Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley

somehow looser. Her arms are flung wide. Her auburn hair looks like it has been thrown carelessly onto the pillow. She sleeps on her back, breathes deeply and loudly. One leg is drawn up; one foot hangs from the side of the bed. Her toenails are painted five different colours. She wears a charm bracelet on her ankle.
    Never, I think, have I seen them so close, yet so in opposition.
    â€˜Everyone has been fantastic,’ Stu says in a funny, strangled kind of voice but I can’t listen to him any more. I feel trapped, claustrophobic, as if the big blank walls, hinged at the base, are angling in towards me. There is a sudden heat, thick and inexplicable, then I am stumbling away, back down the corridor to a door, any door which will take me outside. I gasp, begin to hyperventilate, rip furiously at the handle and am out in a vast space where there is a sharp scent that mixes wet rotting leaves with baked biscuits. The new sun is risen and it smashes into my cheeks. Now I run away from the farmhouse as if I am on the beach of my dream, past the flower garden, past the old gum tree that was forked by lightning years before, across the glistening dew and wild grass and snails on rocks to the barn where the doors are still open and the ladder lies on its side where I threw it and there is a pair of old shears lying in the dirt.
    They seem smaller than I remember. Rust smears the blades.
    And when my own tears are done I look up to see a spider in its corner busily spinning the silver quadrants and triangles of its new web. I remember sitting in this very spot with Kaz a week or fortnight or month ago, snared in another splash and stare until my eyes hurt, and the shears remain, glazed soils of our disparate, unholy of time. I remember some more but the spider continues to spin by sunlight and dappled by the earth.

Seven
    F rancesca and I are together, in a church. It is unbearably hot, the citruses of her perfume are overpowering and I am drifting into other places, wallowing in splashes of time.
    Once upon a time, I remember guiltily, I used to have sex with Francesca. On those occasions her nose flared then narrowed, in sync with the movements of her body. At the time, it made her intensely attractive.
    Now we are occupying the same pew and I can smell her.
    The last church I entered was in Sussex, two days before Kaz and I flew home from our not-long-married dream-trip to England. We were pottering around a village called Chelting-ham. We bought punnets of strawberries that we chomped by the river, took photos of old crumbling ivy-swept houses then rented two push-bikes and cycled through the narrow, uneven laneways that the English insist are roads. It was nearing dusk when we happened upon the church; small and mossy, it stood alone in a field of unkempt grass and lemon wildflowers.
    â€˜Let’s go in.’ Kaz had already dismounted, despite my protestations. She strode briskly to the two arched doors, turned a ring-handle and entered the gloom.
    Following behind I remember honey-coloured pews, an overly large portrayal of the Crucifixion done in pewter and oak, hymn books flecked with brown spots like an old man’s flesh. And the stagnation; as if this compact body of air had rested here for centuries, last breathed by a country congregation at the most holy wedding of a yeoman and his damsel.
    I ushered her along. We wandered through a side door into the graveyard where there were elm trees shading the headstones in a thinning daylight. The colours of the flower-tops and grass stems were crisper than in Australia, where everything seems to have been mixed prior to origin with white clay and ochre. We walked slowly and read the inscriptions on the headstones. They were bland, traditional, quietly respectful; runes to the deceased.
    â€˜Look at this one,’ Kaz said. ‘Alice Margaret Driscoll, 1878 to 1893. A lamb, safe in the arms of the Lord Our Shepherd. Poor thing; she was only fifteen. I wonder