The room where they slept was covered with suicide graffiti. Shlom wrote “I wish I was an orange” on the wall with black marker. She had seen this two years ago when a boy she was going out with scratched it into the skin of a banana at her parents’ house. At the time she had laughed madly because she was madly in love with him. Later, when she was just in love with him she had laughed less when he did it again. When she wasn’t in love with him it was hardly funny at all.
‘Short stories’ Category
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Hardly at all
April 2, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
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Black boyfriends
March 24, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
Emma and Sarah and Lisa talked about getting black boyfriends every now and again but this talk didn’t lead anywhere and the plans and schemes they devised were always missing a key ingredient or got put up on the shelf to be forgotten or were written in faint grey lead pencil so even when they got the scheme down it was illegible.
Sonya put up with the conversations for well over six months before she got so frustrated with their inadequate planning that she decided to take action and right soon.
First it was the internet where she found all these resources on meeting your goals and then how to actually set goals and time-limited goals and SMART goals and using a group to motivate you to complete your goals and then she hit the wrong key and found time-limited goats and SMART goats and how to buy a goat and how smart goats were compared to dogs.
The goat websites were way better than the goal websites and their forums filled to the brim with either fake-cheerful people or sad-fake-cheerful people or plain mean people who would tell everyone on the forum to stop whinging and just do it dammit. The goat websites were friendly and everyone there was so welcoming and the tips and tricks they gave were of actual stuff you could do, not just mental think yourself rich time-wasting.
For a while Sonya forgot all about Emma and Sarah and Lisa and why she’d even started down this path and dived as deep as she could into the goat websites until she finally drifted across to where to buy a goat and how to look after a goat at home and goat appreciation clubs. She wanted a goat so badly and really wanted to take the leap but the very helpful nice people on one of the goat forums told her to go to a goat appreciation club meeting first and so she restrained herself from clicking that buy button and took herself along to the meeting.
The goat appreciation club members were welcoming and happy and soon she had a biscuit and a cup of tea and they were all sitting down to watch a quick film on training your goat to do tricks. As the lights were turned down by Bert, the club president, Jake sat down beside her and took a bite of his biscuit.
Sonya glanced at him and saw he was cute and black and also a member of the goat appreciation club and the black boyfriend plan came crashing back so she whispered her name and he ignored her and five seconds later the get-a-black-boyfriend-and-a-goat-plan roared into life with step one being to accidentally brush her hand against his in the darkness as Bert’s trained goat on the screen jumped through a hoop with a newspaper in its mouth.
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The mean girl
March 24, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
Lucy had stood behind the mean girl on her first day of school and because their surnames were so close together she’d stood behind her right before the graduation ceremony too. Back when they were four years old the mean girl was mean then and then fourteen years later she was exactly the same; the essence of mean grown and distilled and still the same ugly spirit but in a bigger body.
Years later at some forgettable job, Lucy overheard the new guy David talking about the job he’d come from and he’d been talking about his mean girl and said her first name and Lucy immediately asked about her last name and it was her, all these years later, still being mean!
They got out their dossiers and compared notes and sightings and the way she looked at you like you were an insult to the generation of ancestors who came before you and back and forth the conversation went until the topic drifted to flirty things and those flirty things drifted to invitation and that invitation was actually a date and then they went out for eight months.
Sometime later, Lucy suddenly thought about the mean girl for no reason at all and so she looked her up online only to find she was married and looked nothing like she remembered and in fact had huge breasts but was quite slim. She thought back to high-school but there was only the bland marone uniform and she couldn’t get any idea of breasts developing in secret and for a moment, just a moment, she considered that maybe the mean girl had been mean because she actually had huge breasts and must have been dealing with a lot of boy crap and perhaps that –
Wait, no, she was mean little shit when she was four and definitely didn’t have huge breasts then, Lucy remembered.
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Literal
March 24, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
For a few weeks it got rather literal in the house and one manifestation of this was the salt and pepper chickens on the table were joined by salt that was to be rubbed in wounds. Simon was delighted when that one turned up but then despondent over time because there were no wounds and by the time he’d heard James had cut himself shaving it was already three days later and throwing the wound-salt at him was nothing more than a waste of good salt.
The upper reaches of the kitchen filled with a few clouds and their silver linings and Lucy got Tom to hold her chair while she thwacked at them with the broom but they dodged out of the way and hung out behind the abandoned juicer way up on the top shelf. Tom suggested the vacuum cleaner to suck them up and they spent a fruitless twenty minutes looking for it only to find a single nozzle attachment and a torn postcard with London on the front of it.
The house missed the end of the news when the drowning man flashed into existence in the tub, flailing around and shouting. Bales of straw blocked the bathroom door as they took turns shoulder barging it but by the time they forced it open he’d rescued himself and climbed out the window, taking half a bar of soap with him.
Near the end there were birds and bushes and Tom writing calculations on the relative value of this one vs those two, based on weight, size, wild/domestic , the probability of catching those ones over there with a huge bedsheet and how much French restaurants were charging for birds at the moment. Some gift horses turned up in the backyard snickering and snorting and pretty much chewing up anything green and stomping all over the place. It was practically impossible not to look them in the mouth because whatever horses were taught by their parents, not chewing with their mouth open wasn’t in it.
There were broths and cooks and Sarah came home from work and declared the broth seemed fine to her but Tom said it was way better a few hours ago before all the other cooks turned up and then Simon called him a hipster.
When the clouds began to break up, tiny sparkles of silver drifting down and coating the juicer, Lucy said right this is it, we’re nearly done and there was this enormous crash as a giant seal careened through the house, smashed down the back door, dodged a horse only to flip his bike on a tree root and face-plant right into this massive bowl of cold rice.
By the time they’d found out the meaning of that one, he was gone and weirdly, so was another half-block of soap.
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Who is this God person?
March 24, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
A lot of people said that if there were demons there must be God and possibly angels but Lucy said this was triple grade-A bullshit mixed with grade-B lies and a dash of truly low-quality grade-D blind stupidity typical of our dumb-ass species.
The demons had no idea what they were being asked (“Who is this God person you keep talking about?”) and one of the Popes said this is because God is so opposite to their nature they cannot even conceive of Him and Lucy said this was garbage because enemies always know their enemies.
James thought they weren’t demons but probably aliens who happened to look precisely what all our myths and legends had said and weren’t the myths and legends damn-near proof that they’d been visiting the Earth for centuries and only now had decided to stay permanently?
Lucy thought this was retarded and even wrote that this was retarded in her private journal but she didn’t say it to James because they had this unspoken intimacy going between them that only came out when Simon wasn’t around and sometimes it was James holding her hand while they watched TV and every now and again it was kissing on the sofa and most of the time it was confusion and wondering what the hell were they doing.
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Sarah’s drunken chickens
February 28, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
sarah’s drunken chickens pecked and stumbled around the yard while michael and lucy shared a bottle of vodka sitting down – a bad move, really, because as soon as you stand up, whoosh, down you nearly go
one of the chickens, hugo, he got all sombre and sad and kept quoting obscure poetry and slipping into latin
hugo’s great but he gets a few in him and mistakes totally depressive for deep
but then again, so do most of us
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Self improvement
February 28, 2011 by Mathew Ferguson
tom and lucy bleached their teeth, eyes and earlobes and then lucy said hey we need to lose weight so we look thin and pale but that would involve a lot of exercise so they used some of jame’s morphine and the surgical kit lucy bought at a market instead
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Halo
December 23, 2010 by Mathew Ferguson
I sneezed and my halo jolted off and rolled down a drain. Maybe lost forever. I called the sewage people and they said it’ll probably come out in a week or so. I was welcome to come down and search through the huge collection of halos they’d pulled out. We give them a good clean the man assured me. No thank you I said as I hung up. I’d rather go without.
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This is very old writing. Could be from high-school, I’m not sure. I can see I had already started my religious mockery.
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Proprietary eponym
December 16, 2010 by Mathew Ferguson
the purple skirt never failed to delight and mirelle used to great effect, gently moving even when standing in place so the skirt mirilled and ordered attention
that her name had been hoovered and yo-yoed and zippered and themosed and heroined didn’t matter to mirelle – she’d simply turn up at head offices and a mirilling later would walk out with a royalty cheque
pop-culture magazines piled up their chips and went all in on mirelle and tiber becoming a couple, confident that with tiber being the originator of tibered (to couple for the first time with the intent of becoming a couple) that it was simply a matter of time
ha! mirelle and tiber becoming a couple was never going to happen
not with her jamesing and he eved most of the day it wasn’t
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diamond dogs
December 16, 2010 by Mathew Ferguson
diamond dogs flooding the streets barking in the morning and lucy yells shut up you stupids out the window but the dogs only speak chinese so they bark some more and run around crazy pulling plants out of the ground and chipping off bits of themselves against fences
james brings a shard of diamond inside and buries it in a planter box filled with dirt
a few minutes later a diamond puppy digs its way out as lucy yawns in the doorway, hair messed up artfully, pretending she naturally looks that way in the morning
you’ll be feeding it she says to james but a minute later she’s schmooping it, delighting in new puppy scent
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