One night, a cold night, he drove through the dark, investigating the convenience of a plain of
no rocks or cavities, of the mildest undulations, the gentlest of seas, for this was an oceanic
style of travel, where he made the road up as he went along. In the middle of a grass-bearded
swell he collided with a musical sigh, hairingly out of tune. The car fainted. The ghost of the
dashboard drifted out the window and was carried off by an owl. Mister Catchit, quantum
mechanic, minister of roads, vaguely in search of his wife, possibly his daughter, stepped out
among the sweet grasses and invited the unlovely melody to hit him in the face. Hit him
hawwd. It wasn’t so bad. A less experienced man would run off in panic to find a telephone:
his unstable reckonings amounting to what? Hayseed mayors hanging up their chainsaws.
Blue-lit cows come barking from the shed, in search of a pond. No baby raising a peep lest
she be set to perish in a tree. Careful Mister Catchit had seen every hat, every mystery a
weed-bed of possibilities. What, then was this dissonant keening on the plain? The creaking
of frozen waters? Knives and forks squawking? He recognised the scraping together of
horsehair and horseshoe, the murder of an adagio, the winter eisteddfod. A turn-around sign,
he’d been called for, he was wanted, so many broken arpeggios sticking to his ribcage.
*
Johnny Elder, of Melbourne, Australia, abandoned full-time journalism after thirty-five years to write what he wanted to write. He is collecting stories about profound childhood encounters with birds. He persists with dance lessons.
Euphony Journal 