Yellow Dress

• Laeticia Gillespie, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2018

Dry gum leaves crushed underfoot, crackling and crunching, the heat of the Australian summer night seeping into the air and the shipping container, closed, sealed from these outside elements resting on the red dirt.

Often, on nights such as these when sweaty slumbers seem to render me sleepless, I’m often piqued with the thought of this metal, army green box. It’s large and looming doors preventing the secrets it contains from escaping into the outback.

What lies beyond these doors?

Curiosity can be a dangerous hunger for those who thirst for knowledge. For years, I have denied myself the feast of knowledge – the knowledge of what lays beyond. Fear combats curiosity, shrinking the desire of discovery and waking inside an anxiety that urges you to flee.

The crunching stops, the footsteps cease – there I stand so close yet so far from what lays beyond. Cold metal is grasped by sweaty and swollen fingers.
Easing open the reluctant door, that groans its protest, my body begins to tremble as I anticipate what has laid beyond these doors, what has waited to be discovered so patiently.

Fear evaporates from my being, as my eyes fall on the piles upon piles of paintings and easels laying around the beautiful, intricately-laced colours dashed over canvases, swirled into images and the feelings and thoughts that an artist has so boldly stroked. Paintings of the Australian outback, the homesteads around this region and portraits of the people living here.

Amidst all the paintings, there was one that was truly the most unexpected and beautiful of all. The painting is of a mother, dressed in a gorgeously yellow dress cradling a baby, only a few months old. Her eyes are pure love as she stares so gently into her baby daughter’s eyes.

Curiosity has vanished replaced with this knowledge – who could teach one to appreciate art so reverently without they themselves creating their own masterpieces? My mother, she painted these elegant strokes, she swirled the love into these warm chestnut eyes and has carried it with her all the days of her life.

Often, I’ve felt abandoned when my mother vanished for hours as if she needed time to escape from me. All the while she had been thinking about me, wishing to leave behind tokens of her love not only for her child but of the country she loves.