After the death or loss of someone we love, grief suspends us in the non-real, the in-between. The poet Emily Dickinson describes a “formal feeling” in the aftermath of great pain; a numbed anguish where “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” and “The Feet, mechanical, go round”. We become “Freezing persons”.
In Soft Serve, playwright George Kemp’s coming-of-age debut novel, people in a small regional Australian town are trying to thaw. It’s been two years since the accidental death of Taz, an ambitious teen who’d just begun to seek a life beyond the town’s “gravitational force”. His mourning mother, Pat, has left her job as a school career counsellor to flip burgers at the local McDonald’s, finding an anchor in the repetition. It’s here that Taz’s friends, Ethan, Fern and her brother Jacob, have gathered for their annual tradition: toasting three soft serves to his memory.
