To those who are concerned.
They’d cut the water off. I’ve never met whoever a them really is, the collective that assembled to maintain civilisation, fueled by paperwork and a perpetual need to do something for eight hours a day.
I’m sure that they all have names, they often do: Mack; Alice; Jebson; Tim, anything is possible.
My roommate was not one of them.
Ever clever and practical she rigged up a pipe where our water meter used to be; cutting the side out of two green cups Harriet then melted the rims together with a lighter. From a distance her handywork looked just like a real water meter, happily ticking away and living its life as intended; we laughed and laughed that night. But the council noticed after a few days and without even a crack of humor they dug up the water main and left without a word. We never would have guessed that a local governing body could be vindictive, but hey, that’s politics.
On the same note, fun is weird these days.
A man once fired a cannon at Sydney harbour for a laugh and got called a larrikin, that’s hilarious! I book every painter in the yellow pages for a day of work at some address in Glebe and it’s disturbing the peace. After the dust of liturgy had settled, I was left with a $700 fine and a life ban from ever owning a phone book. Maybe the millennium bug’s true purpose was to wipe out our sense of humor.
Stuck between jobs, I’d been spending my afternoon(s) attempting to guess the neighbour’s Wi-Fi password and testing how long I could live off packet noodles before contracting scurvy. Thinking on this I was distracted by the terror of movement known as a pond ibis suddenly taking flight past my window.
Birds like the ibis are proof that existence is a tragedy, they really are!
Their bent craw protrudes from a twice used matchstick of a skull, bespoke almost for their fossicking into the hidden treasures of an open bin. Off–white feathers somehow cling to the bird’s sickly flank with a distaste for its own existence, feathers that look so vile that they may extrude a miasmic plume of mould as the bird stalks along in its nervous gait.
Cutting laboursily through the air the ibis beyond my window tumbled past a tree to then presumably vomit.
They, the ibis that is, are an interesting panoptic reflection to the state of modern society. I mean, in days long ago the bird would spend its time working for its food, becoming strong. Today it has grown manky, the ease of convenience has allowed its disheveled lapse into slovininity. The ibis grew with us, we’re as much a trash pig as they are a bin chicken — I still wonder how they manage to fly sometimes.
I like the Ibis, I really do.
It’s allowed itself to survive. No, it has decided to thrive! For the king of the mud pit shall be a king still and so it is…
Grinding up a St. John’s wort tablet and mixing it into my coffee, I filled up the kettle from the radiator and tried to drown out the noise of the house being renovated across the road. ‘Everything must change’ rolling onward and onward the great wheel of time plows down every moment into the next, sparing no double-brick Filigree along the way.
We make everything too quickly these days, you could build a house in the time it takes milk to go off, seriously.
The Ibis fell.
Dropping from the sky with the same grace a shopping bag uses to float in an estuary, the idiotic double definition of fowl was too dumb to save itself. Fluttering and skipping the ibis landed directly on top of a pigeon, knocking it out cold.
Was this a metaphor for something? Sure, I guess.
-From Alex LeShon
J.McCray
2019
Sunday Short Stories 