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August, 2010

  1. the notes

    August 31, 2010 by Mathew Ferguson

    the notes said i loved you first and i loved you last and i loved you most but lucy pretty much ignored them while the rest of the house freaked out because that crazy riverbank strangler was killing people all up and down that yarra that summer and we were close enough to the river that you could walk down there in about five minutes

    andrew said not to worry about it but then he got a beer and drank most of it and you could see that mimed worry movement said what he really thought

    simon said fuck it and then rhymed bucket with it and then just when everyone thought he was going to say pluck it he said chicken instead and you can see it’s obvious what he was thinking

    sarah came around later and everyone was smiles until she handed lucy another note that had been stuck in the split weatherboard next to the front door

    the note said you loved me first and lucy dropped her half-completed papier mache on the table and said marisol? and rushed out of the house on a wild crosstown ride to this dentist girl she had known in high school

    marisol denied it was her writing the notes then got all coy and flattered but lucy broke her heart for the second time by saying she:

    a)      didn’t feel that way now;

    b)      had been going through a phase

    there were no more notes after that so we figured it had been marisol but then next summer a bunch of people got murdered on the riverbank and they’d all been getting notes so maybe it was just a coincidence but whatever


  2. fairly certain

    August 31, 2010 by Mathew Ferguson

    it was possible that for their entire marriage they hadn’t heard what was said but rather what they wished was said or wished was thought or maybe what they once saw in a movie or read in a book or maybe heard in a song that one time

    george was fairly certain he’d never said he wanted lucy to cut her hair but she insisted he’d said he liked it

    lucy was fairly certain she’d never said she’d wanted george to give her the silent treatment for six years and then hang himself in the garage, his dumb feet scuffing up old back issues of Time magazine


  3. Thoughts Astray

    August 8, 2010 by Mathew Ferguson

    Ian’s mind had begun to run astray at a cocktail party four months ago.  A girl from his wife’s work had been talking when he started to wonder how many flat double A batteries there were in the entire world.  He followed this line of thought until it detoured into the number of spoons ever made, and then to how many pairs of chopsticks there would be in France, a country notorious for holding on to its own culture.

    In the following weeks after the party his mind began to offer up more random thoughts, as though it was plucking them from some deep vault.  Some thoughts he ignored, like wondering if people who wrote bad movies knew they were writing bad movies at the time, and some he followed, like the fantasy about owning a lawn-mowing business and solving local crimes.

    Eventually Ian would think of nothing else but stray thoughts.  Then another stray thought came: if all you think are stray thoughts then they are not stray.  It’s just what you think.