So This Is Life by Anne Manne

Author:Anne Manne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

There is nothing to mark this day from any other. Beneath a sky shot with the delicate blue light of late autumn, a sky no longer leached of colour by heat, there are two children on ponies. A brother and a sister. They are doing what they do every day after school, riding their ponies until dusk. I often paused and watched them briefly while walking home from school, for the sister was my best friend. They are laughing, the sounds spiralling upwards and away into the blue. The ponies are heavily flecked with sweat, panting. They will have just one more race before nightfall.

The girl is taut, angular, competent. She holds the rein tightly as her pony tosses its head, snatches at the rein, shakes its head angrily to gain freedom. She wheels her pony around sharply, and gives it its head so that it breaks into a full gallop in a few strides, its neck outstretched, its body flattening in a long, low shadow over dusty ground. She is all of one piece with it, sitting lightly, easily. She leans way back as the pony slides into the fence at the end of the paddock and, laughing, looks around for her little brother. He is blond and plump, and no horseman. He sits uneasily, scrunched up over the mane, round little body bouncing high into the air at every stride, as his pony comes lumbering after its mate, his face hovering at that moment between exhilaration and fear. As he nears the end he forgets to sit back, just hunches and hangs on, hangs forward. The pony keeps galloping towards its mate, unchecked, then swerves violently at the last moment towards it, away from the fence. His sister’s face still bears traces of her laughter, as the boy falls heavily, awkwardly, head hitting a black metal star picket on the way down and lies still.

There was praise for the older sister, how she did everything right. How she had behaved so responsibly, far beyond her years, in fact, phoning the ambulance, then the parents, then waiting with him, covering him, the desperate, solitary wait in the deepening dusk till adults came. She did everything she could, they said, everything was done that should be done, but nothing could be done for the little boy was already dead.

It was as if time had flowed along the surface of one world, towards one point, and then stopped. Just a split second divided the flow of time when a boy was breathing, laughing, swaying in the saddle, and the moment later. But that one moment flashing out of time, changed everything. It erased the future and gave a different past, for all experience would now be shaped by before and after that moment. For when time resumed its flow, so lightly, so easily and without compunction, those who loved this little boy had been flung into a different universe, a shadow world with the same physical shape, the same colours, textures,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.