Neil Boyak - The light in the Cave
Pregnancy gifted piousness, and she was sick, of the earth; social-dry-retching; the people, their fabricated emotions sewn into diversions obscuring truth; a gathering on the balcony above; heels, popping balloons, selfies, spilt wine, laughter and cigarette butts falling through the decking; here she vowed a non-violent world for her child, herself; no racism, fighting, no guns, no vulgar displays of materialist individualism, no anger. The path became and she left her apartment at 5am; a time capsule of her cocaine, her hosiery, her reading glasses, her winter boyfriend (Justin); left for the forest her father helped replant and regenerate with a mix of European pines and traditional box-ironbark, wattle, where she knew of an abandoned mineshaft in a hollow mountain filled with broken glass, rags, bones, a sterling silver necklace buried in the sandy floor. She was shocked by her own reflection in the mould-blotched shaving mirror she found on a rock shelf there. She smashed it; she was consciously deskilling herself achieving a dream state attending ancient night. In bare feet under the light of a three quarter moon, she left the sandy floor of the hole, for the scraggy forest where, she placed her hands on the child in her growing stomach and made a noise that quietened the screeching owl, the slice of the Bush Stone Curlew; and again, during the day, in the sun, she ventured out on a carpet of a million shadows of gum tree crown in her bare feet, and her torn dress, and she drank from the creek, and she answered the crow’s call, enduring silences, as one waited for the other to call again. Casting away memories and structure and light, she was alone; her being, her heart; although she could not expel the self-deception apparatus; in the fireplace she sparked with a broken piece of magnifying glass, there was hope.