Black Ice Matter by Gina Cole

Author:Gina Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Huia (NZ) Ltd

Grain Stacks

My life is always falling on the ground and breaking apart. Six months ago, at the age of nineteen years, I decided to stop looking at the broken pieces and began to look at the impressions they made in the dirt. I thought about this each day as we passed the roadworks on Great North Road. At first, I tried to stay in place, setting my foundations along the road. At first, I thought about it as just an old road; nothing about it moved me. Background light flickered into my eyes as I leaned my head against the smudged window of my father’s dirty old four-wheel drive. He called it his ‘truck’, but it was a rickety rusty heap with huge tyres. The truck felt like our other home. We were always going places in it. I would study the back of my mother’s head as she sat quietly in front of me looking straight ahead, her long black hair drawn onto the top of her skull in ropey coils. My father’s knotted hands, driving, never leaving the steering wheel. Racheli my sister on the seat next to me looking out the window, her eyes dreamy, unfocused. Day after day we drove along Great North Road, past the houses and the people with their gardens and their driveways and their cars. The road stayed put, dependable. Nothing changed on the road except the light and the weather, until the day I saw the empty house.

My favourite snatches of time on the road I hold in my mind, in catalogue. Such fleeting moments. Favourite number one – a morning in autumn as the sun hit a long row of tall concrete barriers, turning them into rippling molten slabs. A surprising queue of huge blocks standing side by side, boiling gold alien beacons. I tried to hold onto the golden light in my mind and it has remained, imprinted, but it’s elusive and I have to concentrate in the recall. I have looked for this phenomenon since I first encountered it, but I haven’t seen it happen again with such emphatic clarity – although one time came close in a muted and less spectacular version. This is my all-time favourite. The light unique to the conditions, to the air, to the slant of the sun. Lasting for a blazing moment before we moved past it and I found myself back in the truck, back in a world of corrugated grey.

Favourite number two – a morning in early winter. The sky cast a brilliant red burn over everything. I can’t describe it as unearthly because was it spread out around us, the sun a low rhubarb dot above the early urban haze, visible in strobes between the trees and the buildings. The entire sky blazed in gradations of red to rose pink. The light held and threw a blood hue into the interior of the truck. My father’s eyebrows looked black beneath a devil-red forehead, my mother’s black hair a red silhouette of magimagi thick as cod line.

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