Merc's Shorties

Merc's Micros

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:57:00 +0000

And here are a bunch of 30-word micros from the November 2008 Your Messages challenge:

She preens and pimps, coddles and massages bodies and egos; she does sums in her head and wonders at the fuss about women who say they want it all.

When my feet grew too fast for my shoes, I ran barefoot. Later I danced in Blahniks, ignoring the blisters. Bunions split my slippers, but soon I won’t need them.

When the curly-haired ticket collector refused to take mine, I was devastated. Months of electric fingers now fizzled and deflated my dreams. Talk about rotten rejections! No don’t!

When the Japanese Consul turned a deaf ear and kept stamping their transit papers, thousands of lives were saved. Unsaved faces are forgotten and cherry blossoms now bloom in Vilnius.

Pikelets aren’t little pikes, crumpets aren’t a baker’s trump of crumbs and a goblet of tea has little to do with teetotalling goblins. But they all make a fine breakfast.

I lolled in my glass of champagne, puffing on my pink Sobranie. I’d forgotten a thing or two: where to flick the butt, and how to get to my negligee.

I pretended they were glass when I blew them, wanting them to last longer than a blop.
So I hung them on my unpierced earlobes and listened to them tinkle.

OK, he fell. Yeah, and he was raw, but you can’t blame the king’s horses for trampling him and for making a mess. Somebody pushed him. Didn’t you, Your Majesty?

He was a bit of a leech, you know. You had to unfasten each of his suction caps; but then the blood would flow. He had two hearts, it seems.

The soldiers killed all the dogs. They were scared the dogs would warn us they were coming. They were scared, my mother said, her mouth bloodied. They were so young.

The only silence in my house is that of the peeling paint, the straining pipes and the glowing rafters as the fires lick into the corners of my tiled life.

I believed my watch but it had stopped. I’m late for my thirties and I doubt if they’ll let me in. But I’ll sneak in and watch the pc tick.

When I told them I was leaving France they all wanted a spot in my suitcase. They came in wheelchairs and with crutches. Frog legs ain't no dish in Austria.

I have a champagne taste on a beer income but when I wear my necklace of bottle tops, pour ale into my slipper and close my eyes, I’m almost there.

When you cry you may not be noticed while in the act. It’s just afterwards that your puffy face and bleary eyes give you away – and the empty tissue box.

King Pipper covered his boobs with some macramé and with his alpenstock skewered the tenderloin, had a chomp at the flageolet and then washed down the poppadom with a demijohn.

I am learning to go with my gut when smelling roses, jasmine, BO, the odd whiff of rotten-egg gas; how easily odours can turn and undo what the eyes see.

Peanuts. I lift my face and get a big slurpy kiss. I swing up on his tusks and he tiptoes down the stairs, out the door and into the sun.

Transplanting is an art in some places; in others it’s a crime. Take Oz. You can’t even slip in on a banana skin so don’t think about catching a tumbleweed.

The bottle of silence was on special offer. She drank it all in one go, hoping it would be enough. It almost was, but it couldn’t drown out her hangover.

Some see you as a bloom of welcome. But I know you. You cling, you cloy, reminding me of years I left behind while racing sunsets to escape you, Frangipani.

My husband always says he’d have to kill me twice – once to get me six feet under and the second time to stop words from coming out of my mouth.

His getting pregnant and having a baby turned the world upside down. But his somersaulting began when he found his clitoris and saw that it bore the tiniest of penes.

My German-speaking parents spoke to me in English. My daughter’s mother tongue is French but I’m not. She speaks to her father in argot while I just reminisce in strine.

Endings are always tricky. Closed? Open? So are beginnings. Once upon a med res? And if eyes glaze over in between? Call the salvage police and duck. It’s a memoir?

- They’re just like big rabbits.
- It’ll bring down their carbon footprints.
- They’re high in protein.
- Low in cholesterol.

- No way am I going to eat Skippy!

The devil admired the way the pair of red stilettos disguised her. What if she were to keep just one and give the other to Versace, or was that Prada?

In 1955, Dame Edna of the lilac hair first waved her gladioli in the Land of Oz. Fifty-five years later the flowers had become extinct. You’d better believe it, Possums!

Underwater underwear is what they wear Down Under. Dangerous are just the sharks that care bubbles about the gender of the wearer and the ability thereof to hold his/her breath.

Stiletto condoms

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:02:00 +0000

A little kinky.
Me?
And you’re ruining everything.
I thought you liked it.
I do.
Who’s kinky now?
Just touch.

He took her hand and guided it over the parquet floor. “It cost me a fortune,” he said.
“Very nice.”
“But can you feel them?”
“Them?”
“The pock marks. Pock marks all over it.”
“Interesting.”
“You know how that happened?”
“How?”
He glanced sideways at her stilettos on the floor.
“But I thought you liked them.”
“I do.”
“And you always ask me to take off my clothes.”
“I do?”
She ran a hand over his clavicle. “You always say, take them off.”
“I do,” he said.

She’d come in the door and he’d tell her to take them off. She’d unbutton her blouse and slip out of her skirt and then, stark naked but for the stilettos, she’d come towards him and, and … well, who could say no? His parquet, though, was showing the strain.

The parquet is suffering.
The parquet?
Your stilettos.
She ran her fingers over the pock marks on the floor. “Is it a me or the parquet thing?”

She didn’t come for a whole week. He rang. “I’m busy,” she said.
“I miss you.”
“And the parquet?”
“I love you,” he said.
“In stilettos?”
“Yes.”
“And the parquet?”
“More pock marks, I guess.”

He opened the door. “Take them off,” he said. “Your clothes, I mean.”
Smiling, she placed two woolly thinglets into his hand and proceeded to undress.
He slipped one of the thinglets over a finger, the other over a thumb. Naked, she lifted one stiletto-clad foot. “Slip it on,” she said.
He smiled.
“Now the other.”
“I love you,” he said as his eyes ran approvingly over her body down to her felt-clad stiletto heels.
“Condoms,” she said. “For the parquet.”

Tock tocking

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:08:00 +0000

They made me take off my bra and the gold chain round my neck. It had been my grandfather’s and used to be linked to the fob attesting to the passing of time. He died before the war could get him. My grandmother died of cancer as did her son, my uncle. Dad hung in there until the pacemaker batteries died. Mum’s willing herself away.

As the tunnel closed over me and the tock tocking dulled my senses I figured I’d had a good run for my money. I’d seen the world, known love, never lost it, shared my life and my words. I was at peace with myself for those few minutes. I get the same feeling every time I take off in a plane. Then I forget.

But it’s different now. How much time is left to do all the things I must do? An essay to finish. What madness made me commit to such research? But commit is commit. All the sins know that. Do I need to revise them? Leave them part of the story. A novel. Almost there. At least I’ll be saved the rejections. Maybe I’ll have time to be there for Mum. And to see our daughter’s graduation. But there are so many papers to go through, mess to clean up, arrangements to make. And there’s the dog.

I’ve put the gold chain back on. It just links to itself. No interfering fob anymore. Time is today. Every moment. Move on. Regrets? Not really. In fact, none at all. Not even the smoking, but I’m glad our daughter doesn’t. Maybe I put her off. Maybe I saved her life, for a while at least. The chain gleams in my fingers in the way of old gold. Tonight, I’ll be getting back the results.

Christmas goose

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:17:00 +0000

Christmas and fat geese. Fat. Goose. What a goose I was to think that Christmas would fix everything. Time of cheer. Family. Peace. Home. I was out of it. On the other side of the world in the middle of an argument with the love of my life. Skype kept cutting off. Email. He doesn’t answer emails, just reads them. I could hardly post Luv U on my blog and sms was out of the question for the love of my life had three thumbs. There was more of me, too.

Weeks passed and I pined. I had to see him. Bring him a gift. Both meant money I didn’t have. Passion makes possible, I chanted. I ate only salads, drank only water, walked and jogged everywhere I went. Sometimes I was even faster than the bus, but only when it was going the other way. In the Op Shop I bought five metres of red ribbon and asked the butcher for ten sheets of wrapping paper, promising to pick the turkey up later. My old car was getting lonely, I know, as I wasn’t driving it any more. Bye, Morris, I said. I have to sell you.

I bought a cheap ticket via Beijing and Virgin and landed shivering in the snow. With my paper and ribbon under my arm, I hitched a ride to town. Then I wrapped myself up in the paper and rolled about in the metres of ribbon. I tied a bow around my middle and another around my forehead. People were hurrying home. The smell of mulled wine was in the air. Candles glowed from behind windows. I rang his bell. The door opened. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

He pulled me inside, kissing me around the bows. “I knew it was you,” he said.

The Memory Box

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:03:00 +0000

Jewellery can be just a work of art. Did I say just? No. If it’s design, it needs to have some practical purpose. But your practicality, she thought is perhaps my serendipity. That had always been the way with him and he never gave up. But all that was now in the past, and she was firmly in the present with a project to complete.

It’s not just rings on your fingers and bells round your neck, she thought as she took two pieces of aluminium. She cut and filed tiny leaf holes all over them until her fingers and thumbs were coated in silvery dust; here and there thin scratches stopped just short of blood. She shaped the two pieces into the form of praying hands: not ones that were pressed together, those that let life still breathe in.

The silvery grey of the metal was cold, so she enamelled the pieces in ruby red. She dried them on their backs like open palms, and then on their fronts, humped like twin turtles.

She took his love letter and ripped it into scraps. The tears lacerated the words “I”, “love” and “you”. There were so many of them. She piled them into one of the halves and quickly trapped them with the other. With a thin white silk ribbon she laced the two humps of her life together. She wanted to tie a long flowing bow, but the ribbon was too short. There was only enough for a tight little knot.

The humps now resembled a heart: not the Valentine sort, the one shaped like a fist. She cupped it in both hands and shook it about. The love scraps danced and whichever way she stopped the three little words peeked out at her from within her memory box.

-----
Inspired by Maarit's memory box

Uncle Henri

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:57:00 +0000

Everyone in the village was talking about the man who´d asked the little girl to accompany him to the park. Then someone overheard Henri say: “Come with me.” And they´d seen the little girl hesitate and then put her hand in his. They´d watched him go down the street and round the corner and when he was out of sight, they still saw him, hand in hand with the little blonde girl. They saw him lead her over behind the garden house in the far corner of the park and they saw him bend down, stroke her hair, unbutton her coat, untie her shoelaces. And it all became too much. So they called the police.

Henri yelled and the little girl screamed. Someone took her aside as they dragged him away. That was the last she saw of him. When he got out a few months later, he shot himself.

The little girl is grown up now. She sits and stares at old photos of her uncle Henri. She still blames herself for that day in the park. That blame has followed all her growing up. She couldn´t understand then, not even now, what all the fuss was about. Shortly after they took Henri away, she´d noticed how her godfather, even her own father, wouldn´t pick her up or hug her when other people were around. It was as if that sort of thing was suddenly forbidden, forever. She wanted hugs from those she loved, wanted the world to see.

Today she finds it hard to make contact. She fears that once she makes it, they’ll take it away, like they took away her uncle Henri. They´d skirted the garden house, he´d pushed her so high on her favourite swing. It had been the last happy day of her life.

Knives in their lives

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 11:21:00 +0000

The message went out. Reunion! Knives in their lives. Come one and all. So they came from all times and places, some flying through the air and landing pointedly in the trunk of the oak tree, others clattering through the door, others still, just plopping into the grass.

First one to speak was the penknife her father gave her when she flew up from Brownies. “She whittled boughs with me to make arrows to protect her from the brown snake. She flicked me shut and hung me on her Guide belt.”
“What about me?” said the flick-knife. “I´m longer than thumb to little finger. My point can find your heart. He got caught at the border and said he just had me for protection, used me to clean his nails, peel the skin from potatoes. They didn’t buy it. Confiscated me, let him go, though.”
“He was in love,” said the Solingen bread knife. “And I was a gift. But I slipped and cut into her finger. Three stitches. She´s ignored me ever since. He sometimes winks.”
“We just try and hang in there,” said the three plastic knives in chorus. “Keep a low profile. She forgets we´re fragile.”
“Fragile/smajile,” said the cheese knife with the Emmentaler holes in its stainless-steel blade. “Now it´s a matter of design, darling.”
Victorinox concurred, blowing on his toothpick attachment. “But they don’t take us along anymore.”
“We tried,” said the hot-pink Swiss army knife. “But perhaps it’s better like that. Have you seen the riff-raff at the airport? In those plastic boxes? Exposed for all to see?”
“They could put us in their checked baggage,” said the Finnish hunting knife sulkily from inside its sheath.
“Er-hem,” said the oil stone. “You´re all much better off at home with me. Let’s sharpen up now.”

The Halo

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:41:00 +0000

I was sitting in my office waiting for the phone to ring. It hadn´t rung for a while, but I was a patient man. That was my business. Being patient. Then at the slightest whiff of something off, nosing in to sniff things out. My speciality was divorce. But with all the counseling couples were now taking up like a sport, my forte was as strong as lavender in a pot of steaming tar. No match. I was scraping under my fingernails with the letter opener when the phone rang and I almost dropped the receiver.
“Do you do thefts?” a woman´s voice said, lisping the last word.
“Lady, I´m a private eye. You need the police.” I was about to slam the phone down and go back to my nails, when she said. “Wait!”
It wasn´t just the urgency of her voice that kept me connected, it was a certain timbre with husky Lauren Bacall feel to it. I could just see her. Redhead. Had to be.
I leant back in my swivel chair and tipped my hat into my eyes. “What’s your problem, lady,” I drawled and then heard her sigh.
“I´ve been robbed.”
“Police?” I had the feeling we´d been there before.
“They´ll think I’m crazy.”
“Maybe I will, too.”
“Please.”
“Shoot, lady.”
What she said next sounded like “halo”.
“Your what?” But business was business. Nutters also got into trouble. Maybe it was code. “Someone pinch it off your head?” Geez, I hoped she had money. My time wasn´t free. “Lady. Hope you can pay. If you can’t, I’ll have to hang up. I’m a busy man.” Yeah. Nails were waiting.
“I´m sorry,” she said. “Of course I can pay. But you have to believe me.” There was a pause. “How did you know?” she said.

Trashion passion

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:25:00 +0000

She recycled him. Right from the first question: “Got any old jumpers?”
“They´re for the needy,” he said.
She looked out at him from under her fringe. “They´re fashion conscious, too. Give me what they wouldn´t want.”
“Anything?”

He gave her his teabags and ties, old jeans, zippers and ski gloves.
“More,” she said, and so he set off to ask all his friends.
“Why?” they asked.
“She needs them,” he said.
They shook their heads.

“All this enough now?” he asked with arms laden.
She nodded and arranged piles on the floor.
“Why?” he said softly.
She winked, shook her head, just said: “Wait and see.”

She worked for hours on end, days and weeks, and all the while he sat cross-legged and watched her.

She frilled all his ties and sewed them together and made them into a long shiny skirt.
“You´ll need a bodice,” he said, his eyes caressing her breasts. “Better still. We could stay here forever.”
She blew him a kiss and arranged all the tea bags, strings hanging down like Swarovski pendants.
“A necklace perhaps?”
She blew him a prfft! And proceeded to triangulate all her zippers until she had a collar like Comme des Garcons.
“What if I take you walking in the snow?”
“Can’t catch me,” she said and slipped her legs into faded legwarmers that covered her Moon Boots and were made from his jeans.
“But your shoulders. It´s cold outside.”
She gestured to him that he remain seated while she arranged hundreds of ski gloves in a pattern over old jumpers. She sewed and she stitched hands, wrists and fingers until a cuddle-warm cape was completed.
He clapped his hands. “My princess,” he said.
“Trash is my passion,” she said proudly.
He held out his arms. “My trashion is you.”

Inspired by Outsapop

Of witches and parents

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:19:00 +0000

All this advice is such a kafoofle when we all know that witches do all sorts of other things like wear square-toed shoes to hide the fact they don’t have any toes and they scratch their heads under their hats because of the lice and when the broomstick breaks down they just hitch a ride but be careful they don’t spit blue ink at you which is why they always keep their mouths closed except of course when they sidle up to the cleanest of children and take them by the hand and then lead them under ladders to chase black cats and frogs that spit just like they do and hope that the parents will get all upset because parents often forget what it was like when they were children and ran around with dirty fingernails and rips in their pants but then parents never got taken by the hand of the witches when they were young because they were so naughty much naughtier than they ever would allow their own children to be so the witches are just trying to teach them a lesson when they grab the clean children and spirit them off so that they can get to know them and fly and play with frogs and get warts on their fingers and eat worms that turn into licorice and sherbet and it’s not really that witches don’t like parents it’s just that parents seem to think they know everything and it’s not really true because they’re looking at things with the hindsight of years and have forgotten that they’ve grown up now and grown ups have lost it and witches know that so when you wish you were young again look at thirteen as a lucky number because Fridays come in all shapes and sizes.

----
With apologies to R. Dahl and his Witches.

Floating

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:08:00 +0000

She couldn’t really swim, but she knew that if she lay back straight and breathed deeply she might be able to float. So she dipped her big toe into the wild waters of the web, jiggled it about and then jumped in. She went under at first, but when she spat out mouthfuls of sherbet water she soon found that it wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. So she went with the flow and let herself be washed ashore to a place where words played with each other.

They came from all sides and the strangest of places. Some were in code masquerading as numbers. Others spoke of giraffes and dragons, and also of love – love found, love lost, love in waiting, love wanting. Words jostled and danced in groups of 300, playing with line breaks and colons and dashes. The stories they sang touched all generations and flew off and about, touching new places: gut, heart, geography and mind. There was food there, too: chocolate and fish, cups of tea, coffee and wine, even magic mushrooms and smoking signs. Odd names would flit past, some even with faces. Others wore pictures coded in colours.

Words washed over her, shook and cajoled her; some started teaching her how to swim. Lift your arm, breathe deep, flap your feet, play like a dolphin, but mind the sharks and the obscure fish. Don’t worry about what’s going on at the homestead. Play with us now, come on now. Swim. So she stroked and flapped, but as she turned over, she heard a voice say: “Come home now, we need you.” She turned back and saw a big wave coming, so duty bound surfed back to the shore.

“Where’ve you been now?” asked her husband.
“Floating, just floating,” she said with a grin.

Name of the rose

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:48:00 +0000

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

When Romeo tried to find out, she followed up with: “Wherefore art thou?”
The swain grumbled as he dusted himself off.
“Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” Juliet yelled.
“In the bloody rosebush.”
“Huh?”
“The ladder fell down.” And off he went to capitulate. “I’m a swain, see. Got work to do.”

What’s in a name, Bill pondered. Swain. Swan. Swoon. Who?
“Who is Sylvia, what is she?”

No swanning me, Sylvia thought. Here he goes getting me into trouble now. That’s what you get when you stop a girl living in the woods. She can’t see the trees for the roses. No one can spell that name, anyway. Slyvia. Salvia.

It’s no fun getting called Saliva at school. Spit and dribble. Yuk. And then when you get older and apply for management jobs, they send you letters inviting you to an interview, expenses paid, but it’s addressed to Silvio. Who? Yeah, so I wear tights and keep my hair long. They saw through it. “Sorry, we were expecting a man?” But they let me keep the change for the trip home. Home? Ah, back to the woods where the trees are covered with climbing roses. Substitute whatever you like for “rose”, as long as it’s fragrant. What’s in a name? Try clothes.

Clothes make the man. What about women? Turn on the pc. Clothes make the person; any avatar on Second Life can tell you that. Have another go, Bill. They’re working on making the roses smell. Scratch ‘n’ sniff. Don’t need names. Just fly. Do. Be. Do-bee-do, as a mate of mine once said. Watch out for the sting, though, and the thorns that can scratch when you fall back into reality.

Marzipan dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 11:45:00 +0000

From the moment he saw her looking down through the glass panes into the kitchen, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He usually took no notice of the people milling up and down the stairs that led to the rooms where coffee and pastries were served. He knew he was on show; the pastry cooks always were at Dehmel’s. When in Vienna, one went there for the best pastries in the world. It was probably Schnitzler’s fault that the old coffee house exploited a touch of Blue Room voyeurism.

On the way down from the first-floor rooms, although you had to keep moving, you could see through the glass how the marzipan was rolled. Finished products were displayed in a vitrine at the entrance: the mini ex-Chancellor waltzing with his tall blonde Minister of Foreign Affairs; Tina Turner; Bill Clinton.

A pause in the movement on the stairs caught his eye. She’d stopped the traffic. She was staring at his fingers rolling the mixture of fine almonds and sugar. He felt her gaze caress them as he kneaded. He added a drop of rum to the mixture and felt a look in her eyes silk over his cheeks. He blushed, kept on kneading. Then his fingers began to move more quickly as he rolled and tweaked the thick fragrant paste. Sensing a movement, he looked up from his ministrations. The figures on the stairs again had taken up their perpetual motion, blurring the pause that she had been.

With new fervour his fingers began sculpting the marzipan mass. He wanted no colourants. Wanted it natural. Although he couldn’t be sure if she’d ever know how he felt, he piped a thin stream of chocolate onto a white ice-sugar label: Reclining Nude. Maybe she’d see it in the vitrine.

Albanian cognac

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:40:00 +0000

He didn’t go off with the others to the Gasthaus.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I’m Tschusch,” he said.
I was familiar with the derogatory expression the Viennese used for anyone that came from the East of their border. They couldn’t always tell, of course, so it was sometimes used when someone spoke funny. I’d even been called that myself when I tried to get my tongue around the local accent.
“Me too,” I said.
“Nah.”
“S’truth.”

He’d come from what was now Kosovo. Had worked hard and drew a small pension he rounded off by helping out with the dirty work.
“Tschusch work,” he said. “You don’t do that.”
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked.
“Maybe some sandwiches? I can pay.”

I cut some black bread and spread butter, then I added three types of sausage. He’d worked hard on the house. I wanted to do it. “No pork,” I said. “It’s all turkey clone.”
“I don’t mind sausage,” he said.
“Aren’t you Muslim?”
He shrugged. “I like salami.”
“And wine? Want a Spritzer?”
“Just water.”

We sat on the bench and he told me about when the Russians had come and he’d lost everything. He’d started again. Nineteen cows, a house. Then came the cleansing. “I’ve got nothing left to lose,” he said.

When the fires raged through and water became scarce, he started to cry.
“I have to go home,” he said. “Just for a week. See how things are.”
On the day he left he’d had a haircut and clipped his eyebrows. I gave him some cuttings from the garden. “Their roots are soaked; they should last the bus ride.”

Last week he came by and pressed a small bottle into my hand. “Albanian cognac,” he said. “Made the same way, in the same place, for 500 years.”

Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:49:00 +0000

She’d known him for ages, through work, as it was with all the men that she knew. They’d always got on, talked shop and joked, and ignored any frisson they might have felt. Then they lost touch, at least for a while.

“I’m coming for work,” she said on the phone.
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Take me to my hotel?”

She stood at the counter while he held her case. “Just one night,” she said to the man at reception.
“A double room, Ma’am?” the clerk said with what she felt was the slightest of smirks.
“Single,” she said.
“Then twin beds,” the clerk answered in statement of fact.
She shrugged.

She poured him a drink as he sat on one bed. She reached him his glass and sat down on the other. He raised it and smiled. She hesitated. She thought she’d imagined the back of his hand fleet over her breast as she sat down. She shook her head slowly. “Cheers,” she said.
“I can’t stay long,” he said. “My wife …”
“You didn’t tell her?”
He shook his head.
“Never shop talk?”
He nodded.
She thought he looked sad, just for an instant. Or maybe she was imagining that, too.
“How long are you staying?”
“Just the night,” she said.
“Will you ring me before you leave?”
She nodded.
“I’d better go now,” he said and drained his glass. “Have a good meeting. It was good seeing you.”
Good seeing you, too, she thought.
She watched him walk down the hall, saw him turn, give a wave. She raised her hand limply, and the door shut behind him.

The next day at checkout she phoned as promised. “It was good,” she said.
There was a silence at his end. She waited.
“You didn’t imagine it,” he said.

The list of smells

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:11:00 +0000

When Marcel bit into Madeleine, it wasn’t the taste of her that got him going, it was the scent released by teeth that transported him back to a time of his youth. Smells sneak up on you.

You can list what they do: reek, pong, stink, stench, waft, fleet. You can list what they are: fragrant, sweet, redolent, fetid, gamey, rancid, putrid, malodorous, corky, stuffy and even unscented. You can list how you catch them: whiff, smell, scent, trace. You can list what they’re like: rotten eggs, skunks, roses, frangipani, baking bread, cigar smoke, vanilla and musk. This last list is endless. But if you haven’t smelled any of these, how do you know?

Smells can seduce you. Or they can slam you in the solar plexus and get you where it hurts. Take the frangipani. It has a strong smell. Exotic. You’d tend to link it with friendship. In Hawaii they welcome you with leis of the stuff. But the frangipani also has a thick cloying smell. It can make you dizzy. It can make you feel that you’re suffocating. It can represent all that you wanted to escape when you left home so long ago.

You can make as many lists as you like, but there’s no way that they’ll help you get to the bottom of what smells can do. They’re slippery. My poison, your lei. And not everyone likes aniseed or asparagus soup. I’d throw up on the latter for ages. It was linked somehow to a slap I got from my mother just before dinner. Smells are tricky. They bypass language and go straight into your body, plumb the depths of hidden undergrowths and explode. Nose in on them and you’re lost in a jungle of associations. That might be better list, if you dare.

Sweet dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:18:00 +0000

Dreams are funny things. You go to bed and snuggle under your doona and think you’re at peace with the world. Before you know it you’re walking down High Street, right foot on the kerb, left in the gutter. Wait a minute. It’s not you at all. This is my dream.

Men and women dressed in warm coats and boots, their faces muffled in scarves and caps, walked past me, staring and pointing. I looked around and saw they meant me. No one said a word. The foot in the gutter kept getting stuck in a shiny brown mass. I grabbed hold of my knee and yanked the foot up. Then I saw my reflection in a shop window. I was naked except for goose pimples all over my body and toffee enclosing my left foot like a boot.

I suppose it was the toffee that did it. I’d been melting butter and dribbling in sugar, spinning it around in a frying pan. It wasn’t the toffee I was after; it was a smell I’d been trying to retrieve. I wanted to breathe in that carefree time of marshmallows and apples. Go back to when people’s stares didn’t matter. When nobody fired sticks and stones. When nobody cared if I played in the gutter. All that came later, when I grew up.

In my dream, the goose pimples felt like a cloak. I wasn’t cold and I wasn’t scared. The only thing strange was that sticky toffee.

When I woke up my body felt warm, but my ankles were icy. I pulled back the doona and rubbed my feet. My sheet was speckled with crumbles of toffee. I sighed and reached for the tweezers that I keep on my night table and picked out the slivers from between my toes.

My numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:18:00 +0000

You’re doing it again, and this time by numbers. And what if we go phonetic for a spell? Won, too? Tree? I love trees and that makes me glad I can’t lisp. For. For what? 5? Got me there. Can I rhyme? How about skive? I’ll go German for sex. 7? Has to be heaven, but I really love ate. Just to clarify, I hate ‘ate. Germanic No! then. And can I sneak in a big fat hen? (0 responsibility taken for PC or not 2.)

It’s not really the numbers, it’s the words. I get calls from dead parents since they always come through when I’m not engaged. Hubby loves wearing jungle-green lace, so no more talk of undies, please. Rubber gloves? But darling, I only wear mink, synthetic of course. Basically, though in any pack there are just a bunch of jokers. Did I mean to say that? I’m surrounded by tiles which makes it easy to clean the ice-box. Who needs a fridge anyway? Sox? Much prefer sex, but that’s kind of hard in the washing machine. I don’t live in a house, so that takes care of the bedrooms. I don’t have a handbag, but I do have a couple of very close friends; ok, some are my husband’s. I do not drink alcohol in units. Not everything needs to be metric! I don’t count birthdays and have lost track of parties. I prefer red to blue, orange and green. There’s a school next door, but no one stops at the gate. They all go inside for there’s safety in numbers. Yet crowds really scare me. Has that got something to do with the Comet? I do not cook. Why do you think HE gets to wear the jungle-greens? Sorry, my slip. But then, I’m immortal.

First love

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:31:00 +0000

He donned a brown pair of trousers, a white shirt and a green wool jacket. He glanced in the large gold-sculpted mirror and pulled the brim of his felt hat deep into his face. He left through a back door and slipped out into the streets of Vienna.

He walked through back alleys and for the first time in his life he felt free. Down by the market there was a baker. Through the window he saw her. She was the one. Had to be. He entered and asked for some bread. She pushed a large brown loaf towards him, but averted her eyes. He offered a note. She had no change.
‘What’s all this?” said her father.
“It’s an advance,” he said and then added: “For all the loaves I’m still going to buy.”
She smiled. Warm rouge crept over her cheeks. Her eyes were bright as she nodded a “Thank you”. Her father said nothing.

Her flushed smile stayed with him and kept his heart light as he sat on the bench outside the bakery. He waited and watched. Then she came out. He walked with her through the back streets. The next day they walked by the banks of the Danube. The one after, he kissed her.

State business took him to Budapest, but his heart stayed in Vienna. When he came back after a month, he found the bakery boarded up. The whole family’s gone, they told him. Where to, they didn’t know, they said. But he noticed how they averted their eyes. How they would not linger. He felt so alone.

He found her dead in the hospice. He sat by her bed, held her white hand and sobbed. The nun shook her head and looked away. It wasn’t Mayerling. That was yet to come.

Bangles

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 10:13:00 +0000

The wireless telephone started it all. Now if she could just work out how to bundle her thoughts into those electric waves. They had to be in small packages. Ten words at the most. Something like: Help me. I’m at the corner of Smith and Weston. Or maybe: Help. Floodwaters rising. Can’t swim. If she got it completely right then there could be a GPS thingy. They did it in CSI, so it was possible. She wouldn’t even need an address.

It really was the next step. But it had to be in the right hands, or minds. Like anything technological, it was just a tool. It was what you did with it that was important. But this would be more than a tool. She’d have to build in something that did a scan of the heart. That would make it a bit exclusive. She’d have to work out an algorithm that wasn’t judgemental. Ethics had to be a part of it, otherwise what was the point?

It could all be channelled into a bangle, a sort of wrap-around Velcro thing that you could tuck under a sleeve. Or in places where it was too hot for sleeves, it could even be see-through, or invisible. Yeah. Make it invisible. But the heart thingy would have to work.

When the bangle caught their help cries, it would relay them to a central in each city. She’d have to deal with the politics of the day. Go international. Some countries would make problems, of course, and it wasn’t always the ones that you assumed. But it was early days yet. At the central they could sound the alarm and help would be on its way.

She scratched her head. Telepathy was the next step and she was determined to find a way.

Chicle alert!

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 11:31:00 +0000

I can’t tell a cliché from a chicle, except that the latter is Mexican. I can chew on them both for countless hours, which probably explains why I like Ferdinand. So let me take the bull by the horns all the way to China. I tend to jump out of the frying pan, so here’s my bull story.

Ferdinand is an alpha bull. He loves to smell flowers and is gentle and sweet. One day, he got hit by anosmia and couldn’t smell anything anymore. But he remembered how his horse friends would nibble the flowers he’d get his nose into, and he loved horses nearly as much. That’s why I took him to China. It was tough getting him on the plane to Xi’an, but I dressed him in a pink coat and we went economy with Virgin. They’re not too fussy and even said we could fly to Mars with them once the route was up. But we had China in our sights now. Ferdinand had always wanted to see Emperor Quin’s terracotta army, not so much for the soldiers, but for the horses. He was very gentle and didn’t break a thing. Told you he was alpha.

On the way back we detoured over Mexico. Ferdinand wanted some of that gum. I’d told him that we had Chiclets at home, but he wanted the real thing. Before I knew it he’d swallowed a whole 500gm serving and was well into chewing his cud by the time we landed. He burped his way through immigration and at the scan desk a huge blob of gum in his belly came up. Chicle alert!

Seems Chiclets are on the soon-to-be- banned list and Ferdinand copped it for smuggling the stuff. They took him away and it broke my bleeding heart.

Jungle greens

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:42:00 +0000

He’s strutting down the main drag carrying a black attaché case to match his high heels and stockings. His legs and chest are unshaved. His jungle-green bra matches his suspender belt and panties. Nobody looks at him. They’re not even averting their eyes. They just don’t notice.

My husband dreams in media res, in colours and scenes and wakes up in a sweat before any epiphany. That’s when I say, tell me, and he does.
“Can I have it?” I say.
“You’re so greedy.”
“Ha!”
“What do you do with them all?”
I grin.
“I don’t want to know,” he says.

There’s the one when I gave him a glass with a hairline crack and red wine seeped over his new white shirt. There’s another where the tiles in the kitchen were falling off the wall, and when he tried to catch them, they just fell more quickly. Once he’s given me his dreams, he forgets them, he says.

I don’t analyse his dreams, I just play with them. I can sit for hours doodling and moodling.
“I don’t want to go there,” he says.
“Where?”
“Into that head of yours.”
“It’s no big deal,” I say.
“I can hear little cogs creaking away.”
“That’s because I’m exploring stories.”
“I don’t want to go there. Not with this last one.”

When he was wearing his jungle-green undies, a writing mate had come to stay.
He told her his dream.
“Can I have it?” she said.
“Hey, but it’s mine,” I said.
He looked at us both and shook his head slowly. “Why don’t you just share it?”

My writing mate hasn’t done anything with his dream yet, and my little cogs keep skipping past the jungle-green lace. I guess the corporate drag queen’s on hold, pending a future board meeting.

Happy?

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:08:00 +0000

Hey, what’s this for? The Book of My Face Spice? You already know my name, my age, my sex, my town, my friends; you’ve got my pic, and my accent. And now you ask me all these happy questions. You fire them at me, triggering a cacaphony of smells: warm milk and frankfurts, cinders, doonas, wet stones and slime, and pink marshmallows.

I hear shouts and screams and gentle warbling. Songs and shudders paint the walls.

Einstein’s tongue is licking the fine hairs at my nape as we roll with the pigs in the magic of mushrooms. Giggles like bubblegum burst over my face and clog up my nose. I am dying. I am flying. Memories mingle with flowers and brickbats, soaked in aromas of vegemite jam. And there are the dragons, the ones that I fight with. The red ones, the blue ones, the lizards of the land. And the land, it is dry, yet the waters are rising and there’s a green goo at the end of the road. Or was that your nose?

Rights, you ask? Who has rights these days? Secure rights? Right to security? I hear the gallop of oxen and morons. Of course I cry, and I’m not ashamed. I sometimes do it so much that I pee. Maybe that’s where it lives, in a five n’ ten bladder.

I ask myself many things, but don’t often get answers. I should be so lucky, but let’s not moot the point. You still with me? It’s whiskers on raindrops, and brown-paper geese and all of that’s hard to sew as a costume. But it tastes of sherbet. And it fizzes on your tongue and warms the skin on your wishbone.

You think you’ve got my number, but you forgot to ask if I were happy.

Chubby goes to Yale

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:02:00 +0000

Chubby didn’t want to go to Yale. In fact, he didn’t want to go to any university, even though his parents had been putting money aside against tertiary dreams as long as he could remember. Chubby wanted to get a job, get money, and he wanted it now.

“You’ll get a better job if you study. Education is the key, Chubby,” his mother said.
“You’re so fifties, Mom. And quit calling me Chubby.”
“But you are, dear.”

He heard those words every time he jumped on the scales and craned over his belly to see his weight. Right. He would quit eating. He would go on a hunger strike until they gave in and then they’d have to call him something else. Chubb sounded cool. When he was Chubb he’d go and look for a job.

“I’m going to become a locksmith,” he said when he was 20 pounds lighter.
“Chu-ubb!”
“It’s good money, and I can moonlight.”
“That’s against the law.”
“Gotta catch me first, Mum. Nobody’ll see me in the dark.”

“What are we going to do about him?” his mother said to his father.

“Let him fall on his face. There’s no money in making keys. They’re a dime a dozen at the hardware store. He’ll come round.”

Chubb got a job at the hardware store. Nights he’d go out with his tools and pick locks. He’d never steal anything, but his boss marvelled at the run on padlocks. Everyone in town wanted one. He gave Chubb a raise, and in a few weeks another. Soon Chubb was rolling in it.

One day Chubb came home and said: “I’ve quit.”
“Why?” said his mother.
“I’m going to Yale. Gonna get myself an MBA.”
His father laughed. “Told you he’d come round.”
“How about a triple hamburger, Mum?”

The Package

noreply@blogger.com (Merc) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 10:22:00 +0000

“I’ll take the package,” I said. They could have been famous last words before it all blew up in my face. Trouble was, he wasn’t listening, or if he was, he couldn’t hear me. My voice had got stuck somewhere between my heart and my epiglottis.

The package had been my dream. The way out of the day job. A now or never deal.
“Speak up.”
I choked.
“Too bad,” he said.
I stared at him with my mouth open, but no words came out. It was all over.

I skulked back to my one-window office, grabbed my bottle of Evian and gargled. Then I spat into the aspidistra. Five more years. A life sentence. I would die. Hey, why not? Even that would be better than endless Excel charts that fudged the stats. I’d go down, but I’d go down swinging. Maybe even get famous, though I probably wouldn’t be around to see it. Vincent had cut off his ear in frustration. I’d go one better.

I found out how to do it on the Web. Wasn’t too hard, although I did get my fingers into a bit of a twist with the wiring. I had a brown paper bag. He didn’t deserve pretty paper.

I got all dressed up and went to the top floor.
“About that package,” I said.
He looked at me over the pile on his desk. “It’s too late.”
“Yeah, I reckon,” I said and held out the bag.
He got up. Then everything went black.

I came to in the ward, hands and ears blown off. They couldn’t charge me in that state. Seems that the stats got burned up in the blast, but he got away with just a scratch. I’m on invalidity now. It’ll take time, but it changed my life.