The Story of Us
by Anna Murchison
As is the custom with starting new things, I am doing this not well but with the intention of
improving. This you & me, which we may as well call us – this face to face & heart & lung(s) &
other vital organs we’ll be needing for this trip, most impressively in your case brain (& please
do notice how I flatter you here because it may be some time before I do that again) – as
terrifying as that sounds, & is, & will be, feels to me to be nudging like a fat tender grub towards
something not uncomfortable, towards not gross, inching its way into the fragile world of light &
air & utter transience. It is a feeling not standard.
I am a pretentious little thing, including & especially in relation to matters of the aforementioned vital organs – i.e. heart, lung(s), brain – & I feel the kidneys, too, deserve mention here, given their job of filtering out all the crap. I imagine there will be plenty of that ahead of us on account of us both being human n all, ergo, fully weird.
Or is it the liver? & what the hell is a pancreas? Perhaps if I had listened more instead of undressing
with my eyes the man I will simply refer to as Mr Biology (albeit my execution was
meticulous). Cellularly speaking, he remains not insignificant – which is more than can be said
for the box of frogs he had us dissect & spear (in not that order). There’s nothing quite like that
timeless combination of amphibian death & bad aftershave to stir the primal lustings of a
thirteen-year-old. I am sorry in advance for all the crap your organs will be required to deal
with. & I will just add here in my defence that failing science is a long-standing family tradition
(with the exception of Phil the doctor who we mostly don’t talk about, hence the parenthesis).
Anyway, this is me saying hopelessly hopelessly but with what I hope you will assess to be a
commendable level of enthusiasm that I am more than moderately impressed with the start we
have made, despite my opening gambit & notwithstanding our various inadequacies,
idiosyncrasies & other nouns which makes us sound more complete than we currently are. The
thing is, I think that together, in time, we might become so – that in time you might teach me
important things such as how to use words like ‘antecedent’ & ‘diaspora’ for reasons other than
fashion or fear, & that I might teach you things, mostly smiling-related, such as how to smile at a
leaf & at not winning the lottery & at good things happening to bad people such as bad people
winning the lottery, & that together we will grow worthy. & armed with this shared knowledge,
this shared worth, we will go forth & make a story which we will breathe into the eversphere so
those passed into energy may admire us for our valour & our pluck, & blow: Well done.
Isn’t it funny how verbs are called doing words & adjectives are called describing words etc.
when presumably all words are just trying to be themselves? Perhaps we should just let them be
– or at the very least stop typecasting them.
I also apologise for my insistence on believing that my casual (mis)use of language in some
intangible but charmingly hipster way heightens my appeal. I hope to soon grow out of this. For
now, I will sing along the exceedingly long floorboarded hallway of our soon-to-be house & at a
certain point, just here, I will stop. to listen. to the story of us. Are there children? Are there
cakes with candles? Is there loss? Are all the usual too strange too wonderful things of life
present?
Anna Murchison hails from Tasmania, a wild, anarchically situated island (see: bottom of the world) inspiring a rich literary tradition. Anna started writing poetry as a means of not losing her mind while working on her first novel. People tell her this has proved only partly successful. Anna finds herself responding to the prevailing noise of narcissism and self-interest by thematically deep-rooting her work in the messy subsoil of life while stubbornly seeking its light.