My homeland is not my father’s homeland. Our generations are splintered, two distant cousins separated by an ocean of blood and a lifetime of hardship. His home is farmland: a place of solemn rituals and festivals, of duty and reputation. Goats and donkeys and men and boys, and the women and girls they keep behind closed doors.

Mine is suburbia, a stubborn concrete leviathan that shimmers like a mirage in the desert. Its veins are wild with cloned cars and buses that smells of piss and three malls all painted varying colours of depression. Suburbia, the motherland of working class families scrambling for dominance, determined not to be the one to be fucked. Because life, like love, can only have one victor.

And so my father and I meet on the precipice, where we’ve spent the last two decades. A home, or at least a house, dropped between two others just like it, in a suburb of a thousand more. But within the home it is all a sad echo of the motherland. The language is broken and honey-viscous and impossible. Tomatoes grow and die on crawling vines; we have an olive tree, but it bears no fruit. Sant Nicolas judges us from above the microwave, his golden skin flaking more with each passing summer.

We do not see eye to eye. How could we? We’ve lived too long in different worlds, we were forged by different fires. He has his gods and I have mine. His are vengeful; they demand obedience and worship. Mine glitter under neon lights and melt on the tip of my tongue; they promise salvation and obliteration, and ask nothing in return but my soul.

We eat meals in separate rooms, communicate through texts and silence. We even sigh in different languages.
But something is different tonight. The phone is ringing. Late.

He picks it up and answers—he doesn’t even bother trying to speak English. I stand in my doorway and hold my breath.

The ground rumbles beneath me. I flinch at the guttural bleating of goats outside my window—a foreign sound—and wince at the turgid stench of manure. My father is crying as I step into the corridor. Something to do with his father, then, or perhaps his mother. Voices I don’t recognise, dozens of them, and footsteps. They echo through the walls: aunts, uncles, cousins. A baby is crying, and then another.

I run my hand along the chipped paint of the wall I’d splintered with my fist last year and I feel dampness. Skinned rabbits hang on twine in the laundry, bodies glistening, eyes bulging; destined to be stewed and devoured.

My father isn’t crying anymore. He is muttering, barely audible over the noise of life and chaos and death and family. He is whispering a prayer.

I am standing in his doorway now. His knees are pressed into the broken tiles, the cord of the phone wrapped around his wrist like a noose, or rosary beads. An olive branch sits on his bedside table, its leaves curled and blackened, smoke trailing spirits around his covered face.

I step on something sodden. A clod of soil: it has stained my sock, crumbled into the fabric. I will never be able to get it out.

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Jason Schembri (he/him) is a queer Melbourne-based writer with a hunger for exploring identity, history, and the darker side of humanity. His bio remains his most elusive piece.

Featured Art:
Claudio Parentela
PAINTING 3047
Mixed media on cardboard, 2024