Do thylacines run like dogs or leap with their kangaroo legs? Does the yip yip yip of their call echo through quiet cities uncommented on, not because it isn’t heard, but because no one actually remembers what a thylacine sounds like?
Awkward, hand-held ghosts inhabit the dark corners of offices, trap themselves in spider webs, knock against the walls. Ambiguous images in light and shade fade from the windows of empty buildings, “Like” stuff on Facebook, place themselves in news updates.
YottaFLOP computers appear spontaneously on every desktop in the world. You look up to find the new machine staring back at you.
Constructed of light and silver, supported by a platform of belief in the fantastic, the thylacine turns from her cellulose railway and steps through the self-actualising field into your room, ears forward and yip yip yipping in excitement.
There’s a collection of stationery that hasn’t been touched for months. The thylacine’s foot brushes it as she steps over and out the window. You watch in open-mouthed amazement as her black and taupe stripes blend with the light and shadow of life. There’s a stationery avalanche. Unopened letters and bills slide away to reveal your camera, battery now flat, memory card of Jase still there inside it.
Your fingernail digs out the flashcard and flicks it onto the flat of your palm. You offer it to the computer.
~~~
Amanda le Bas de Plumetot is an award-winning writer of poetry and short stories, and also a performance poet. She has been published in books, trains, websites, zines, school readers, collections, magazines and TV commercials. She is a graduate/survivor of Clarion South 2009 and is awestruck by the wonderful people she met there. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her kids have moved out, so she and her beloved hubby share the place with lots of pets. She likes cats, robots, movies, camembert and frankie magazine. She gets paid to sell movie tickets. She would like to be more organised when she grows up.
Website: http://amandale.net
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/featherfour
Michael didn’t understand her loss. Even she didn’t realize how deep it ran, until a saber-tooth cat helped to heal the past and point her toward a future she didn’t know she needed most.
PAST SURVIVORS
by Sarah Adams
It’s odd to think LA might be one of the sacred places of the world. But here, in the dreaming hills that hem in the vast puddle of concrete that is the city, there is no clear past or future, only an eternal present. Pockets of time — past, present and future — overlap and spill into one another in the breathing silence that fills the canyons and valleys.
It was the silence that drew me into the hills. I had hiked miles up a deer run, letting the rhythm of my feet wipe away everything else. Now, I sat in the shade of a sage bush, on a sunset-facing slope, asking the silence to hold me together. I held myself still — still enough almost to stop the blood in my veins. I trained my eyes on the sun, holding down the thought of my own blood trickling into the dusty earth, becoming part of the hills. The mountains breathed all around me. A lizard flashed across my foot. Knees drawn up to my chest, I tried to breathe with the hills, to be still like them.
But a mule deer, flanks lathered in sweat, crashed across the ridge behind me. It landed on the trail, stumbled, and went to its knees. Its eyes rolled white in its head. Froth bubbled at its mouth. As the deer flailed to its feet, a massive cat, too big for a mountain lion, sailed straight over my head. It landed on the deer’s back, mouth already clamped on the animal’s neck, even as its weight sent them both crashing to the ground. They landed in a heap of flailing hooves and a sickening thump. The deer jerked, blood bubbling from its nostrils, but the cat’s impossibly long canines were buried in the deer’s jugular. The cat squeezed, holding shut the windpipe until the deer’s head hung limp.
Our eyes met across the carcass.
I, still as a sage bush, crouched on the ground with my knees up with my chin, arms wrapped around my shins. The cat, bloody-muzzled, panting, stood with one paw still on the deer’s windpipe. Later I would wonder why I felt no fear, not even a dim, intellectual awareness that I should have been afraid. But I felt only the quiet of the hills pressing down around the sharp beat of my own heart.
Massive, angular shoulders tapered back to narrow hips. Dusty brown ripples ran over deeper golden shades, almost a broken tabby pattern, darker over the head and shoulders, shading into the pale beige of fallen leaves on its hindquarters. Fangs like ivory daggers curved back toward its body.
My hand crept over my heart, not to still the pounding, but to feel it, to know that my heart could still beat aloud. At the motion, the saber-tooth stretched its jaw wide, wove its head back and forth as if brandishing its weapons. Blood drops flew from the fangs, spattered the dusty ground. Its absurd stump of bobtail lashed at me.
I blinked and the cat was still there.
Eyes still fixed on mine, it lowered its head and seized the deer’s limp neck, dragging the carcass with it as it backed away from me below the lip of the hill. I waited, immobile until the little sounds in the brush resumed: the terrrrrrr-whit!of a quail, the rustle of lizards at the roots of the scrub. Vultures dipped over the canyon, stooping toward the carcass. I got to
