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One
Short Stories
Sollai Rhys
Copyright © Sollai Rhys 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication are fictional and any
resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
front cover by Shona Nunan
photography by Kevan Halson
Copyright © Sollai Rhys
www.sollai.com
Stories
My name is not Fat-man
Mona
A Trip through space
John - a portrai
Man
wwwiii
The One
Murky tradings
Hey
Front liner
My name is not Fat Man
Dedicated to the Great Britain Pub
The wind gave way to a cold calmness in the night. His skin, hot from playing baby foot in the warm confines of the pub, rejoiced in the wide fresh air. He was in the beer garden, a brickwork ground giving way to short courtyard walls about nature strips; tall trees reaching, lumping some of the brick work with its roots, veins into the soil below.
He sipped at the pub’s brew, rightfully named “Piss”, then took a longer draft to get it over with.
The night looked infinite in its beauty, he described the stars in his head uncreatively, like diamonds, so finely cut….
He was drunk. His head floated dumbly around his thoughts. He congratulated himself on every sober act he made, like a step without a fall, a sentence with an ending and clear precise wording. Then he would strive for more limitations on his brain and less he’d care for. A drug for the now. It took him no special places, time wasn’t infinite, he was just dumber and he cared less. He loved more openly and laughed too loudly. He was a man, a shark, his Mohawk aiming him to his delights like a bow's arrow.
“Bang!” He’d say when he went again inside to commune with his friends. “Bang!” and he’d be there like a magician reappearing like the best of them from some clever trick. “Bet you didn’t even know I was gone!”
“Bet you I did”
“Oh?”
“Indeed, I missed you.”
He went on a wander about the pub and met a man who’s 21st it was. He was incredibly fat, bearded and hairy in an orange sort of way. His hands were like fat children's hands and to our most prominent, fit, strong, handsome hero, he was a waste of humanity. Fat boy talked like a nerd and was embarrassing to be about. This smart arse thought he was wonderful.
"Oh look, its my 21st!"
Yeah just look at you fatty, you’re a waste…. When it all comes down, when society runs out of mod cons, and you're left with a fucking spent battery, where will you be? What’ll keep you alive? Why not die now? You’re a waste! A fuck! A waste of a fuck!
“Happy birthday to you.”
Our prominent character looked down to his hands and glimpsed a half felt image of a spear in his grip. Some clever, simple device created to end life for food, feed him so that he might live another day to kill and kill again.
~~~
Mona
Dedicated to Aidan
Sunday drove by on the wheels of a hot pink Ford car belonging to some old-school value. The sunset was like long red cuts in the darkening sky. Wind hit her hair.
The fair and attractive Mona sat in the driver's seat alone, wishing she wasn’t, while every man wished they had a woman like Mona until they actually had a woman like Mona.
The trees were uniform and attractively paced along the quick moving road.
Sea breeze had dried her whipping hair. She certainly had nice hair, though. Blond like an 80’s rock star. Did I mention she was beautiful?
The car sounded meanly treated. It had an air of unkempt freedom but it suited her bizarre unchecked character.
Tom’s house was about five minutes away and she hoped her tape would finish before she got there as stopping it mid song was not fun. Some upbeat guitar music played that made her wanna dance. Well, soon she could. She’d see Tom and grab him around his slightly sweaty, flannel collared neck, hang from him sultrily and dance like the sex goddess she was. She’d make him forget about his brow heavy wife and not complain about the seat being left up after him in the dunny. Why that annoyed people was beyond her. The world was a filthy place… She wasn’t sure whether the seat being left up made a cleanliness difference or whether it was just inconvenience… Well, the world was often inconvenient too. Whatever. Mona liked happy things. She looked at positives as a rule and frowned upon rules. She liked Tom too. He had the ‘Mona smile’ though. They often made jokes about it. Mostly because he claimed that he smiled more when Mona was around. It was true too. Mona had convinced herself.
Tom made Mona forget things. He also made her remember things. She forgot that she had never loved anyone seriously enough to attempt a life with them and she remembered that perhaps a dedicated love was a possibility.
The car turned into the driveway, a long one. It didn’t have a gate and the surface was stony hard dirt, flanked on either side by empty long dead grass fields. Summer heat.
She was make-believe and the man waiting for her, Tom, wasn’t. He had quite a rough appeal. She liked it. He wasn’t rich and liked beer too much to be. She felt like a slutty 80’s chick with holey stockings, lustfully intruding in on his space and his life and his wife! She wasn’t.
It was messed up. Tom’s wife had been dead three years now, but the two of them, too afraid to commit to each other, sought the way around. They had a secret affair like they’d had before Tom’s wife had died. It suited them. It was wrong and evil, but so was their mentality. They listened to rock at clubs and she wore hoop earrings and baggy men’s motor bike jackets of the cheapest leather. She wore too much makeup like she’d done when they were young, and he got tattoos and fought when blokes talked to her. He also drank too much beer and had to do exercise to keep off a beer tummy.
He’d been working on his motorbike, a real hog. It was rough as guts, dusty and muddy under the guards, but it was his stallion and she was his woman and he was her man. And Tom was all man. His heavy arms, tattooed like a tribal warrior pulled her out of the open top of her modified machine; modified by himself with his old grinder to take off the roof. She clung to his neck, hovered there easily off the ground with one leg bent horizontal in her joyful surrender.
He said “Hey babe.”
And she said “Tommy!”
Acadaca was going berzerker and a little too loud in the back, but its sound spread out in the openness of his property and couldn’t wreck the communication which had ceased now anyway as they kissed grossly, slobbery. Monster passion.
He lay her half across the hot bonnet of her car. It was getting dark and she wondered whether they’d do it there. He kissed and groped and, before I write too much, this middle aged couple living an old dream found themselves exhausted in a twisted mess of linens in the stinking ruin of his room.
She was falling asleep upon his broad hairy chest, spent.
“You have to go love. Soon.” He whispered.
“What time is it?”
“She’ll be back soon.”
“I wish your wife worked all night.”
“Me too.”
“Run away with me!”
“I owe her more than that Mona”
“I know… I understand.” She crawled back, sliding off the bed, landing in her clothes… Maybe her clothes. What if they were his wife’s? She felt a pang of guilt as she thought of his wife. She’d be coming up that drive soon. She’d make him dinner, wonder what he was hiding. Would she blame the Ford's tracks on her imagination or just bottle it up. What would she say to bike and tools not put away as Tom was usually so careful to do.
“I’m sorry Milly.” Mona whispered. Was that her name? It was. Mona had never met Milly. She only knew her as the absent presence that kept the house clean in a way Tom couldn’t possibly achieve. She’d seen the coffin lowered into the earth from afar. Watched Tom cry his heart out in the company of a loose string of friends and family who she’d never meet. Mona had also carefully forgotten that memory to keep the guilt, for Milly’s respects. For Milly’s respects, Tom could go on pretending Milly would come home and that he could continue disrespecting her with the Mona affair. His disrespecting affair was his love for her. The only time Milly was ever alive.
The pink Ford backed up, turned and drove quietly down the driveway, seeking the long voyage home. Taking the back roads Milly would never see Mona’s car upon.