Family friend

I’d gone to see the kid a few times. To console myself more than anything, though I don’t like to admit it. It’s never easy. I would ask the kid how he was doing and he would mumble down at his pigeoned-toed feet. He was a lot older now, but he still had those frightened eyes. Emilie hates it when I go to see him.
It does him no good, you going there and reminding him. You just do it cause you feel guilty. And maybe she’s right. I tell her I do it because I owe it to his parents, and I wish it were true. She doesn’t like him much. Think she blames him for the way things have gone. I told her I had stopped dreaming of smoke and twisted limbs, too. But the truth is that their faces are still stained on the back of my eyelids, waiting for night. It was only these visits that stopped them for a time.
The jingle of the doorbell ricochetes through the square brick house. Identical houses line the street like school kids on the first day of summer. Only the wooden number next to the door sets it apart. The green manicured hedges look down on the discoloured, crisp lawn, littered with bindis. The street is bare, the silence as relentless as the empty sky. Inside I heard the tearing of skin from leather and the strain of old knees.
Who is it darl? comes a female voice from the back of the house.
A man with skinny bowed legs poking out the bottom of his stubbies walkes up the hallway toward me. He straightens his sweater over his bloated stomach.
Yes? he says through the fly screen. His teeth are yellowed and wrinkles lined his lips like stitching.
Jake there?
Who’s asking?
I’m a family friend.

Laughing at a funeral

The footy stops and starts in front of him; the favourites are losing and the ref is making bad decisions. Outside, the distant hum of a mower steals the orange from the sun, and the pollen and dust refuse to set. Michael and the neighbourhood kids play silly buggers in the street. The Old Girl tosses a plate at him. It bounces around like a hoola hoop before plunking on the table. She’s cut the devon sandwiches neatly in two and tomato sauce oozes out like a wound. His eyes don’t leave the screen as his Adam’s apple pulls back at the beer to the roar of the crowd and drone of the whistle. He’s getting old. Almost forty, but he looks much older: years in the sun and ocean have pulled and sagged and clawed, and made blotches of his face. Was this it? he would find himself thinking, like a kid with a maze, tracing from the finish to start. But his mind would always find itself at the same dead end. He remembers her. Not that he ever loved her. In fact, he never really liked her: more of a childish indifference, and it puzzled him that his mind would hold him hostage on this carousel. He remembers the first day he met her. She had a flower stuck behind her ear. He remembers how its thick petals peeled away from one another to reveal the yellow nectar. And the scent. He remembers how she’d tease him for having a penis, and his parent’s laughter when he had asked.
It’s ya jelly bean, his father bellowed, slapping his leg.
And he remembers the splashing her arms made as the water drank her down. He didn’t cry at the funeral. But perhaps he should have. It seemed to make things worse, him not. Her mum said, are you okay? I know you two were close.
I’m good.
She asked him to put some flowers on the coffin.
Ok, he had said a little reluctantly.
On his way down, on account of him trying to act all solemn and not looking where he was going, he damn nearly ran into the girl in the box. The surprise of it forced out a laugh. He felt everybody’s eyes branding their guilt into the back of his neck, like piss in the snow.
Did you just see that? they’d be saying. That boy was laughing. Laughing at a bloody funeral.

Frangipani

It was one of those mornings when the sun leaps from the sea and yells, surprise! at the unsuspecting town. Only the children and the surfers see it coming. Kids play cricket on neighbours’ lawns, dodging bone-coloured nuggets, while their parents wipe sex from their eyes and rinse their mouths with tea, remembering an age unclouded by experience and forgotten ambition. The buzz of cicadas force the kids to yell and the dogs bounce around excitedly.

A girl with a frangipani tucked behind her ear smiles at a boy she knows is incapable of feeling for her the way she feels for him. He’s an odd boy. He doesn’t seem to understand the concept of friendship. And he has a habit of studying his pigeon-toed feet. His eyes are splinters of blue and green and something else, and it’s this something else that has a hold of her. While other boys wrestle in their brightly coloured board shorts, he watches the birds in the tree as they gossip and bicker amongst each other. The other boys call him names but he doesn’t seem to care, or notice. And neither does she. He doesn’t say much, just looks on absently as she dances in and out of the pool.

His facial expressions don’t change, but for a slight widening of the eyes, as she screams, is gagged by a hand of water, and pulled to the bottom. He sees the splashing and hears the thrashing, but doesn’t understand. He doesn’t move until long after the bustling of fluoro vests and the limp body is taken from the pool. He just stands. Stands. Stands there, twirling the Frangipani in his fingers.