Suburban legends

Suburbia births these liminal spaces. Did I really see her? Rebecca, the ghost of my primary school field. Rebecca dangling from the tree, eating peaches and mocking us. Adults would say trick of the light. I know more about tricks of the dark. The way streetlights drench the grass aglow, like floodlights. Like places where alien landings happen and the kids get wise and the parents aren’t around. I am twenty-one. I never was those kids. How is it that we can grow on the wrong side of time? We have the days planned out but then we’re idle. The sky rots pink and it’s too much sitting around, too much gripping onto the bones of evening. In the end it’s clear: If we’re all too good for this place then nobody is. We have the future mapped out though, and it’s stay/leave/stay/leave/stay. I am twenty-one. In truth I never subscribed to those myths of restlessness, of regression. Though I did wonder why the summer always smelled of decay by the time we got to it.

Anuja Mitra

Anuja Mitra enjoys mint chocolate chip ice cream, indie films and petting her small colony of cats. More of her writing can be found in Signals, Starling, and exhibited in “The Next Word: Contemporary New Zealand Poetry” at the National Library.