"Insistent Assassin" by Ian C Smith

He was good at tracing things believed lost.  Once he found a child.  Scarfing hamburgers with workmates perving on lunchbreak girls among the flow of shoppers outside a crowded mall, their sarcastic scores out of ten for sexiness were interrupted when a frantic mother blundered by.  Slipping from their land rover he asked quick pertinent questions then directed his trailing mates to search in different directions.  After footing it fluidly through the pack inside he triumphantly offered his hand to the toddler trying to mount a glassy-eyed elephant that only worked when paid.  He realised it would look bad if the child cried but she was charmed by his invitation.  A hero to that mother, he would always remember her ten out of ten he didn’t deserve.

When he was nearly four, speeding on his big sister’s tricycle cornering on two wheels, showing off watched by neighbourhood girls with ribboned hair, he hit a hump, losing control.  Despite pain and tears enough to shame him and curb his zeal, the gods of prudence and virtue disturbed, the cast was set, both on his broken arm, a perfect scabbard, and in his psyche.  Escapades later, blood-jammed in the half-dark, breath the scald of heaven, he watched the breasts, the hair, of a bending woman – whose young daughter embraced adventure – as night air fell on arrangements of dust in a room where so many years have now been forgotten.

Nostalgia creeps in under cliché’s cloak with the odour of rain on earth, or the reason a crosshatched ink sketch of a gaunt pier matters, regrets from edited versions of the heart, sky’s famous late-night jazz riff fade from blue, and warm nights on slow trains.  Sounds such as a ferry’s foghorn, the cello’s sombre yearning, prompt it of course, or the tolling of bells, their sonorous echoes.  Flickering shadows, reading in bed by lamplight about love’s sweet old song when snow settles all around, that movie, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and pangs from unrealised ideas, induce its arrival.  Climbing stairs to an attic’s musty air, or listening to One Fine Day when brooding alone, the glimmer of firelight on silent afternoons, old school photos, rereading stained letters, all beckon our supposedly irretrievable pasts.

The dangerous world he had vied with changed forever, even the weather, pensive, reviewing earlier chapters of his heft of days, their glory and disappointment, his fiercest dreams all left behind but never broken he could add: let’s not forget her birthday lanterns under stars so cold, so bright that long ago October, strung between pale birch boughs; self-belief ghosting lithely through a crowd, the memory of an elephant, solemn vows.

'Ian C Smith's work has been widely published. He writes in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.'