Poems and Other Shit

Mia - Short Story

Before The Incident, Mia had lived in a regular house with a white picket fence. Her mother resided in a backyard art studio, composing artwork from discarded pieces of household furniture and broken china, making mosaics and sculptures from unwanted objects while her stereo absentmindedly hummed away in the background.

They never made much sense to Mia, but the art critics loved it. To her, they were a gleaming dance of broken fragments. Often Mia would trail her mother at local galleries, hiding behind her skirts while collections of people came to congratulate. But He was never among them, the biggest art critic of all.

Most afternoons Mia would come home from school, the windows open, the sound of gentle rhythmic music playing. On the day of The Incident, the front door swung dangerously on its hinges, squeaking and banging against the wall in the breeze. The house was deathly quiet. Mia stepped gingerly between broken glasses strewn haphazardly through the kitchen.

She found her mother outside in the art studio, smelling of perspiration and grout. She had been crying, and she wiped her tears on the back of her hand, smearing chalky plaster across her cheek. With her bloody fingers, she pressed grout in between her jumbled collection of kitchen ware and wiped away the excess with a damp cloth.

"Mum," begun Mia, feeling nostalgic at the sight of their best dinner set in fragments.

Her mother had made a resolve, and she smiled at her young daughter. "We won't come back."

It was easier than either of them ever thought to abandon the little house with the white picket fence. Mia only ever felt a dull sense of guilt at never having said goodbye to Him, the man with the sharp scent of aftershave and the cold arms.

---

Mia's sense of nomenclature only grew stronger as the days stretched on. She came to know the ocean as Friend, and they followed it for hours at a time, occasionally losing it behind buildings and bushland and meeting it again where it lapped at the sand, slowly eroding away at the coast, reaching for the mainland.

Her Friend occasionally dappled her with reminiscent tastes as Mia would lick her lips, recognising the taste of salted cheeks. Her mother knew the tastes too, and her hair would grow sticky with salt, her arms dry, her eyes red.

The atmosphere became unbearably humid, the air shimmering with the midday heat. They had decided to wait out the summer, and they lingered on the beachside, drunk and lethargic on the sunshine. Mia's mother made artwork from driftwood and old fishing lures, playing on the little fame her name still carried. It was her name that attracted Them.

---

They came one morning while Mia was looking out over the ocean, feeling the tingling sensation as the Easterly wind cascaded over her body, infusing her hair with the smell of the ocean and a restlessness to move on.

Her mother was begging them, pleading for compassion, which quickly escalated into insults. "Bullies! You gang of heartless bullies!"

The gang leader was a stern faced woman. She sat Mia in the back of her car to talk, and threw words around nonchalantly. Her favourite was "unstable." She spoke of foreign people, of two who became three. When Mia tried to get out of the car, the door was locked.

She saw her mother getting dragged away, crying, kicking – the shadow of a woman she once was. And Mia had never gotten to say goodbye.

---

She stood before Him that evening. He looked older than she remembered, and His cold arms reached out, pulling her into an awkward embrace of unsure limbs and a hint of distrust. He smelt of sharp aftershave, and a lingering scent of feminine perfume Mia didn't recognise.

And then there was the third person, pungent of perfume with a brittle forced smile. Mia looked past the two foreigners with numbness, to the walls of a house a family had once laughed within. The walls had never looked so white.

Mia would find herself staring into a foggy mirror after she had showered. She looked strangely grown up with limbs that were too long and knobbly and a face that looked dangerously on the cusp of adulthood. She would peer into her dark eyes for minutes at a time, until somebody would impatiently bang on the door.

Any essence of her youthful innocence had long since abandoned her, and The Incident materialised within her mind. She saw her father and his new mistress, and she saw her mother, her smile growing smaller every day until eventually she was throwing their prided wedding present across the kitchen, liking the way the noises within her head sounded out loud.

She looked for whispers of the woman who had once lived in this house, but they had been erased with new furniture and the sterile white paint.

The art studio in the backyard had been padlocked. Mia pried the door off its hinges and stepped into a scene from her childhood. There was a bucket of solidified grout on the bench, the stereo sitting patiently in the far corner.

The mosaic was sitting on the bench as it had the day they left. Mia brushed away the dust until the china surfaces gleamed again. She took it outside and left it where the sun would catch it, where the foreigners would see it.

For the first time, she understood her mother's artwork, a symbol of heartbreak and hostility – it was a portrait of them.

It made sense that Mia, her history rich with abrupt goodbyes, didn't bother with formalities this time either.