All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

‘Promise me you will make your life graceful, Molly. Promise me you’ll make your life grand and beautiful and poetic, and even if it’s not poetic you’ll write it so it is. You write it, Molly, you understand? Promise me your epitaph won’t be ugly like this. And if someone else writes your epitaph, don’t make them struggle to write your epitaph. You must live a life so full that your epitaph will write itself, you understand? Will you promise me that, Molly?’

‘The finest blades are forged not with steel, son,’ he would say. ‘But with story.’

‘Then my father is a liar,’ Yukio said. ‘Your father is a storyteller,’ Saburo said, washing thick brown fish sauce off a dinner plate. ‘He tells those stories to fill this plate for you each night. There is a difference between liars and storytellers, Yukio.’ The grandfather passed the clean dinner plate to his grandson. ‘Some storytellers still make it to heaven.’

‘The lost are not lost. Sometimes they transform. Sometimes they stay with us.’

‘Because sadness is the truest emotion,’ Greta says. ‘Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realise that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?’

Mildred places her reading glasses on her nose, pulls a rolled piece of paper from her purse, unrolls it and reads from it. ‘We wish to have the following words written on the gravestone,’ she says. She studies the paper and reads the words out slowly. ‘“Rest . . . in . . . peace . . . Lloyd”.’ Molly taps these words out on the typewriter. ‘Good, and what should we write next?’ she then asks. Mildred is puzzled. ‘That’s all we could think of to say,’ she says. Clem shrugs his shoulders. ‘Pretty well says it all, don’t ya think?’ Molly nods. ‘Would you consider a couple more lines, perhaps, that say something more about the full life he enjoyed before he passed away?’ Molly suggests. ‘He didn’t really enjoy much at all,’ Clem says. ‘Something about how he cherished his family and friends, perhaps, and how he was cherished in return?’ Molly tries again. Mildred looks at her son, grimly. Looks back at Molly. ‘He was mean and sour most of the time,’ Mildred says. Clem turns to his mother. ‘When I told people the news, everybody seemed to have the same look on their face.’ ‘What look was that?’ asks Mildred. ‘Relief,’ Clem says.

He hated the tea leaves that built up in the bottom of his teacup and he hated the branches from the backyard oak tree that scratched against his tin roof and he hated the sun that kept on rising and telling him to go to work and he hated the sound of the fiddle players in the Hotel Darwin and he hated the beer that warmed too quickly in his hand and he hated anyone who wished good fortune on Tom Berry because he hated Tom Berry most of all.

That’s why people tell stories, she thinks. They remind us why we love things. They remind us why we love other people.

‘My human heart needs to stay warm,’ he says. ‘But it can only stay warm by warming your heart. That’s the trick of the human heart.’

No weights of gold to measure Only scales of truth and lies For we are living treasure Under all our shimmering skies

You meet the one the universe forged in the fire just for you and they bury their love deep inside you but sometimes you don’t even know it’s inside you until it’s ripped out of you, until it’s dug up out of you like pure gold dug out of earth. The hole remains. The hole is never filled and your blood and your soul and your joy and your life leak out of that hole, until you are empty. Until you are a ghost.