Kirsten Alpin is the first winner of this year’s Bellarine Writing Competition.
It’s the fifth year that the competition has been running and Kirsten’s entry for the first topic – ‘Through the window’ – was judged the best out of 26 entries.
Kirsten won $200 for her efforts and will now go into the ‘grand final’ where the overall winner will win $1000.
The next topic is ‘If I had only known’ and must end with the sentence ‘that never would have happened’.
Entries must be a maximum of 750 words and submitted by Friday April 28 to acobham@bigpond.com
Kirsten lives with her two sports-mad sons, husband and dog in Ocean Grove. They have lived there for eight years and have never regretted the move from Melbourne.
Kirsten currently works in change management but has spent most of her career in communications roles where people have paid her to write.
Recently Kirsten has started writing for fun and is enjoying the challenge of ‘switching off’ the corporate speak.
Kirsten always has a large stack of books next to her bed and would like more hours in the day to read them.
When she’s not working, Kirsten is usually watching her kids play sport. Kirsten also enjoys being at the beach, bush walking, yoga, swimming, eating out and reading.
Moonlight
By Kirsten Aplin
Framed, as it was by the window, the night sky hung like art on Eva’s living room wall. The moon tonight was a thin sliver, but seemed unfeasibly bright, as though it were generating its own light rather than projecting back the sun’s. A tapestry of stars was on show, so epic in proportion and brilliance that Eva found herself holding her breath as she gazed upon it.
From her position lying prone on the couch, chin propped on the armrest, Eva viewed the moon in the top right corner of the windowpane. She knew that by the time the sky began to lighten in the space between the trees, the moon would have completed its celestial arc across the window and moved out of sight.
Eva was grateful for the dry summer – with no clouds to disturb the view, she had taken to watching the moon’s progress each night with a resolute consistency. There was reassurance for her in the reliability of its lunar path. Locked in a gravitational embrace with the Earth, the moon was an ever-present companion, a comfort to Eva in a way that the sun could not be. Not right now.
A memory surfaced unbidden.
Two pale, dimpled feet. Tiny toenails, like pearl seashells. Small, silver nail clippers and a pile of delicate crescent moon-shaped clippings.
With practiced efficiency she suppressed the image, letting it sink to the back of her consciousness.
A slight frown appeared on Eva’s forehead as an uncomfortable feeling formed – a thought was there, but it was slippery. Since it had happened, thoughts and feelings had become harder and harder to grasp – increasingly fuzzy around the edges, undefined. Nights and days were blurring, and she had lost sense of time.
The days were the hardest. When the morning sky began to brighten, Eva would make her way to the bedroom with a cup of tea, pulling the curtains against the sounds of the neighbourhood waking.
The sun seemed like a rude affront – the daylight hours brought people, responsibilities and routines that were too difficult to face. At first, she had regularly heard knocks at the door, concerned voices murmuring, the sound of food being left on the front porch, her phone ringing and beeping. But gradually these intrusions had lessened, and the daylight hours would pass in an uninterrupted fog of chemical-induced sleep.
At sunset she would re-emerge, like a nocturnal animal from its nest – cautious and expectant. In a way she felt like a wild animal, reduced back to a set of instincts, a lower-order sentient being.
“Do you see the monkeys? Can you see the baby one there, with its mummy?” A round face, intent and serious, eyes wide with the wonder of it. A chubby pointed finger extending from the cocoon of a pram, following the monkeys as they swung.
The thought that had been bubbling up began to take shape, and she suddenly pushed herself up to sitting.
This was the thought: this crescent-moon is familiar.
Was it waxing now, or waning? Surely it could not have been a month since the accident?
It must have been a month.
This was the thought and it acted like a shot of adrenaline. In a way that nothing else had been able to cut through her grief-haze, the realisation that a full moon-cycle had passed had the effect of lifting Eva back into her body.
A single tear glinted on her cheek, and then many. She’d shed no tears yet, but now, bathed in the soft silver moonlight, she let them flow. She hugged her knees to her chest and rocked herself back and forward as she cried, immersing herself in this moment, in the catharsis.
Dappled sunlight, the trees outside the window creating shadow-play on a quilted bedspread. A small body swaddled, breath moving rhythmically through the small form. A cherubic face, asleep, long eyelashes casting shadows on porcelain cheeks.
She knew that tomorrow she would at last open the curtains to the sun – perhaps not fully, but enough to let some daylight back in.
