He lifts his head before I do and scrambles to the nearest plant. He stands up and nibbles the leaves that hang down. Yay, Addy! He knew what to do. He’s gonna be alright.
So when he’s busy munching, I sneak back to camp. He don’t follow. Dad and the blokes had set off ages ago. The others at the camp say “Hi,” the kids happy to have another kid around.
People look worried when I tell them all I want is to lie down, play later. I get worse, feeling hot and sweaty, and things start to look blurry. They put me in a bark hut with lots of blankets, give me something to drink. I can’t stop thinking about goannas getting their heads banged.
It’s hard to sleep, even knowing Addy will be safe. I tell myself over and over that he’s much bigger than a goanna. The Blackfellas will leave him alone. Even if they find him, they don’t want no nosy scientists on their island. Addy’ll be safe, gonna keep on teaching him to hide when he hears footsteps. Nobody’s gonna bang his head. I can sleep now. Sleep, please!
The night goes by in a kinda haze. The day too. I’m still in bed and the night’s deep dark when Dad and the men come back. I hear them, whooping and shouting. “Yes, yes!” and “He done real great!”
Dad sticks his head into the hut, and shines the light in. Hurts my eyes.
“That initiation’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever done. Incredible.” His voice hurts my head. “I saw Yarondero.”
“Huh? Who?”
“Yarondero. The spirit, the actual spirit our ancestor fought to drink from the waterhole. It was a huge lizard like I’ve never seen before.”
The words lizard and waterhole echo round my brain. “Addy?” I can hardly get the words out. I feel worse than before I went to bed. I’m dizzy like I haven’t been since I was sick years ago.
“Mate, you look really off. You OK?”
“What happened to Addy — the lizard?”
“Don’t tell anybody I told you, but that’s what the initiation’s about. You gotta spear Yarondero. And I did! Fabulous.”
And I get sick, am sick and sick up all over the hut, all over Dad, all over the air ambulance. So sick I get a seizure, when I haven’t had one for so long. So sick I’m back in hospital with all its spiky smells and shiny floors.
But I want to go back to Jamorjah. Back to Addy. Gotta see he’s OK. Please, don’t let Addy be dead. Not my secret dinosaur. Dont let it be Addy.
“Dad!” I say, and the words are hard to get out. He wakes up, coz he’s been sleeping in the chair next to me. “Yarondero?”
Dad blinks at me, doesn’t understand.
“What’s he look like? Please.”
But now Dad’s looking spooked. Tells me it’s sacred. My tumour coming back is his punishment for telling me about Yarondero and the initiation. It’s wrong for me to know about Yarondero before I’ve had my own initiation. Says he never believed in spirit things before, just thought he had to kill a goanna. But the legends are real, he says. Real!
I gotta forget what he’s told me, so’s my tumour will go away.
I tell him it was my dinosaur. My dinosaur what I brought up from an egg. But he just cries and says it’s worse than he thought. Delusions, he says.
Over the next few weeks, I wonder about what Dad said, about Addy maybe being just a delusion. When I actually do any wondering, that is. Most times I feel too sick to think. Sick from the tumour, sick from the operation and the medicine.
Len visits one day. Asks me which of the nurses I’m gonna marry. Good looker like me could take my pick. I tell him to shhhh, what if they hear? Anyhow, I’m not good looking right now. Can’t keep my food in or my hair on.
I ask Len if he’s been to Jamorjah, hoping to hear about Addy. He looks at me strange. Tells me he seen tracks round the waterhole. Tracks like he’s never seen before, except in our backyard.
“Lotsa secrets in Jamorjah Island,” he winks. “Not saying anymore, except that somebody not used to chucking a spear don’t usually throw them strong.”
~~~
[Author’s note: Jamorjah island, the Jamorjah people and Yarondero are fictitious. Other elements in the story, however, are consistent with aspects of traditional and contemporary Indigenous Australian culture.]
~~~
JO ANTAREAU is a Melbourne-based psychologist. She hopes you enjoyed the story; her first publishing success. She is currently working on a non-fiction manual and several pieces of children’s fiction.
Blog: http://procrastinate-writenow.blogspot.com/
Cassie felt alone in the big city and estranged from her coworkers. But when a female Neanderthal skeleton arrives at the museum where she works, Cassie learns that a woman who has been dead for thousands of years still has something to teach the living.
THE LANGUAGE OF ICE
by David North-Martino
She wakens while the rest of the tribe is sleeping. Yet she knows she’s in a dream. Lucid dreaming?Is that what they call it? But the world she has entered is so real, 360 degrees of sight and sound, temperature and smell. She huddles with the group, their body heat providing most of the warmth, while a low-burning fire, sputtering at the lip of the entrance, provides the rest. There is muskiness to their presence, but it is not an unpleasant odor, and she feels comforted by the fact she is not alone.
Carefully, so as not to waken the others, she rises and stands above them. She has seen them before, but the symmetry of their faces and the angles of their bodies are so much more beautiful, so much more robust, than a modern human could ever imagine. In the dream, she realizes she, too, is one of them. She pads across the frigid rock, every muscle fiber speaking of
