Spinifex Press - White Turtle

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White Turtle

Merlinda Bobis

WINNER STEELE RUDD AWARD 2000

WINNER National Book Award (Fiction category) from the Manila Critics Circle

Other awards won by Merlinda Bobis

Shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year (Poetry) Summer was a Fast Train without Terminals
AWGIE Award for radio script Rita's Lullaby (Australian Writers Guild) 1998.
Prix Italia Award for a play Rita's Lullaby.
1997 Radio National Short Story Award.
Out of Ashes Trans Tasman Short Story Competition1998.
1995 Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize Rita's Lullaby.

Fiction

Once the turtle was small and blue-black like a polished stone. Carried on its back the dreams of Iraya's dead children that later sprouted into corals the colour of bones. After many funerals, the turtle grew larger and lighter in colour, finally turning white, bone-white...

Ferrying the dreams of the dead. A kiss, the taste of burnt sugar, melting with infinite slowness. A woman's twelve-metre hair trawling corpses from a river. A fourteen-year-old street girl's 'working siesta' in a five-star hotel.

An anomalous kiss. A white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead. A working siesta in a five-star hotel. A woman’s twelve-metre hair trawling corpses from a river. Or a queue of longings in Darlinghurst. These enigmatic tales are stories of chance and hope. Alternately mythic, wistful or quirky, Merlinda Bobis’ tales resonate with an original and confident storytelling voice.
‘Merlinda Bobis writes like an angel. Her characters whisper to you long after they’ve told their bittersweet tales.’ —Arlene J Chai

‘Merlinda Bobis presents a world of large emotions, wild dreams and vivid sensuality. A valuable contribution to postcolonial and multicultural literature.’ —Bruce Bennett

‘A versatile collection that brings together the creations of wide-ranging observation, a candid mind, a sympathetic heart, and a delicious sense of humour. New angles on the familiar startle and refresh the reader at every turn. A writer to watch and applaud.’ —Yasmin Gooneratne

‘An evocative glimpse into a little known culture,’ Ginu Kamani, author of Junglee Girl

Watching The crook of your shoulder, a boat. I am sinking into a boat, I am rocking. When you shrug & my eye switches to slow-mo, so your left shoulder lifts always higher than the other in that soft odd way - then I think of sailing.	Waiting Sails promise to keep the appointment at 3:00 in this morning pillow, who cares? Look, I billow half-hearted, ventricle not quite unhinged even as the water deepens bluer than the sky still under the lids. Nudge them, beg me leap, unfurl as if life were only about setting out to sea. Willing to be Ahab's whale, or else we drown in land.	Waning Wind on a diet. This desire growing thin. Breath settles on a scale that registers zero & I think me saved from a tempest - duress is beautiful. Run aground the flutter in the lungs. About not feeding the air to push a longing, such is my conviction
as she longs & watches as he waits & longs as she wanes all longing to a halt. At a boating party, Martha hopes Martin will turn around, return her look, even vaguely, while he believes his wife, Mary, will hold him again, she who must stop wanting Martha. What soap opera, this doomed triad,
but a non-event, really, I read in your shrug as you turn away, unaware of how I unfurl like a mast. As clean as the white of my eyes, O look. & come.	Sand & pebbles, I eat them but think wet between my legs, fumble of half-heartedness. Make me whole & full like a prow. Head of an eagle almost alive again, potent statement against the sky.	& quickly starve. No fasting could be sweeter & more profound. I am fashionably thin, thighs so lean - flush tingle ache in them even leaner now. No more launchings or moorings. No wind, just that, no wind,
as we launch a trilogy. One hopes each story reads accurately on its own, even as these three plots of certainty sail into each other, reading so ambivalently. Martha, Martin, Mary. You can read them vertically or horizontally. Grounded on two feet - land is always steady after all. Or stretched like the earth itself, all the bumps & hollows more visible, body always uneven & vision blurred. & today, Martha, Martin, Mary are caught just like that. Supine. Stranded
on the edge, such is the only way to come. On a wish on a shoulder, I sail out, out to fuck the horizon. Martin, my name is Martha, listen.	A supplication: Mary, be my captain astride the prow. Before the bed sinks - the twenty year old golden band much heavier now & gravity more keen. This eagle, it cannot fly to save me.	No trace of fat. Such redemption after all the nights of being wedged between duty & desire, gorgeously corpulent. Now disarmed, deflated, made anorexic, Martha. I am safe & O so light
for champagne - Mary celebrates on the upper deck. Her back to Martha & Martin. At the wheel, he still imagines waking under Mary's fingers, while Martha tries to catch his ungenerous eye. Everyone has gone. Boating party over & anchor down as
I stare, mast of my eyes white as wished- for come. Whole orbs gloriously coated blind - & you vanish just like that. Don't!	Weight of wait: whale & eagle both, but only in a yearning so sharp, cuts a hole on the bed. I sink through & you don't even know, my love. END	That fades - the one longed-for, as longing loses all wind & long-ers fizzle out. All made thin, perspective pushed to a vanishing point.

This publication is assisted by the Australia Council, the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body

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ISBN 1875559892 Sep/99 Fiction
200pp 198x128mm pb
Territories:World
Philippines: De La Salle University Press
USA/Canada: Aunt Lute renamed The Kissing
All rights:Spinifex

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