Found/Flow
What if…
short story
Artwork: Alice Pasquini, Melbourne Skater Girl, Melbourne, 2016
Thinking about sounds.
I was feeling them through my feet. My skateboard rolling against the street. The air a rush in my ears. Car engines thrumming. A siren blaring somewhere to my right. A voice pitched high and yelling.
Just thinking about sounds. And words.
Stopped. Turned hard and wrong. Butt landing. Laughed so crazy, even with my hands skinned. Not deep enough to draw blood. I skipped to the curb feeling light. A rush of blood still whooshing in my head.
How to make sounds become words.
The high wire fence divided the pavement from the fall of a slope down to the tracks. There it was, that rumble through the soles of my kicks, shivering through skin. A train coming in, fast.
Sat on my board and pulled out my book from my hoodie pocket. A black ink pen. Most times I preferred blue. Smoothed the cover, black and blank. A gift I never thought I needed.
“Stop you losing all those notes you keep scrawling.”
Sam would know. My brother would find them around the house like a trail. I’d write on scraps, anything at hand. Leaving crumbs of myself for anyone to see.
It beat staring at the cracked screen of my phone trying to make words in the Notes sound true.
Pen marks on paper worked best for me.
Sam loved books. Real books he piled in his room. Liked the smell and the feel and the worlds in his hands. His room was my personal library.
Slouched on my deck, chain link at my back. I flipped the pages, the cramped lines of black and blue ink, blurred patterns when I flicked quick. I wrote tight to make use of every page.
Drew a line under the last words.
To begin.
Words rolled out in a column, a streak lining down. Tallying sounds. Meshing sounds with words with feelings. Trying to make it sing.
Maybe that’s when it caught me. My English teacher who made us bang out beats on our desks to the words on the page. To find the rhythm in language. To dream and listen and make “music and meaning merge”.
Some big poet said that. I was hooked.
Words trickled to a stop. To keep the flow I had to keep moving.
Tucked the book in my pocket, kicked up my board. Eyes set high. The hill climb was a killer.
So I tripped, my feet catching on a trash bag. My hands grabbed for the chain link and burned. Better than a face hit on cement.
Nudged the bag out of my way. A fat wad of bills popped out.
Crouching, the long brown curtain of my hair screened my face. Instinct to shield, not sure what the hell I’d stumbled into.
Poked the wad with a stick. Looked real. Lifted the edge of the bag and my eyes couldn’t compute. You couldn’t know what you’d never seen before. And I’d never seen this much cash—ever.
Stood too fast and the blood gushed to my feet. I was spinning.
Checked out the street, spine chilling. It was a tight two-way, a row of houses opposite the tracks. No people around, no cars parked this end. Shaky and gut tight. This couldn’t be happening.
Grabbing my phone I took a shot of the bag, texted Sam—
WTF do I do? Found THIS
He called.
“Is this a joke, Niki?”
“Nope it’s a bag of cash. A freaking big bag of cash.”
“Shit.”
“He’s not here to help. You are.”
“Why aren’t you at school?”
“Study day.”
“Out skating, huh?”
“The bag, Sam!”
“Shit. I can’t leave the store. That money could be anyone’s.”
Drug money. Big money. Dirty money. Who threw out money like it was trash? I knew what he’d say before he did. That’s how I landed in the cop station making a statement with Mum.
She’d panicked at first. Knew she would. It’s why I’d called Sam. She had to cut class, teaching music. Her car had to be jump-started this morning. Wasn’t sure she’d make it to the station.
Thinking—no seeing that cash in my head—I knew how much we could use it. Money we didn’t have. Money we needed.
Cops said they’d call when they wrapped up who it belonged to.
Not us. Almost said it out loud.
Didn’t stop me dreaming—
On the ride home with Mum flustered with too many questions.
Making cheese toasties, grease skinning my lips, chewing.
Lying on my bed, staring at a crack that widened a little, year by year.
I did the right thing, but not in my head.
Did that make me a crook? Wanting what wasn’t mine?
Probably.
Maybe.
Maybe not. What I wanted was the dream.
The what if—
what if, what if, what if...
Wanting to make the dream real.
Propping up pillows, back to the wall, the book in my hand.
Pen poised, words blunt on the page.
Not a wish list. A life list.
Mum getting her car fixed right.
Painting my room blue—wanting the sky inside.
Shelves in Sam’s room. He always wanted more books.
More notebooks like this. For me.
A new deck for my board.
That piano Mum kept talking about—something with “stein” in it. She’d lugged the old upright she played most nights from her student days.
A road trip to the beach.
I wanted to see the sea so bad. Wanted to breath it.
The what ifs didn’t seem so big. Not in print. But they felt like a world away.
Maybe if I wished hard enough, the cops would call and say, “Couldn’t find who it belonged to. It’s yours!” Someone at Mum’s school told her to get a lawyer involved, just in case. Yeah. Right.
Luck like that, crazy out of the blue luck, didn’t make life happen day-to-day.
What I did know, if that what if was real, we wouldn’t keep it all. Mum had this thing where if the universe gives you a gift, you give something back. So some of that money would be passed on to someone else, and it goes on.
The life flow.
And I was feeling that rush on my board, catching words on the sounds.
Trying to make those words fly on the page.
That was my kind of giving.
My kind of flow.
© Angela Jooste 2021