Dirty Three - "Rising Below"

Edmund was at his father's apartment building, a building filled with many retired people and elderly couples that jog. Edmund's father Peter was a member, in fact a co-founder, of the Helping Hands committee, a service put in place to assist the families of those who pass away in the building. If someone dies and they have a small family, or in some cases an unsupportive family, Peter and four other men in the building have volunteered to help sort personal effects and clean up the unit. Edmund calls them the "Corpse Troopers", which Peter is somehow able to laugh about. On his visit today, Edmund was conscripted to help with a clean-up, that of Judith Martin's apartment, a little yellow-haired lady of 91 who owned three closets full of sundresses.

As they boxed and bagged tablecloths and stacked plates, both decorative and non, Edmund told Peter about his new girlfriend May. "She's great, she works for the province." He had been reticent to confess about seeing her, because he'd anticipated that special look in his father's eyes, that look of "here we go again". "Oh yeah?" said Peter, not looking up from the china trays and photo albums, "You talk to Jen recently?" Jen, Edmund's third wife, had been Peter's favourite. Probably because Jen's natural state was flirtatious and her magnetism was felt most acutely by those just outside her closeness. "Jen? Why do you ask?" Edmund thought about why they couldn't just destroy all this left over stuff. It would be so soothing, to rip a sundress in two, send death a real message: don't mess with me. "Oh, I don't know..." One of Peter's time-perfected fade-outs. Edmund considered not following up. "No, why?"

"I just think you should have fought for her. I thought she was the one."

Edmund was not usually one to rant. He hated ranting because whenever he watched someone do it there were dips and valleys of meaning and focus, where they lost the plot and tried to bring it back. A rant's never a planned thing, and that means it's almost definitely going to go wrong, if even for a second: "Fight for her? Dad, what are you talking about? Fight for her?! I fought everyone else in the world so she'd love me and that wasn't enough, I'm not gonna fight her too!"

Peter took a breath, panting almost as much as Edmund. "Well--"

"And don't give me this bullshit about the 'the one'! Fuck 'the one'! 'The one' is dead! There is only the many. It's taken me this long, forty years of seeking steadiness and pattern to realize that steady is a lie, it's not that it doesn't exist, it exists, it's just a lie. It's like smoking. It's only the transitions that keep things going. Rooms are over, Dad, it's all about doors now!" And he slammed the door to the apartment, with the 419 nailed to it, Judith Martin's 419. Or rather, no longer hers.

[Pre-Order]