Status Updates From Hurdy Gurdy

It’s not a heartbeat is what I understand and the people who say it is are making a mistake because what they’re talking about as a beat is just electrics. It’s a stub where the heart will grow but they want to say ‘heart’ instead of ‘electrical impulses’ and they want to say ‘feelings’ instead of ‘inability to experience pain’ and they always say ‘baby’ instead of ‘foetus’

We see roadkill every day and when we do I imagine their life energy having left them, either with a violent pull or a gentle drifting of spirit strings that rise silver from the body and trail the sky. Those creatures are gone to a better place other than beside a lonesome stretch of road

Me? I have no name these days, I am called Sister. He found me on the picket line, it was a while back. I was a student of nursing when I heard about the clinic protests so I went and joined. It was a day of shouting and pushing. At the end of it he came to me and asked me to go with him and we’ve been together since that time, though once he said he wasn’t yet sure whether he would keep me.

The world has altered in the time he and I have been together. The infections and inquisitions, rumours of law changes and a strangled welfare system. Billionaires colonising the space stations. Our planet moving into extremity with heat events of fifty-degree days and fireflies arrived now in Tasmania. There are more households with generators than electricity running from wires. Houses made fit for other purposes,

Valentina’s our head clown. She thinks we’re all clowns but that while some of us know it most of us don’t. Her grandfather was a clockmaker in Moscow, he got arrested and taken away and they never saw him again. After that here father turned clown because horology was dangerous but he found clowning difficult too. Telling jokes was an extreme sport in those days.