We’re pleased to announce the first of two winners for the March WWWC: Megan Sougleris. Responding to the prompt ‘the air was moving’, Megan’s artistic tale paints a story of familial love, grief, and learning that some things will always be unknowable.

Read Megan’s winning piece, ‘Tempera’, below. Find fellow winner Robert Moore’s piece here.

Tempera

It’s already past midnight, but I’ve become accustomed to staying up late, wearing Henry’s blue scarf over my face. His smell is fading now, and I blow hot breaths into the fabric, feeling it warm and dampen around my mouth.

I haul out a thick brown pad of cartridge paper and my painting box. Perhaps I will make him a Christmas card, something he can keep and cherish. I sit at the kitchen counter with the varnished end of a paintbrush between my teeth, the others in a honey jar of water. I start to doodle a wavering line of Carolina blue across the dampened paper; this is how I always paint; I pick a colour and a shape and wait to see what will happen. The line of blue becomes a river, with a rough grassy bank sprouting dock leaves, speckled green and burgundy with bumpy seed heads and silvered rosettes of thistles. There are people on the riverbank, a couple, actually. One is lying back on his elbows and the other is sitting upright, watching a group of children splash each other at the water’s edge.

I am painting by the light of a sputtering candle that sits beside me on the greasy counter, but in my mind, I am there, at the river, with my family, on a muggy summer’s day that keeps threatening to be bright but never quite delivers the sun. Henry is turning his face to the sky, still propped on his elbow on a red wool rug, with wine glasses and sandwiches and creaming soda for the kids. The two girls are in their daisy swimsuits, darting down the bank holding hands, stopping just at the edge and daring each other to go in. Their pale, wispy hair is in ponytails, flapping from side to side as they wave their arms above them, their little shoulder blades sticking out from tanned backs, tender as chicken wings.

The river looks greenish beneath the humid sky; there are lily pads with tightly closed flowers the size of lemons and a dusting of insects that fly at the water, spotting it here and there with tiny rings.

One of the girls leaps off the bank, just as the sun blazes out from behind the cloud. She hits the water, which breaks around her like a million diamonds, and it seems then that everyone gasps. It is as though the air was moving. The little mermaid, I think to myself, as I leave them all at the river and wander by myself back through the fields to the house. I pick handfuls of flowers, twisting the bendy stems into loops. They are all strangers, I think, as I tear a branch from one of the seedlings that Henry had planted in the autumn and use it to behead lavenders with vicious swipes. A single magpie lands on the old elm tree by the verandah and howls and squawks at me, a low rasping hack.

I am found a short time later on my stomach under the bench in the summerhouse, a romantic name for what is really just a pretty garden shed, picking tar from the knots in the old pine floor. The summerhouse was Victorian, used most recently as a flower house, and re-erected board by board by Henry as a surprise anniversary gift to his wife soon after the birth of his second daughter. I often hide in there, in the far corner of the garden, with the warm cedar smell of the wood, looking back up at the house through the dimpled smeared glass of leaded diamond panes.

I wrap my arms around my legs, pushing my throbbing eye sockets against my knees. In the distance I hear the shrieking of the girls’ laughter and know that Henry is probably throwing them high, high up in the air. I clench my hands to my ears, drowning out their joyful cries.

When I get to the kitchen a short time later, they are all eating ice cream with hot chocolate sauce and my stepmum tells me that she’d saved me some macaroni and cheese, kept it warm in the oven. Henry looks at me, says, ‘Ah, Tessa, come and sit beside me. Let me hear your voice.’ I feel my mood lifting, the heavy dark fog from earlier dissolving, like vapours through the mouth in winter.

I’m the sole witness of my father’s past love with my mother. Did he love her? Had he loved her? They are questions I ask myself often but have never had the strength to voice out loud. I don’t know when I started calling him Henry. Perhaps it was when he didn’t feel like mine anymore. And now, as I sit, dabbing silver highlights to the ripples in the water in Henry’s picture, I wonder if these are things I will ever know.

About the author

Megan Sougleris lives in the Adelaide Foothills with her husband, two children and beloved pet dog.  
She writes late at night, and reads voraciously, finding inspiration and wisdom from her favourite books and authors.