SCRAPS #1
She seemed to have become rather conservative in later life,
narrow-minded, intolerant, just to protect herself. But, maybe she always was.
Julia Creek was seven years old before she realised she'd been named
after a piece of geography.
Mike likes summer. He likes it because he can wear his shirt out over
his belt. He believes this softens his lateral profile, and godknows his
lateral profile needs it.
There are twenty-six ways of stuffing up your life. Molly Dean has tried
all of them, and many of them she actually enjoyed, some were even her own
invention, but...
He would always form his reply to himself in his mind, to weigh up what
reaction it might bring from her, before saying it, or not saying it.
It was inevitable that Pete would win the KUTA that year - the Kick Up
The Arse award, presented annually at the staff breakup do - because it's not
every year that someone writes off the boss's brand new Alfa Romeo.
When he blew his nose, his left nostril thweeked, like a badly played
clarinet.
“I’ve only been drunk four times in my life...”, she said, “...and each
time I got pregnant. So it was a matter of giving up drinking or giving up sex.
But I like sex too much.”
Big Jim had his own lean on how a guy should express himself. “When I
was in the USA...”, dropping it into the give-and take on meat. “...I made
the mistake of ordering a large rare steak. Geez she was rare. It looked like they’d just
wiped its arse, ripped off the horns, and whacked it on my plate.”
It was his first short story. Once it had been born, he never went back
and had another look at it, fixed it up, even when he knew it wasn’t very good.
He’d say, it’d be like wanting your kid’s eyes to be a different colour.
Some days it feels like there’s just me and the screen and the keyboard,
and that enigmatic hum of the Intel Quad Core, or is that the sound of my brain
searching for the words?
“Geez, I hate gettin’ old!” she mumbled, looking for sympathy.
Her friend was already old.
“Yeah? – then you’ll fucken LOVE the
next stage!”
One day Bazzer found himself pining for the taste of “real” nectarines,
from his own nectarine tree, the one that was on the block when he was young,
the one that had simply got old, and died by degrees.
A blister of sun in a relentless sky. North wind from the desert. There
was no trace of pleasant-ness in the day.
Just before she lost the plot, Vera won a fridge in a competition. It
was so big it tended to carry an echo. In it they found only a butter pat from
a café, half a carton of milk, and something wrapped in alfoil.
She said she always wanted something flash. Like a cubby house. When she
was a kid. Even though she never had shoes that fitted, or at times shoes at
all. But she still dreamed of a cubby house. Because it would’ve been one-up on
the kid over the road. She had a small sofa on wheels, and she would
wheel her sofa over to Joan’s place to play, but any time they had a tiff she
would wheel her sofa home back across the road. The neighbours could always
tell when they’d had a falling out.
It was when she found out that he loved to photograph tombstones, out at
the cemetery, but not the old ones, the new ones. Then there were those other
photographs...
An old shearer’s cook once told my dad that there were two pairs of big
ells in life. (At first Dad thought she meant Hells, and maybe she did.) She
said the first two were Love and Lust, but they usually got mixed up with each
other. People say they love you when what they mean is that they want to jump
on your bones. Then there’s Loyalty and Liability. . .
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