Dan Djurdjevic

"These hands were made for fighting, not for music," the artist says ironically, lifting his shovel-like palms and meaty digits. I look down at my own impossibly long, slender and delicate fingers. Then I notice the oversized and calloused knuckles. I see how one finger slants at an acute angle. I feel the once-broken, now-healed bone that juts sharply out of the back of my right hand. And I wonder how the reverse came to be true. Copyright © 2009 Dejan Djurdjevic

A big, brooding figure he was. He would come home from work and sit in the kitchen of our old weatherboard house in Footscray, Melbourne, dressed only in his underpants and a singlet, using the big breadknife to smear slabs of unsalted butter on thick hunks of bread. I would sit nervously next to him while he buttered the end crust for me. He was also the menacing figure who, belt in hand, towered over my crayons and me, glaring at my artwork scribbled on the wall or in his precious encyclopedia. He was the guy who let me tag along with him into town on Saturday mornings, saying almost nothing. He was my old man. Copyright © 2009 Dejan Djurdjevic

James was like a brother to me, only he lived in a two-storey mansion big enough to get lost in, with distant, preoccupied parents and a brooding, venomous, older brother, where I lived in a cramped, prefabricated asbestos house with a family given to screaming matches, raucous laughter or both. Whenever I went to James' house we would dine alone (his parents having eaten already, his brother nowhere to be seen), small portions neatly spaced on large plates, pristine cutlery clinking on crisp-white porceline. At our place James and I would sit with the family, crowded around our chipped linoleum table in the kitchen, digging into the over-used pressure cooker for pale, gelatinous chicken that fell off the bone. I still remember how James, a rake of a boy with a tousled mop of hair, would be completely absorbed in his meal, greedily gnawing at the palid chicken with greasy fingers, pausing occasionally to grin, food caught in his teeth. For many years later I would cringe at the mem...

I put pen to paper, scratching furiously in blue ink lines, smudging, crossing, looping. I pause to look out the window where I see one child on a bicycle, another bouncing a ball. A door slams and I go back to the words, legions of them in thumbed, curling pages, each page embossing the next. I hear laughter from the lounge and want to shut it out, fall into my own my silent world, creep between the cold, thin sheets. Yet I am torn: I also want to share in that laughter, to close the notebook to which my hand is glued. All the while my hand keeps racing – ideas, thoughts, remembrances colliding in indigo. Copyright © 2009 Dejan Djurdjevic