A Bell Rings

February, 2022

In sailing lore, the ringing of a bell of its own accord signals death. 

 

A bell rings and a ship is lost at sea; a fisherman’s myth.

But he comes back on an old yellow paddleboard that’s floating by the overturned fishing boat.

The boat groans and then just disappears like a diving whale, taking a crate of lobsters and his favourite jacket and then it’s just him, the centre of a huge radius and a speck on every other radius. One arm in front of the other, again, again. He lands on the same boat ramp he left from. It’s impossible, but there he is with his shirt wrapped around his head and his yellow board, and what do you do?

Everyone’s handing him water bottles and blankets for a week, even though it’s January and 35 degrees. They want some profanity or profession, but there’s an emptiness in him like when you’re surrounded by ocean and you can see land on the horizon but you can’t name the colour or the place or are they buildings or mountains and who’s in them and what day is it, so can anything mean anything if you can’t place it? He has nothing to say and they stop asking after him.

At home he sleeps and drinks tea and sleeps and he rubs his arms. His hands shake in the mornings, he has nothing to do with them now.

It rains for weeks, the air is warm and wet. He’s had enough of water and he waits in his emptiness for it to stop. The grass is overgrown, the shrub by the letterbox droops with the weight of rain. There are moments of sun between the rain and he sees the plants move and grow. Do they fight or thrive? Accommodating or opportunistic? They are his allies, he sees; there is no emptiness or inaction in them, there is obstruction and movement.

And now there’s a world awakening in that mind.

It starts with a single pot plant he picks up at the petrol station, green palm with purple painted tips that speaks to him in its patience and silence. At night the streetlight by the window flicks up sharp jungle patterns on his ceiling like he’s laying under the plant itself. No stars and clouds there and he goes to sleep smiling at that.

Then he is drunk in creation, his house soon overcome and dusty with succulent cuttings in old wine bottles and mugs. The rain stops and now his yard is peppered with gumtree shoots. He’s sprouting seeds on the windowsill; the kitchen first, then every windowsill.

He’s taken to the park, now – nothing can stop him building. At night he digs up patches of grass and plants penny leaf gums and banksias. The council are confused and the neighbours want to call the police, but don’t – a bell rings and a ship is lost at sea, but he’s come back when he shouldn’t have – that’s not how the myth is meant to go. Leave him.

There’s a world in those eyes, painting his view with green and red leaves, so that he might never see the horizon again. His mind races and questions, to never be in emptiness again.

Why do we laugh? Who has been born this very second? And this second. And this second. Is there a colour we can’t see? How old is that tree? What is my impact on the world of becomings if I step on this fallen gumleaf? Who has stood on this very spot? And this spot. And this spot.

He sits on his own at the pub. They whisper behind him – he paddled 100km, I heard. Nah, it was 200 they reckon. He stares at his beer in the corner, a world in that look. They don’t look that way when he’s there, won’t sit there when he’s not. The one that came back that they don’t know what to do with.

He dreams of forests, lines of pines that point every way – always paths to somewhere. The sunlight is broken up, the forest a shield and in the way of something, everything; trees in every direction and he feels warm. The leaves applaud, slow clapping against each other; he can’t hear that hum of the ocean.

On the paddleboard his arms had stung, raw with salt burn and exhaustion. They don’t stop now, paddling at the earth, torn and blistered again from the shovel. He can build a world in that earth.

The gutters on his house are falling down with the weight of the ivy and earth he’s stuffed in there.
Then there’s dill shooting from the broken concrete at the bus stop in town.
He’s put a magnolia in an old barrel drum outside the Chinese restaurant.
His neighbour wakes to a crop of flannel flowers in her front yard.
He vandalises the school one weekend, dragging sacks of wildflower seeds around the dirt yard. They sprout between rollup wrappers and footy games, his crime breaking the earth in slow silence.

In each there is something growing in its own way – moving upward and forward towards horizons and skies with steps and shoots, one in front of the other, again, again. Each battling emptiness in just their being and in their longing.

by Sparrokei