Alchemy (with props to Kevin Stein’s ‘Tract’).

This entry’s subject is the burnt beach, under a cut ginger sky, at 7 pm last night. You saw it. The front came in over Scarborough, irriguous with wet ink and moving towards the city. Dry lightning crackled through the smog, wrinkling over the foil of the sea. Fish that were electrocuted in middle-distance showed their bellies like a flotilla of illegal medical waste. This entry does not concern itself with the latent goods of that scene; with its tumescence and augur. All the author wishes to convey is that it was good weather for sharks. A hundred heads in the wash and inside every head the silky shadow of a hammerhead. A hundred shark-fictions cutting channels in the glass facades of waves. The author held her breath beneath the breaker and distilled some thoughts about human nature. Pushing off the seafloor those semi-transparent sharks bumped her, tipped her, nosed her under. She felt their rusting skins against her skin. She took their wood-grain grazes, their stinging abrasions. This entry does not draw parallel between these skins and boundaries, or littorals, or the promise of death in the amniotic fluid of the sea.

Out on the beach objects holding their heat were starting to sigh, shrugging off their body temperatures and de-anthropomorphising. For which there should be a word. The air thrummed like a bloodstream. Boys, shadow-board Kings, ran around the Araucaria trees – four-lettered howls when their soles met the sharp nuts in the grass. The backbones of grape clusters and chip packets the strewn wreckage of their lunches. The author ate apples as hard as cats’ hearts with a salty mouth. This entry does not care to draw attention to the essential democracy of the beach, to the socio-political potential of suitless, uniformless, hard-hatless people, or the way that their hottest thoughts boil off while the sun sets and their talk opens out, finding different tributaries. All the author wishes to convey is that the smell of sunscreen mixed with the marrow scent of an unbroken storm is a dense aphrodisiac.

Cicadas unzipped the night. Darkness came up like silt. A slow granulation of the scene from beyond the horizon. An atlas of sand stuck to her calves and each step broke continents into new archipelagos. The streetlights were soft areola, hazed with insects. Reader, do not ponder what it means to feel wholly contained within a landscape. To see it for one moment as an ultra-sound of all that has yet to come for you. This entry’s subject is only the burnt beach, under a cut ginger sky, at 7 pm last night.

Marginalia: 1. ‘Grey Nurse’ has to be one of the most evocative names for an animal ever brought into English nomenclature, don’t you think? 2. I’ve been trying to find a link to some footage I saw on the SBS news the other day of a bushfire that encircled about twenty people, including the camera man, and forced them to walk out into the ocean. It’s a really eerie sequence: they’re standing at hip-depth, in their clothes, and the fire is right on the beachfront, sending out rolling waves of smoke over the water. If anyone knows where I might see that again, please jot me a line. Ta.