Vulnerability, fluorescent islands and resilient teabags – a story by Trish Harris
This piece was performed by Trish Harris at the Crip the Lit event at Verb Festival 2020. Crip the Lit promotes, encourages and amplifies the work of writers with lived experience of disability. The provocation for the event was ‘Vulnerability’ - as we all know, it's a word of the times – but then, just to mix it up a bit, we threw in some random words which is how we got the intriguing session title of: Vulnerability, fluorescent islands and resilient teabags. Every writer has approached our theme in their own style. As you read the work (selected pieces published from the event) you might also catch those random words subtly inserted in some pieces and not so subtly in one...
Once upon a time, in the year of Covid, the islands of Wellington harbour began to move inland. By Saturday November the 7th as the brunch crowd began their eggs benedict, the newly beached land masses rumbled past them down Featherston Street.
‘What do you think you’re doing - you’re islands!’ yelled passersby.
‘We’re sick of being static, we’re re-imagining ourselves as verbs!’ the islands yelled back, rolling and schlepping their way up the Molesworth Street incline, pausing to re-form themselves outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Before they could continue city council workers swooped in, surrounding them with bright orange road cones. By early afternoon the newly christened ‘fluorescent islands’ had their own instagram account with 5,000 eager followers.
The islands weren’t the only objects to come to life however. On Molesworth Street’s lower slopes, Kate Sheppard’s green silhouette stepped out of the pedestrian light box and shimmered into three dimensions. As she strode up the street her head swivelled right and left absorbing the transformation of the last 100 years. She stopped abruptly outside the National Library of Vulnerable People.
‘Come in, come in,’ said the man on the door. ‘Everyone welcome – the vulnerable and the venerable – here’s your resilient teabag – you can dunk it in a cup of hot water OR because we know not everyone likes tea, you can attach it to your arm like a nicotine patch and let the resilience seep in.’
Kate found herself inside before she could protest. In front of her were verbs, everywhere. Verbs ruffling feathers, verbs opening doors, whispering secrets and stories, imagining something new… talking and laughing and ranting and entrancing….and sneezing. ‘Don’t forget to sneeze into your spine,’ an official looking woman said to a wandering book.
‘You have to see He Tohu,’ a man wearing a “Learning facilitor” badge called out. He ushered Kate to the glass doors embossed with the words: A declaration. A treaty. A petition. ‘A petition,’ she gasped and then jumped as the doors opened before her as if moved by some invisible hand. ‘What powerful magic is this?’ she muttered on her way through.
The petition was just as Kate remembered. Every name, every sheet attached to every other sheet, every signature of every brave and angry woman.
She moved to the Declaration and the Treaty. She stared long and hard. She wanted to touch those documents too but before she knew it she was swept by the buzzing words to the first floor and into the National Library of Vulnerable People’s auditorium – a room brimming with the endless glory of books.
As she made her way up and down those rows of books, her fingers played on the spines, and she paused to read titles out loud:
Alice's Adventures In Vulnerableland
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Vulnerable Man
Where the Wild, Resilient, Vulnerable People Grow
Once Were Vulnerable
It was the next book though, that made her stop: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Vulnerability as Strength. Vulnerability as strength? She could still feel the sting of labels from her petition days. Her desire to flip those labels on their head. She looked at the resilient teabag clenched in her fist. A little parcel of tea, she thought. How odd.
She dunked the teabag in a steaming cup of water, snatched The Hitchhiker’s Guide and headed outside, clambering past the orange road cones and climbing the nearest fluorescent island. As she sat on the summit, she beamed down at the photo snapping crowds: ‘Give me a fresh view on the world any day!’ she yelled, shaking the book at them.
