‘If’, uttered Glen, ‘it is acceptable to carry a small bag of faecal matter while walking next to a dog...‘
A pause, while Glen awaited interjections. None arrived. He continued.
‘Then why do we frown upon the man cupping blood near a park bench? Or anyone gently swinging a bucket of semen at a bus stop?’
Point made, Glen was poised to receive any retort.
But the train carriage was empty, so victory was Glen’s.
Neil was the first carpenter on the building site. But Neale wasn’t far behind. Always early to a new job. Always. Scope the place out. Wow the client.
‘G’day’, said Neil. ‘Name’s Neil.’
‘Neil’, accepted Neale, ‘I go by Neale.’
Neil leaned against a fence post. Neale backed awkwardly into the tray of his ute. Or it could have been Neil’s. Same make, model, year.
Wendy emerged from the house, weatherboards rotting, verandah sagging. Bloody knockdown, thought Neil. As did Neale. Both poker faced.
‘You must be Noel’, Wendy said to at least one of the two carpenters in front of her house.
‘Neil’, said Neil. ‘Neale’, said Neale. Simultaneously.
‘Common mistake’, said Neil and Neale. Also simultaneously.
There was some confusion, and Wendy remarked upon it. She’d get to the bottom of it, but she needed a job done. Soon as.
Neil was happy to oblige. As was Neale. Neither was too aggressive, but neither could lose the work.
‘Would you go halvies? Do it as a team?’, said Wendy, sniffing a better outcome for the same price.
Neil looked at Neale. Neale looked down. First at his own steel capped toes. Then at Neil’s. Then at Neil’s knees, calloused from a life of kneeling.
Neale’s gaze rose gradually. To Neil’s tradie shorts, stubby little pencil sharpened. Measuring tape securely spooled.
To Neil’s sturdy chest. Wiry, powerful arms. His thin lips, yellowed teeth. Once broken nose. Sunglasses tan line. Neale remembered to breathe.
Neil returned Neale’s gaze, and for a moment Wendy wasn’t there. The twin utes were fluffy cloud, and Neil was floating high above the knockdown weatherboard cottage. Neale circling him in the sky.
‘Righto’, said Neale. ‘Righto’, said Neil. Simultaneously.
And they got to work.
You can enter the bathroom while I’m showering.
You can leave the door wide open.
You can screech for no apparent reason to attract attention to the bathroom with the door open where I’m showering.
Even when my Mum is visiting.
You can do all of this. I can take it.
But when you scrunch the bath mat up a little bit so it’s not nice and flat and lovely and dry for when I get out of the shower... that’s when you devalue me. As a human.
This is me. I am human.
Oh – hi Mum.
“I’m looking for a picnic rug”, said Mark with a smile. The department store lady offered no empathetic reaction whatsoever.
“For you?”, she blurted, not having seen a male person in the homewares section in her eight years of service.
“Yes.”
Mark had not planned for this conversation. Were certain picnic furnishings aimed at certain types of people?
“We’ve only got pink ones left”, said the lady with an air of termination.
“OK”, said Mark, defeated and already backing away.
It was months before Mark would leave the house again, and when he did, it was with his picnic rug. Having had to plumb the depths of the dark web to find it, Mark’s rug was befitting of his gender. It bore a repeating pattern depicting penises snaking around beer cans, and he only loved it because he had been radicalised by incels and no longer loved himself.
‘I’ll pack’, said Glen, his voice intentionally imbued with masculine energy.
At the checkout, Jeremy looked up, shocked. His eyes darted downward from Glen’s close cropped hair to Glen’s groceries, parading like infantry on the conveyer.
Cashews and lean mince. V8 juice and rat bait.
‘OK’, said Jeremy fearfully, as he scanned the barcode of a bag of unwashed potatoes.
Jeremy hoped like heck that Glen knew what he was doing.
It’s a truth self evident that people treat other people better when the other people are wearing bandaids on their faces.
‘Mother’, whimpered Rick, ‘you told me to dance like no one’s watching’.
‘Of course, dear’, said his mother.
‘If I feel self conscious even when dancing when no one is watching, does that mean there’s something wrong with me?’
Rick shifted uneasily in his seat. His mother smiled knowingly.
‘Yes, dear. It does.’
Claudine entered each aisle in a state of anxiety. She was consumed with the obligation of duty to offer a smiling nod to the man who had helped her retrieve an item from a high shelf some minutes earlier.
Over four subsequent meetings since the high shelf retrieval, spaced about 90 seconds apart, Claudine’s gratitude-and-humility face had lessened in its sincerity.
Claudine knew that the duty she owed to the high shelf retriever would last through to the end of her retail experience. It was onerous. She would honour it.
Heinrich emptied his pockets at the behest of Brenda, the matronly airport security lady. A single, packaged prophylactic tumbled from his hand into the grey plastic x-ray tray.
A moment.
Brenda looked away. Heinrich looked away too, but a different away so they weren’t still just looking together.
A moment.
Heinrich knew that Brenda knew that packaged pocket protection meant one thing. Not that Heinrich had lain with another. But that he hoped to.
Brenda gently nudged the condom across the smooth surface with her index finger. Breathless.
I saw a man putting his jumper on while a woman went in for the kiss. The jumper came down around both their necks, so they were bonded by this love jumper. And I was going to send it in to be used in the opening titles of Love Actually but they finished making that movie in 2003, and I wasn’t recording it.