Excerpt # 2 from The End: Anthology.

This is an excerpt from the precursor of the climax in a short story called Gabriel Sohlers. It is not majorly relevant to the key messages of the plot, in fact it is just an ending development of the main character. It is so random that it wont reveal anything relative to the narrative’s twists. This one is more grittier than the others, even more so than Two Homes. (I’ve worked very hard on the ending scene for that one). Gabriel Sohlers is about a child care operator who deals with a perplexing ethical issue involving two fathers that compromises her legal obligations as a child care worker and her own moral compass as a mother. I would imagine this would be the heaviest to read. The fourth story has been begun but it is my flimsiest yet so that will take longer. The title is imperative to one of the key messages in the plot. Ultimately it is a portrait of the inadequacies of the law and compliance in modern society. Well the one that I know at least. The story takes place over eight years. The excerpt is below.

I strolled like it was a normal reasonable day to the car and tapped his window. His head harpoons to me like a quick parrot. As this happened I had tried the door handle but it was locked. ‘What d!-‘ He saw who I was and it was in that moment of understanding, drawing on the look of revenge on my face, he thought it safe to turn on the ignition and drive away from where I stood outside his glass barrier of protection. I couldn’t let that happen. For me, at that moment, it was as if that the generational angst scourged by this man could not move on to its home forgiven. That’s right fucker, look surprised, you’re going to feel something fresh and new extremely shortly. Deftly lifting the steel can of peaches from the plastic bag with my right hand, it took three smashes to break through the glass. Something had taken over me. When the local community ‘pillar’ punched me in the breast with his right hand whilst his left hand was on the steering wheel, Todd opened the passenger door and scrambled out of the vehicle. ‘GET BACK IN HERE SON!’ He took his foot off the pedal and turned his head, sprinkled with glass fragments, trying to intimidate me with that repulsive and absolutely arrogant and deadly glare. I was looking at him the whole time. At least I don’t try and act like someone I am not. His perverse punch had hurt but I wasn’t backing down. It took more punches to my face, slicing my arm a bit on the smashed window, but I gripped the door handle and dragged the stupid thing painfully open. Gabriel leaped out like a leopard and pounced on top of my slow turning frame. I didn’t see where Todd went. The father on top of me punched me in the face, my head shooting to the side like a rolling bowling ball. For five seconds I was seeing little meteors like white droplets glittering in all directions across my ageing sight. By the time it returned to normal, I pushed my aching self-up from the spattered asphalt below me and saw him again, dragging his son into the car on the other side. He saw me and threw his son into the passenger side. Few seconds before he would be on me again, trying to get away from the scene. I emptied all of the contents out of my bag except the glass wine bottle and I flexed my fingers around the thin handles behind my back. I pretended to back off when he rounded maliciously the corner of his car with his fingers spindled flamingly on the bonnet. I had really ticked off the man. I counted down. He was preparing to hurt me again. One. As he drew his fist back fleetingly from his side as he was one foot away from me, I tried to be quicker with my right hand, pivoting the left side of my body for momentum. Two. Fuck it. He’s doing it too early.

He was the victim for the first time in the eight years I knew him. A purple coloured circle with a smudge of red was evident in his left temple, it was there immediately after we both heard the sound of glass breaking and shards tearing. His eye closest to the canyon-like abrasion was locked shut and grimacing and tightly. It was right then and there that I laid into him.

Excerpt 1: Two Homes.

Two Homes is the current title for an upcoming story from The End: Anthology.

It is a drama and coming of age text, possibly might be finished as a novella. When I finish the final draft, I will give more background information about the context of the story. I have roughly 24 stories to complete before I can consider publishing the anthology as hand held copies. I plan to end the collection with The End: Part Two. Part One and Port Fairy can be read on this blog if you haven’t read them already.

Two Homes

2009

The full gulf of orangeness and redness will swallow us if we don’t leave. ‘Look at me Jake!’ My husband, stunned by a falling piece of debris from the ceiling, is dazing at me under the searing heat. ‘JAKE-we must get Lily-Abby and get out, get up JAKE!’ Our wall shakes with a rumble in a split second and explodes into our direction with the fist of the bushfire behind it. We are so close to dying. ‘JAKE GET THE FUCK UP!!’.

Two Months before

A boy at Warrick Primary yesterday said in community circle that school is like our work place. We, the neatly uniformed fifth graders arrive studiously at nine in the morning and leave at three twenty in the afternoon-eager for a new day of learning after our appropriately achieved amount of sleep. In and out. That’s how I look at it. A boring thing of how you move back and forth to one thing for six years. This though, this was far from boring. An adventure beyond the mysteries of childhood and marvel at the natural world. An adventure that landed me in the principal’s office, the principal whom is looking like as if he is trying to change the colour of his skin to that of a red apple with strange snakes under the skin of his forehead and forearms-even his neck. It really was an incident rather than an adventure, but Tolkien discovered endeavour in the oddest of things. ‘What happened and don’t give me any smart crap, tell the truth.’ ‘Grace pushed me, I was talking to Anthony and she pushed me. She pushed me Mr Trolt, FALICITY PUSHED ME. DO YOU HEAR ME? I WAS BULLIED AND SHE PUSHED ME, SHE CALLED ME A VERY MEAN WORD. I WANT-…’ Bethany is not my enemy. I see enemies as people worth paying attention to. She is comparable to a flea with no legs. Just as easy to ignore because of her useless contributions to class discussions with Mr Marc and just as lazy in team work classes with Mrs Calanser because of her inability to simply help. What a stupid, repugnant an incredibly judgemental girl. I believe that she will not be of aid society when she grows up. She is just an annoying little brat, like an ear lobe, just wobbling and not functioning for its purpose: to catch sound convex soundwaves and gather them in the ear. I feel her trying to burn me with her dirty looks when I use big words in English classes. I am not trying to sound smart! I get it. It makes me sound different and like a know it all. But you wanna know something Bethany, you moronic daft thing? It is not my fault that you don’t study the dictionary and sentence structure booklets after school because you don’t care about Highschool right now. But I want to be the best. That is my goal and my problem and Bethany just has a knack for expressing opinionated ideas about other people’s aspirations and tiresome missions. Anthony on careers day said he wanted to be a scientist when he grew up and Bethany said that he should learn to speak properly or else ‘scientist guys and boss people’ would think he is ‘retarded’ and that ‘they’ wouldn’t ‘hire’ him. The moronic mouthy human being obviously hasn’t heard of Albert Einstein who had a stutter, or Stephen Hawking. Me and Bethany-Bethany and I, are the same age but for crying out loud: have an open mind you arrogant smartless moron. Your mother intended to give birth to a rational human being, not a narrow minded snail who is practically asking to be squashed. I keep these thoughts to myself, but why? Why can’t Bethany just accept different people and not act weird around them. Arrrggh.

The incident happened at halfway through lunch time. The boy’s name is Anthony something, I don’t quite understand his last name because it’s too hard to understand. Too lengthy. He is the one who said school is like work. As mentioned before, he has a passion for science. David Attenborough specials, encyclopaedias on space things and stuff, he’s onto it. In the grade of adventurous prep-he was the first classmate I spoke too. Remembering what my mother said: ‘be kind and accepting, be yourself too but don’t let yourself put down others because of their difference’, I persisted in speaking to him in recess and playing brandy with him at lunch times. It grew more and more overbearing to interact with him however. He had some sort of ‘’disability’’, as the other classmates put it, he couldn’t use the sound ‘r’ or ‘s’ or even ‘th’ when he opened his mouth. ‘Where is the wake?’ he would ask when we had to clean up the bicycle shed where the floor is the bottom of an ocean of leaves which break off from the black-cotter trees along the edge dirty boundary of the school grounds-leaves that float through holes in the roof, large enough for us to crawl up and out into a higher platform of the world if we had a ladder or something. ‘Hey Ceve, can you help me carry this?’ Steve had no choice but to happily become ‘’Ceve’’. ‘Fair is a naked man running wild on the oval Mr Trolt.’ ‘WHAT!?’ Yes. It is true. Last year a man with some mental problem, paranoid schizophrenia or something, climbed over the back gate and ran onto the oval and just yelled at us. ‘I AM THE DIRT MAN!!’ Wearing nothing but his pasty skin. We all charged into the class rooms, locked the doors and emptied the scissors from the armoury of our pencil cases for battle. It all ended quickly after Anthony had immediately informed Mr Trolt and the police were called. ‘That man is naked, ew’. Really Bethany? I thought he was wearing a wetsuit that had a naked format. At first I had screamed and cried, who wouldn’t? It was a bloody terrifying and traumatic experience, but I felt better when I was huddled with my class mates in the classroom. All the teachers were having lunch at the Café Lazatte so thank our innocence that the principal was working in his office at the front of the school when the self-proclaimed ‘dirt man’ charged onto the school grounds. Five sessions later with the school psychologist and semi nurse, I stopped having panic attacks spurred by anything. Greg and Andrew were laughing in Science when they whispered that the ‘crazy guy’ was ‘fucked high as tree’ on ‘pingers’. Whatever drugs they are. Several months later, today, Bethany was nosy enough to dig up that the temporarily insane individual that was to be charged on indecent exposure to minors and adults, was in truth Anthony’s older brother who is intellectually disabled. Anthony wasn’t scared of him. I guess it must be because he has probably seen his misunderstood sibling heaps of times in that state. Sadly that was enough for Bethany to verbally and abusively conclude that because of the blood relation between Anthony and his ill-talked about hidden brother, that somehow Anthony’s stutter is an extension of the intellectual disability in Simon. I think his name is Simon. Anyway, I called her a ‘rude bitch’ and that she should ‘walk away’, she thought she was the nastier one by retorting that my Grandfather is dead. Simply put: ‘Yeah…well-you’re grandfathers dead, have fun cr’- before the next moment could arrive, I had half hit-half pushed the swiny big knob into the jutted concrete of the basketball court. Next thing Anthony and I knew was that we were soon to face against a family of swiny big knobbish apes for standing up to their single over-appreciated brat. It was like I could hear the storyteller, sitting on my shoulder, a sensible alter ego of myself saying: Meet Mr and Mrs Donolotto, very shortly to be the cathartic makers of your further frustration with ignorance and rudeness in the next forty eight hours. Well, it was more like I was meeting them and Anthony was silently hushed out of the equation. Didn’t want to involve his lawyer parents I guess. Because I got involved, that had given Bethany’s parents the perfect reason to not interrogate their lovely child and be awkwardly forced into a parental position of telling their daughter that she is responsible. I wish it could pan out that way, oh the amazing miracle it would be if Bethany experienced what it was like to truly understand that she is at fault. She is the snotty parasite from the sunny honeycomb that ruined the day. No. I hurt her. So they, Bethany’s parents, will aim their verbal guns of mortification and anger at me. The girl who defended Anthony. The boy who no student really cares about.

As the middle aged appearing man stands up in the ‘letting out and go’ room to share his experience or give a speech, I think about my daughter and what she is doing now. What is she thinking about? Is it good? Whatever it is I somehow know that it doesn’t have to do with me. Some mothers have that intuition. At first I thought it was uncanny but the conservations with my daughter have revealed that my wonders, while they are not accurate, they haven’t been far from the truth neither. Dyson calls it ‘cold reading’. Can he call me knowing that I had a bone bound idea that somehow at school, Felicity had burnt herself ‘cold reading? I uncovered quickly that she had scolded her hand with a fallen pot of hot water. Taylor and Lucy think it’s a ‘mother thing’ like all mothers naturally possess a quality for insight into the wellbeing of their children, a ‘universal’ characteristic. ‘Dr Seko’ my therapist, calls it ‘concentration of neurological activity in my prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes’. ‘Areas of the brain as you know Sarah, are involved with empathy, anxiety and social interaction. Anxiety and Social interaction Sarah. Anxiety and Social interaction.’ ‘How much am I paying you Dr Seko?’ During my welfare officer years, I met mothers who knew their children like they were just kids and not actually their children. Why are we different? What’s the effect of struggling on the perception of people close to you? Well one of them had a proper excuse because she had Korsakoffs.

The speaker brings my thought back to the surface. He speaks straight to the point of why he’s here.

That’s it. Please give feedback, any comments on my other posts as well would be awesome and very appreciated. Thankyou for reading.