Other writing by Verity

Strangest of all, it makes a sound. Not a sound of light you’d expect, the blink of a fluorescent globe that’s failing, the crackle of a cosy fire, the incandescent explosion of a firework. It’s a rustling sound. Like static or white noise, the sound the powerlines made when it snowed in Stockholm where we used to live. When the lights hang right above our heads in soft vertical lines of purple-green, we can hear it; the world around suddenly silent, as if allowing the space necessary for such quiet mumblings.

Inside was a fascinating maze of chambers that resembled something you might find if you prised open a mussel or a clam. Parts of it were darker, appearing almost fungal, like the fine gills under a mushroom cap. Here was the famous organ of greeting cards and Romeo and Juliet, which we were reading in English class. There was nothing romantic about the lump of flesh that sat before me. The muscle was tough beneath my gloved fingers. It didn’t slice easily. But did these cells contain a soul once? I couldn’t say.

The taut skin of my belly becomes see-through as sound ripples through my body and the echoes make shapes appear in the gloom. One day this geometry will reveal the thrum of a tiny heartbeat appearing as a white flicker. There will be another day in another year when there is no such heartbeat, and the monitor shows something that looks like a cocoon but is actually a shroud.

He flung open the kitchen door, went outside. She heard the axe, smack, it bit into bone. Smack. It severed. She knew it was her body he was butchering, not the cow's. Slicing muscle, sinew, bone. Separating limbs.

In her mind she threw boiling water over him, watched his skin begin to melt. She'd bludgeon him with the frying pan, push his carcass down one of the old mine shafts that dotted the hills like small, hungry mouths.

The way his eyes grew cold sometimes when he looked at her. She knew he was thinking of it. Caressing the idea like a new lover, getting a taste of it.

And Watch the Whale Explode: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2017 and The Best Australian Stories 2017

Some people call them milk teeth, or baby teeth, though the scientific term is deciduous teeth. Deciduous, I think of the forest in autumn. An x-ray of a child's head is not so beautiful. Crammed with far too many teeth, all the cavities and empty spaces of the skull crowded with them; they lie dormant like bulbs beneath a winter soil.

In dental terminology, when the first baby teeth push their way through the gum they erupt—imagine miniature volcanoes. It is a slow movement, like sluggish lava sticky with gas or the growth of a blind, white flower. It causes pain. And when the teeth fall out it is called exfoliation.

Island 149, 2017

All around you the forest is dripping, ferns uncurl and vines strangle. The moss collapses beneath your feet where you tread, threatens you with tripping. Leeches inch through the undergrowth stirred by the scent of blood. Strange trees stretch skyward and you never truly see the light. The mountains fold in on themselves. At night there are no stars, no moon, only the sputtering fire sending a tendril of smoke into the suffocating dark. Then the rain comes. Soaked through, the cling of mist shiver in your bones. Teeth chatter. Belly clenches.

And you walk through day and weeks.

The Furphy Anthology 2021

Image sourced Wikimedia Commons

It is the hands. We cannot stop thinking of them.

Scrubbing our greying clothes in a tub, we catch a glimpse of our own hands blurry beneath the water and remember. Or in the garden, digging for potatoes in the thawing ground, fingers scrabble in the soil, and our minds stray to the corner of the yard and what is buried there. Those clasped hands.

Beneath the ground worms writhe and roots tangle and small things live and die and eat one another.

Empty Sky: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2021 and 40: Forty Years of the UTS Writers’ Anthology

Your heartbeat is too slow. I sit and try not to think about that as I watch the boy watch a fat blowfly buzz around the room. What does he think of this strange flying creature that he sometimes calls a butterfly and sometimes a bee? When one brushed against his hand once, he shuddered in such abject horror it was almost comical. Later the fly he is watching will die on the windowsill, upside down with legs curled skywards. Outside the first purple flowers are blooming on the jacaranda.

Left Turn on Red Permitted After Stopping: UTS Writers Anthology 2022

No poisons, no embalming chemicals, no features forever preserved like a museum piece. Just dead body, ready to go back into the universe, to become useful again. Bacteria will decompose. Small creatures will eat. Flesh will be consumed and repurposed. Nothing will remain but bone until centuries pass and then millenia and the apatite in your bones will pulverise and erode and become sediment and metamorphose and parts of you will percolate and precipitate and create new beautiful things.

Island 172, 2024

Infinite Threads: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2019

Science Write Now Edition 6

These Tiny Threads Remind Me: The Written in a Time of COVID-19 Anthology

These Tiny Threads Remind Me: The Written in a Time of COVID-19 Anthology

Aurealis #146

Vestal Review Issue 58