IMOW - Excerpt from Lovesong

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Excerpt from Lovesong
Nikki Gemmell

Australia

GALLERY

CONVERSATION

I'm not even sure I was ever a little girl: a young person, yes, but not a girl. I just didn't have all creamy in me those...

...A mother's comment from long ago was etched deeply into me and it coloured a lot of my teenage life. The woman had visited mum in a barely disguised gloat a week after the school fire and I'd hidden on a step and trapped scraps of their conversation in my journal.

I'll never forget the sting of the words, I don't need them recorded in my journal for they're in my head too much. Eight years later a quote was centre-stage on my bedroom wall: My life is founded on the rock of change. It came from an elderly, milky-skinned actress known for her character and not her looks.

...I'm Bolted awake by a scuffle of sounds on the stairs and the blood is booming in my ears and I'm straining with the listening. There's my father's "what the" - and a thud and a muffled melee of feet and it recedes and the front door slams and there's a settling quiet and I leap from the bed and run to the window and catch, just, three figures running from the land and then one slows, and stops, and lingers a looking back.

My arm lifts in salute, I don't know why and the figure raises a high hand in return , it hovers for a second or two and then the figure runs on, catching up with the others and then all three are claimed by the black, the night drinks their skin and they're gone. I lean on the window sill and cup my face in my palms and breathe in the still sky and no one comes to my room, no one explains.
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