Bird on wire
... microfiction and excerpt from novel in progress
For instance, the radio had been left out in the rain, left on replay, pounding out the soundtrack to Leonard Cohen, and Angelo sat on the wet plank of a half-finished garden table and lit a cigarette and listened to Suzanne takes me down by the river. A babykookaburra flew in and sat on the rocks opposite and looked blankly into space. He reached into the fish pond and scooped one of the woman’s goldfish and threw it onto the ground. The kooka scooped off with the fish and there was a sound like indrawn breath, from behind, after the fact, and when he turned, Prize was observing him with uncomfortable intensity. “The radio was left out in the rain,” he said to Prize.
“One of them birds fished a rubber band on its beak. It died.”
“Haven’t you got anything to do right now?”
“No.”
“Where are your friends?” he asked, and she shrugged. “I need a cheque... when is your mother back?.”
“Sometime.” And when he raised his brows. “Sometime in the future.”
He heard the sound of Jorge’s ute. They would have to put off working on the cellar and focus on the verandah section. “Do you like kissing?” Prize asked. And said that her dad did not want her to kiss anyone but her husband. Where was her dad, he asked. He had gone back home to Pakistan, she said, but she had to stay with her mother. So the woman must be the natural mother, he thought.
“Do you tell lies,” Prize asked.
“Why do you?”
Well, she said, the newspapers
thought her father was a liar and now everyone from her country was a liar.
Which was fine, she said as an afterthought, because her father WAS a liar,
a big one. He was not going down that path but said in a kind voice that
he had lied to his wife once. Not a biggie. He had told her before they
got married that he liked kids. Prize put her foot on the scaffolding and
started to climb up. “Well it was silly of her to believe you,”
she said from a lofty height. Hey, he started to say, and then he shut up.