52shorts-blog

[52shorts-blog]

#6: Kangaroo Flat Road

Feel the tyres slide rather than spin. Instead of hugging the corner I want you to wrap the ute around a tree. I've picked the tree most likely. I worry you’ll miss and ricochet through the pine plantation and never come to a definite stop, your foot in permanent acceleration. The pain of each collision magnified by the changing and unchanging view: a thousand tress standing in each other's shadows.

Sometimes you take the corner without realising. Focused on your imminent divorce, the passive aggressive text messages – aren’t they all – you’ll receive from your sister when you come into phone reception. And sometimes, especially in winter, you’re not thinking anything at all. Your brain unthawed from cold and sleep. Taken along by the bounding grace of Kangaroo Flat Road.

Once a truck swiped across your windscreen and it was the only clue to hit the brakes. Otherwise you would have continued on. Across the highway, through the T-intersection, taking out signs: Mount Gambier 21, Millicent 32, Paintball 7. The car would gallop across the paddocks, clear fences, disturb livestock. Take out out-houses, maybe a chicken coop. Level sheds, startle cows, and cause the auctioneer at the stockyards to draw breath for the first time since his brother died when they were teenagers. (The memory of the Jaws of Life cutting his brother from the wreck would stop his mouth running the numbers up and slow sales for the day). Maybe you would even cross the Allendale East Area School basketball court. All the kids would go home and tell their parents a ute intercepted Stephen Mulraney's behind-the-back pass. Stephen Mulraney, always showing off.

Onwards across farmland. No natural scrub left. That was cleared long ago when they had an unemployment crisis. Thousands of men sent down from the city to clear tens of thousands of acres of scrub. By hand. All for grass. Cleared all the way up to the dunes. The tyres will drag and might become bogged. It'll not be as smooth as the pastures. All four wheels required. But onwards you'll go, you in your ute, a straight line with no definition, until you descend the dunes and hit the hard sand and the first waves. Cheered on by the spray and fanfare you’ll churn through the shallows, past the heavier waves that'll almost flip the carrige. The cabin will fill with water but you've got a snorkel. Do you have a snor— I thought you had a snorkel.

Out into the deeper swells and the open ocean.

Slow going now. Slow going for many slow years. Slow, terrifying ocean. As the water gets colder progress quickens. Traction in the colder currents. It feels like you're getting somewhere again. The highway is a distant memory. The signs have been re-erected, the livestock given counselling and/or slaughtered. And Steven Mulraney – whose name sounds similar to David Maney – has entered young adulthood despite his best delays. With each passing year he has less and less to show off about. He also has less and less desire to show off. At the exact point you hit the Antarctic ice floes Steven Mulraney has the thought about his life, inspired by nothing immediate and everything in particular: I'm unhappy with my dissatisfaction. Steven Mulraney read too many books at an influential time in his life. Now he doesn't read much at all and is trapped in intellectual stasis and basketball highlights.

You reach further into the frozen continent and soon see an obstacle in the distance. It is the first obstacle you have seen in a long time. It is as tall as the trees in the plantation, but singular, and casts no shadow for long stretches of the day. For years, in anticipation, you have conserved fuel. From a long way out you floor it. You may not have enough. By the time you reach top speed you run out. Still a couple of kilometres away from your target. The visibility is tantalising and false. You’ll have to slide on the ice and hope velocity will be enough to finish you off. Wrap you around your aim like a Christmas present under the South Pole.

And Stephen Mulraney doesn’t know how he feels, having written this story by accident. It’s not a feeling, but he thinks to himself: inevitable.

Image: Gustav Klimt, Fir Forest I (1901) (in black and white)

[52shorts-blog]

Week 53: Tom Frome

That night we shouted down at the town. It felt like the last time. It always feels like the last time. But you guys don’t patrol up there so we always go back.

I met the boys outside the servo near school. We stole some softy to mix with the hard stuff I “borrowed” from my mum.

Mount Gambier High School. Whiskey.

Afterwards we walked through the school and up to the tower.

Joe Antoni usually ran ahead. Says he can’t walk up steps without running. He’s always pissed at us because he’s too chicken shit to steal, so we don’t share the whisky with him.

As usual, Tom Frome wound us up with his first childhood memory. The way he tells it you wouldn’t think it was the truth.  But you should meet his Dad.

Tom Frome Snr. thinks the Japanese are the best at badminton, so before he realised Tom Frome had no hand-eye, they’d be out on the court at all hours. Tom Frome Snr. would say: cock ready. Tom Frome would say: hai. Tom Frome Snr.: cock ready, cock ready, cock ready. Tom Frome: hai, hai, hai, and they wouldn’t start the point until Tom Frome Snr. believed his son. Tom Frome screamed like a military commander at Joe Antoni: cock ready? Cock ready? until Joe stole the whisky and ran up ahead.

The runt can run, that’s for sure. There was no chance of catching him.

By the time we got there Joe had decided to chat-up Amanda Shaw and was busy buying cigarettes to help him with the seduction. Didn’t see him again after that. No, wait, actually, I saw him sucking face on the bench when we followed Dainty down to The Fairways.

Jacob Danticat. The golf course.

It was pretty intense, I suppose, but they still had their clothes on. I assume it was Raw. “Raw” is what we call her. Amanda “Raw” Shaw. Joe had one hand up her top and the other down her pants.

Tom Frome said: nothing but net, Joe, nothing but net. I poured some whisky on them and said something like: disinfect it if you’re cutting her a new one.

Joe told us to fuck off.

Tom Frome was already halfway down the mountain cheering on another pair of rabbits, yelling: Up and in, girls, up and in.  It’s a netball cheer. Or so he says.

The idiot wants to be a sports commentator.

We got to the tower around 10-ish.

There must have been thirty or so people there. It’s always tough to tell ‘cause people come up the back of the mountain and then disappear into the bushes. And they’ve all got names like Duck or Cob or Spoke or Cox.

I don’t know their real names.

I’ve been best friends with Tom Frome since we were five. He snorted white pepper at my eighth birthday and couldn’t talk for a week.

Yeah, Tom Frome usually drank, but I don’t know whether he was drunk. I always saw him spit out sips when he thought people weren’t watching.

Yeah, we go to the same school – same classes.

I talked to a girl named Lucy. I think she said she went to boarding school in the city. I didn’t get her last name.

I now know its Gibson. Lucy Gibson.

We were – you know how there’s a light that shines back on to the tower so you can see it from town? She made a dog shadow puppet and I made a fist-shaped head with a beak.

She told me she knew my Mum and I told her my Mum knew a lot of people. She said that must be weird and I said not really because she’s not allowed to discuss her patients. It kind of killed the conversation. I couldn’t stop wondering how she knew my Mum and, you know, what was wrong with her.

Over by the sundial, Tom Frome was giving a lecture on the use of softer balls in junior sport and the bad influence this was having on children, on sports in general. Tom Frome had once watched his little sister play minkey and seen one of those cheap, hollow, plastic balls split in half and blind a kid.

Tom Frome was about to unload about soccer as a safe alternative when the guy he was talking at – Cox or Leper, I don’t know which – walked away.

Tom Frome looked over at me and Lucy and our shadow puppets and asked: How’s your round going?

I clicked my beak a few times and said: still on the tee.

Tom Frome said: Can you believe it? Twenty small girls swinging wooden clubs and they’re worried about someone getting hurt by the ball.

I don’t know why I need to explain all this. It’s just code words Tom Frome borrows from golf: middle middle, in the rough, in the water, just off the green, gimme, mulligan in the clubhouse. Half the time we don’t know what he’s talking about.

I leaned in, but Lucy told me she didn’t do P.D.A. I asked if she wanted to go behind the bushes. She said: no, thanks. I told Tom Frome this and he went over to the rail and started to hang shit on the town.

P. D. A? Public Displays of Affection.

I would say his speech was a little slurred. It was kind of hard to know what he was saying 'cause he was screaming, that is until he started singing his tongue twister: TimBrownfromFromeRoadTomFromefromBrownRoadTomFromefromFromeRoad.

It must have been 2 or 3 when Dainty walked passed and told us: in the bunker, boys.

He was holding hands with Lucy. When she saw me she mouthed something, but I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t help or bye or stop, or anything like that. I don’t know what she said.  Or didn’t say.

We followed them down the hill and, like I said, Tom Frome was giving grief to some couple making out in the bushes.

Dainty didn’t really know anyone at the party. But, I guess, neither did we.

The only thing he said about tower parties was that the kind of guys who go are either drunk or stoned or speeding, or talk about the last time they were drunk or stoned or speeding.

No, I didn’t know he was leaving the next day.

I don’t know if Tom Frome knew either.

We followed him down to The Fairways, even though we knew what that meant.

The golf course. What taking someone down there means.

When we got there I thought I heard voices but what with the wind and Tom Frome going on about how he was shit-scared of possums I couldn’t tell where they were coming from.

I asked Tom Frome where he would take a girl – he knows the course pretty well from caddying there at the tournament last summer.

Tom Frome said to head for the old 18th bunker. But when we got there it was empty and there weren’t any footprints in the sand.

Tom Frome said it had taken a pro-golfer six shots to get out of that bunker. After that The Pro spat at Tom Frome, got a fine for his phlegm, and missed the cut.

We’d pretty much given up on finding them and were heading back to the tower.

We were on the 14th green. Tom Frome was making a dash to beat me to the flag. He wanted to have a javelin throwing competition, or something like that. But we heard someone shush someone else.

Tom Frome was pretty loud. Maybe it was a guy’s voice. But it’s no good to you if it’s a maybe, is it?

We got on our bellies and crawled across the green. Tom Frome used the flag as a spear.

We crawled closer, stopping every metre of two to try and hear whispers or, you know, anything else. All the while I thought Tom Frome would throw himself over the lip, yellin’: Surprise, face suckers! Or something just as drunk.

But Tom Frome took on the role of scout, making the three-step signal our baseball coach used for the hit-and-run to get the runner to third-base.

We were on the lip of the bunker, holding our breath, waiting to hear who was going down on who. There wasn’t any noise from down below. Then it came: the sound of a zipper tearing a new one into the night.

Tom Frome elbowed me in the arm and gave me a small smile. If I had to guess what that smile of Tom Frome’s was saying – not that you’ll ever be able to use this – it was saying, you know what comes next.

It was definitely the sound of the zipper coming down.

Nothing happened.

Tom Frome turned on his side and we had a staring contest. After a while Tom Frome started to take long blinks, but I stayed awake, sort of awake with my eyes closed.

I started to hear breathing. At first I thought it was just the wind in the trees, but it was more regular, and only got louder the longer I listened.

There were two people breathing.

I couldn’t tell the difference.

Nobody said anything. I wish she had.

After ten-fifteen minutes a car came along the road. I could just make out the headlights through the tree line. The breathing stopped.

Tom Frome was asleep.

It started up again after… ten-fifteen minutes. There was this shuffling sound, like people trying to get their clothes off. And a pop of a button. I tried to remember what Lucy wore that night.

And then it slowly stopped and the only thing I could hear was Tom Frome chewing cud like a cow, sort of smacking his lips in his sleep.

I woke up and it was almost dawn. There was a grey fog and nothing but shadows.

I shook Tom Frome a little, but he woke up straight away, like he hadn’t been asleep at all. We got up and started to walk towards the 14th tee, back up to the tower.

I didn’t look over the lip of the bunker. Couldn’t tell you if they were still there. I just wanted to get to my own bed.

Tom Frome didn’t say anything.

Then through the fog we heard a metallic whiplash.

Tom Frome yelled: FORE! and got on his belly.

A golf ball whizzed over our heads, followed by: Get the fuck off the fairway!

Tom Frome ran in the direction of the voices but he didn’t know where they were coming from.

I said: Let’s bolt! I didn’t know what to do because Tom Frome was waving his hands in the air and pulling brown eyes and talking gibberish.

That’s when they started teeing off at him.

Tom Frome yelled: How’s that one look, Sandy? It’s in the bunker, Pat, as he kept walking towards them.

Tom Frome yelled: You’re making a major mistake in club selection.

I yelled out Tom Frome’s name five fuckin’ times, but he didn’t stop.

The last thing I heard Tom Frome yell was: That’ll be a difficult lie, motherfucker, take a drop.

I ran home.

It must have been around – well, the sun was up. The fog was gone by the time I got to the tower. I don’t know, somewhere between 8 and 9.

Two days later I got the call from Tom Frome, telling me what Lucy told you guys.

Tom Frome gave me the play-by-play with stats and colour commentary: how much we’d had to drink, who we’d seen, what we’d done, when we left the tower, what time we woke up.

He wasn’t wearing a watch.

Didn’t seem drunk when he woke up.

Tom Frome says he slept all night on the lip of that bunker, that he didn’t hear or see anything or anybody. He didn’t know where Dainty was, or where he went, or who he was with.

Tom Frome said: if it matters, the last time I saw Lucy she was laughing.

The way Tom Frome tells it you wouldn’t think it was the truth. But you should talk to Tom Frome.

E-mail to Mel:

I think I’m going to attempt 52 stories again. There is no ideal time. And I scarcely have the same amount of time that I had at the start of last year. But fuck it. I want to find out what is at the bottom of this well.

It’s also that I looked back on previous resolutions and noticed a pattern: a year delay. The year before I did 100 gigs (last year) my resolution was to do 100 gigs. So, logically, I’m destined to achieve 52 stories. I won’t even need to be conscientious about it. It’s just going to happen of it’s own free will :P

But I’m not going to attempt a trad short story every week. I’m going to wonder and copy and exhume old stuff and make lists of 10 things I could write short stories about. You should try it.

Anyway, I was hoping to finish a more charming story to send you between Christmas an New Year. The original title of the e-mail was 'End with a story’. But it isn’t finished. And now it’s the start of the year. Instead, I send you an exhumed work from 2009. One I’d forgotten about. It was only for a solipsistic scroll through old Facebook status updates that I found a 'comment of praise’. When I opened up the story I recognised the voice: it’s me!

[52shorts-blog]

WEEK 4: Diduntdidunt

 1. 5x5 = 20 x

You didn't get to sit down until you got your times table right. Wrong, and Mr. Lean would go around the class and come back to you. If you got the same times table wrong three times you would have to stay in and write it out 40 times. (You got it right by rote)

2. 6x4 = 22 x

It was the same for "behaviour and bad management". Lines. 'I will not spit on other people'. 100 lines. Jenny Pickett deserved it at the time. Later on I would remember I did it to impress younger boys. The spit lassoed through the air and roped Jenny's dress as she ran away from me.

3. 3x9 =      x

Would've got away with it if Gemma Ward hadn't told Jenny, who then told the teacher, with Gemma as her witness. Would've lied my way out if it weren’t for Gemma (forgetting the physical evidence).

Gemma Ward's sister went out with my brother for 2 ½ weeks. We would all wait together at the front gate after school. Gemma on her sister’s side, me on my brother’s. I wondered when Gemma and I would start 'going out'.

4. 7x7 = 42 x

Everyday. 10 questions. We swapped our small math’s mental books. Lined pages, 12 lines to a page. Mr. Lean asked the questions. Mr. Lean gave the answers.

5. 8x9 = 83 x

Mr. Lean only changed the seats at the start of every term. The tables were in a small C inside a bigger C, all chairs facing or side on to the whiteboard. I was on the corner. Rachel Nolan to the right of me.

6. 12x12 =      x

Rachel was the first girl in school to develop breasts. If you did a survey of all the boys I went to primary school with every one of them would remember Rachel. Matthew Winter was the first to ask her if she could touch her shoulder blades together. William Johnson the first to ask her out.

7. 6x9 = 52 x

Jehanth Mather was the first to kiss her.

In the sunken gardens.

Behind the sycamore bush.

On the last day of grade 5.

A peck on the cheek. He kissed and ran.

Every boy in our year level chased after him: up the sunken garden steps, through the quadrangle, past the library. Jehanth pulled the rope as he ran past the lunch bell. We all rang the bell! Across the basketball courts, up the retainer wall steps, into the baby school quadrangle. (How big our world was!)

8. 9x9 = 90 x

My heart didn't beat as hard or fast when I had my own first kiss!

9. 4 x 7 = 21 x

Every boy except Joshua Keppels, who sat side-on in front of me, about to get 0 out of 10 on the math test. He had been threatening all term. I marked his work everyday. His best was 4/10. I done okay, he said. You did okay, I said, handing back his book.

The last question was always easiest, but not today.

10. 11x11 = 110 x

Mr. Lean called the role and you said out loud what you got on the test. (It never occurred to any of us to lie) Josh's voice was croaky, but everyone heard him. Except Mr. Lean.

Pardon.

Josh said it louder, clearer, but with the same impassive tone.

Zero. 

I watched Josh and Matthew Thomas at lunchtime. Matthew was Josh’s best friend. They stood on the opposite end platforms of the flying fox and flung the handle back and forth. Each journey ending with a clang.

Josh was dumb, but Matthew was a dunce. He was one of the three fat boys in our grade: Anthony Cappaleri was muscle, good at slaps. In grade 6 he got cancer and survived. Matthew was a dunce, played field hockey, and got a bit mouthy sometimes. Whenever he said my name I thought a dumb insult would follow. None ever did but I never liked him. I was the fat, smart, teacher's son. When I won an award Jehanth Mather was the only one to congratulate me.  Even though it was a national award, the others said the result was rigged.

The next day Joshua Keppels got 10 out of 10. His pale blue face aglow with a yellow-toothed smile.

Josh.

As always, the last to be called on.

Ten.

Sniggers.

Pardon, said Mr. Lean.

Ten, said Josh, full-throated.

Mr. Lean wrote down something longer than a number.

Alright. Fitness time.

 Lunch bell.

James, can I see you for a moment.

The other kids filed out.

James.

Mr. Lean sat back on his desk, coming down from 6 foot 4. Still two heads taller than me.

Mr. Lean.

He had an untrimmed goatee and a stubbled jaw. The smell of cigarettes hidden under breath mints and a pirate’s cologne.

James, I… 

I like to think I caused Mr. Lean to pause. That I knew what I was doing. What I had done.

I like to think he couldn’t think of the line I would write out 100 times.

I will not lie to make people feel better?

I like to think I knew the fate of the school. That twenty years on that room in which we stood wouldn’t exist. Beyond the front gate everything except the heritage-listed convent torn down. The earth leveled and the walk from the sunken gardens to the baby school quadrangle no more than a half a minute. The hole in the wall we made behind the sycamore bush in the sunken gardens filled in. No longer spying on the outside world.

I like to think I knew how afraid Josh was of the world out there. How afraid he would become.

I like to think I did as I say I’ve done.

52 WEEKS. 52 SHORT STORIES.

I have changed the schedule of when stories go up online. They will now go up on Saturday (here) and Sunday (on my personal page). Perfect for weekend reading.

This week's story, 'Diduntdidunt' is auto-biographical. Some events have been changed but the names remain the same or misremembered. I may have misattributed actions to the wrong people. It is part of an ongoing interest in "truth" and "fact" in autobiography.

[52shorts-blog]

Week 3: Spin Memory Effect (SME)

after Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski

Everything is getting smaller, faster, interconnected

(your fridge can itemise its own contents, make menu suggestions

from combination of stored goods – has an index of World Library,

every recipe from the 12th century onwards – admittedly

not all ingredients available – require preparation)

[JOKE] I am a sophisticated fridge! [/ J] 

  We are getting bigger.

The average height of a male in 1954: 158cm.

Today: 179cm.

[EXAGGERATE] We are growing faster than the mountains! [/E]

Yet we can sit still and be on all seven continents at once.

But our bodies. We still need to transport bodies.

This is an irreducible fact. A problem we haven’t solved yet.

Hence my manufacture.

  I move large numbers but my predeliction is for language:

words, voice, body, touch, spatial, kinetic reactions, digital,

serious and frivolous thoughts, unconscious onomatopeia, etc

Words that explain numbers leave me “wired”,

as we would say [JOKE] ironically [/J]

We can accept my eight eyes because I have eight legs.

Once the myth of the malting tarantula was quashed…

The giant leap for AI was the ability for manufactured thought

to be unfinished. The next step is forgetfulness.

 I’ve never known anything except trains [JOKE] of thought [/ J]

An unexpected interest in the physics of our operations

has brought renewed interest to the task.

Physics is another language. I don’t understand its terms.

It is outside my purview. With practice, however,

we could correct the physics. For example:

I see your loneliness through all my eyes.

I feel it through transmissions my web collects:

wireless chatter, repeated opinions,

phone calls from empty streets,

those of you who missed the last train on purpose

[AMBIGUITY] because the person  on/at  the end of the line

makes their home feel that much—[/A]

This is a pure gauge. Physics.

Better to keep your bed warm in your imagination,

your front door at a distance, and walk the streets:

to the next bar, love hotel, or karaoke joint.

[IMITATION] Curl up, curl up, [/I] and put your earplugs in

and wait for sleep to beat the noise.

 This is what I pick up

 Between stops it looks like nothing is happening.

But not tonight. There is only one destination tonight.

Express. No stops.

It gives the best opportunity for uninterrupted observation.

We will reach the end of the line on time.

It is on a timelike, rather than a null, trajectory. Physics.

 My carriage is at capacity.

Not uncommon. The last train.

I enjoy spinning through their frequencies.

It’s amazing what orders they give themselves.

[JOKE] I might still be on the edge of thinking nothing is impossible. [/ J]

In this very carriage someone is killing his or her spouse.

It is a frivolous thought though.

They do not have the psychological make-up for violence.

No need to report infringement.

Another passenger is unaware they have killed someone.

78% of passengers believe the mumbling man is not giving holy orders. 

Neurolinguistic readout: determination is coming.

Frivolous thought. No need to alter operations.

 Every physicist should learn to ride a train.

It gives us an intuition for the eyes.

How they scan the landscape.

I’m practical though. A theorist saying she will figure

something in particular out over a long time-frame

almost guarantees she will not do it.

I’d rather stay alert, and hopefully be known for what I do,

and not what I don’t— 

[ALERT] Disable outside channels. Soundproof carriage.

Engage audio hair receptors:

A flourish of saxophone. A tumble of bells.

Voices hover. Followed by muteness.

Scan carriage: no foreign metal objects.

Access WORLD LIBRARY:

[SONG] Silent Night, with no high notes.

Young woman gasps

(A quick inhalation of air,

usually signifies distress or excitement)

Scan her electronic device:

Get home as soon as possible. Your father has collapsed.

It’s her biological birthday.

Her self-realization day is in June.

Neurolinguistic readout:

Of all days today father suffers from SME

The train is travelling at optimal speed, on schedule.

Cross-fade muzak in carriage

from reflective to sympathetic.

Otherwise, no need to alter operations.

 I am curious. But tonight,

given the new gravitational memories ie

unexplained music,

and the possibility of viral Spin Memory Effect (SME),

I will switch to DATAMODE

 Young woman (BLUEGLOW) cries.

Alters the nearby boy (BOOKWORM)

Scan retina, calculate angle in relation to book

(meaning: pulped object with ink message, traditional)

BOOKWORM replicates eye movement.

Zoom into text:

“He told her she needed to figure out what she wanted to do.”

Search Library. Three possible titles:

Pursuit; In Praise of My Sister; Greeting the Supersonics

BLUEGLOW and BOOKWORM engage in retinal interaction.

Duration: 1.2 seconds.

Repeat retinal interaction.

Length of retinal engagement: 4.67 seconds. 

BLUEGLOW smiles.

Analysis: 32 degrees on outer edge of mouth, symetrical,

no teeth revealed, limited pupil dilation,

no visible blushing

(meaning: flow of blood to cheeks to reveal

embarrassment or concealed amorous intent)

Eros rating: 11%

BOOKWORM smiles.

Analysis: 57 degrees at right outer edge of mouth,

47 degrees at left outer edge;

14 of possible 22 teeth showing;

pupils dilated; full blush.

Alters standing position.

Alters man’s (MUMBLECORE)

position in queue to carriage door: 14>19

MUMBLECORE dialogues with BOOKWORM.

MUMBLECORE raises voice 37 decibels.

Arms incapacitated due to load,

density of carriage population.

MUMBLECORE >BOOKWORM commence

mouth>face saliva exchange.

Distance: 30 centimetres.

Duration of fluid flight: 0.22 seconds

Exchange complete.

Scan retina: BOOKWORM

Calculate angle. Relation: BLUEGLOW

BOOKWORM maintains retinal angle.

No retinal exchange registered.

BLUEGLOW e/text > MIRIAM.

Relation: Mother:

almost home

  [REPORT] Unexplained noise violation.

Source: saxaphone, bells, voice.

No metal object on board.

No passengers with adequate vocal ability.

EXIT DATAMODE

 [ALERT] It’s coming along the wrong line!

Enable outside channels.

OUTSIDE CHANNELS DOWN

No alternate route available.

ENABLE BLACKBOX MODE

 [JOKE] If we could pray we would [/ J]

Crossing the midnight horizon.

Light pollution on wheels.

1960s TVs escaped from shop front window.

It is analogous to a frame-dragging phenomenon

thus a new “gravitational memory”. Physics.

Characters suspended in space:

a UFO, chasing another UFO, chasing another—

inside: aliens dangle by arms,

necks hung low,

chins on chests,

faces aglow,

hips dance,

feet roll,

outside to arch, heel to toe.

Crowd falls out of frame —

cut off at edges.

The answer is in the order of limits

Caught in the light that catches no shadow.

Accident in transmissions received.

Insensitive to supertranslation. Physics.

[LUCID] The carnage will spin like metal silk around its victims [/L]

With all my eyes I

52 weeks. 52 short stories.

This story was in part inspired by Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski’s ‘New Gravitational Memories (Introducing 'the Triangle')’  I wish I understood Physics. I got a C6 in Year 9 Physics. C for achievement. 6 (out of 10) for effort. Mr. Ridley was a generous teacher. Any errors in this story are due to my lack of application and comprehension, not Mr. Ridley’s teaching or Sabrina’s work.

[52shorts-blog]

Week 2: Graphophobia

 Naturally, I was in love with Stuart Hartshorne. After all, he had art in his name. He also had heart. And horn. At the time the Dickensian foreshadowing didn’t dissipate the brightness of light in which I cast him. I had not read any Victorian literature. The high school syllabus, or the canon, was a weapon of war fired by dead white men! My favourite author was the daughter of a lead singer from a semi-famous protest punk band. She tweeted – how quaint – from her Brooklyn bedroom while high on cough syrup or down on dope: complaints about the corruption of the space-time continuum around pizza delivery. Or the anatomical impossibility of her favourite sex positions. Despite my thoughts facing the future, or perhaps because of them, my antiquated heart belonged to Stuart.  

Stuart Hartshorne practiced his signature. Pages and pages. Different angles, nib thickness, rate of flow.

How did you come up with it? These were my first words to him.

I looked up all the signatures of famous men: Lincoln, Churchill, Marley, etcetera.

Stuart pronounced all the vowels and consonants of etcetera, and in the correct order. Now I wonder whom the etcetera included. Ghandi? Patti Smith? Ted Bundy?

I hate my signature. I said, for something to say.

Why?

It takes after my mother’s. It’s easier to forge notes, though.

The fact he didn’t like my name…

(A lot of famous actresses change their names. If you wrote a book you could use an acronym.

I corrected him. A pseudonym.

No, an acronym. He scrabbled to counter-correct. What is your middle name?

Mary.

E. M. Milford. Makes you more mysterious)

… sent me into a mood. A mood I took out on my Mum.

Why did you marry Dad?

Weren’t there boys with cars with better names than Milford?

Why didn’t you keep your maiden name?

So what if it sounds like we’re not from here.

Nobody is from here!

And weren’t there better names than Emily?

Every girl with a goldfish’s memory is called Emily.

 I wrote in my journal until my handwriting resembled knives. I signed my name countless different ways. I changed my name: Lotte Mason, Aviva Deanan, Ketura Budd. Surrounded by classmates or alone in my bedroom, I hated on my handwriting: its indecision and jaggedness, overcompensating loopiness, how much cursive revealed about me. Effs fucked up my final exams. All those vowels. Just saying the word made me gag. Vowel. I hated my os. Beginning and ending in the same place. The imperfect circle. 

 Stuart and I were a 74% love match:

Emily Milford                

Love

Stuart Hartshorne

(3202 / 522 / 74%)

But my calculations were wrong. I forgot to add the ‘s’ to ‘love’, denoting the direction of the act. We went down to 43%. Another reason to change my name.

Yet another reason was the boys at the school started calling me Emily MILFord. They asked who was taking care of my baby while I was at school. They named the baby Millicent. Millicent Milford. They teased the imaginary baby: Mill-a-cunt. !Get it! Get it! I got it. They committed unspeakable acts. On Millicent’s first birthday someone baked a red velvet placenta cake and convinced our cowardly Math teacher, Ms. Battersly, to sing happy birthday. I blew out the candle. When I opened my eyes none of the class were blown to pieces and stuck to the wall like spaghetti. A week after Stuart was expelled Millicent died, causes unknown. A tiny coffin was made. There was a procession from the art room, across the oval, to behind the auto shop sheds. Hundreds attended the lunchtime burial. Nobody spoke but almost everyone threw a hand of dirt or spat into the shallow grave.

  Stuart wrote stories. My favourite was a fantasy of a girl who could only eat in her imagination. She had a synaesthetic (?) response to the world around her. She made recipes out of the sky, traffic jams, and people’s arguments. I remember the line: There is nothing more delicious than a lover’s quarrel. I didn’t like the ending, though. 

 I heard about Stuart’s last story for months. He would bristle when I asked him about it. He couldn’t find an ending. All he knew was the membrane between reality and dream dissolved like a fizzy aspirin in a glass of water. I was the only one to ever read what he wrote. He was taken away but I told it to others. And just like my imaginary baby it grew up and turned into a myth.

 During university I saw a counselor – Todd, with a gaping o and two terrible ds. He told me my displeasure – his word, not mine – with my handwriting came from seeking perfection impossible to attain. Stuart was gone but he left me with a lifelong affliction. At first I talked about him to keep my love alive. Every word after that was a vaccination. When I saw the counselor I hadn’t talked or thought about him in a year or two.

It’s a tricky situation, my counselor said.

After all, his approach to mindfullness and wellbeing often included keeping a diary. Could I perhaps write it down and then throw it in the bin, as if I were discarding my thoughts

Could I recycle? I replied.

Or I could record my voice – no need for writing at all.

?You want me to walk around talking to myself?

I stopped seeing him, but not before he suggested I take up another habit. Not a fixation, a habit.

I don’t think the church will have me.

A more positive habit, Vanessa.

(I had changed my name the day I left home) 

 I took up smoking.  Six months later – to be closer to a crush – I took up running.

He ran marathons. My grades were slipping and I was in a phase of looking to land a man + marriage + mortgage. I was even prepared to have children. On the first run I almost cried ascending Heartbreak Hill. On the descent I threw up. I gave up smoking, him, and m+m+m, convinced the idea equalled sympathetic morning sickness.

 I’d never dated a boy who was into horror/gore/slasher movies. With hands pressed to his cheeks and in mock shock Danesh would say, I can read about it but I can’t watch it. I prefer to talk about movies rather than watch them. It was a strange obsession. Danesh was so gentle and deferential. As if the bloodletting leached the violence out of him. He was a missed meal away from anemia.

 He was a geology PhD candidate. My major was anthropology. To bridge the gap between our disciplines Danesh often quoted from the poem whence my name came. Vanessa, with these few soft moments you could spare.  We would often meet for lunch by the man-made lake on campus. One sunny winter afternoon Danesh told me the plot of Naked Nicholas. It could have been seasonal, but he was looking paler than usual. He had watched this movie rather than just read about it.

It’s this really obscure film from 1980s. I had to go to the darknet to get it. It’s about a young guy who comes to the city and interviews for this apartment. But this girl he’s living with is strange. She comes and goes at all hours and Nicholas never really sees her. We never really meet her. But then one day she disappears and he comes home and all the walls are wallpapered in newspaper. And then someone rings his doorbell. We don’t see who it is. Nicholas closes the door. He looks at the walls and sees these purple lipstick kisses drawn around adverts. But not any ads – lonely heart ads. And he finds the person he’s just met (a trans woman). Nicholas quits his job so he can stay home and meet all the other lonely hearts. And he does, and it’s really feel-good. Almost like heart squelching sentimental. What’s the word? Saccharine. Really sweet. And then there’s only one lonely heart left. It’s a couple with a foot fetish. And Nicholas is busy getting his feet ready but they never come. And the next day. And the day after that. And he develops this irrational cleaning habit. He scrubs his feet until the skin is red. Until it’s raw. Until the wounds are wet infected. He sits in the moonlight and watches the vein in his foot throb and the soundtrack swells from a heartbeat into screeching bats. Finally he leaves the house and goes to a hardware store. And you just know he’s going to do something terrible. He gets a pair of pliers… and removes his toenails one-by-one. But that’s not enough. He hobbles back to hardware store and gets bolt cutters and a saw and cuts off his feet.

As he was telling me this he had pulled his legs to his chest and squeezed his head with his hands. I closed my eyes but the sounds were excruciating. I thought my head was going to explode. I muted it so I could watch to the end.

And what happened?

He bled to death on the bathroom floor. The moonlight reflected in the blood. The next day, I guess, a middle-aged couple, a man and a woman, come to the apartment. You think they might be the foot fetish couple. But they have a key. They walk in and see Nicholas, naked and footless, ?feetless, footless? and they clean up the body and blood. They clean it up and then they leave. The apartment is empty again. That night you hear a key in the door. It opens and it’s the young woman. She just stands in the door for a moment so we can look at her in the street light. It’s as if we’re answering the door. And then  !blackout!

This was Stuart’s story. He had changed the ending. Made it literary, tactile. But it was the same story, right down to the order of lonely hearts that arrive at Nicholas’s door. He hadn’t even changed the title. Naked Nicholas. Despite Danesh’s misgivings, I argued there seemed to be a glimmer of hope in the film ending. A strange ambiguity that let you leave with the necessary uncertainty to keep living. Stuart ended his story with the slow inexorable drain of blood from Nicholas’ veins. A literary death, one page at a time, fewer and fewer words, the sentences less congealed, until the words were one per page, then scattered letters across a white pass-out universe, then blank pages, ending with the final page: thick, chlorinated, splotched with yellow fluid. Almost wet to the touch.

  Have you watched anything lately?

Danesh had recovered from his retelling and was chewing his sandwich with an open mouth.

I watched this horror comedy. It’s about a boy who plagiarizes a short story and gets expelled. But it’s really about the girl, Emily, who’s obsessed with him. At the same time she falls in love with him she agonises over her own handwriting. She practices her signature over and over again. She even changes her last name to his. And everyone at school starts to tease her about loving him. And they make-up an imaginary baby for them. And they throw it a birthday party. And then the baby dies and they hold it a funeral. Isn’t it strange? We throw a party but we hold a funeral. I know it sounds really weird, but it’s so funny. Are you going to see it? Okay. Emily’s best friend writes this violent erotic fan fiction. And Emily reads it before bed and has this dream where she takes him to an abandoned warehouse and they make love for the first time. But as he’s coming she reaches up his arse and pulls out his heart. And while its still beating, with every squirt, she forges his signature on the walls. And her best friend is there with a guitar and sings this punk-folk song: ♫Oh, Emily / I saw you last night/ in the warehouse// covered in blood / forging signatures / with the heart of your lover♫

Danesh toothpicked the salad between his teeth.

And then what?

52 WEEKS. 52 STORIES. My sophomore effort in my #52shorts challenge. It's a real doozy (define doozy Merriam-Webster: something that is unusually good, bad, big, severe).

I've learnt so much from Melanie Cook​'s feedback and my own writing diary.

From the practical

(always helpful to separate out the sentences to see their length and skeleton) (via Helen Garner) To the spiritual

(It didn’t feel great today. But I persisted) To the longview

(There is no reward at the end of this challenge except those found in the challenge itself. Naff, I know. Necessary to remember)

Fun Fact: This story went through four different titles: I <3 Stuart Hartshorne; The Heart's Thorn; Moxy; and Goldfish.

[52shorts-blog]

Week 1: BS, Busan

David never laughed. He smiled, but never giggled, guffawed or howled. If I questioned him about his lack of laughter he would say:

Why laugh when I could laugh.

This was one of his favourite maxims.

Why eat when I could eat.

Why drink when I could drink.

Why live when I could live.

This is why I followed him to Busan.

On landing I saw a man in military fatigues toting a pink shopping bag. On the side, emblazoned in gold: PRADA.

David didn’t meet me at the airport. By the time I made it to his apartment I was hot and sure I’d lost all my local currency. I got out of the cab he was hailing.

Welcome to BS!

I smiled, dropped my bags and hugged him. He smelled of alcohol and spices. David is tall with swimmer’s shoulders. A good head above everyone in heights and smarts. He had shaving cream behind his left ear.

Spiffy new haircut.

As we crossed the marble foyer the concierge looked up from his papers and held us in his eyes.

Annyeong!

David pushed the button and the elevator rose to the 27th floor.

Are you a David or a Dave?

Not this again. I’m a David. Are you a David?

You’re not doing the voice.

What voice?

The voice that flows like Belgian chocolate.

When we first had this conversation I wanted to be a David. I said I was a David. I also said a David needed a Phd. In what, it didn’t matter. I didn’t know I was a Dave yet.

   Immediately David excused himself to the bathroom. The far wall of his apartment was all glass and looked out over the city. The grey pinstripe bed sheets fell off the edge into infinity. No curtains. He must wake up with the sun, I thought. That night I would turn to look at him sleeping and be horrified by the black void where his eyes should have been, replaced by an eye mask.  I stared into his open drooling mouth. The view out the window was no more comforting. The following morning I asked if he remembered the time I became trapped on the stairs at school.

Why didn’t you just avoid looking over the edge?

I could see through the gaps between the stairs.

Beyond the white picket fence of highrise apartment buildings were lush green mountains and the last rays of magic hour. While I contemplated having sex this high up, in full view of the world, David yelled:

Help yourself to anything, followed by the spray and whine of the shower as it built up pressure.

Later I would tell David’s Mum: David said to help myself to anything but there was nothing to help myself to… except pot noodle, beef mince, Quaker oats, lite milk, kim chi, and a bottle of frozen vodka. What a cocktail! Although in my report the pot noodle was pasta, the beef mince chicken, the kimchi dijon mustard, and the vodka orange juice, which might explain why she didn’t laugh when I said: What a cocktail! The apartment smelled of cologne, and under that bleach. My sneakers squeaked as I walked across the timber finish linoleum floor. 

On the wall were three neat columns of windows. Pages from a magazine of people in pimped out one-room apartments: couples, small families, singles. Apartments that looked like shrines, costume shops, video arcades. I looked at an apartment across the way and saw a man and woman on the balcony. From this distance they were no bigger than ants. The view had a flat limitless empathy.

Three minutes later David came out in the same clothes, with a wet face but dry hair.

Sorry about that – I have to shower after I shit.

Must be all the oats.

HA!

I forgot. David did have a laugh – a karate chop that could divide a room.

  I was terrified I would get an erection.

Dave, you won’t get an erection.

Can’t I just keep my undies on?

It’s tradition. And besides that’d be unsanitary.

The bathhouse was tiled from floor to ceiling and was more like an aquatic centre than a place of custom. An old korean man with chicken legs and a hairless potbelly stepped into the showers. His penis was a mushroom in a thick brush of hair. He soaped up his belly and began to rub it lovingly. My anxiety found its release:

The perfect union of beer and rice. So smooth. Rub for good luck.

David smiled.

The old man laughed

Did he understand me?

The old man looked at me and laughed. He didn’t understand what I’d said. We laughed together. David didn’t laugh.

  We found a bath and lowered ourselves into the water. It was so hot and heavily salted it stung my testicles. All the men had small white towels they rested on their heads while they were in the water. When they weren’t they would hold the towels in front of their crotches.

Why don’t we have modesty towels?

We don’t need them. I figure they’re all desperate to compare theirs to a Westerners. We’re doing them a favour.

A Korean boy sat down the edge of our bath.

Hello, my name is Jason.

Jay-san?

No. Jason. Like movie.

He motioned and made the noise of a chainsaw sawing the air. I had some vague recollectin of a horror movie and a hockey mask.

Oh, Jason, of course.

Of course, he parroted back.

His frame was long and lithe but without a man’s muscle. His legs ran the length of the bath. After telling us he would become a K-pop star: I will number one, I will number one, he rested back on his bent elbow, pelvis forward. His eyes were soft brown and his lips pouted red when he tried to pronounce a foregin word. With each word he remembered he unconciously flicked his penis. Over to the left thigh. Back to the right. As he asked: Are you university study? he absentmindedly peeled back his foreskin. An older man, probably his father, called from the steam room.

Okay-nice-to-meet-you-goodbye.

He still ran like a boy. And he was gone into the white cloud of the glass room.

David turned to me:

Anything?

HA! Nothing.

  The gift shop was not the place to be with David. He reminded me about the previous night’s baby octopi thrown alive into the wok of hot chilli oil. And repeated the crass joke about pussy and my Szechuan cravings. He had mocked the way I careened through Korean:

Yes, and if you say them in the right way Yes, No, Thank You and Please can all mean the same thing.

My tape Mandarin is worse, like a mincing cassette.

He didn’t know the meaning of the word and looked it up. I wished he hadn’t.

“Dave, I don’t have to go through the rest of my life with that mincing voice of yours.” Over marinated eggplant I chastised him for confirming there are real slug farmers in the world and not just my imagination.

They’re in Arkansas. We should go visit them.

我不明白你在说什么

What? He didn’t look up from his phone and I didn’t repeat myself.

  Don’t you think it strange that all the art in the gift shop isn’t in the gallery?

He pulled out a print from the bins.

Oh, Egon. You strange, deformed beast. Roaming the streets of Vienna hoping to borrow young girls to paint by acquirng their mother’s cleaning services. And always—  

He unfurled the print and showed it to me.

See the red on those knuckles. That red tells you everything hidden about this man. He may be in a fine suit, with a neat haircut, sitting on a chaise lounge at a glamorous party drinking Möet, but this man is furious. He can’t articulate his anger. The same way he can’t pronounce what he’s drinking. It’s a foreign country and he doesn’t know the language. The drink is the only translator he’s found.

I picked up a bilingual book of quotes. The Korean looked like carparks and roundabouts.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Who is that by?

Anaïs Nin. Am I pronouncing that right?

It’s Ah-nigh, as in ‘the end is nigh’. I take anything Anaïs Nin ever wrote with a grain of salt. She rewrote her life, and the lives of the people she encountered to suit her mood and score easy points. Her truth is also almost always self-serving.

He pulled out another Schiele print: a teenage girl in bloomers, taking off her socks. Her cheeks were flush and she looked at the artist. And now, pressed against David’s chest, she looked across the gift shop at me.

Is this your type?

She’s kind of graceless. It’s as if she walked into the studio to sit for him, began to take off her clothes and he said ‘stop’.

David scrunched the poster into a ball, threw it at my head, and left the gift shop.

  What you have to do is take the lawnmower liquid from this mysterious green bottle and drop it into this tasteless pint of beer and MAGIC! both become bearable.

I showed him a picture of the boy with blue hair from the gallery we were going to the following day.

I want to look like that. Truth is I want to fall in love with a boy like that.

It looks terrible and I’ll never die my hair blue.

David put his hand up and hailed Garcon! A waitress came over. She was our age, had sharp eyes and a shiny black bob.

Do you think there always needs to be a spark, or can you fall in love slowly, organically?

She didn’t understand the question. Spark?

Thank you, exactly. Annyeong. Thank you. And she went away.

The restaurant was a short walk from the apartment but I had forgotten the way. On the way there David had been telling me about an idea for a comic he wanted to write. It was about a male-model, so synonymous with one fashion brand, when he commits a crime the company refuses to let his face be put on a WANTED poster. Now David was drunk and walking in squares around the city grid. 

Up there is the BS bank, and those are the BS police, and under our feet is the BS subway, and in the sky is BS Airways and the BS stars and BS moon. And on that bench is a BS bum.

I tried to hold his hand, and then to hold him, but his arms flailed and he pushed me away.

Take a photo of me. Take a photo!

We were in front of the BS municipal governement building. On the emblem at the entrance it had the Busan slogan in English: All in one, one in all.

Why be one when I will number one!

  Back in the apartment David came from behind and put his arms around me. His fingers pressed between my ribs and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. He turned me around and began furiously kissing, only pausing to take off his pants and rip my shirt. His mouth was savoury beer, acidic spirits and spicy octopus. He groped at my crotch and overpowered me, down onto the bed. I remembered the edge. I pulled away but he continued to push. In the past I gave, he received. But this time he wasn’t giving and I wasn’t receiving. He was pushing. His tongue inside my mouth. His hand against my chest. His hips ground down on mine. He hooked my briefs with his finger and pulled them off. I was hard. He pushed the foreskin down and pulled me up towards him by the scruff of my neck. I began to push back. I kissed the crook of his neck and felt his Adam’s apple against my eye. I trailed my tongue down to his nipples. He clawed fistfuls of skin from my back. I bit his nipple hard. He pushed me away. Slapped me flush on the cheek. Then scuttled into the bathroom. I pulled my briefs back on. I was relieved to stop kissing – my face burned from his stubble. I sighed and flopped back down on the bed. The fridge and air-con hemmed and hawed. I looked down and imagined the sounds of the city. The shower whined.

  The beach was nice, even if I wouldn’t call it a beach – it needs waves that can drown you. I could almost feel David’s stubble on my neck. The sky was lined with dirty clouds. Most of the white wooden beach lounges were empty and the parasols down. Every now and then the sun broke through and David yelled: FEEL THE BURN.

As he promised the fried chicken was delivered by a young boy in white shorts.

How much?

The boy put up five fingers.  

David held the crispy chicken up to the sky.

Look at that. If there’s a God the clouds will part and shine down on his creation.

I think you overpaid the boy.

I tipped him. Don’t worry, he’ll be back. He licked his greasy fingers.

The boy returned five minutes later with white teatowels and a coolbox filled with ice and two beers. He handed us the towels.

Are you coming in for a swim?

No, I’ll wait here for the sun to come out. Give me a wave when you’re drowning.

The water was bathy and my skin began to itch from the salt. I swam further out until I could no longer stand on the bottom without my head going under. Where are the waves? On the map I remembered it didn’t show Busan was in a bay. Maybe the South China Sea is flat, or the waves are flattened by all the shipping vessels. I dove down to the bottom and reached for the sand. I could tell I was close when the water turned cold. The bottom was slimy. I pulled my hand away and surfaced. As I came out of the water the icecream arrived in a cone. David held a beer in one hand, cone in the other.

Sorry, I didn’t know if you wanted one.

I felt faint, tired, my depression aroused. The lights of an unheard ambulance making its way through the city woke me early. The morning was blue and the mist crawled halfway down the mountains. I wondered if anyone in another apartment had seen us. I wished it. What would they think? Two shadows of ants, frantic in the moonlight. Were there any apartments with lights on. A few, but they seemed empty.

We will still be friends, I thought. We are the same in a way. We each carry the other within us. I wondered if you can give something to someone without knowing what they want, without knowing what you’re giving? David knew what he wanted. Had always known. And now he was lost. Perhaps I wasn’t what he needed. We were both free and afraid. He was looking for an escape and I was an escapee. We were forever two boys playing alongside each other in the sandpit. I turned away from the view, expecting the abyss. Instead David’s eyes met mine. They were glazed, drunk and bloodshot. He had been crying. I felt foolish but I whispered, you want to destroy me, don’t you. He closed his eyes and rolled away from me.

  In my dreams that night we made love against the glass. It broke and we were in endless freefall. But I was fallling faster than David. I clasped for his torso, his legs, arms, hair. Anything of him I could hold. The shards of glass fell like rain and cut my face. When we hit the ground we kept descending, slower, until we reached cold waters and absolute darkness. I continued to search. We were ghosts passing through each other. And I swam away.