Jordan Reid
The grey light slowly creeps into the room from the window behind the couch. A table, chairs, and a small cluttered kitchen slowly emerge from the darkness. They’re colourless, kept in shadow by the thick curtains that hang in front of the windows behind the sink and by the table. The room is silent, bar the muted tick, tick, tick of a clock you found at a church fair in other days.
Soon, the ticks are overlaid by a soft scuff, scuff, scuff and the quiet creak of a wheel on your frame. You stop, steady yourself, the door opens. You’re hunched over, grey and shapeless like your furniture.
How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.
In autumn I began cutting back the Japanese anemones as they finished blooming. Then I became ill again and the last few still in flower were left to look after themselves. The flowers fell, the tips of the canes where they had been turning to white cotton. This held a novelty for a while, but then they began to look shabby.
In New Zealand, the first weekend in June is Queen’s Birthday Weekend. Corpus is taking a short break today for the public holiday. We hope you are able to enjoy some time off too, perhaps shoring up on some precious, fortifying pre-solstice fresh air and sunshine to carry you through the next few months of winter.