Open door

Open door

Article Type: Literature and Insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 29, Issue 6.

Our procedures never enumerated the precise distinction between effective ajar and full closure, the allowable gap between latch stile and jamb, let alone a formula by which one should categorically decide, or not, to admit a whiff of love in the air, failed remnants of tubular fluorescent glow, decaying shards of variously mixed messages, a tremolo insinuating scant contraindications preferably left unsaid.

Shunning raw vacuum, stubborn memoranda linger, awn the voids between proposition and action, haunt loosely labelled years recalling broken piano strings, blocked telephone lines, the coarse transequatorial fog enveiling clear speech, when untrustworthy corrosion riddled the elegant pretence within our make-shift armamentarium, ambried against climate change and landslide and guilt.

Airless, my head reels. Plagued by butterflies and moths, solitary bees and ichneumon wasps, I fail to assemble the conversation I must propagate, weed, circumscribe with surveyor’s marks and inadequately disguised earth. As fingernails peel splinters off my chair back, neither laughing gas nor local anaesthetic has the desired effect: calendars mangle filing pins, glider clips continue to stall.

Ian Gibbins - Niteshifter Productions, Adelaide, Australia