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The Lay of the Land

March 3rd, 2010 by the_lifer
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Winona trembles with recognition as they are driven away from the airport.  (Her father’s news, that the construction under way at the airport is to construct new terminals shaped like gigantic copper rocks, was so surreal that her jet-lagged mind has gently suppressed it.)

It’s all so small after London, so clean yet shabby after the rest of the world. Driving through Victoria Tunnel, her father shows that he’s still her Dad by tooting the horn while they’re underground. There’s the turn-off to Newtown, the scruffy suburb where she and Will had their first flat. Now, they’re going past Cuba Street, where she spent most of her time as a teen in the grungy late 90s. And, most of all, the rippled hills, under their heavy verdure, first cradling downtown, then framing the street she grew up on in the suburb of Kelburn, five minutes away from the city’s heart but hours away in serenity.

It’s all settling around her now, firm and comforting, like the Doc Martens she used to lace herself into in her girlhood.

Even as she’s starting to relax, her partner, Will, tenses beside her. He has yet to release his iPhone. “Bloody oath, what’s wrong with the local network?”

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The Great Leap Backwards

March 1st, 2010 by the_lifer
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They’re at the end of a 24-hour plane flight, at the stage where to have to stay seated five minutes longer in their economy seats is to explode.

They are experienced travelers by now – that’s what a three-year OE is supposed to be for. They know their shared travel time is best spent in silence, white earbud wires drooping from their ears, a book in her hands, a game-laden iPhone in his. The woman in the window seat is slim enough to be comfortable in its narrow confines, but starting to feel the echoing blurriness of jet lag. Still, she keeps peering out the oblong window. When the green hills rolling below start to be speckled with houses, she plucks away her earbuds and nudges her companion. He raises his eyebrows and looks at her. “Wellington,” she says, loudly.

This rates having him, too, yank his earbuds. “Serious cloud cover. Think they’ll let us land?”

“There’s sun,” she says.

As they eye the sun and storm below them, the woman sighs, “Typical.”

They both know the city below them well. At least, they think they do. It’s their home.

A Janus-faced city, changing its course every election, tough for outsiders to read, offering the best and worst of everything, but little in between. The weather is either ravishing or horrible. Jobs are either fabulous creative gigs or government-beuracracy nightmares. Flats can be delightful aeries or gloomy, cold oubliettes. People are happily partnered or committed singles. Best friends or eternally sworn enemies.

As their plane spearheads through clouds and out into sunlight, it’s hard to tell what it’s going to be for them when they land, the good or the bad.

A steward has materialized beside their row. He holds out a basket. “Would you like a sweet?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Take a couple,” he says. They both do.

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