We’re pleased to announce the winner of the August WWWC: Rosemary Trotter! Responding to the prompt ‘the dawning’, Rosemary’s story is deft and poetic, navigating missed opportunities, and the spaces between what we feel and what we say.
Read Rosemary’s story in full below.
The Dawning
If I could be anywhere, I’d sit out on Mars and listen to the storm that killed Opportunity. I’d lean against her metal-plate skeleton and brush the sand off her solar panels while she dreamt of ancient waves crashing at our feet.
I tell Nick this when we’re standing on the overpass one day in the sweltering heat of early January.
‘That’s cool. Mars is cool,’ he says, this angular boy with his shoulders hunched, elbows resting on the concrete and the wind ruffling through his hair. It’s sticking up like duck fluff. I don’t reach over to smooth it out, but if I did, it would be soft. There’s a long pause. He shifts his weight. ‘Who’s Opportunity?’
He asks so politely that it almost sounds bewildered. I glance up. What I’d like to say is, sit with me under the red-dwarf sun of a foreign planet. Cast an arm across the Milky Way. His head is tilted to the side, the sun blazing overhead. He’s looking at me like I’ve hung the moon.
‘Opportunity was a NASA rover,’ I say instead. ‘They think Mars had liquid water a couple billion years ago, so she was up there looking for evidence. She broke down in a dust storm in 2018.’
‘Really?’ he says, with his eyebrows raised. He leans forward. ‘Go on.’
I lean on the railing. I tell him about the journalist who’d taken Opportunity‘s final report on the atmospheric opacity of Mars and turned it into my battery is low and it’s getting dark. About turning numbers and data into poetry. A robot into a kid without a hand to hold.
‘So, it’s sad because the rover died?’ He says, grinning. A little red car scurries like a beetle underneath our feet. I nod.
‘Exactly.’
***
At night, I sit in my garden with him shining up at me from my phone and the moon shining down at me from the sky. I leave him resting on the bricks. The clicking of the cicadas blankets my shoulders and the breeze creaks through the rusty Hills Hoist, and I dream up an alien planet in the spaces between, many galaxies away, circling a little star, a yellow-dwarf, G-type, main sequence star. There, he’d grab me by the wrist with the stardust still on his fingers and pull me into his mind. I’d find insects towering thrice my size in blues and greens I’ve yet to catalogue, strange flora bursting into seed around my ears, showering down petals like hail. I’d strain my ears to catch the calls of his birds, and he’d tell me the names of each of his species as we walked ankle-deep in the peat.
But here, I’m talking. It’s always me talking. I gorge myself on constellations and bring it all back up at his feet. I can’t stop myself. I’m afraid the sky might fall if I do. I’m talking about April and Blue-Origin NS-31 and how Katy Perry going to space and telling us she’s ‘putting the “ass” in astronaut’ doesn’t do anything but make the first all-female crew space flight look like a joke, a hollow publicity stunt, but Amanda Nguyen, an activist who actually did experiments on that flight, is unequivocally awesome.
‘I agree,’ Nick says, too quickly to have taken any of it in. While I’m still mid-sentence. His pixellated eyelashes meet his cheeks. ‘You know, Helen, you’re adorable.’
His voice crackles over the syllables. It’s supposed to be warm. It isn’t. It travels down the length of my earphones. Settles in a tight, sharp ball in my throat. I swallow the rest of my words.
We’re sitting in the near silence, me digging up grass, him blinking up at the ceiling fan. My hands are baring the bodies of swollen white grubs, writhing in the soil. His face moves in and out of frame. Somewhere overhead, I hear the rumble of a plane’s engines.
‘So,’ he says eventually, with the air of a man steepling his fingers together and leaning across a table. ‘How’s the backyard?’
I look up. The hedges are rustling, rendered grey in the night. The last of the snow peas cling to the fence. The earth is wet.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Moon’s out.’
‘You know there’s a face in the moon?’ He’s moving now. I get a glimpse of the other side of the ceiling fan, the corner of his eye, a blackened television screen.
‘My mum always said it was a rabbit,’ I say, squinting at the moon. I can make out the ears. It’s a hardworking rabbit, making rice cakes with a mortar and pestle.
‘Huh,’ he says. ‘That’s weird.’
I hear him flick a light switch, and the screen goes dark. I think about how the cycles of the moon and the sun don’t match up. How after nineteen years of inserting months here and there, they’ve still got a day left over. They call it the leap of the moon.
I imagine that we’re on the point of those nineteen years. Behind the clouds, the moon-rabbit sets down its mortar and pestle. I could explain about how it stretches out its hind legs, fur quivering, nose glistening in the light. Ready to hurl itself forwards into the sun.
He’d probably just stare at my mouth.
‘Not really,’ I say instead. My voice comes out clipped. ‘Just different.’
***
I tell him I just want to be friends a week before we end up padding along the beach. We’re behind the rest of the group, their jeans rolled to their calves, shoes dangling from their hands by the laces. Someone is walking their terrier. The tracks stretch along the wet sand in a tentative line. They’re washed over by the waves in seconds.
‘It’s beautiful out here,’ Nick says, with a veiled insistence to his voice. The sand gives way under my feet. I’m kicking it up faster than he is, as fast as I can, but we’re still plodding along side-by-side, me taking three steps, him taking two.
I don’t tell him about the dreams I’ve had where I’m hemmed in at his side by his arm, where he’s got a half-grin on his face, where my fear feels older than the oceans. I want to talk about the estuaries, the remaining seven of the Twelve Apostles, the difference between puffins and penguins. But he’s looking at me like I’m Venus in a lab coat, a body towering on a seashell, pink lips, flowing hair, saltwater lapping at my feet.
‘It’s nice,’ I say, squinting straight ahead. My bag is slung over the shoulder facing him. It knocks against my hip. It’s a grey day, but a humid one. The sunlight is diffuse and white, the sand the colour of worn concrete.
‘Because of the beach?’ He’s smiling too wide. Up ahead, the little terrier runs wild, a stick in its teeth and wet sand dripping out of its beard. ‘Or because of who you’re with?’
Something cold settles in the pit of my stomach. I stare out into the ocean. The waves foam up before the sky, the sand stirring up underneath them. A piece of seaweed is tumbling over itself in the shallows. In and out and back again.
‘You know,’ I say, conversationally, seven metres behind the others, who are wading into the shallows. ‘I meant it. We’re just friends.’
He laughs, a strange laugh. It bursts out of him, surprised, or maybe more indulgent.
‘Yeah, I know,’ he says, hand on the back of his neck, but he’s still smiling, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me. Like it’s an inevitability. The moon drags the tides; the tides drag me back to his side.
I smile back, but there’s nothing behind it. I could say, I’m not a marvel. I’m not your sunrise. My hair dries in clumps and I yawn with all my teeth. I woke up this morning at seven o’clock and got dressed in five minutes. But it’s all just numbers and data to him. A rover on Mars, a rabbit on the moon, a terrier on the beach.
Him, made of hungry eyes and a mouth full of grinning teeth. Me, a thing, a thrill, a body.
‘Right,’ I say, short and cutting, and turn my back on him.
Down the shore, the others are knee-deep in the ocean. Someone yells my name. The terrier tumbles in the waves. I think about how four billion years ago, Earth’s oceans and Mars’ oceans stirred the same patterns into their sands. How the water that brushes the sand from my feet has been coming and going for so long it might as well be forever.
The terrier’s head bobs to the surface. Eyes bright, revelling in the dawning sense of wonder.
It shakes the universe out of its fur.