Peanut Butter

Maahnoor, on her way from Wellington to New York, stayed with Gerard only for a few days – she had sort of asked, sort of demanded. It was an unreasonable thing to ask and she behaved in her usual unreasonable manner: she complained about the cold; she complained that he did not have a clothes rack; she criticised the art on the wall and the colour of its frames; she bought a lamp and put it on the coffee table; she stalked in one evening and snapped off, with an imperious flick of her fingers, the BBC news he had been listening to.

She hadn’t changed a bit.

There was no way that she would put up with drinking whatever tea he had in the cupboard, and so, when she departed, she left behind a half-empty box of her Himalayan Ayurveda Ashwagandha tea.

*

What had the questions in the census been?

14: Is your dwelling damp?
A damp dwelling may feel or smell damp or have damp patches on the walls, ceiling, floor or window frames.

15: Can you see mould in any part of this dwelling that, in total, is larger than an A4 sheet of paper?
mould (mildew) may grow on the walls, ceiling, floor, doors, window frames, curtains or blinds..
Yes – always
Yes – sometimes
No
Don’t know.

Gerard had spent a long time cleaning the house before Maahnoor arrived.

*

It seemed to Gerard that the left-over tea would keep better in a jar than in its exquisite blue box. He washed the empty peanut butter jar: ‘Pic’s really good Peanut Butter – no salt – Crunchy – Aussie’s legendary Kingaroy nuts fresh roasted and lovingly squashed in Sunny Nelson, NZ’

Did life get weird even at that point? Did the light change imperceptibly, did time begin to fluctuate and slow, did his stomach start to spin even then?

He picked the corner of the label – it seemed to be one of those labels that would peel in one piece if you were careful. Ashwagandha should not be kept in a jar with a peanut butter label on it.

Gerard slowly peeled the label and things definitely got weird. On the back of the label, visible before only from inside the jar, were words:

Right down the end of Lonely Street

You’ll find the Stone Hotel

One punter watching rugby on TV

No one to hear you crying

No one to call your name

Out loud, falling down, out loud

No room here called Self-pity
No room called Desire

And no name to be mentioned in your grief

Your love affair is dead and gone

Your deal has been done

Your tears are falling fast and falling free

You took a walk down Lonely Street

You booked yourself a room

And now it’s loss you’re keeping company

No one to hear you crying

No one to call your name
Out loud, falling down, out loud.

Dhiraja

On not shooting cuckoos

One of the things Maximilian loved about himself above all else was his impeccable sense of timing. Vital for a professional percussionist, it was also an art he was perfecting elsewhere in his life.

Of late, Maximilian had been refining his entrance to the concert platform, just a little after the rest of the orchestra. Standing at the stage door, Maximilian waited as the rank and file zigzagged through the empty chairs, sat, shuffled, picked up their instruments, played through the tricky phrases in cacophonic disharmony, sucked their reeds, adjusted their tuning pegs, tightened their bows, and aimlessly rifled through the music on the stand. Only once stillness had settled did Maximilian sweep forth, his golden locks glinting in the lights as he ascended to his position behind the gleaming brass kettles of the timpani.

Finding this too easy, Maximilian had upped the challenge by waiting until he glimpsed the conductor hovering in the wings on the other side of the stage. Once he had held his beat so late that the audience had burst into spontaneous applause as he entered.

This night, Maximilian arrived just as the lights dimmed and the rustling and whispering in the audience subsided. Imperious on his swiveling stool, Maximilian regarded the scene before him. There was violist Baxter, still scrabbling with his rosin. And bassoonist Fleming with the wrong music on his stand. Not Saint-Saens’ great Organ Symphony but Frederick Delius’ First Cuckoo of Spring and Summer Night on the River. What an idiot…!

Maximilian’s blood ran cold, and his heart ka-thumped in time with the paradiddle of the conductor’s patent leather shoes, now stepping on to the podium. He was early, a whole work early. The hardware of the percussion section and the organ console were deserted. He alone inhabited the outer reaches of the orchestra.

What to do? Maximilian was caught in the glare of the lights; he could neither slip off stage, nor slide gracefully to a crouch behind his instrument. Could he feign a part, a gentle thrumming on the skins? The baton rose and Maximilian knew that a whisper of timpani in Delius’s pastoral lilt would shoot the gentle cuckoo right out of the sky.

He sat, staring straight ahead in as regal a pose as he could maintain for twelve long minutes, enduring the conductor’s puzzled glare as he stood with the whole orchestra to acknowledge the warm applause.

Maximilian slunk from the stage at the conclusion of the concert, shrugging on his coat and hustling to the foyer so he could pour out the whole sorry story to his wife.

Oh! the shame, the mortification!

She hadn’t even noticed.




Rosemary McBryde

The man in the yellow shirt

Totara Park is like a painting by John Constable – a green, pastoral idyll; rolling, grass-covered hills interspersed with trees and woodland; placid cows graze. The trees are perhaps a little darker in hue than the oaks and beeches of blessed Albion – the dark khaki of the vegetation of an antipodean archipelago – with a smattering of white manuka flowers.

Totara Park is one of Manukau’s premier parks and stretches over 216 hectares. The park has something to offer everyone, with a wide range of facilities and activities to enjoy. From this entrance you can take an easy scenic walk, horse ride, or bike ride along the historic bridle trail. Please share with care.

Spring, like a timorous suggestion, can be felt. Rabbits scamper at the pasture edge and tui swoosh overhead.

‘There’s no nice way to put it: he got fucked up’, the New Zealand Herald reported.

It has been a long, wet winter; the ground is waterlogged and pugged with the hoof prints of cattle, each footfall a stinky little lake in the sward.

The sign says ‘Keep to the trails’. Walking off the trail, a man sinks in the muddy slopes, his boots and the bottoms of his trouser legs soon caked with slimy mud. The cows squelch as they walk, and, when they pick up speed, gouts of water splash up around them.

‘A herd of “possessed” cows attacked and injured a man in South Auckland’s Totara Park on Sunday afternoon ripping hunks of flesh from his body.’

Scattered beneath the puriri trees are fallen, crimson flowers like the reminiscence of blood.

‘The cows were rocking back on their hind legs and raining down on the victim who tried to free himself from the attack.’

‘Blood makes noise’, Suzanne Vega sang – it was an odd thing to remember:

But blood makes noise
It’s ringing in my ear.
Blood makes noise
And I can’t really hear you
In the thickening of fear.

Once you are down, and time fails to move at all, the only thing you hear is the pounding of blood in your ears; and a strange, bright light fills the air as the great shapes move above you and the pain explodes.

Barnaby McBryde

Red and Grey don't make Yellow

The ridiculous looking machine sits in front of me, its wheels no bigger than a side plate and when fully inflated looking like something off a bloated garden wheelbarrow. I think about the HMX500 BMX bike I had wanted for ages and the daily pleading that would be met with a ‘We’ll see’ from Mum. Ultimately, I did get a bike; a pinky-brown thing the same colour as school radiators with a carrier and no crossbar. It was effectively a girls Raleigh 20 (second hand); however despite the heavy steel construction I later found that it could do satisfactory jumps and even better skids.

“So, are ya gonna get on?” Dale asks, jolting me back to my present surroundings of the small neighbourhood park as he stands beside the throbbing machine, the two-stroke motor emitting hideous blue smoke.

“Ah. yeah, sure,” I reply trying to recall the stop and go mechanisms. Right-fast, left-slow. Got it - I confirmed to myself. Maybe I’m not so sure I’m ready for this; it wasn’t all that long ago that our fun consisted of making an aeroplane cockpit out of cardboard boxes joined together, a transistor radio and curled telephone cord forming the imaginary coms to the tower. Now I am about to step onto a real, ‘live’ machine, even if my Raleigh 20 might have dwarfed it.

I can feel the wind around my ears, I’ve got the hang of this. What was I so worried about?

“I can’t stop!”I shout in mild panic to my friend not that I can see him. My right fingers are attached to the throttle like PVA glue holding my digits together by a second skin. I feel I’m getting faster and now I’m faced with my first serious choice of my ten-year-old life. I don’t fancy dying until I have at least three paragraphs of achievements to place in the paper.

Coming up very quickly is a wooden power pole on my right and on the other side, a corrugated iron fence. Decision making not being a strong point, I lay down the bike at speed in some idiotic form of surrender. Neither pole nor fence have won, but neither have I. My left hand a casualty of the footpath, gravel embedded into the open palm wound and my forehead chipped and grazed. Blood makes a curious colourful addition to the drab grey pants and jersey of the Main school uniform.

I can’t yet decide if this is going to help or hinder my chances of obtaining a bright yellow BMX bike.



Andrew Hawkey


BONUS STORY

The boy who jumped off a cloud

Once upon a time there was a 8 year old boy that wanted to jump off a montain because he likes to go and amagine that he was in a reall clowed his pearince wur very sand and lonely so they drove up the montain to see if they could find the 8 year old but they didint see him so the pearince Jumped too and then they found the 8 year old boy we went back to the car and drove back home but there was a ginat rock in the way and the cars enjen was brokend. then we had to call the towtruck to come. It took 10 minute then the totruck came they hocked the hook. The Pearince and the boy wur safe. they lived happely ever after.



Cole Hawkey aged 7 (and a half)

Time Stood Still

His voice was a clear indicator that something was terribly wrong.

Whether it was the slight tremble in his tone or his restlessness in shifting his weight, she could not decide. He kept on talking, hastily, spitting out words quicker than his heartbeat. He was loud, but she did not understand a word that fell from his lips. It was the language, perhaps, that made her body stiffen and a lump form in her throat.

He was talking too fast, and she could not fathom why.He knew she was here; he knew she was going to be here. And never before, in their two years of friendship, did his lips move so quickly. With a forced laugh, though no one else could know that it was unnaturally coming from his belly, he ran his fingers through his hair and paused. He was looking right at her.

For a minute, time stood still.

It was as if no one else was there, his eyes never tore away from her. Her eyes never tore away from him. He stumbled on his words, muttering a quick apology and offering his signature warm smile before straightening the paper in front of him. Fixing his microphone, although it was perfectly in place before, he glanced up.

After his short pause, he spoke softly and slowly, making sure that she could comprehend everything he was saying. But she did not want to know how grateful he was that everyone had attended the event. She did not care that he felt honored to be invited as a guest speaker. She wanted to know what he had said.

So when he came down from the podium, she asked him.

“Minor mishaps with my initial script, a bit too long, a lot of unnecessary information that I had to skim through-“

“But what did you say?” Her words, still vaguely unfamiliar to the new tone of the language, were clear to him.

“I told you, it was the original script, just rushed through.” He tried to reassure her, but her eyebrows stayed furrowed. He sighed heavily and gave her shoulder a soft pat.

He walked away from her to shake hands with someone she did not know. The man leaned over his shoulder to whisper something, making the both of them smile and nod. Just as the man opened his mouth, he started talking.

“May I introduce you to Alaiza?” He gestured for her to come over. She shook hands with the man, despite the initial shocked expression and pursed lips that were quickly disposed of when she came to them.

“Hello, Alaiza.” The man said calmly. He made an apology and excused himself, claiming to greet someone who had just arrived.

“Is it because I am Arabic?” She finally asked him. He wanted to reassure her, she could see it, but she did not let him. “Because I am a Muslim, that is why you gave a different speech.”

“Alaiza-“

“And someone told you to change this speech. You did not talk about friendship, or unity, or acceptance! You said what they told you to say!” Her voice trembled, tears brimming in her eyes as her face grew hot.

“Be quiet, people are staring.” He stepped closer to her, whisper-shouting.

“Let them stare, let them hear us. I do not care. I am a proud Muslim, and you are a coward.”


Katya Tjahaja

August

Thanks to those who are soldiering on with stories - hopefully some of our other contributors are still reading, thinking and scribbling.  For August, the Artistic Director has offered this inspiring idea:  Time stood still. I hope this gets the creative juices flowing for the next 31 days.

Stories to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 31 August. Happy writing!