Xiaole Zhan
Listening to Knoxville:
Summer of 1915
I
And we are all there in the lilting room. There are voices going round and round in blank song. All around we are there in the circular light. There is my mother, and my father, and my brother, and my sister, faces like blank moons. Round and round remembered words, heard words, bird-words, and all along in all this faceless love, I am there. The world is empty, there, and happy as wide white sky. I am there and it has become that thin time of evening between gasps when the street lamps have only just flickered on in anaemic light and when the cul-de-sac stands still unlit with biscuit-coloured homes eyelessly lining both sides of a sunwarmed road. Only a gasp later and all the homes all at once will glow. We are all there, we are still between gasps. There is a candle, it is my birthday, and all around our windows are glassy and silent with mirrored light as old eyes.
II
I enter the water I know like the rain knows the sea. Like the gladness of rain slapped upon open water, of two bodies meeting. Of linelessness, and of losing edges, of losing hands, arms, torso, sternum. The face forgotten, the wetness of lips forgotten, lick of collarbone, forgotten. Liquid as lyric, something no longer solid but overheard, like an old song, or remembered words. Imprecise as childhood, I am here as a coincidence of limbs. I am here where I used to swim alone as a child, and I almost believe that I am still there, pale ghost-child, naked-kneed child, scared, dear child. Sometimes I feel myself beside myself in my bright aloneness, two people in the same room, saying nothing. The distance between us like the space between loving and being in love.
III
Along another corridor, now, and again all the floors snowed over and our hands roughed with cold. My brother, and my sister, and our melting laughter, we are there like ruffling swans in the dull lunar glow. It has become that time in the small hours of the morning when we are beginning to become aware of our mother being awake in the room beside us where small bell sounds and the smell of warm food silver in the long warm-blooded light of the afternoon. We are all there, now, and my brother is opening all the doors, and my father is laying a quilt on the grass, and we are lying there in our backyard together in the sunned light. My mother, and my father, and my brother, and my sister, all lying there and saying things, and saying nothing. Among warm faces, I am there, too, and the side of my cheek spills over the frays of quilt and presses against grass. And there in bath-warm air the sweet green voices of cicadas by my skin. Where do I end and where do I begin, almost-grass, almost-else, still learning to sound vowels cleanly from my vague moth-mouth.
Xiaole Zhan is a writer and composer. Her name in Chinese is 小乐 and means ‘Little Happy’ but can also be read as ‘Little Music’. She was the winner of the National Schools Poetry Award 2019 and the first-equal winner of the 2019 Secondary Schools Division of the Sargeson Short Story Prize.