NOT WITH PEOPLE

• Notes

  Update - April 24th

  This story feels sad and violent, like most of my stories seem to be, and I'm looking forward to finding out more about the main character.

  I'm drawn to the structure of the living rooms, I love it when scenes like that emerge - I call them Loch Ness Monsters. When I was a kid I had a book all about the mythical creature and before I had the patience to read the black and white text, I would flick through the pages to the ones that were broken up somehow. Bullet points, lists, facts, pictures, some structure to draw me in.

  I look for Loch Ness Monsters in all my stories.

  RJ

This is a story about the time I left the house to be around people but not with people. People when they’re looking at the newspaper or at each other are comforting bean bags and people when they ask you to explain yourself are that bed you bought from a cheap website that time. The one that doesn’t feel quite right and your back hurts and you wonder if you’ll ever get used to it.

People when they’re holding each other at bus stops and on each others shoulders across the bridge and wishing the movie was over so they can look at each other again. Those people. They’re the first coffee in the morning after your senses have come back after a head cold and you open the curtains and the sun feels like the sun and you are a frozen flower. People when they make you feel small and then say it was just a joke are that bed you bought once from that cheap website that bursts into flames and burns your house down.

So I left the house to be around people but not with people.

Between the car park and the coffee shop there’s a department store and the department store has a fake cul-de-sac with wooden house fronts and upsell gardens and a walk-in catalogue of living rooms one after the other.

You can only see the first one through a fake window. You walk under the flimsy cardboard streetlight and over the plastic grass and there it is. A wooden portal into modern family life. You can breathe deep and smell the flowers from the vase on the coffee table reminding you that family can be slow and calm and you see the broken banisters from curious customers wondering what is upstairs reminding you that family can be chaos. The flowers are lilies today and they are replaced every day and that makes me smile and I wonder who does that. This is the room of flowers because there are flowers on the mantlepiece too. Under that, a flat screen TV and games console and pretend homework out on the dinner table with pens and exercise books and a fake spilled glass of water.

Past the room of flowers is the ice cream room. I call it that because it reminds me of every summer the ice cream van jingled to our house like an old cartoon where even the trees danced and the man inside was a 99 flake with sprinkles. He would have lived in a house like this. Polka dot curtains and colourful lampshades with see-through plastic stands and I don’t really know what jive music is but they had music playing that was as colourful and angular as the ice cream room.

I like the next room because it reminds me I’m nearly at my favourite room. This room is Julie Garland’s kitchen and it smells of freshly baked cookies in a way that almost smells of freshly baked cookies but reminds you of the early 90’s when they tried to make scratch and sniff TV a thing. Anyway it’s the only room with a mannequin and she’s dressed in a white blouse with a blue apron that makes her look like Dorothy and when I told my friend she looks like Julie Garland she laughed and told me that’s not her name it’s Judy but that’s now the name of this fake housewife offering up a homely kitchen for just $999 plus installation.

That’s my journey. Every day I’m not working. I drive to the car park by Madison and Cooper and make the short walk to the coffee shop past the cul-de-sac of rooms for sale. The room of flowers, the ice cream room, Julie Garland’s kitchen, and then my favourite room. The final room. The final room before the exit to the coffee shop and it’s the only room not for sale. This is the anxiety room. A chair with no purpose and a table with no placemats. A fireplace with no mantlepiece. A vase with no flowers and a door that leads to nowhere. The room is roped off with signs on every surface reading This is an arrangement area and not for customer use. In a store full of sink-in sofas and deep oak dining rooms and lavender diffusers, here is a room so unsettlingly lifeless and an off-grey that can’t even commit to being brown and the only room that tells you off for even looking at it. The anxiety room is my favourite room because it’s the only room that changes. Sometimes a clothes rail with curtain patterns against whiteboards and wallpaper samples  and other days old coffee cups and someone left behind a walkie talkie after a staff meeting. That room is never allowed to be anything it has to be all things to everyone and we are soul mates me and the anxiety room.

After the anxiety room it was a jumble of sale rails and end of line items. Out of season overcoats, last year’s technology and then the exit. Across the street, past the fountain and into my people watching spot.

And it was in my favourite people watching spot that our story begins. Because it was in that spot that I first saw Albert Levels. Picture a hat rack in the most expensive bar in town. A tower of dark fabric. Not the dark of cheap whiteboard marker maths, the dusty dark of a hundred history lessons rubbed into old chalkboards. I guessed his age in a heartbeat. If he wasn’t 43 he was 42 and if he wasn’t a summer July August baby he was definitely a cosy winter jumper December Christmas tree and nothing in between. This wasn’t a maybe there will be flowers soon person this was there are flowers right now see how I bloom person.

Right in front of me in the queue, ordering what I would then hear him order every day.

Hello yes thank you.

I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you, can I pay with cash.

Always with cash, always with permission. I fell in love before his coins hit the counter.

The next day. I got there a little later but I could still hear him order.

I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you can I pay with cash.

When he said can I pay with cash he looked the barista in the eye,

Currently writing

THE MARKET

• Notes

  I’m keeping this little story intro around because I’m in love with the rhythm and heavy description. I can feel the story but I haven't given Adi the time he deserves to truly come to life!

  RJ

The market like a fishing net. The market at the surface. The market arching from a crane. The people like flapping fish. Squirming, slipping, sliding over and over and under and over. Opening their mouths for air.

The sky like an empty stove. Red hot and ready to burst.

The sky like an alert. The sky needs a pan.

Some air and then sand between your teeth. Some breeze and then the smell of freshly baked bread. Some wind and then the cumin. Some gust and then the spice.

Between the hollers of the traders and the bargain hunting crowd, there in the horrible discord stood Adi.

Adi stood in that horrible discord and Adi was silent.

His first day behind the stall. His third day after his father died. The fourth day his family was hungry.

And he had no idea what he was doing.

A table of tools with carved wooden handles. No idea. This one here with the three spikes. No idea. The ones his father painted yellow. No idea. Red. No idea. Yellow. Red.

"Two hundred Rupees for the crosshead." Adi picked it up and said, "This says four."

"I'll give you three.”

“Deal.”

Adi wondered if it was a deal. Was it a deal? He guessed it was a deal.

“Five for this,” said an older lady who had been eaten by her hat and was holding up a bag of nails.

“These are good nails,” tried Adi, “The best. I won’t take less than-“

The woman was gone. Swallowed up in the market. Money on the table.

Some noise this early in the morning. Some shouts against his thinking. Some harmony, some melody, too many boats in too small a harbour.

SIRENS

• Notes

  I once applied to join an exclusive writing club in the community Scribophile.

  The moderators chose five applicants to write an audition story, with only one winner being given a membership.

  The blue section was the prompt, and the rest was mine. It’s hard to read such an old version of my writing now, but it’s part of my journey!

  And yes, I won.

  RJ

Brandon flicked the half-finished cigarette to the parched ground. He mashed the still smouldering stub beneath his stained boot. Gazing across the sunlit cornfield, he spied his prey foraging through ears of freshly harvested corn. Raising his rifle, he brought the scope to one eye and planted his prey firmly in the crosshairs. He pulled the trigger.

The crack resounded amongst the farmhouse and barns. A flock of startled birds took flight, their wings frantically beating against the heavy summer air.

“Nailed it,” he muttered, glancing nervously towards the bunker.

“You must be crazy,” came a whisper over his shoulder. “They’re killing us while we sleep and you decide to come out here to find dinner.”

Brandon still had his eye to the scope. “Keep your voice down.”

“You don’t think they already heard-”

“Lucy. Stop talking.” He reached into his pocket for a round, but it was empty. “They’re looking right at me.”

The bunker was a half-buried black box which stretched for a four-day walk across the plains. Brandon had never found an entrance and yet these creatures seemed to come and go as they pleased. Little Lucy with a thousand freckles and ringlets had been hopping shelters with her father since the towns were destroyed on the day she was born.

She nested between the tall rows of corn and the canvas bags of sandwiches and grenades. “Did they see you?” She lowered herself into the dirt. “Are they coming?”

“They’re looking over. They’re all just staring.”

“Which type is it?”

“The tall ones. Long jaw, black eyes.”

“We…you…shouldn’t have…”

Lucy’s whispers were drowned out. The entire sky filled with a blistering siren. The pulsing bunker alarms distorted Brandon’s vision as he tried to keep track of the creatures. One figure became two, and two became an army. The tall grass at every side became whipping razor wire. Blood was dripping from Brandon’s eye socket as he wrestled to keep the scope to his face.

The ground shook as though something huge was passing just inches under their bodies.

“Lucy.”

The sandpaper soil scuffed their skin raw as they were rattled again and again.

“Lucy.”

The siren looped between a ground shaking rumble and a high pitched squeal.

Brandon chanced a yell, “LUCY COVER YOUR EARS.”

He could feel the siren burrowing into his skull and it started a crack which ran through his cheekbones and split his jaw in two. The alarm worked its way through his nerves and tangled them in knots. His arms became stiff and the rifle fell from his grip into the crushed grass.

The spiralling octaves brought more swarms out of the bunker. Groups of wide eyed creatures all stood, monumental, staring at the cowering couple. Lucy looked over at her father who was face down in the dirt. His brown shirt trailed into a sticky red mash on the ground. She screamed, still covering her ears and unaware that the world was silent again and that her voice was bouncing between the bunker and the farmhouse.

Her hands were shaking and she moved them to cover her mouth. She couldn’t bring herself to look at her father’s face but she didn’t need to. She could see tiny black specks in the distance but couldn’t make out the detail. She climbed on top of her father, sobbing as she grabbed his belt to hoist herself towards the rifle. She remembered.

Slow is smooth, Smooth is fast, Pull back the bolt, Don’t let it jolt.

She rustled through her fathers pockets; deep pits of cigarette butts and pictures of her mother. She found a new box of rounds and wrestled it from the seams.

Slow is smooth, Smooth is fast, Pull back the bolt, Don’t let it jolt.

She lay prone on Brandon’s twisted back, gripping the rifle with tiny hands. She lifted her head to the scope.

The creatures had started walking towards her.

Pull back the bolt.

Thumb the round, tip first.

More of their skinny frames joined in the march, out of their hidden entrances to the bunker.

Push the bolt forward.

Take a breath.

The piercing alarm started again, ribbing the hot afternoon air with its poisonous shriek.

Fire.

The bullet cut through a creature and it dropped like a flapping chunk of meat.

“Nailed it” she whispered as she looked down at her father through tear soaked eyes.

She took aim through the scope again, but now the creatures were running towards her.

Lucy fired wildly past the stampede. They were kicking up the dirt and moved as a single cloud, rapidly approaching, increasing their speed with each round she fired in panic. The siren was cutting into her ears. She had an itch in the centre of her brain and somebody was scratching at it with broken fingernails.

She fired again. The cloud began to choke her. She fired again but the siren was too painful and she dropped the rifle. At the moment it clattered to the ground, the noise stopped.

She covered her eyes with her hands and was curled up on her father’s back. The scuffing of hooves against the dusty ground told Lucy they were standing in a circle around her. She pictured her mother in the dark palms of her hands. She could still hear her voice as it was becoming more frail from starvation.  Her words broke through the scrapes and snorts as the long-jawed creatures moved closer.

“My darling” she said, rubbing the stains of a shirt with a butter-coloured bar of soap, “No matter how small you are, you will always have your father’s shoulders. You can look all horrors in the eye and they will never forget you.”

Lucy dug her heels into her father’s back. The creatures were tightly packed in a black stain around her. The air was filled with a rotten mist and she could barely breathe. She stood as tall as she could and stared deeply into the ink filled void in the creature’s faces.

“You can look all horrors in the eye, and they will never forget you. Even if they win.”

Lucy smiled, raised her fist to the sky, and spat out the pin.

RENTALS

• Notes

  Rentals was the result of a writing exercise I took part in with my friends. I wrote the part in blue, and then we all finished it on our own and shared what we’d come up with. Perhaps one day I’ll reach out to them and see if they still have their version!

  RJ

I was distracted by the mud on her shoes.

"Do we have a deal?" she asked, frustrated.

"We have a deal."

She handed me a white envelope. It had four numbers written along the side.

"Is this it?"

"This is all you need."

I slid the envelope between the pages of a John Steinbeck novel and put it back in my jacket pocket.

"When do I-"

"When I've left" she snapped.

The distorted speakers played a mix of REM and The Cranberries, and some guy in front of us said “10 please.”

“How easy was it to find?” I asked, trying to pick apart my shoelaces with my fingernails.

“What do you think?” She said.

The guy in front was with his girlfriend. She put her shoes up on the counter. “6 please.” He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. They both left the queue with their rental shoes in hand, walking towards a bench near the pick ‘n mix.

“I just mean-“

“I know what you meant,” she said, putting her shoes in front of the assistant, “8 please.”

Somewhere down the lanes, a birthday kid got a strike and yelled.

She picked up her new shoes. The red and black squares of leather were as frayed as her home-bleached fringe.  “He wasn’t where you said he would be. So now we have to be more careful.”

The attendant turned to me and I told him I needed size 11.

“I never said he would be in his office at the weekend.” I picked up my shoes. “It was your idea to go on a Sunday.”

She blew her wispy hair out of her eyes. “Are you serious?”

“Where did you think he would be?”

“Well I didn’t think he would be a church-going fella.” She pulled her shoes over her heels and grunted. The assistant asked us to move out of the line.

“You got what you came for. I ain’t sticking around in this racket any longer.” She grabbed my hand. Her fingernails were mustard with black edges. “It was nice doing business with you.”

She checked the coin return slot of the arcade machine and walked out through the sliding doors. I’ll never forget that walk. That carefree stride with a backing of Everybody Hurts.

How anybody could walk in those shoes is beyond me. I went to the men’s room and danced between the sticky puddles and boot-print hot dogs. Inside the envelope was a mobile phone. It was locked with a four digit code so I tapped it in. The screen lit up the cubical showing thirteen missed calls and a voicemail. Bingo.

Julian, my darling. My wife’s seduction. Once reserved for me. I miss your strong hands. When you’re not too busy to answer my calls I want you to take me away. She laughed. Take me back to the lake and the soft blankets from the cupboard under the stairs. I’ll tell Joel I’m going away with the girls. Call me.

I put the phone in my pocket and walked back to the alleys of happy families and birthday parties. I’ll never know if it was the old popcorn smell or the Shiny Happy People soundtrack, all I know is I turned to the door to see her standing in the car park with a trail of smoke between her mustard and blacks.

It might take me a while, and perhaps I’ll never get used to them, but as I walked out of the door in those ankle cutting rentals I felt young again.

“Fancy a game?”

“With you? You gotta be kidding sweetheart.” The smoke drifted out of her mouth as she spoke.

“A drink, then.”

“You buying?”

“I’m buying.”

She flicked the cigarette onto the kerb and her shoes creaked as she tiptoed out the embers.

“C’mon then.”