s merciful escape, toes frostbitten. Once he succumbed without snuffing out that precious wax. While stars kept their watchful silence flames flickered, burning, bowing, burning, refusing to die. Why he loved recalling that night in the candlelit darkness was the dream blessing him. He swam through a blossoming sea, the sky festooned with blazing fireworks.

Their holiday nearing its end, he arrived at the lake after work, parking in the usual shade. In his ticking Ford with its damaged mudguards, the dent from whiskey once, the scrape from teaching himself how to reverse the caravan, its hot familiar smell mingled with expensive takeaway food’s aroma. He rolled a smoke watching thunderclouds signalling a change. Going over his planned family announcement of his major work promotion, a responsible post, he imagined the coming rain washing clean only the harsher elements of past struggle. Feeling safer now, he hoped life continued being one trial run after another. His flight from school and home was half his lifetime ago then. He was twenty-eight years old.

Above it All

by Bart Edelman

For a New Canticle

by Ping Yi

Afghanistan or the bush

by Doug Jacquier

Jack came home between tours in Afghanistan to find the living ghost of his father and an exhausted Uncle Joe. The longest drought in the region had stripped them of their reserves of hard-bitten resolve. The land had become a dustbowl, and creeks that no one had ever seen dry were now cracked mud tracks.

After the last big drought, a raft of politicians and bureaucrats visited for photo opportunities and promised dams, bores, and low interest bank loans. But like the rain, these things never came, and after a few weeks, the drought disappeared from the television. 

This time, the bank refused to help, and the pittance of government drought relief couldn’t hope to cover their costs. Their stock, carefully bred over generations, had been sent to the slaughter yards. There was nothing left to sell, including the now virtually worthless land itself. The plain Jack grew up on was now dotted with derelict houses and sheds. 

One afternoon, Jack and Uncle Joe returned from some optimistic fence-mending to find Jack’s father face down in the shed, his shotgun by his side. It was over.

When Uncle Joe collapsed in shock and, after a few days in hospital, passed away in his sleep, the foundations that had started to crumble for Jack in Afghanistan finally mixed with the relentless dust of the farm. 

He wasn’t going back to the Army, and he was certain he was never going to find his way back to anything he recognised as himself. He was permanently damaged goods, who barely slept and interacted with as few people as possible. He continued to exist for reasons that became less clear with each day; life was a biological condition, not a state of humanity.

He abandoned packing to return to base and looked at the peeling papered walls and the chipped brown furniture and then out to the barren landscape. In a daydream, he calculated the possibilities that a payout from the Army would last him long enough to take a chance on the drought breaking next year. “Idiot,” he said out loud. 

The bottom line was he wasn’t going back to the Army but the trail to somewhere else had long disappeared.

Then it began to rain. The rain came in sideways, driven by the same scouring winds that had delivered the dust from farms hundreds of miles away for so many summers now and sent their own on a similar journey. 

Jack hoped there was enough to drown out his despair at fly-blown carcasses in the paddocks, 100-year-old trees falling like matchsticks and harvesters rusting in sagging sheds (because these days real seeds only produced phantom crops). 

He whispered prayers that the rain would trigger flash flooding and wash out the roads and cut off the power; that was pain he could gladly endure.

Rewilding the Living

by Carole Cloud