The push and the pull

The canvas captures three shadowy figures on the back seat of a car. Big, middle sized and small, they are seen as though the front seat passenger has just turned her head to – what? Issue a reprimand? Check if they are asleep yet? In the distance, through the back window, two sets of taillights recede while the hint of headlights beyond the straight illuminates a stand of pines and the corrugations of a farm shed.

One girl offers a direct gaze, the smallest of the three. She’s off centre, edging away from the child on the left who leans in, her hand stretching forward to the unseen front seat passenger. To the right, the oldest is in half profile, her forehead resting against the glass as she stares out into the darkness.

Shona steps back to view the canvas. It’s almost there but not quite. Not quite right. It’s still just a memory of the familiar nighttime ride home from their grandparents’ town, hemmed between Fiona’s wriggling and squishing, and broody Bron, whose stabbing right elbow would catch her in the ribs accompanied by a low, hissed “Move over!”

Shona drops the brush into water and walks to the kitchen. She drains the teapot into her cup and steps outside. The hens dust bath in the vegetable patch in late afternoon sun which has turned the bay to sequins. A tui calls to its mate in the swamp gums.

When Fraser left her, the noise in town was unbearable. Without the masking barrier of his music playing in the next room, the neighbour’s steady stereo bassline was relentless. She missed the doors opening and closing downstairs, the rattle of kitchen preparations and the waft of spices, humming in the shower along the hall and the discarded running shoes. Overnight, there was only other people’s dogs, children, lawnmowers, music.

The cottage felt like a homecoming from the first viewing and she consented to sell the family home without hesitation.

Fiona was horrified. “What will you do all the way out there? What if something happens? All by yourself… it’s just a knee jerk reaction. You’re upset – why not wait a few more months…”

“He always was a prick. I never liked him,” Bron jabbed. “Move on. Make a fresh start.”

A cool breeze rattles the flax leaves. Shona wraps her paint stained shirt more tightly around her body, and returns to the warmth of the house. She throws another log on the wood burner and takes the brush from the jar, wiping it on her shirt.

She knows what it needs now – a puzzle, a premonition. She loads the brush to gift her younger self the hint of a smile.


Rosemary McBryde

Puttin' on the Ritz

Anthony takes the AirTrain from the Hotel to Howard Beach Station where he transfers to the A Train, then the L Train, then the 123 Uptown to Broadway. From the station it is still a long walk on hard concrete through thick crowds of grim humans to reach ‘Harry’s Shoes’.

     Have you seen the well-to-do
     Up on Lennox Avenue
     On that famous thoroughfare
     With their noses in the air?

There are too many people, too many buildings, too many miles of canyon-like road to negotiate.

Anthony mutters to himself, ‘My awa is Oruarangi, my maunga is Pukeiti …’

He weaves his way through the crowds.

     That’s where each and every Lulu Belle goes
     Every Thursday evening with her swell beaus
     Rubbin’ elbows …

It is almost impossible not to rub elbows.

At ‘West Side Stationers’ – 2620 Broadway (corner of West 99th Street) – Anthony buys a note book and pen, green with little stags’ heads on it.

He sits in ‘Starbucks’:

‘Everything is water. I slip and slide and get stuck in sodden earth. It is a grove. The silence is defined by the constant, irregular drip of water from high branches and the gurgle of the tide on the rocks. There are the footprints of ducks in the mud and, as the light fades, frogs chorus. On the fence – the decomposing body of a pukeko.’


Barnaby McBryde

Rats

It was time he moved out, moved on, generally got his life reconstituted. New job, new house, new relationship – certainly an end of this current madness.

The one good thing about working in a laboratory where they tortured animals without end – and as far as one’s psychic and spiritual well-being there had to be some significant compensation – was that in the lunchroom he could sometimes talk to the scientists, the psychologists, the experimental ecologists about their ideas.

It had long been known that, given access to a lever that dispensed cocaine, laboratory rats would push that lever without cease and snort coke until they died a seemingly miserable death. It was an irresistible addiction.

It took an imaginative scientist to wonder if that was really inevitable. What is the life of a laboratory rat in general? – a small, sterile cage; no elbow room; loneliness; a lack of social interaction and family ties; endless sameness; endless lack of conformity with his or her own nature. And more – one scientist had constructed cages that measured the pressure that the rats’ feet applied to the floor. That was for use in experiments to measure how much pain the rats could endure but it revealed a coincidental fact – when a human walked into the room the rats started walking on tiptoe.

The imaginative scientist built what she called a ‘rat park’ – soil, plants, sunlight, dark, tunnels, space, nooks, unconstrained social interaction, freedom … and then, the cocaine lever. The rats tried it once and then got on with their lives. It was time to move on.


Dhiraja

Elbow Room

I just need time alone, away.

He told me these exact words on the 20th of August last year. When I asked him where he was planning to go, he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in dismay. The rest of the drive back to mine was silent after that, excluding the radio in his car that blared out a steady beat, pounding in my ear.

When I looked at him that day, he was different. Unrecognizable from a distance, with a haunting darkness and looming melancholy over his face. His eyes never lit up, and a frown stained his face eternally. I was upset, disappointed, in rage with what he had become.

But I didn’t say anything to him.

“Hey,” he called out as I shut the car door. “I’m going to be alright, I just need some time.”

I didn’t say anything to this. I couldn’t. One look into his mellow eyes and I thought he was going to leave and never return, and I was ready to forget him. I didn’t want to see him ever again. After a year, I had my fair share of tears and anger and disappointment, I was done with constantly being physically sick and tired of worrying.

So when he arrived back at my front door on the 21st of August this year I screamed. Whether it was purely from joy or panic, I am still unsure. I was ready to yell at him and ask where he’s been, slap him and hug him. I didn’t dare answer the front door or climb down the stairs.

“He’s back!” My mother flung my bedroom door open, overzealously, expecting me to be excited. When I turned down her offer of seeing him again, she gave a pitiful smile and proceeded downstairs with pursed lips.

He came back the next day, and the next, until it was late September. After weeks of attempting, my mother forced me to see him. She told me I could just greet him and decide whether or not to say anything else. I agreed and made my way downstairs.

I thought I was going to yell at him and interrogate him mercilessly, until I actually saw him.

How he looked from the stairs, playing with his car keys and humming, made me smile the slightest bit. I wanted to cry and laugh, run up to him and literally jump for joy. Seeing his face made me realize how his freckles had multiplied and the gleam in his eyes had emerged once more. Displaying his pearly white teeth, he opened his arms, timidly, and waited for me to go up to him and embrace him.

In a few hours, we found ourselves inside his car headed for a frozen yogurt store.

“I told you I’d be alright,” he clicked his tongue. “I just needed some time.”

“And a hell lot of elbow room,” I smirked his way. He laughed, throwing his head back.


Katya Tjahaja

July

It's heartening to receive stories every month from our loyal band of writers - and others send an apology or a promise to write soon.  Spread the word, as more writers are welcome any time.  This month, as the days are short and we spend too much time inside, see what you can do with "Elbow room".
Stories of 300 - 500 words (or so) to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com.  Happy writing!

Fifty buck jump

Mike, or ‘Mad Mike’ as he had been dubbed by the locals for some time, was not known to be a man of science. To be honest, science hadn’t been one of his strongest subjects at school but thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the ease of access to great learning tools such as ‘Youtube’, weird and wonderful projects were a click of the button away. He’d spent months planning the event right down to providing enough food for his four cats and buying a second-hand motorhome that would also serve as a base for operations.

“I bet you fifty bucks you can’t make that jump,”  Rosita had declared, waving little more than a couple of fives between her fingers although he would have given that up for a kiss. That was probably why he had been staring down the makeshift wooden ramp knocked up in an afternoon at the back of his parents' place, wondering how the hell he was going to get his bike over the three forty gallon drums that loomed before him like a mountain range.

He rubbed the half circle scar on his forearm, left after it caught the edge of the last drum. Mike thought of that day and how he received neither the fifty bucks or the kiss. He thought of Bill, Stedman and Priscilla, friends at college who had convinced him the moon landings were staged, JFK was an inside job and that jets were emitting chemicals to control the population. He may not have got the girl and just because he was a taxi-driver living out of a mobile home, his moment in the sun was about to be recognised. After several months of design, construction and welding, the ‘Flat-Earth’ steam-powered rocket would finally prove that the world was flat and the images the world had been fed were a giant cover-up.

With the steam at the correct psi, the weather clear and no overhead air traffic, Mike released the final tether to the earth and immediately he was thrust back into his seat. Sensing he had been shooting upwards for what seemed an eternity he prepared to eject the canopy and float back to earth while he could enjoy the view and declare his mission a success.

Blackness.

“Do you think we should do it?” asked the one on the left of the other with the joy stick in his hands.

‘I’ll see what they say,” he said and spoke into his mike to invisible people responsible for directing traffic in the sky.

He nodded to his colleague and pulled back on the joy stick in preparation for guiding the craft into the darker blue from the lighter hue. The patient, now awake, was advised to look out the window. His horizontal view was the vertical image for his two medical travellers, his eyes straining out to the horizon where he could just make out a gentle curve.

His scar ached.


Andrew Hawkey