Self-Portrait at the Center of the Universe

The desert bends over backwards, snaps in the heat of the sun, and there is Alice in all her red glory, halfway between Darwin and Adelaide. Short mountains that made her impossible to find for a century, and a river that never runs, and a liquor store where a man shoves wine bottles down his pants. Red dirt that cakes into school shoes, and white ghost trees, and the living hum of millions of cicadas. Everything shimmers as if it were gold.

The trampoline is a viewing deck for UFOs. At night, the golf course is the home of delinquent children and kangaroos and the security guards who chase them both. And the Queen of England owns that playground next door.

The embarrassing slap of puberty, of Christian private school, of refinement, of wilderness. Slap. The white chalk on my palms billowing as they meet the uneven bars. The smell of sweat soaked into the mats. Green leotards, and nerves, and Imogen’s music on the loudspeaker as she dances through her floor routine.

Slap. The rain on the tin roof, the first rain in seven years. The Todd floods, runs again, murky with silt and debris. No one goes out to feed the wallabies behind that motel, and they are starving for those tasteless pellets (like zoo food), snap ping and biting at hands, grabbing and holding fingers with their own, alarmingly human.

Slap. The grasshoppers stir up, explode, hit legs as they walk past. The little troop treks through the bush, junior-rangering, searching for scat. Or visits a graveyard outside of town to see one monument, a red stone man panning, lost and dead searching for gold.