ROSEMARY JONES
In My Father’s Square
Greenstone, cool and smooth as the day my eyes lit upon it in a little souvenir shop in Auckland. A gift for my father. Inside the square’s regular geometry, drift mottled, soft-slung greens. They shape-shift into clouds. Inside the clouds, dark amoebas swim towards a Maori sea. Inside the sea: pounamu—greenstone—dug deep from a mountain riverbed.
When I gave it to him, his eyes stilled with pleasure. Gripping it in his long, summer-baked fingers, he slid a thumb across the polished surface, recognizing solace and a place to rest. On his oak desk, the pounamu paperweight chose a spot beside his brass letter opener and a stack of white medical cards: old catalogue cards of patients, each bearing a name typed at the top and a radiological procedure described in brief below. Un-interpretable medical-speak really, hence nothing confidential. I didn’t know any of these people held tight by a rubber band. He used the cards for his To Do lists. Each weekend, the numbered lists grew. A child with too many books? Build another bookcase. A child needing a driveway paved? A roof fixed? More doctorly scribble beside their names. Beside his lists, the stone gathered the light when the curtains were open and gathered the night when the curtains fell shut. The green square collected his moods—his tempests, his quandaries, his joys, absorbing, like a riverbed, the run of waters. For the next 44 years when I visited, I understood the stone would return to me: reconfigured by his ether of precision, the metabolism of his long-legged bones, the sweep of industrious fingers.
Years from now, I imagine my father’s square of greenstone, the nephrite, this New Zealand mountain jade, will sit on my eldest daughter’s desk; I’d like her to have it. For her to pick it up, hold the square against her cheek, to hark back—the stone will tell her so—and to know that love forged in riverbeds tumbles on.
Gone For A Walk
You’re in a 4 x6, but rather than occupying your own frame, you’re a little bent from being propped on the bookshelf in front of Robert Walser who, as did you, liked his walks. The photo was taken when I used my Ipad as a camera, embarrassing my children by holding it up in museums and sneaking shots of paintings. We’re at a table pouring tea from a stainless steel pot in an unappealing café that’s about to close. Behind us, someone’s sweeping and stacking chairs on tables. A slice of my face is missing. You’re smiling, showing a couple of false front teeth, and your hair, which used to fall long and brown and wavy almost to your shoulders, is cropped close to your head, greying. Your eyes: an unstoppable, penetrating blue. It’s late one winter afternoon in Adelaide at the Burnside Village shopping complex. Outside, the light is failing. I’ve called you up at the last minute and you put off your trip to the library to use the computer there to meet me instead.
I haven’t seen you in years and I’d stay longer, but have to hurry home to my children, make dinner, all the usual. Rush, rush, rush. Each day of this trip, I explain, is spent visiting my parents, or my parents-in-law, or siblings, or my aunt, or close friends. I drive from one side of the city to the other. I’ve squeezed you in. You want more. Lunch? You ask. I shake my head. I’m exhausted by the relentless timetable of lunches and afternoon teas and dinners and I have only a few days left. Besides, all the lunch spots are taken. But for this moment, we’re smiling together. For this moment I have no idea that next time I fly in and call you and your answering machine answers and I leave a message asking you to lunch that actually you’ll have gone, tying yourself up on the back of your bedroom door—was it there?—swinging out of the world just a few weeks before I can make it. But right now, we’re still smiling. Lunch? No lunch, I’m sorry. A photo instead. A few weeks later you’ll send me a card saying how good it was to see me in my loose, orange, boiled wool jacket, my life so full. And yours, yours too empty. I like to think you’re on a long walk beside the River Torrens, readying a list of complaints to make to the city council, especially about the dearth of native ducks—the maned wood duck, the hardhead duck, the grey teal ousted by the bullying mallards— and have simply forgotten the time. When you come back, I’ll be here.
Rosemary Jones is an Australian whose nonfiction has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Cimarron Review, Sweet, Cleaver, and Waterwheel Review, amongst others. She was awarded first prize in Alligator Juniper’s nonfiction competition. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, Gargoyle, Corium Magazine, and Brilliant Flash. In 2019, she received a merit scholarship in the Summer Literary Seminars fiction competition to attend their conference in Tbilisi, Georgia.