i would pay to see you on a rainy sunday.

a year or so ago, i was invited to attended a two-day writing masterclass: writing architecture. i'm still unsure how this piece came about. i think it was after a written observation of, and a workshop at, the state library of queensland, during which we were asked to write as though we were photographing the building.

"The inky, steely clouds frowned upon him as he skulked, silently, across the vacant courtyard. They sensed his intentions; didn’t agree with his motive. The glass doors, however, parted and begged him in. Up the stairs: odd numbers only. His thin soles allowed the visual markers to caress his feet. Another beckoning door. Beyond, the smell of historical knowledge hung in the quiet air.

It was her day off.

He located the aisle that held their first encounter: when he had drunk her delicate cinnamon scent and had been seduced by her red shoes. He’d not had the courage to meet her eyes. She was there each Saturday, but he found himself caught in a stillness that permitted him only to admire her from afar.

He slid between the shelves and retrieved the bobbin from his left pocket. The pack of needles came from his right. Carefully, he drew the red thread through the eye of the needle, sucking at the end to make it easier. He closed his eyes and ran his fingers across the spines until they came to rest on one that felt right; felt comfortable. Removing the sleeve from the book, he began his task. Weave by weave, the thread passed in and out of the ripened paper. The needle’s choreography slowly completed a heart.

Messy and irregular, its imperfections carried with them a sense of a speculative future with her: happiness in places not yet visited; eating sandwiches on the train on the way to the sea; disagreements over which film to see on a Tuesday night; lying under a leaf blanket in the autumn-heavy park. Speculations drawn from novels read; from fictions yet to evolve into lived memory.

He was whisked back to reality by a slight scuffle in the next aisle. He glanced at the heart. He felt its uneven redness once more and returned the sleeve to its book, wrapping it with lust and caution. The book was replaced on the shelf – evidence of a recent lust-tampering now invisible.

He smiled and hoped that she might, one day soon, discover the book. The book in which he had left his heart on a sleeve. Just for her." 


another piece i wrote can be found here.