Squeeze Edges to Make a Diamond

Elizabeth Tan

You botched the odpening of the new milk carton, and now the broken lip of the spout gets weaker with every pour, milk dribbling, and really, you should have seen it coming, that first decisive moment when the cardboard refused to peel clean, but the thing is there’s nothing you could’ve done about it – not even make the side which says OPEN OTHER SIDE into a spout, because that’s how they manufacture the carton; it’s supposed to work from the one side only, it’s just supposed to.

And all the boxes of loose-leaf tea are judging the hell out of you when you unravel a tea bag, but oh lord how much easier it is to do just that, and not just on days when the CBD is covered in mist, with reports of Godzilla-sized silhouettes moving within, and your husband has abandoned you to join the effort to investigate it. You begged Paul not to go – what exactly was he going to do, anyway? – but he said this is how a man protects his family and left you to do the school drop-off on your own. 

Today was meant to be a writing day, a morning clear of distractions. You could’ve finished transcribing your interview with that botanist, the one who’s been tracking those anomalous mushrooms spreading through suburban backyards. Instead, you’re scrolling Wikipedia’s List of films featuring giant monsters at the uncleared breakfast table, sipping your too-milky tea, the first thing you’ve drunk this morning because there was no time to make anything for yourself before the school drop-off. Scrolling the list and thinking that those Godzilla-sized silhouettes in the mist could be anything: bird-lizards, spiders, mutated rabbits. Gorillas, sharks, things with tentacles. When you get to the Jurassic Park section of the list, the description column reads almost like an ominous haiku: 

numerous dinosaurs 

genetically-modified dinosaurs 

numerous dinosaurs 

Dinosaur. You lurch to the dishwasher and yank out the bottom drawer – Jaime’s plastic yellow-handled spoon with the red stegosaurus on the top is still nestled in the cutlery basket. What kind of parent sends their child to school without a spoon for their Yoplait? You. You unthread the spoon from the forest of grown-up cutlery and clasp it in your hands and ask yourself if it’d be too much to drive back to school just to give Jaime a spoon. Things might have gotten worse out there – road closures, panicked drivers, buses crammed full of commuters fleeing the CBD, petrol station queues spilling out into intersections. Speeding cars driven by blokes like your husband, eager to help the situation and defend the city by standing around with their hands on their hips making the same two suggestions over and over. 

You take the spoon with you back to the laptop. You switch to the tab with the ABC’s Perth CBD mist-ery live blog and check the updates. There are newer, more accurate photographs of the mist available now. It seems like the mist has evolved. The previous photographs hastily snapped on phones and uploaded to Facebook depicted the mist as grey and matte, garden-variety smog. But in these new photographs, the mist is a luminous pink, a rose quartz shimmer. It’s sparkling. 

The Premier urges people to stay away. The relevant authorities are monitoring the situation from a safe distance, he says. He is dismayed that people have gathered at the site of the mist. Please, just go home – go to work if your workplace is outside the CBD, send your kids to school if their school is outside the CBD – just stay out of the way and let the authorities do their work, please. Emergency services are already thin on the ground because of the bushfires up north; please, everyone, just do the right and sensible thing. The Prime Minister could not be reached for comment. 

You text Paul to ‘come home’, and you also send a link to the Premier’s press conference, as if that’s going to convince him.  

A new update from the ABC live blog; the mist smells like fairy floss. 

It’s your former colleague, Daphne, who’s live-blogging the mist. There she is, smiling from her round avatar next to the timestamp of each entry. This was the sort of thing you used to collaborate on, back in the day. In fact, you were both assigned to the live blog team during the big storm which caused the Swan River to flood, a few months before Jaime was born.  

Instead of sorting through reader comments and questions and proofreading Daphne’s updates, you’re here at home, not writing, feeling resentful about milk cartons. You have come to hate the milk cartons. They were fine when it was just you and Paul, but with a third human in the house who devours cereal and porridge and sippy-cups of pure milk, it has just become more practical to buy the two-litre bottles, but on those infrequent but also not-infrequent occasions when you text Paul to buy milk on the way home from work he invariably arrives home with a carton. You asked him about this once before, and he said he thought he was buying stopgap milk – like, milk to tide you over until you get the actual proper milk on the next shopping trip. No, you said – no, please buy not-stopgap milk, two-litre milk; you’ll even say it in the text message, please buy 2L milk – and he said, okay. That was two cartons ago. 

Last week at the school drop-off the other parents were talking about how exciting it was when the 100-bag boxes of Twinings were half-price, and how sad that it is so exciting, ha ha ha ha, and you offered your story about the milk cartons, and you were met with a flurry of solutions (buy three litres at a time, keep a spare long-life milk in the pantry, transfer the milk to a sealable jug), when really it’s a problem that should not require any strategy more elaborate than he just gets the damn milk you asked for. 

A new update from the ABC live blog; the mist smells like a strawberry-scented scratch-and-sniff sticker. 

The borders of the mist – not unlike a suspicious, potentially cancerous skin lesion – are uneven and asymmetrical, and constantly shifting, sometimes wavering so far as to touch the tips of the surrounding suburbs. It has subsequently been difficult for emergency services to establish a secure perimeter and discourage civilians from turning up to investigate.  

But according to Daphne’s last update, there’s been a peculiar change in the mood. The fact that the mist is pink, and glittery, is making some of the blokes on the scene drag their feet, withdraw into themselves, retreat to their vehicles and sit inside them grimly. She overhears someone saying, ‘It’s more of a washed-out red, really. A washed-out purple. Not really pink.’ Some of the men are heeding the Premier’s words and returning home, the problem of the mist and the Godzilla-sized silhouettes suddenly less urgent, not part of their wheelhouse. 

‘I mean, it’s not like any property has been damaged yet,’ says Troy, 39, which isn’t quite accurate, because twenty-two minutes ago the live blog reported that there was a loud crash from inside the mist, like skyscraper glass shattering out of their steel braces, followed by an ‘oops!’ and a chorus of giggles. 

The experts’ analysis of the Godzilla-sized silhouettes has identified four distinct figures hiding in the mist. There is nothing angular about their shapes, as if one might be able to recreate their bodies entirely with balloons, their digitless limbs and round heads, their bobby movements which convey a surprising amount of nuance. They exude a Dick Bruna-esque charm. One of them even has long ovular ears like Miffy. There also seems to be something jewel-like embedded in each giant’s forehead that emits a small amount of light in the shape of a diamond with curved concave sides, a bit like the emoji for sparkles. 

The ABC live blog reports that there are sounds emerging from the mist – glass swept up and scotch tape stickily unrolled. And high voices singing in harmony: ‘This is how we, this is how we, C-O-O-P, C-O-O-P, this is how we, this is how we, C-O-O-P-E-R-A-T-E!’ 

The mist now smells like a patty pan peeled from a fresh honey joy. 

You appreciate these scent updates. They really place the reader at the scene, you think. Daphne always did have a flair for detail. The stegosaurus spoon that you neglected to send to school with Jaime is part of a dinosaur-themed set of cutlery that Daphne gave you at your baby shower on your last day at work, a reference to an article you co-wrote about the time that dinosaur bones kept appearing in children’s playgrounds.  

You don’t know if this story about the anomalous mushrooms is going to turn into anything. You haven’t been commissioned to write about it; you just thought it was interesting. You don’t know whether it’s going to be a feature article or something more essay-like, or whether there is a connection between the mushrooms and all the other things – the bushfires, the floods, the dinosaur bones, maybe even these round-limbed sweet-scented giants with bejewelled foreheads tearing up the CBD. You don’t know what the story is going to be because you’ve had barely a quiet moment to sit down and figure it out, which you were supposed to do today, which Paul promised you could do today. 

Daphne’s latest update describes a few men to whom the pink mist and the cuddliness of the threat is no deterrent at all; if anything, their conviction that something must be done – and that they have something to contribute to getting it done – has increased. Graham, 51, has brought several metres’ worth of bungee cord and winch chains that could be used for ‘restraining, tripping, or garrotting.’ Others have cable-tied kitchen knives and hedgeclipper blades to the grills of their cars. Richard, 45, has a chainsaw. ‘We’re ready to rip the stuffing out of these Teletubbies,’ Richard says, ‘if the Premier would stop being so bloody useless.’ 

You text Paul again: Are you on your way home? 

Those men – the men who had attached blades to their cars. You don’t recall Paul raiding the kitchen before he left the house, but you check the knife block and the cutlery drawers anyway – find everything in place, even the electric knife with its charger cable coiled in the cabinet below the oven – and then you go outside to the garden shed. All the tools seem to be in their slots, but you don’t have much of an imagination for what could be weaponised. Could fertiliser be used in an explosive device? Were there previously two bags stacked in the corner of the shed, or three?  

You keep an eye out for anomalous mushrooms as you walk back to the house (you’ve heard they fire spikes on occasion, little spiteful payloads of spores). The washing is still out on the line from yesterday. It’s the second time you’ve done this particular load, because the first time, bushfire smoke blew in from the north and made the clothes smell like you’d laundered them in an ashtray. Paul didn’t understand what the big deal was, but you don’t think that Paul understands how the laundry is the most never-ending of household tasks. You scrunch the hem of one of Jaime’s t-shirts, but you can’t tell if the material is still damp or just cold. 

You don’t quite know when you started to feel this resentful about it all, when something as simple as a broken spout or having to redo the laundry made you want to scream into a pillow. Perhaps the day simply crept up on you like so much pink mist, spreading out overnight.  

And how is it that Paul can oscillate so smoothly between two personas, like a mask on a stick twirled between palms – the one that knows best, this is how a man protects his family, listen to me, I’ll look after you; and then the one who shrugs helplessly, oh how should I know, you didn’t tell me there were clothes out on the line, that the meat wasn’t taken out of the freezer this morning, that we were running out of soap, clean mugs, vacuum bags, toothpaste, wet wipes, batteries, Panadol, sugar, dishwasher tablets, that Jaime’s been a size 4 for months now, that we were about to send Jaime to a birthday party without a gift, that the hosts’ names are Perry and Lacey, not Terry and Casey, that Jaime’s favourite PAW Patrol pup is Rocky, not Skye, that we can’t leave a plate of crumbs out on the coffee table anymore because the ants will come, that we’re not meant to use detergent on the cast iron skillet, that there’s only one brand of laundry powder that doesn’t give Jaime a rash. 

This is how a man protects his family, Paul said as he swiped the car keys off the kitchen counter, and maybe you should have seen it coming. And what if there was a universe in which it was easy for you to do what Paul did, what all those others have done – drop everything, fashion a harpoon from a broomstick and an electric knife, clip Jaime into the car seat, speed to the city – though whether you’d charge into the mist or stand with your back to it, whether you’d point your homemade harpoon at the giants or the crowd, you don’t know. 

According to the live blog, the giants have started singing a new song: ‘I have feelings! You have feelings!’ Clap! ‘Everybody has fee-lings! Feelings are okay (yeah)!’ 

The mist now smells like the dyed synthetic fibres which are used for dolls’ hair and also the hair of toy horses, ponies, and unicorns.  

Expert analysis has come to focus on the light-emitting diamonds on the giants’ foreheads. There is worried speculation that the lights could be blinding to humans, or that they could be radioactive, or that they could be lasers. The Premier holds another press conference, urging the people at the site not to confront the giants. But on the ground, Daphne is reporting that two distinct groups have emerged, and one of them is ready to move. 

The men who wish to enter the mist are approaching it now while the men who do not wish to enter the mist look on. In the light of the mist, the worried lines on their faces seem like crayon scrawls, quaking and crag-like. You wonder which group Paul is in: the men with weapons or the men who watch.  

The mist now smells like the moment right after a child has blown out her birthday candles. Smoke and frosting. You watch the live feed of the mist. You can make out the giants’ luminescent jewels, four points of light. Today was meant to be a writing day. Your child is at school without a spoon. There are clothes on the line. Your tea has gone cold. You make the live feed fill the whole screen – there are still so many buildings standing – and you find yourself longing for destruction, for disobedience, as if it might give you the courage to topple something yourself, to refuse to yield. To peel open into your own shape. Pour yourself through the annoying broken lip of your life, that collapsing blistered diamond.