Lucinda Ferguson
Wasabi Peas
Chlorine-smell. My sister learning to swim
in the indoor pool at Uncle Pete’s house.
The room filled with light caught in
water, light never standing still. One time
there was a spider floating, dead,
a sad splay of blackened thoughts like
it had been dancing; been suspended
mid-move. My sister has never been the same
since, ever the Arachnophobe. I tried wasabi
peas
for the first time in this room,
I was five-years-old and there was a
party happening. Family, everyone at Pete’s.
I did not know (why) he wanted to die. Not
then, anyway. That came later. Wasabi peas
taste like you’re being bitten on your tongue
and being five-years-old is easy until you’re
at the wake of your Uncle and can’t see
through the black-clad legs.
There was a magician there,
at the wake. He drew me up
from the cross-legged crowd of kids and
I held the end of a ribbon
as he pulled it from his mouth, a miracle, magic,
it was never-ending, seemingly,
but eventually it was all done and I went
back to sit in the grass, cross-legged.
Later, my cousins (who’d come all the way from
New Zealand) took me and my sister up, up–
winding out of the green-grass gardens where the
wake was, wending through the bush to a kiosk.
We got icy-poles. I was a why-child,
always asking questions,
a self-made Socrates, impossible to
please. We had been in the car, my mother
and I,
had arrived somewhere. I opened the door
to air, soft; the trees, full of gentle sounds.
Asked my favourite question, of course,
‘Why?
Why did Pete die?’
and received my answer slowly.
Even at that age I knew it was sensitive,
this death-business. My mother said,
‘He stopped taking his medication.’
‘Why?’
Silence. I waited, watched her watching the gumtrees,
the blue sky, the birds flocking up in rejoice,
in mourning.
‘Well,’
she said,
‘I guess
He just decided life wasn’t worth living anymore.’
God, I thought, though I didn’t believe in such
a thing. God, I didn’t know that was an option.
How could anyone think that, God,
that doesn’t make sense. Then my mind began
running ahead of me and I imagined
for a moment, with a wave of horror, Life deserting me
if I thought for an instant I didn’t want it anymore.
Imagined Life leaving me
in a huff, taking its hat off the hook as it went,
‘Hell, no one appreciates me around here!’
Slamming the door. Collapse. Think of:
The emperors seeking
eternity in goblets of wine. Endless
love affair with life - the return
and grip of it, the treading-water of it,
the cool of pool tiles and the bite of the thing,
and, really, this change:
change me, change in me, cold change
in my hand as I go up to the kiosk to buy an icy-pole,
lemon-flavoured. Delicious.
