Writers Abroad Magazine Issue 7 November 2017 | Page 15

WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE: THE THIRD SPACE
THE END OF AN AFFAIR
BY Sylvia Petter – guest writer
I’ve cleaned under the house at last. I threw things away. One of them was
Papua and New Guinea with the bit known as West Irian back then. It looked
like a bird, a sort of prehistoric one. It was a map in relief mounted on plywood.
I’d painted the green hills and the rivers. Stuck a pin into Port Moresby. I’d
made it at school. Can’t remember the year. Don’t know why I kept it all these
years. Must have just been forgotten. Stowed away, like so many things one
hangs on to.
It reminded me of you.
People said cannibals lived in West Irian. I still have a bag made from twine and
decorated with wild boar incisors a friend of my mother’s brought back from one
of her visits to Papua. The friend’s daughter was working for development, she
said, some UN thingy in Moresby. The man across the road, the one who never
recovered from the war, told me stories about fuzzy-wuzzy angels. They saved his
life, he said. But the experience must have blown his mind.
You told me stories about leprechauns riding rainbows. How they would surf on
electric storms all the way to New Zealand. You said you’d walked through the
streets of old Japan with Anjin-san and that you skewed raw fish on a train you
called Sooshi, or that´s what I thought I heard. I could just see it puffing along
through the ravines, or was it the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto?
I’d run my fingers through the jungle of your hair, run a thumb over your
wishbone that jutted out like a crag and we’d play hide and seek behind the
waterfall at Dunn’s River. How ever did we get all the way to Jamaica? We’d swim
in the Ontario summers of Algonquin and dry ourselves in the folds of a sleeping
deer. Bambi? Felix Salten also wrote porn, but you didn’t tell me that straight
away. Well, I thought that sort of thing was a no-no, so in Vienna I did some
research. It was all a part of the times.
I trace my finger over the ridges of West Irian. It’s now called West Papua. Tribes
have become extinct and people have been killed. You told me about a prison
island. Can one half of an island be a prison?
Things are not always as they seem, are they?
When you told me you were going down the River Styx, I believed you. I knew
that you didn’t believe in God. We were all insects, you said. Grist for the
compost. At least you believed in a sort of Afterlife.
But where’s my Afterlife, now that you’re gone?
Based in Vienna, Austria, Australian writer Sylvia Petter holds a PhD in Creative Writing. Her
latest book of short fictions, Geflimmer der Vergangenheit (Riva Verlag, Germany, 2014), includes
21 stories drawn from her English-language collections, The Past Present (2001), Back Burning
(2007), and Mercury Blobs (2013), and translated into German by Eberhard Hain. Her poem, “The
English Lesson”, appears in Teaching as a Human Experience (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
UK, 2015). Her collection of 17 erotic tales, Consuming the Muse, was published in 2013 by Raging
Aardvark under the pen name, AstridL.
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