Archive for the ‘Jason Fischer’ Category
Formula
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
I test the bottle against my wrist, and the white dribble is neither scalding nor tepid. It is just right, perfect for a tender little mouth. I caught hell from the missus the first time I overheated the formula.
I take one long tired blink, and fight the yawns. Jules has nearly kicked his way out of Sharon’s expert wrappings, and his squeals are constant, his struggles furious. He latches on to the rubber teat with relish, and chugs down the white muck like a frat boy. He never liked breast-milk so much, and I think Sharon is quietly relieved that her days of swollen breasts and saturated t-shirts are over.
Jules is thriving on this new diet, and he’s growing by the day. I know there’s been some safety concerns in the past, but we’re told that the formula is perfectly safe these days. “Bottles Bring Better Babies!” says the label on the tin.
I don’t care that people on the picket-lines call us bad parents. I never try to hide the formula under my other groceries, and I don’t bother joining the online forums. Why would I want to be friends with other formula-feeders, the ones who try to keep it secret, who are ashamed of what they’re doing?
I even caught some prick trying to paint a slogan on my house, and frog-marched him out into the street at gun-point. We’ve got a dog now, and cameras. If the vandalism gets any worse, I’ll put in an application for a kill-fence.
It amazes me how judgemental people can get. There’s been a resurgence in natural methods, breast feeding and home births, all that hippie stuff that we thought dead and buried. Whenever we mention that we feed Jules on formula and formula alone, we get everything from silence to accusations. Jules’ food intake is a bone of contention between Sharon and her mum, by which I mean they scream at each other frequently.
I try to imagine the nanobots, invisible little servants suspended in that sweet warm liquid. Even now they’re flooding throughout his little body, and as Jules looks up at me with those trusting little eyes I wonder how much has changed. Are the bots already in there, working away, making his eyesight perfect? Better? His bone-density, just that little bit stronger? His brain, his heart, his muscles…
We’re just like any other parents. Who wouldn’t want to give their child the best start in life?
When the River Died
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
When the river died, its bones ran through a wasteland of our making. House-boats rested on crusts of salt, torched where they lay or stripped to the framework. Weather-beaten jetties jutted over dead ground, stretching for the water that they could never touch again.
And out in the middle of the cracked salty jags, a thin ribbon of red. Still water, tainted with algal blooms and two centuries of superphosphate. All that was left of the mighty Murray River, an artery that once carried steamboats by the hundred, a Nile that flooded and receded as it wished, coating the plains with thick, healthy loam.
When the river died, the pelicans left, and they never came back. If they found fish somewhere else, no-one knows about it.
All that was left of Australia’s fruit bowl, mile on mile of orange groves and vineyards, now dead sticks in dust and waving in the hot winds. Irrigation pipes led down to the salty muck, thick-throated and ultimately thirsty.
When the river died, it killed a hundred towns. Grand old hotels, rotting hulks that were witness to the empty, dusty streets. Cars without the fuel to run them left junked, burnt out. Rows of quaint country shops stood silent, the windows smashed and the doors broken or gone.
The only man left in each town was the statue of the lone Anzac, features nearly worn blank from the acid rain. Most of these stone soldiers faced the river, the old lifeblood, and perhaps it was a kindness that their eyes were worn smooth. “Lest we Forget” each slouch-hatted figure exhorted us, but they’ve been long abandoned. Nothing left but these ghost-soldiers to defend the dead places.
When the river died the arcologies were born, great spires of steel and glass, hiding the children and grandchildren of the evacuees from the murderous sun. A million of these pasty folk, living in a fluorescent hell with each other’s stink, praying that the desal plants will work for one more day.
But if you were to leave that crowded place, and knew the signs, the ways to strain the briny water through ash and stone, you could survive. If you figured on a method to trap the tough little creatures that come out at night, and knew which of the bitter succulants were safe to eat, a whole continent could be yours.
When the river died, a soft nation was finished, but a tough new land was born.