LUKE RAMSHAW

Luke Ramshaw is currently completing a Bachelor of English and Creative Arts degree at Murdoch University. His work is featured on a number of websites such as www.illiterarty.com as well as his own site www.getwiththepogrom.com featuring blogs, book reviews and short stories. Bellow are two of his latest short stories ‘The Heart Shaped Box’ and ‘Carnival Dream’.

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Elsa had been elected by all her brothers and sisters to clean out their parent’s apartment. They died within hours of each other, as old lovers so often do. Elsa looked at the last photo she’d taken of them together, they had hated it. Hated posing for it too. Elsa thought she understood why. There were two sets of lovers in that photo, the thin, too-old pair and the kids who had fallen in love, were still in love under the veneer that time had draped across them. Of course they hated the photo. It didn’t see the truth of them.

She put the photo on top of a pile of papers. She’d been at it all day. ‘Good little Elsa’ who had been elected removalist and cleaner. Most of their parent’s furniture was now in storage. There were a few pieces left that Elsa was sure she could fit into the back of her station wagon.

She sat in the middle of the apartment on the beige carpet, the late afternoon sun a yellow stream through the window. Dust floated and danced an alien maypole along the light and traveled out to the corners of the room.

All around Elsa were boxes. The archive of her parents lives. She didn't know when her parents had started boxing things. It might have been when they were in their forties but Elsa was still young then, the youngest of all the kids. Back then her curly brown hair was yet to be streaked silver like it was now. She was in her forties now and God knew she hadn’t started boxing things up just yet.

But then, she hadn’t found anyone like Dad yet either. She hadn’t been able to find something as beautiful as her parents had had. She suddenly felt very alone in the apartment. She shook her head in the orange afternoon light.

Never mind. She heard her mother’s voice.

Musn’t think of that now.

She surveyed the room and eyeballed a small pink box shaped like a heart by her right foot. She grunted her way forward and dragged it towards her. It smelled like her mother.

The interesting thing about the box was not the aura of her mother that seemed to hang about it, but the way in which it was shut. A mountain of twine went around the box. A hundred times around. Elsa pulled the box trimmer out of her pocket, snagging it on the loose threads of her tracksuit pants.

The twine snapped like old hay and a plume of dust erupted into the stream of window-light. Underneath a yellow membrane of sticky-tape made the same elliptical journey around the box. Elsa creased her brow at the box, shifted it against her and snapped through the old tape.

The lid of the box opened with an ethereal crack and it breathed a dusty old breath onto her hands. She stole a quick look around and flipped the lid open, it sprung agape like the jaws of some giant pink fish. Elsa was disappointed to see that the box was empty but for three or four sheafs of paper.

She sat for a moment, letting the light from the window dip lower. What if her mother had sealed up this box so that no one else would see what was inside?

Now you’re being really stupid Ellie, she thought. Why else would someone seal up a box?

The papers looked like letters, fancy paper, dark handwriting. Elsa just sat still, frozen with indecision. She shut the lid.

“What if I really don’t want to know?” They were the first words she had said aloud in hours and their volume startled her.

What could she find out that would change how she felt about her parents now? How would she understand them in the light of something new and untold, how would she understand herself?

She remembered when she was a girl and was inconsolable over some break up or another, her mother would hold her, kiss her on top of her head and say:

“Never mind Elsa. You just put that in your little heart-shaped box and forget about it kay?”

Her mother had always been able to make her feel better.

Now she stared at her mother’s heart shaped box.

A part of her envied her parents, their closeness, the immediacy of their love. She suspected that her own failure to find someone was due in no small part to this.

She opened the lid again. Inside were two letters and a photo.

The photo was of her mother and father as each probably remembered the other. Young, firm, beautiful. And there was another girl. The photo was old and brown, it felt like a shell and Elsa had an instinct to hold it up to her ear. The unknown girl stood in front while Elsa’s mother and father stood behind, holding hands. All three faces lit-up with the flame of youth.

She unfolded the first letter, a hot, pinprick tear already welling up.

It said:

My Love,

I’ve made a mistake.

I’m just a stupid foolish man.

I don’t love her, I love you let me come back and prove it.

You are everything to me.

A tear fell from Elsa’s eye, glanced off her ruddy cheek and made a “thap” as it struck the page.

She unfolded her mother’s reply.

Yes you have.

Yes you are.

When you come back I’ll give you the rest of our lives to make it up to me.

And boy, you better try that long.

Elsa stood for the longest time. Just holding the letters, standing. Eventually, when the sky was velvet black she put the letters back inside the box. She took a big roll of packing tape from the floor and sealed her mothers heart shaped box again.

She wound the tape around and around until the box began to lose it’s shape.

After putting everything into the station wagon, she put the big lumpy heart onto the front seat and drove home.

As she watched the street lamps and traffic lights pass her, she smiled a weary smile. A smile that could have meant she understood. Understood them, their love. Understood herself now.

We sip sweet cold coffee in the show-ground.

You and I sit on a bench where there is sugar in the air and the whine of the sideshow. The ground breathes, warm and grassy on our legs. Distantly, the calliope warbles on.

A small elephant trundles by, led by a clown whose wig is stuffed under his arm, he smokes a clove cigarette and his brown skin peeks through the flaking white paint on his face.

A little boy chokes over by the fig tree and people stop to gather round.

His mother screams and a man with big hands smacks him on the back.

Some obtuse piece of food flies free and he gasps a ragged breath in through his tiny mouth.

You look up at the sky, golden flames of hair tumble further down the bumpy path of your spine.

You close your eyes breathe in this carnival air. A zephyr whispers to us about the falling dusk and paints a picture of the show-ground that makes me close my eyes as well - sugar, popcorn, dirt, cinnamon, coffee beans and hot-dogs, turf and horse shit, sulphur from the fireworks and the warm close smell of human bodies - a thousand different smells, a hundred sinful shadows.

A little man pushes a cart full of hay and stops by our bench. He has one green eye, the other is white and dull like a tumbled stone. Above this eye an old scar divides his forehead, below it, his cheek is puckered.

He looks at you side on, his green-eye-side to you, and places a paper cup full of John quills at your feet. He gives me a little nod and pushes the cart along the way.