Here is Good

A short fiction piece, published in The First Word Journal in 2021.

Graeme rests a cigarette between his middle and index finger, grasping a white ceramic company mug. He’d made coffee just before – Blend 43, with the last bit of milk from the carton, and like every morning, he sits on the plastic chair on the porch and looks out squinting to the decrepit house across the road.

The neighbours are yelling again, and Graeme wonders if it’s about the dog that won’t stop barking. He imagines the dog is cowering in the corner, head down and nose to the floor, while they’re screaming and throwing silverware at each other and a knife ends up stuck in the drywall. It’s not the dog’s fault.

Corey stands in the kitchen, tapping a scuffed steel-capped boot on the linoleum, occasionally sipping a Red Bull midway through a conversation with Jaxon on the other end of the phone about the day’s work site.

Cheryl smears taupe lipstick over her thin lips, which purse together tightly, but she doesn’t have time to fix the smudges. She gives Graeme a half-kiss on the corner of the mouth in-between his exhale, before clearing the wrappers from the front seat of her car aside. There are stains from Annabelle’s nail polish and crinkled plastic disposable cups in the back seat. Remnants of soft drink on the cups caramelise in the sunlight.

There aren’t many windows in the office where Graeme works. The room’s light is bathed in yellow, undercut by fluorescent lights that hover above the cubicles, with the smallest peak of sun housing hordes of dust that swim in circles. He wears thin, rectangular glasses that correct his eyestrain. They fog up every time he freshens up his coffee in the staff room, where he makes small talk about his car service, the shocking Pies game on the weekend, and whether Kyle from Accounting will be sacked. He watches the seconds pass on the clock go by like time stretches further away from him.

The work he is given is neither easy nor hard. He takes a lunch break at twelve, and Giuseppe from two cubicles over asks what he’s brought from home, his head just peering in; but Graeme never has much to say about it, given lunch is usually from the 7-Eleven across the road. Giuseppe dresses like the Fonz and wears three small gold chains around his neck that peek out just underneath his collar, and his skin is perpetually greasy, despite the office aircon being stuck on one setting – frosty. But there’s something about Giuseppe that reminds Graeme that perhaps not all his co-workers are potential robots, and he smiles knowing that he has a friend. The rest of his office is pleasant and always polite, but they look straight through him with a face like they’re processing instead of than feeling.

The background on Graeme’s computer monitor is of a tropical beach. He doesn’t know what beach it is, given he found it on the third page of a Google search, but it’s balmy and warm-looking and full of palm trees.

He looks long enough to see himself there with Cheryl. She wears a one-piece bathing suit and sips on tall blue cocktails like a tourist, pestering the pool-boy for more ice cubes and better shade where the air is water and the starry evenings are sticky-hot. The crevice in the middle of her forehead eases after years of furrowing her eyebrows, and she smiles at him again, caught in-between moments of roaring laughter. He gets to go back, for just a passing moment, to the summers he spent fishing for crabs with her in the dry heat and the cool mud which squelched between his toes, to the airy nights underneath the thin mosquito net together when his hair was much longer and curlier than it is now, to when they were still very much in love. He knows he shouldn’t be here.

‘But here is good’, he thinks. ‘Here is where I should be.’

Graeme makes meatloaf for dinner. Annabelle picks at the gristles, pulling the tiny fibres apart with her fork and pushing them around the plate, chewing at the crispy edges that spent too long in the oven. There isn’t much conversation to drown out the noise of knives scraping against plates, and Corey doesn’t eat, to go to his room at the back of the house to fiddle with the Gatorade bottle that sits beneath his bed that Annabelle doesn’t understand. A faint grinding sound spills out from the space in-between the door and the floor, and it takes Graeme to when his youth, smoking weed with Cheryl when they first met. They skinny dip at the pier among the yabbies that nip at their feet, and he holds her head in his hands beneath the blinding light of the moon and he feels like he’s home when he is with her.

Cheryl is critical of his daydreaming when they are alone. ‘You’re never here.’

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘It’s like I’m looking at you,’ she says, ‘and you’re looking back at me, but are you even here? Where do you go, Graeme?’

He hangs his head in his hands and sinks further into his lap, saying nothing.

Annabelle sits cross-legged in front of the television, occasionally flipping through the pages of a Dolly magazine. She looks to her left and right before carefully opening the Sealed Section, reading a column on the do’s and don’ts of a first kiss, her middle finger grazing her bottom lip. She hasn’t quite figured out how to blend out the lines of her foundation — the colour and consistency of chocolate mousse — so the streaks battle with the peach fuzz that grows from her sideburns.

Corey comes inside from the biting cold, smelling strongly of cigarettes like Uncle Rob used to when he’d come to visit unexpectedly, kissing Annabelle not quite on the mouth or on the cheek, but toward her neck; always wet, always scratchy, the tufts of his moustache grazing against her skin. Corey’s music bleeds out from tangled headphones and fills the house faintly, but Annabelle can still hear her parent’s exasperated argument through the just-open door; Graeme seldom speaks, the door closes gently, and then she hears nothing.

He is drying the dishes later when he broaches the subject: ‘What if we went away for a little while? Just say we did…’

‘Yes’, she says.

‘Would you go with me?’

‘With the kids?’

‘No, no,’ he says. ‘Just the two of us. Just us, together, alone. I was thinking we could go somewhere nice. Somewhere much warmer. I know the cold has been bothering you.’

‘It wouldn’t be difficult?’

‘No. No, it would be easy. Just come away with me, please.’

Cheryl pauses for a moment as if to consider the offer. But she turns to walk down the hallway and shakes her head looking back at him with eyes like glass, and he knows it’s over.

Graeme is taking his children to the beach. They’re young again. Annabelle is losing the last of her baby teeth and Corey still makes sandcastles, delighted by the simple way the waves take them all back by the end of the day. He packs white-bread sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and puts a warm towel on Annabelle’s shoulders when her hair is wet and salty, and the sand is stuck to the soles of her feet. He pretends to be a sea-monster in the waves and even though she knows it’s always him under the water, she squeals every time and they laugh the whole way to the car. He feels the sun on his face through the open window, driving down the winding coastal road which puts his children to sleep in the back of the panel van he bought in the summer he found his first job. He cycles through the Midnight Oil album he finds in the glove box and he sings the whole way home, feeling the bass pulsate through the speakers like a heartbeat, and he feels alive.

He sings until his voice is hoarse and his children are awake, when the car is pulled into dirt where driveway should be and Cheryl is smiling in the doorway, holding a mixing bowl and spoon against her hip; until the lights from the cubicle above his head pull him back, to a monitor full of palm trees.