#6: Big Sky Paradise by Anna Krien
Available: Going Down Swinging No. 26
Author also featured in: Best Australian Stories 2008
Ok, this is isn't actually short fiction. But after reading it again (and again) last night, I did not see necessary prescribed classifcations on what does and doesn't constitute narrative form; I saw my own restrictions, hemming in experience by nature of a preferred structure. Because make no mistake, Blue Sky Paradise is a story, a seeing, breathing roadtrip, both in and out of oblivion...and it is so full of imagery that it makes some stories seem positively blind by comparison.
The Story
An unnamed female narrator and a man named Steven wrestle with love, death and medication as they drive naked accross a desert "carved up with burnouts and doughnuts". Decay is all around them from rusted rerigerators to "dead foxes hanging from cyclone fences, their tails like fiery brushstrokes."
Pills and prescrptions pads lie stuffed in a briefcase at her feet, the latter to soon be torn up by Steven, leaving him not crying, but gasping, "like an almost dead animal at the side of the road." The skin from the narrator's own hands flakes from her palms. By day, they trace the decay and by night they fuck and find each other underneath the doona.
When they reach the end of the desert, they will put their clothes back on. She will help him with the "zips, sleeves and shoelaces." But before they go, the narrator leaves one last meditation on where they have been, where "stars streak like graffiti, a single firework in slow motion," in "land somewhere, out there, in the desert."
Why it Sticks
Prose poems can either sink or swim based on their imagery, and while Krien naturally explores more commonly-held notions of the desert, she also charts unusual suspects: the clash between nature and technology, death in all its forms, and the peeling away of layers, be they physical or otherwise.
While not every image rings true, the sheer weight of the imagery is hypnotic enough to distract attention from potential misfires. The imagery literally leaves the reader in their own heat-haze, with death and decay melding into moments of intimacy on a sun-scorched backdrop. As readers, we also take the journey, breathing and releasing as the couple ventures deeper into the desert.
Put simply, this story feels soaked in the desert and all it contains, from child-support dodgers to dingo pups and unfortunate ghosts that plowed into trees not so long ago. Through it all, the faltering couple remains, if not screaming, then at the very least surviving all that they see.
