March 2024: Tremble - Jemma Pollari
Tremble
“Homie,” I say. My hand is trembling again. I am frozen reaching for the peanut paste, a breath strangling in my chest.
He doesn’t answer; he is dipping half a grapefruit in sugar. Another doomed-to-fail attempt to lose weight. The kids tumble into the kitchen: noise, chaos. Bus, school, work. When the house is quiet again, and I am alone with the baby, I realise the shaking has not stopped.
In the attic, I hunch beside a box overflowing with clowns and once-gold records, scrabbling for a battered journal. My baby crawls, playing with the detritus of our lives, the pacifier snuk, snuk, snuk in her mouth. Endlessly.
I write words I can’t speak to anyone. They would label me crazy. Would send me, again, to soak in a mud bath, to roll my head in circles on a neck that is a warm piece of asparagus. To “recover.” To “have a rest.”
Why does nothing ever change? I scrawl.
The pen shivers above the page. I stare at my daughter. Shouldn’t she have grown? Do I remember her birth? It feels so long ago. Decades. Forever.
The dog barks in the yard; the cat yowls. Like a bad dream, the moment fades. I am anchored again. Normal. My world is as it should be. I give my head a little shake, laugh. Drop the journal on top of a rhinestone-encrusted jacket. Pick my daughter up, and we climb down, back into my life.
But it doesn’t last.
The waves come more and more. The sense of falling, the sense that beyond a veil I cannot lift, there is something else. I watch my son and daughters play. I watch him with them. We have love. A home. Each other. I should be happy. And yet. I count the days, try to fix them to paper. I try, but I get confused.
“Homie,” I murmur, late in the night. He is warm, solid, against my side. I curl into him. Press every one of my four fingers into his softness, gripping, as if he can hold me here, make the trembling stop.
“What is it?” he mutters, shifting, half-waking.
“Do you ever feel like we are… trapped?” I whisper. He’s my man, my life partner; we’ve been through so much. Too much. How can it be so much? I can’t resist the urge anymore, the compulsion to vocalise my growing horror. “That we are stuck… in time? Never changing? Never aging?”
“I’m aging,” he groans. He is only forty. Forty, finally. I remember two years ago when he realised half his life had passed him by. It feels an eternity. And it feels like two years. The dismaying, spiralling battle of the two realities rips the breath from my lungs, and I clutch at him harder.
“But how long have you been forty for?”
He chuckles. Slides a hand around my waist – still narrow, delicate, even after three kids.
“Go to sleep, Marge,” he says. “Don’t worry your pretty little head.”
Jemma Pollari
Right Left Write’s March prompt was Fanfiction.
Find out more about Right Left Write at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/rightleftwrite.
The competition’s April prompt is Screenplay.
Right Left Write’s March prompt was Fanfiction.