the humming of cicadas in the neighbourhood in summer gets louder and louder. windows start to break in their panes.
after complaining to translink, your bus arrives on time. exactly on time. you happen to look out your window while making breakfast. the bus is there, in your driveway. waiting.
kookaburras laugh outside your window. you go to the doctor to get your cough checked out. the doctor jerks away swiftly when she places the stethoscope against your chest. muffled, you hear them laughing.
you find an old 4 minute shower timer from the water restrictions during the drought. you turn it over and watch the blue sand fall. when the last grain lands, the rain outside stops.
buskers in the queen street mall start singing in time. from one end of the mall to the other, they sing. the same thing, in the same voice, at the same moment. you make eye contact with one and feel your lips start to move. ‘help’ is not the word that comes out of your mouth.
it is summer. the dinosaurs outside the museum begin to rot. you can see bone.
small children with white hair emerge from the beach at south bank. ‘marco’, one says. ‘polo’, says another. a third points at a passing child. ‘fish out of water’. salt water starts cascading from the child’s eyes.
Slip. Slop. Slap. Slip Slop Slap. S l i p S l o p S l a p. SLIPSLOPSLAP. It gets closer.
you go on a Macca’s run at 3am. A Ronald McDonald statue stands opposite the order box in the drive thru. You look down and see soft serves sitting beside you. You hear the sound of large shoes slapping the ground, running.
thousands of kookaburras sit on telephone wires. their tails are on fire. the continue laughing. smoke fills the air. car alarms start going off.
after a night out drinking, you and your mates lay in the botanical gardens using goon sacks as pillows. you ask Tommo how he’s going and he says he feels pretty seedy. his fingers sink into the earth. then his elbows.
it’s finally winter. you curl up under your doona. a hand touches yours. you break out in a cold sweat. a strange voice whispers ‘no homo’ into your ear.
The woman on the left had acid thrown on her with no consequences for her husband that did it, while girls can’t wear that shirt in school which problem should be solved first?
You know that we can work on both problems at the same time, right? Giving a shit isn’t a finite resource.
And using the women on the left as a prop to try and tell other women to shut up on the internet is a pretty gross move. Female survivors of violence are not your silencing tactics.
Antifeminists should stop acting like they give a fuck about women in the developing world. They don’t give a fuck that women are victims of acid attacks, they just want a reason to belittle the problems of women in their own goddamn country.
If they really cared about women, they would start with their own culture and attitude. Instead they utilize other women’s experiences to make the bullshit “it could always be worse!” argument.
Who cares about victims of acid attacks? Feminists do.
