Spleen
My nephew describes a string of objects he found by the estuary: the separated eyes of a
plastic dog, the paper wings of a miniature plane, apple stickers. And already when he came
in I could tell that something was wrong, seeing him looking up at the ceiling and rubbing his
head the way his mother, my sister-in-law, would, when he was a toddler, something he had
transferred to himself now, at the age of seven, and which I found a little strange, seeing him
here in the doorway as he told me how he and his older sister had gone out past the estuary,
where the trash gathers, to the carpark beside the old New World, and how he had seen
something in a puddle there, he said, that he thought was a wrapper in the mud, but realised
was a bird, a small bird in a puddle of oil, and that even though his sister told him to leave it,
to let it die, he couldn’t help picking it up to try and save it, watching it spasming in his
hands, against his palms, trying to massage the oil off, without water, the bird sort of pulsing,
struggling against either him or the oil, which covered it like a membrane, a sac, and then I
saw the oil on his shirt, in a black layer, like the network of bile in the laparoscopic photo of a
spleen they took of my mother, his grandmother, when she got sick, and which I used to take
to school as a kid and show to people, claiming it was mine, watching them run their hands
over its surface, this weird semi-intimacy approaching understanding, a photo which is still in
our family album, and which I still feel ashamed to look at, my mum always refusing to
remove it, placing it arbitrarily between a photo of our trip to Mt Ruapehu and a birthday my
brother had at McDonald’s, so that my memories of these things collect together, gathering
in time: ice on the floor in the bathroom, plastic balls in the snow on the ground, networks of
bile over the lettuce, snow fields melting over the tiles. And even as he spoke my nephew
kept rubbing his head, adjusting his shirt, covering both slowly with a thin layer of oil, which
was still on his hands, but even as he spoke he didn’t notice, kept speaking, saying how dark
it was getting in the carpark, how dark it was getting as he held the bird, the carpark seeming
to go on forever, he said, to go on and on, the trash gathering in heaps in an edge beside the
streetlamps, a heavy layer, grey, and in the end, he said, in the end he put it down, the bird,
because he couldn’t help it.
Will Salmon is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He has an MA from the IIML where he received the 2025 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry.