kenosis

i can feel the winter coming. what i call winter, having come from the north. what i know has other names. bitter cold and constant damp, the bay churned up, the soil saturated. mushrooms slipping out of their homes to greet the air, the early wattles flowering. i think this may be chunnup, cockatoo season. but the cockatoos do nothing unusual. they screech like dinosaurs as they always have. maybe i’m confused. or inattentive. or i’m thinking of Country far from here. it’s too late to ask anyone or google it. i am down to the last books, the ones i read for company. later, i will go walking. collect a few things from the supermarket. there too i am down to my favourites. cans of black beans and mexican seasoning. tinned salmon, the fancy one with chili oil. potato chips with truffle. like all american children, i was raised on the apocalypse. the real dream-laden and imminent one, whores and horses, smoke and sulfur, bitter water. and the one suffusing everything. the desire for all fear to end at a single point, a few of us emerging triumphant, social bonds and libidos intact. previous apocalypses swept under the rug. perhaps it is strange that i’ve kept so close to my old routine, sleeping in my shoddily insulated house, washing the sheets in the creek and hanging them on the line. i still feel uncertain walking out of the supermarket without paying. i heat water for tea in the morning on the pot belly stove. i read, write a little, stretch, watch the magpies. i go down to the beach and swim laps around the buoys until my toes go numb. it has been a year or two of this. i have a complex relationship with routine. i am a restless person by nature, in need of constant movement. but i have landed later in life loving the repetition of everyday tasks, the nourishment of sameness. and looking back, i see the threads of routine, the strange habits, the element of inertia hidden within novelty. the same dinner night after night in new places. small rocks rubbed in the shape of an 8.        but i shouldn’t tell you this story as if i didn’t sneak into the neighbour’s house on the seventh day, the one on the corner with the delicate windows that face the sea. as if it were the comfort of home that circumscribes my movement and not the memory of their strange corpses, desert-red, iron-rich, the skin sliding off like paper bark, crisp and smelling of lemons. as a child, i found others confusing. their indirectness, their lack of awareness of the world around them, their need for power. their inability to be either alone or together. but in books, each character was complex and entangled, their difference made erotic. not sexual i mean but tangible, responsive. i made my way methodically through the shelves of the one library, using one system and then another, moving alphabetically and then by topic and then by color. i was often in trouble for reading at the wrong moments. during my father’s sermons. at parishioners’ funerals. i did not think of it as an anti-social act. for me, it was a white flag, a signal of my willingness to let my solitude be punctured. before the Death, i never understood the myopic immediacy of tragedy, the way it does not break from the trained linearity of your life, the waking up on an ordinary day and finding no one. on the first day, the cold woke me and the kettle didn’t boil. my phone stayed black. i thought maybe the power had gone out, the wind dropping a branch from a gum tree as it often does. or the water bills i thought were quarterly were not. or i forgot to put petrol in the car. i sat on the porch listening to the rosellas chatter. and i noticed, eventually, the quiet. the total absence of the human. the first month, i walked a full day in every direction and found no one. sometimes corpses. but more often, emptiness. each night i came home, read quietly by candlelight, sometimes poetry, sometimes theology, sometimes smut. the gradual accumulation of time told me that something had happened. maybe here. and then, maybe everywhere. there are people i love within a few days’ walk. but i’m afraid to know for sure. i feel in my gut that i am alone, that fine threads of my relational world have come loose and float in the air around me untethered. the grief of it is unfamiliar and sits somewhere in a mute corner of my body, a third ventricle clotted with blood and salt. this is not the apocalypse i expected. a long life more and more constricted by floods and pandemics and fire, by the movement of desperate people, and myself eventually among them. and i thought too that the dead would accumulate, balance out the violence of the living world, a proliferation of ancestors. but instead, there is this emptiness. and it extends where it should not. and the voices i heard previously have gone quiet, and the dead themselves seem to have died. maybe it is this emptiness that keeps me in the straight line of my old life, unwilling to face the possibility of deviating and finding no one still. or maybe i am afraid of being found myself, of being thrust back into a world still in the grips of capitalism, the tragedy, after all, only local, given a bit of support for a year or two, and then expected to find a job, go on a lease, carry on conversations about bosses and memes and colonoscopies. when the cold and the damp came back, i found myself unwilling to burn anything but the human. old journals, receipts, postcards. and then books. first, in spite. the dull ones. and then, all of them, kindly, carefully, reading them aloud, releasing their individual dreams back into the primordial soup, heating beans in the ashes. in the spring when the beard-heath burst with white flowers, i walked to the library with an empty suitcase. i waited outside and looked in through low windows. the aisles were lined with odd shapes and i understood. maybe they all came at once in the night, that first and final night. maybe the library has always been a community gathering place, something for emergencies i didn’t know about, like the surf club. i’ve never been good at keeping up with important details like that, wouldn’t know what to do in a bush fire. or maybe they all came here individually, like me, after the Death. hoping for a new story. one by one, bodies tense, trying not to look at the others. breath slowing. everything beneath the epidermis gone rotten. but the epidermis itself split into layers, dried out, the uncomfortable pink of baby rats, not the five layers i learned in school, but hundreds, thousands, falling away at a rate invisibly slow to the human eye. my eye, now. mine alone. i think a lot about the idea of kenosis. more than you might expect. the self-emptying of the will to become a body, to incarnate. not to be confused with ketosis, which has its own emptiness. but for each of us, i think, as much as for christ, there is something effortful or lax or both about being born. i have never understood what it had to do with obedience. it reminds me instead of that david eagleman story, the one with the horse that is reincarnated as a man, or a man as a horse, or something. it’s hard to explain things with no one left to explain them to. but what i mean is that the Word is synaesthetic, flesh and description folded into one another like a crepe. do you understand? once i found a baby ringtail possum on the path to the supermarket. she was clean and soft, a little too old for the season but still a juvenile, her bright eyes full of questions. the sun was high and she was no bigger than my hand, an easy lunch for a raven. i tried to wrap her in my shirt, but she ran at me with her tiny pink hands held up, squeaking. i placed my whole palm over her back with my fingers spread wide, rolling her into a ball and she stayed there. i took her home with me and kept her in a dark box by the kitchen until night-time, the box where i once kept plums. she slept there and when the dark came, i placed her small body back into the same tree from which she had fallen, hopeful. there were so many stars. it was the first time i’d been outside at night since the Death. an unreasonable superstition. i have always seemed isolated to others, i think. closed-off. so much of my attention turned inward. but my feeling has been one of publicness, of dependence on the bodies of others. not lovers i mean. but everyone. you. the possum. what i love most about aloneness is the quality of its invitation. i sometimes wonder if i alone survived the Death because i failed to project myself into any human future, if i simply went unnoticed, another small body, bacteria-filled, hairy and warm. but i am less sure than ever what the human is, what it excludes. whether i have ever loved well enough for the term to describe me. for years before the Death, i comforted myself with the possibility of a life that didn’t include people. i purchased things when they went on sale, a good pack, a tent, a shit-shovel. i collected maps. i have always been haunted by noise. the hum of the refrigerator. the thin whine of electrical outlets. the high-pitched static of wireless headphones. the bass of someone’s music in a car at the end of the street. i have a collection of facial expressions whose sole purpose is to convince others to turn down whatever they have turned up. but after the Death, silence. cacophonous silence of birds and possums grunting and hissing and dropping their bodies on the tin roof.            silence of water.            new time scales.            some unknown inflammatory response within me started to ease, the body regulated and gentle, porous, welcoming. i felt as one does after many days of being alone that i was finally ready to meet a friend for coffee. not longing, exactly.         but space.             so i walked to the neighbour’s house with small offerings. sand, empty tin cans, a dead millipede. their bodies had spread. not swollen but unfurled, pushing against the door, layer after layer flaked open by time. they crowded everything out. the colour faded to grey, angophora-pink. i leaned against the frame, felt their weightlessness, their pull. i ran the side of my hand against a strip of them, expecting it to splinter, to possess a sharpness it did not. i rubbed my face against the sheaves, the softness of paper on my mouth. there was nothing human in them. but a glimmer, maybe, of capillaries, a kidney-sense, an intestinal impression.       i let them be.   i walked home.

it is almost the season for lyrebirds. what has become unfamiliar to me, they go on mimicking.

This story was shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Prize 2025, an international short fiction prize judged by Mariana Enríquez, Henry Hoke and Ottessa Moshfegh. KYD is a proud publishing partner.