Featured Writer: Coral Hull

THE KISS OF MACHINERY

There had been such a build up to this meeting within the New South Wales wheat belt, that the black crows had predicted storms before daybreak. This man who lived alone in his mother’s shadow after her husband had died, had a shy and lonely smile. The boyish tilt of his head, and wisps of brown hair falling to the side made her hot. She marveled at the stupid harmlessness of his broad chest and inside his jeans his warm brown cock, hung softly on the edge of its own fulfillment. He was in sexual oblivion, quiet and unspent, a private man whose loyalties shifted urgently from the golden ears of wheat to a single woman. She meanwhile ached for his shyness and interest. Suddenly it was as if the wide world was cheeky and cock-eyed like a mongrel. The hesitation and extended side looks entering into the long and loving lake looks, then subsiding again. The silver flicker of fire in the vagina, the arms and breasts lengthening into heat, the day droning like hornets fat and sticky, and the talk of his mother becoming more distant, added to this anticipation.

Then his silly antics with a bull calf, its strong young legs sending it off into the scrub. His nicely rounded backside walked in his blue jeans, a young farmer’s arse. The bull calf took off almost kicking him in its haste for the getaway, the open bush. For awhile the mother followed her son, her swaying breasts hung like bells, whilst the young farmer came back as silly as a show off. All was forgiven because he was spunky, as he called her longing away from the house. She was hypnotized and attached to the cycles of the planet. That was her function in life, to be taken in the harvest like a tractor. Once he had entered her thoughts, he drove his prick into her cunt from behind. She slobbered down her front as her clitoris shook and fluttered beneath his nervous fingers. A thick white moth took off from a patch of cabbages beside the house and was taken by a brown bird. It’s life ended inside a beak devoid of daylight. She was consumed by her own orgasm as helpless as digestion, his hands on her strawberry cheeks, as arse-up the shimmering horizon rocked.

She saw the ripple of mature wheat like a flash of forked lightning, that claims the mirror of flat water. She couldn’t see his face as the flood of her escaped and creamed his fingers. Is that me or him?, she thought. She was as wet as a mirage, the flies excited by her body coming out, the super rich smell of woman in the shed. She could have done this years ago, but instead chose to remain lonely, attaching love to fucking. So none of this really happened. Only inside the land of her fantasies whilst she was masturbating, did she become life’s process. The quiet walk away from the house to the sheds containing the machinery was intense, like blood pounding inside the veins of the ears and wrists. His thighs were rapidly closing in behind her, as he showed her something that only turned out to be a distant bird of prey hunting down the grass. Soon they were inside, each taking position on the dusty floor, her cunt open and at rest on his abdomen like a tiny kite, her hands moving his hands up to her breasts and neck. His slight breath misty on her cheek, as the dry shed atmosphere opened its louver so that the clouds outside could drink him up. She bent down, flooding him with her red hair that he ate like hay.

Her shoulder in his eye as powerful as a tractor blade, and his dusty shirt and brown nipple ripening like wheat before a thunderstorm. Her hand moved along the scar on his chest to his stomach. Some time ago, someone had opened him up and he had trusted them to close him again. His slightly bulging gut was warm, like the corner of a shed piled high with smooth driftwood. His eye watched over his opening like an owl sleepy with dawn. He trusted her gentle palms and was now created from them. The soft brown hairs above his cock are dry lichen, and down between his legs, she gathered the hard warm earth. He quickly released the wordless fluids. The heat sighed with him in the wood. She wasn’t in the mood and the scene was awkward, on the edge of sensual but light years short of it. The mature wheat stood uneasily filling the lakes with its crackling husks. The situation was dryness. The deep thirst of a whole country, aided by the burden of the river drinking crops, had made it so. Then the mother’s voice from the house, like a crow saying it was midnight at noon.

She emerges like a train coming their way. ‘IIIAAAANNN?’ Then moving back from that force or that long cool gust brought by trains, she squashes a centipede as they crash into a flimsy wall. She looked down to see its red arms screaming from her shoe. ‘Oh my God. I’ve killed it.’ He took the heroes' path and killed the second half. ‘He’s all right now. He won’t feel nothin’.’ But she knew that the dead felt nothing. It wasn’t about that at all. It was instead about her part in it. Her participation as quickly as the lighting shaped rain fell down, and the land between her legs was saturated and disappointed. If you’re not prepared to walk down the street with them the next day, then don’t fuck them in the night. Yet it had been all right out here, where only the day passed by and nothing but the grass stopped to look. But enter the protective mother and the centipede and the scene was suddenly tacky, almost silly. It was clear that she had detached herself from the situation, as quickly as a bird leaving the wetlands when the shooting started.

Meanwhile, his lips were dry and smooth, the edges of stones wedged into the backs of dry rivers. Her hands stuck down the front of his jeans as the centipede lost its life. It was not on. It was like feeling into a dark toolbox for a spanner, not nearly as complete or ferocious as a snake. She later told her daughter, when I touched him he stopped murmuring and went as still as the land. The wheat in the lake stops rustling and the birds were silent in the twigs. A whip stick bird flashes in his brown eye. A gecko moved to a cooler corner of the glass in the window of the giant shed. Only the thick transparency of that particular square had stood the test of time. She pushed him off as his lips got hot and turned wet. She went to grab his hard cock but her hand landed on a brown snake. It muscled beneath a floorboard beside her petticoat. She screamed, jumped up. He was panting like a kelpie at a dish. For her the whole experience was incomplete, like opening up a space where nothing was filled in. The day opened by an old continental sun and rain clouds without rain.

She left him staring at the sky, or a blade of tinder grass its yellow stain on his tongue. His eyes become narrow so that the desert couldn’t get in. Later that afternoon, he polished his gun and ignored his mother’s cries from the house. His girlie magazine with the bunny tails and ears fulfilled him, beginning in the unused machinery that had been kissed. A drip on the dust. There was no evidence beyond dryness and the desert had invaded his heart. Spaces howled inside and there was no thought of her. She had come close, to the boundary fence surrounding the house where he and his mother lived. He had reached out to kiss her, but by now she had been a ghost, shed tools or a component of the harvester. The bush plays tricks with the mind and the box trees reveal nothing but themselves. They want you to see them in a certain way, but you only see box and black box. She was in town looking for her husband. The bakery opening its doors, and no buns delivered that morning. She walked down the path, her stomach as empty as the shelves, her mind accommodating that huge distance between human beings, within close physical firing range.

Coral Hull Coral Hull is an Australian writer. The work represented most recently in Ascent is from her current work in the outback. For more of her work and her mission take a look at her magazine, Thylazine.

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