Coober
We know the list, but we still write it down:
Milk opal, resin opal, wood opal, menilite, Muller’s glass, siliceous sinter, fire opal, Peruvian opal, black opal.
The overhead projector makes a noise like a click beetle flexing its abdomen, until it stops at the Coober Pedy Opal.
It’s ours.
It’s ours more than anyone in the class.
Our grandfather helped to claw that opal out of the earth at Eight Mile.
In a couple of years, we learn how opals come out of Coober Pedy. But I can see how it happened already – sheaths of phosphorescence skating off the rock, falling like water into the blushed, hot soil. A couple of neon drops kissing my fingertips.
Sometimes we visit our granddad in Coober.
His dugout cave has a carpet-panelled basement where he keeps his collection of small opals and home brew kits. They are married together in an old apple crate, overrun by silverfish. He takes us on his knees and tells us about the first tree they made in Coober. ‘Metal, it is’, he slurs, ‘Where else can you find that?’
Elizabeth Welsh is an academic editor & writer, originally from New Zealand, currently living in London. She is rather consumed with short story writer, Katherine Mansfield and misses beach-living. She blogs here.