The Slap
Wings
Hard and fast, like a memory of shame, and the blush just as hot and bone-deep. That hand, lined with the uncertainty of nighttime and stories of metal and earth, skidding across that face, positioned 180 degrees in opposition and an obstacle to empty space. Collision: a short-term interaction between two or more objects simultaneously causing change in motion due to internal forces. The seconds afterwards like a film in which the cliché is just too much, rubber stretching into an instance of impossible length, and yet lost with a breath too brief to count. A moment of perfect inelasticity. And the noise, as the wedding party reached that pitch that could be hysteria or pure electricity from bodies connected and lit like circuitry, which does not stop or even pause at the violence taken for a nerve-ending jerk in the wrong direction.
A woman and a child with lemon yellow hair on a street greasy with the aftermath of rain. The earthiness of petrichor, and slug-heavy flowerheads on the pavement. He points upwards, to a bat hanging from power lines, the patagium biting hard into the threads of hot wire. Its belly is ash coloured and full, moon-like over feet bent into arthritic shapes. He wants to stroke the leather membrane of its wings while she is reminded of a jilted Chinese bride who dressed in the ruched silk and tulle of her wedding gown and stepped from a window in mimicry of flight. Caught by the neck, her body hung like a lace-shrouded Lepidoptera from the arm of a stranger. The boy, compelled by the weird flesh displayed above his head like taxidermy, points to the broken teeth and black eyes of the bat, murmuring words about electricity and death, and the curious dreaming of animals.
Alyson Miller is a lecturer in writing and literature at Deakin University, Australia. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in both national and international publications, alongside a collection of prose poetry, Dream Animals, and a critical monograph, Haunted by Words: Scandalous Texts.
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