Black Ice Matter E-Book

Gina Cole

• Herausgeber: Huia Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This collection of short stories explores connections between extremes of heat and cold. Sometimes this is spatial or geographical; sometimes it is metaphorical. Sometimes it involves juxtapositions of time; sometimes heat appears where only ice is expected. In the stories, a woman is caught between traditional Fijian ways and the brutality of the military dictatorship; a glaciology researcher falls into a crevasse and confronts the unexpected; two women lose children in freak shooting accidents; a young child in a Barbie Doll sweatshop dreams of a different life; secondary school girls struggle with secrets about an addicted janitor; and two women take a deathly trip through a glacier melt stream. These are some of the unpredictable stories in this collection that follow themes of ice and glaciers in the heat of the South Pacific and take us into unusual lives and explorations.

Leseprobe

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Tabua

Swim Bike Run

Till

Pigeon Shoot

Rabbit Shoot

Baby Doll

Ice

Grain Stacks

Home Detention

Glacier

Black Ice

0.001

Melt

Acknowledgements

Copyright

In memory of Bart, my black and white

Tabua

Serafina lay dying. She caught sight of a young Fijian man from her second-storey bedroom window, digging in the yard next door of Kerpal the Indian taxi driver. He stopped digging, leaned on his shovel, and looked up towards her window. The late afternoon cacophony had begun. Endless jazz licks, barking dogs, buses changing gear, car horns, high-pitched laughter, fireworks and the rolling intonations of deep-voiced Fijians.

Why did he stare at her? Had he paused for a break? From her vantage point, it looked as though he was working on something important for Kerpal, not just ordinary yard work clearing the leaves of the breadfruit tree. She had seen this type of work before when her cousins cleared a site to install a scaffolding structure for a funeral or some such gathering. Typical! Instead of working, he stood like a carving in the middle of the yard leaning on his shovel. He suffered from the national malaise. No wonder nothing ever gets done in this country, she thought. How could anything ever get done with everyone standing around leaning on shovels, or sitting around kava bowls brooding, or loafing on the Suva roadsides as the road workers did, gathered around dusty orange cones?

She had seen how the road workers would labour for weeks filling in cavernous potholes around Suva city. The weather and the regime always thwarted their efforts. They had no equipment to prepare the potholes. No tamper machines to compact the fill. In desperation, they would throw hot black asphalt into a pothole and run a truck tyre over it once. They left the new asphalt jagged around the edges and dipped in the middle, and the next downpour of pounding Suva rain would grind out the black sticky mixture and wash it to the side of the road, leaving the potholes bigger than ever. She would bet money the road workers knew the pointlessness of their efforts. They made a great show of trying to fix the potholes anyway, and everyone suffered the consequences of their shoddy work. They made sure to look the part; to do something, anything, even if it was only standing around leaning on their shovels, before moving on to the next pothole, dragging their feet like a herd of disconsolate donkeys.

With great effort, Serafina dragged her greying body off the bed. She leaned on the windowsill and peered at the man through a gap in the lace curtains: the smooth shirtless contours of his skin, his blue jeans streaked with the red volcanic earth of Viti Levu. He stamped his feet, shaking the mud from his heavy brown army-issue boots. He strutted the length of the yard, stopping and starting, gesturing and nodding with jerky movements as if giving a violent speech. A defiant speech delivered by a cocky man with a shiny muscular chest. He reminded her of the men in Apolosi’s unit: men with ominous intensity, men who either were dead or had fled the country.