‘Go for a flight Icarus, it’s a beautiful sunny day.’
The steady thump of metal upon a different kind of metal reverberated through the small backyard somewhere in the outskirts of Brisbane. Strewn across the anhydrously curated back garden were tools, scraps of metal, and enough lost bolts to restock a bolt factory.
In a moment of huffed silence the sound of a dropped hammer was quickly followed by a gruff bark,
‘It will start, just you watch!’
The sky was warm with the first hints of Spring and only the crows, who perched upon the awning that overlooked the yard, remained brave enough to watch on, knowing that whatever was about to be thrown in their direction would most likely miss–such was the foresight of crows. Karl, the more curious of the two, cawed mockingly at the human who had forgotten to unseal the exhaust cap of whatever she was working on and turned to his friend with the universally accepted gesture of “this will be good”.
…
And so, it was to be another cloudless day of limited progress, Stephanie thought while neglecting the puffy white whips of almost cloud that made the sky take on that pleasant kind of dreamy feel. She hated this kind of weather, it statistically should be a perfect day, one well suited to building, but that ever-droning note of halcyon dripped over everything like honey and prevented her from thinking straight. Why did everything seem so in place? Nothing was, the bloody chassis had been thrown through the neighbours back fence, the smokestack was in the stratosphere, and she was almost sure that she saw a fly-wheel leap to freedom from the engine, hurtle over the roof and become the problem of whatever was in the street at the time.
It was a nice day, that was arguable, but progress never happened on nice days. You heard the distant bell of noise from the city and then became lost in careless daydreaming on days like these. You took a long lunchbreak and had a nap on the veranda, you didn’t do things like angrily start a half-finished motor just to prove a point.
Stephanie had tried to build on stormy days. She fell into a mad flurry of muse-filled creation, lighting cracking over-head, she had felt like Frankenstein laughing with a clear and present madness while bringing life to a scientific marvel. But after spending the next week scrubbing rust out from the engine block and draining water out of everywhere else, she had resigned her creativity to graph-paper while it stormed.
The afternoon did look quite nice though, she thought, not yet cognisant enough to organise a headcount of fingers, toes, and eyebrows. With a pained cough she began to untangle the bundle of bruised ribs and limbs that the explosion had hurtled her into.
The sky was that royal blue you always would see before the smoke haze from the west began to coat the afternoons, making life hard for the asthmatics of the city. An azure vastness of pure infinite beauty, one that Stephanie hypothesised only existed because the sun made space too bright for a moment. How long had it been since she had just watched the sky? She could remember at time spent laying in actual grass instead of a lawn that had the same texture of sand, she could remember a small hill that felt like its own island within the cosmos, she could remember the surprise of a dog’s inquisitive nose bumping into the side of her forehead.
BAH! It was happening again, daydreaming, wasting the work hours that the neighbours couldn’t call the police on her for. She was not going to caught by the petit mal of contentedness again, she needed to do some constructive thinking.
‘See,’ Stephanie was beginning to delude her way to something that was close enough to a point, ‘It started, and although it kept starting until it exploded, I’d still call that a progression from last time.’
‘When Ahab was killed by the white whale, he called that a progression too.’ Stephine’s house mate laughed while attempting to extract a piece of fan belt from her tea.
‘Yes, yes, you read books very good, the seven labours of Humpy Dumpty or whatever. How did it look before housing exploded? Did it sound quick?’
Rolling on to her side before meekly attempting to stand, Stephanie looked to the dark plume of smoke pour its way out from each of the missing cylinder caps. She wasn’t too sad about the damage to the engine, rebuilding was half the reason she built things to begin with, and there were always discoveries to be found in every failure, her main sadness was in the fire department’s threat to ban her from purchasing oil if this exact situation happened again. In the distance she could already hear the familiar sirens of joy-less, Dalmatian-less, firemen.
‘Very quick, it sounded like it had more grunt than last time, and it didn’t break any windows like the time before. Shame about the sheets though.’
Looking at the sad remnants of a hills-hoist and it’s oil-battered load of washing, the roommate sighed and remembered the good times she had spent with a pair of socks that were smouldering alongside an enflamed peg basket.
‘I loved those socks,’ she whispered to herself already beginning to write a brief epithet to their character in her head. Surely there was a good Latin phase for cold was the winter of the lost sock.
‘It really is a nice day, isn’t it?’ Stephanie said, uncoiling the garden hose taking a moment to glare at the crows who looked to be having too much of a good time on the roof of her Veranda, ‘what do you think about pressurised gas for the ignition cycle?’
The afternoon was golden, the smell of dried eucalypts mingled with the warming of a nearby barbeque and swelled to the underscore of Brisbane suburbia. The world seemed polished tonight, whatever radiance of the day had begun to return from the land and with it lifted sprits upward reknitting the joy of a lost friend, the cradle of a mother’s arms. Many would miss the beauty of this perfect hour but for the lucky few held in its shadow, no other piece of dirt could be as important as this one.
‘Well Icarus, I think you should start to call me Ishmael.’
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 