Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

turned back to the figurine.

      ‘So how did he lose his foot?’ I asked.

      ‘He was captured by the bloodthirsty Spartans and put in bonds,’ he said. ‘But he managed to escape by cutting his foot off.’

      ‘Bet they didn’t see that coming,’ I said.

      ‘No, young Eli, they did not,’ he said. He laughed. ‘So what does Hegesistratus teach us?’ he asked.

‘Always pack a hacksaw when you travel to Greece,’ I said.

      Tytus smiled. Then he turned to Lyle.

      ‘Sacrifice,’ he said. ‘Never grow attached to anything you can’t instantly separate yourself from.’

      *

      On Mama Pham’s upper floor dining area, Tytus places a hand on each of Mum’s shoulders and kisses her right cheek.

      ‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘Thank you for coming.’

      Tytus introduces Mum and Lyle to the woman seated directly to his right.

      ‘Please meet my daughter, Hanna,’ he says.

      Hanna stands from her seat. She’s dressed in white like her father, her hair is blonde-white, a kind of non-colour, as if all life has been sucked from it. She’s thin like her father.

      Her hair is straight and long and hangs over the shoulders of a white button-up top with sleeves running to the hands that she keeps below the table as she stands. Maybe she’s forty. Maybe she’s fifty, but then she speaks and maybe she’s thirty and shy.

      Lyle has told us about Hanna. She’s the reason he’s got a job. If Hanna Broz hadn’t been born with arms that ended at her elbows then Tytus Broz would never have been motivated to turn his small Darra auto-electrics warehouse into the home of his fledgling orthotics manufacturing shop which, in turn, grew into the Human Touch, a godsend for local amputees like Hanna, and a source of several community awards given to Tytus in the name of disability awareness.

‘Hi,’ Hanna says softly, giving a smile that would light small towns if it only had more time in use. Mum puts out a hand for shaking and Hanna meets it with a hand of her own raised from beneath the table, and this hand is no hand at all but an artificial limb beneath the white sleeve, and Mum doesn’t skip a beat as she grips that skin-coloured plastic hand and shakes it warmly. Hanna smiles, a little longer this time.

      Tytus Broz reminds me of bones because I am all bones and the other man who just caught my eye is stone. He’s all stone. A man of stone, staring at me. He wears a black short-sleeved button-up cotton shirt. He’s old but not as old as Tytus. Maybe he’s fifty. Maybe he’s sixty. He’s one of those hard men Lyle knows, muscular and grim – you could chop him in half and measure his age by the growth rings in his insides. He’s just staring at me now this guy. All this activity around this circular dining table and here’s this stone man staring at me with his big nose and his thin eyes and his silver hair that is long and pulled back into a ponytail but the hair only starts halfway along his scalp so it looks like this long silver hair is being sucked from his cranium with a vacuum cleaner. Slim’s always talking about this, the little movies within the movie of your own life. Life lived in multiple dimensions. Life lived from multiple vantage points. One moment in time – several people meeting at a circular dining table before taking their seats – but a moment with multiple points of view. In these moments time doesn’t just move forward, it can move sideways, expanding to accommodate infinite points of view, and if you add up all these vantage point moments you might have something close to eternity passing sideways within a single moment. Or something like that.

      Nobody sees this moment the way I see it, defined as it will be for the rest of my life by the silver-haired creep with the ponytail.

      ‘Iwan,’ calls Tytus Broz, his left hand on Lyle’s shoulder, pointing at August, who is standing beside me. ‘This is the boy I was telling you about. He doesn’t talk, like you.’ The man Tytus calls Iwan shifts his focus from me to August.

‘I talk,’ says the man Tytus calls Iwan.

      The man Tytus calls Iwan shifts his eyes to a glass of beer before him, which he then grips tightly with his right hand and brings slow as a chairlift to his lips. He drinks half the glass in a single sip. Maybe the man Tytus calls Iwan is actually two hundred years old. Nobody’s ever been able to cut him in half to be sure.

      Bich Dang approaches the table, calling from afar. She wears a sparkling emerald gown that hugs her torso and legs all the way to her hidden feet so when she walks across Mama Pham’s upper-floor dining area it looks like she’s hovering over to our table. Darren Dang shuffles over in her wake, visibly troubled by the smart black coat and pants he’s not so much wearing as enduring.

      ‘Welcome people, welcome, welcome, sit, sit,’ she says. She puts an arm around Tytus Broz. ‘Now I hope you have brought your appetites. I have prepared more hot dinners for tonight than this one has had hot dinners.’

      *

      Points of view. Vantage points. Angles. Mum in her red dress, laughing with Lyle as she drops chunks of crispy tilapia onto her plate. The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell.

      Tytus Broz resting an arm over his daughter, Hanna, as he talks to our local member, Stephen Bourke, who wrestles with a chopstick clump of Vietnamese lemongrass beef noodle salad.

      Lyle’s best friend, Teddy, staring across the table at my mum.

      Bich Dang bringing another dish to the table.