The Don “Cheese” Baxter Memorial park consumes a neat square metre of land in front of the Teewonga community center. Nearby, a placard fused to a rock declares Fukushima to be the town’s sister city.
Twenty-one Teewongans, the mayor, a reptile wrangler, and a mariachi band, have gathered beside the park. The Mayor thanks them for coming to what is officially considered to be a local tortoise’s birthday. He reminds them he is committed to funding community events. They clap blandly. They do not vote on the basis of community events.
A tortoise is present.
The mariachis strum their guitars and blow their trumpets. One of them sings a song titled La Mentirosa. No one watching speaks Spanish. They record the event on their phones. When they run out of storage space they will delete the footage.
The tortoise does nothing.
It does not remember hatching over one hundred years ago on the Galapagos islands. It inhabits a zoo enclosure and eats mounds of bok choy and kale every day. It does not remember what other tortoises look like.
A young female reporter rallies her cameraman in preparation for the end of the song. Their feelgood bit will provide a cheery capstone to an city news channel’s programme of weather disasters, economic downturn and political incompetence. She does not know the taxonomic difference between tortoises and turtles. She does not know where the Galapagos or Fukushima are. She does not know who Don “Cheese” Baxter was, and like everybody else present she does not know the point of this occasion.
As the band winds down she squats beside the ancient two-hundred-kilogram reptile. The tortoise’s obsidian eye is devoid of anything a human could relate to, but that’s not what jumps out at her. All she sees is her own reflection.
