The following is a sample story from Where Oceans Meet by Heather McQuillan.
‘A Post-Traumatic God’ by Heather McQuillan
Tāwhirimātea1 tried to stand his ground but was outnumbered. The ground he stood on was his mother’s unstable belly, doughy and stretched from so many sons. She let him down in the end, as all mothers do. Let go of his hand.
This he remembers: darkness humid with sweat and the sourness of spilt milk; the hau2, the beat, the pulse, pressed tight between his parent’s renditions of love, their keening drone, beneath the shouting of his brothers and the TV turned up too loud.
This he remembers: the rupture; the coming into the blue lights and sirens and the whero3 of eyelid blood when he closes them against the glare; his mother convulsing, his father gone, brothers scattered.
This he remembers: a stranger’s hand on his shoulder; the weightlessness of feet that have nowhere to stand; the weight of swallowed words deep in his belly while they click Bic pens.
In resting he is jolted. Thought spirals into cyclone cones — always back to the eye of the storm. He’s tried the recommended doses, but they don’t work for him, so he pulls sharply from the bed he shares with a thin-boned woman, takes his clenched fists away from her frail flesh, and he runs. His feet tread heavy along his mother’s backbone, along the length of the coastline out to the headland, where he howls at a cloud-blacked father-sky and slaps his chest until the skin burns.
This he knows: cold air and the taste of blood in his throat and the taste of endorphins that will bring him, finally, to rest.
Tāwhiri sits on the paint-peeled seat outside the takeaway shop. He is waiting for the skinny woman to fetch him back in her beat-up car. Sweat stains the curves of his white singlet. His father is hazy today. His mother has not rumbled for some time. His brothers are pencilled scars on the horizon.
1. In Māori mythology, Tāwhirimātea (or Tāwhiri) is the god of weather, including thunder and lightning, wind, clouds, and storms. He is one of the sons of Papatūānuku (earthmother) and Ranginui (sky father).↩
2. Wind, breeze, breath.↩
3. Red.↩
by Heather McQuillan from Where Oceans Meet (£8.99)
