Until Then
I remember. I remember the sweets, the pink chocolate pigs and the railway tracks and you. I remember the toy store and you and the packaging you couldn’t open and I couldn’t afford. I remember sitting with a pink pig and you at the park. I pushed you in a swing and was singing to you. I remember trying to push my life away so in that moment I would belong only to you, and failing. I never saw how you’d grow up and inch away. I remember that I forgot to tell you to wait for me.
The phone rings sometime before dawn, the beginning of a hangover licking at my temples from that third glass of cider at book club, and I haven’t finished the marking for my year tens and, “I forgot to tell you,” you say. “I was dreaming. I dreamed you were asleep. I forgot to wake you. You slept in a white room with the curtains blowing. There was music. I heard shooting. A train in the night. What time is it?”
“It’s alright,” I say. A siren wails somewhere at your end. A continent between us, time zones and malls and drought and cities and jails and airports and sports arenas. “It’s almost day.”
DEEDEE RATNER is a schoolteacher from Taree, NSW. Her first novel is underway.
