?Interrobang! · Track 57 · middle
What We Bought for a Future That Never Came
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): baby clothes bought for a child who never came. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Leggy Lucy — mermaid-tail maker from a costume shop; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: the rain-drowned interior of Fiordland. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Lucy builds tails that erase legs though she's Leggy; left baby-clothes bought for a child who never came in the deep fjordland. What do we do with the things we bought for a future that didn't arrive?
Lyrics
Fiordland. West of Lake Te Anau. Where the rainfall is measured in meters.Under a boulder, at the foot of a forty-meter fall.A rusted tobacco tin.Not from 1931, not anymore. This one is yours, isn't it?The lid pries open with a rusty sigh.Inside... white woollen booties. So small. Unused.And three dried alpine buttercups, pressed flat by a future that never pressed down.Leggy Lucy, you sew sequins onto scales.You build the tails that erase the legs.But what do you do with the things you bought for the feet that never walked?What do we do with the proof of a future that didn't arrive?In 1895, Quintin McKinnon heard this same drip into his tin billy at four a.m. and wrote it down.At Preservation Inlet, a whaler’s wife left a linen gown in the dirt, her name lost from the ledger.Just ‘infant effects.’ You’re not the first.This land is a midden of small, sharp hopes.You sew the fantasy fins.You build the tails that erase the legs.But what do you do with the things you bought for the feet that never walked?What do we do with the proof of a future that never arrived?The air smells of wet beech leaves, of decaying red tussock.It's the smell of things breaking down to become soil.But these... these stay whole.A map to a room that was never built.A key for a lock that was never forged.A little boat for a sea that never was.White wool.Unworn.What do we do?