As If Death Summoned by Alan E. Rose

Author:Alan E. Rose [McMan, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612941868
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 2020-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

• • •

I saw O’Shaughnessy Thursday afternoon at our regular time.

“I don’t really have much to talk about,” I started. “Everything’s been going okay.”

“Is that your goal: Okay?”

I shrugged.

“So, do you feel done?”

I thought about it. “Not sure. But I don’t know where to go from here. Or what else to explore.” We’d discussed the recurring dream, my grief over Gray’s death, my mother’s inability to accept a kind-of-important-part of who I am, my trauma as a five-year-old when my sister revealed there was no Santa Claus. What was left to talk about?

“What is it you haven’t told me?”

“Haven’t told you?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm, let’s see. Thirty-seven years. I might have missed something.”

“What is it you’ve avoided telling me?”

“You mean like sexual fantasies?”

“Are they important?”

“Not really. Pretty tame.”

“Tell me one thing you regret.”

“Come dance with me!”

I stared at O’Shaughnessy, but was looking out over the Bogong High Plains. Early autumn in the southern hemisphere, 1991. Stars especially bright that night, an early chill settling over us as we huddled close to the fire. The band Gondwanaland playing on the boom box Gray brought from the car. I was reading a book cradled in my lap, holding a flashlight in one hand, nursing a mug of hot tea in the other—

O’Shaughnessy said something.

I blinked. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

He studied me for a moment. “I asked you to name one regret.”

Looking out once again across the dark expanse of the high plains, I whispered, “I wouldn’t dance.”

“Wouldn’t dance?”

I felt my face reddening, my throat tightening. I swallowed. “We were camping. It was about a month after Gray received his diagnosis. He’d graduated from being HIV-positive to officially having AIDS. He wanted to dance and I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a terrible dancer.”

“I’m guessing we’re not talking the foxtrot.”

“Come dance with me!”

“You know I don’t dance.”

“Yes, at the gay gala. Around people. But out here? Just the two of us?” He pulled on my arm, sloshing tea on the ground. “C’mon, I want to dance.”

“No. I do not dance on principle. Anywhere.”

“What principle?”

“On the principle . . . that I do not dance.” I returned to my book.

“C’mon, there’s no one else around within fifty kilometers. Dance with me! I want to get in touch with my aboriginal roots.”

“What aboriginal roots? Your great-grandparents came from Liverpool.”

“My family may be English, but I’m 100 percent Australian. This is my land. This is my sky.” He turned his gaze upward. “And just look at it.”

“So I did. One vast, blue-black canopy. Sky everywhere. In all my travels, I’ve never found a sky to compare with Australia’s. Immense. Unbroken by mountains or trees or anything but the horizon. And that night, with no moon, dazzling with stars, the Southern Cross the only constellation I could recognize, it was like looking out into a different universe, and reminded me of a poem—

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