Strange shadows cast themselves a good leading role at being indiscriminately meaningless against the dampened stress cracks that infected the walls of a tiny suburban Sydney apartment.
Even stranger shadows were lurking, possibly waiting for a rainy kind of day where their presence could hardly be explained at all.
The day was drawing dim and there were those shadows, who through some bizarre synergy, believed that most days were indeed far too bright and were currently dreaming up a plan to fix this.
The list mechanic’s expression changed. A short period of time visibly floated by followed, almost immediately, by a much longer one. Meanwhile, the mechanic had moved from in front of the repaired lift and gone somewhere else – possibly home.
As pointless as it all seems, everything imediately became a convincingly consistent shade of black which conveniently signalled the end of this day.
Quite a few hours later, new day had surely begun. The shadows were back.
This morning was just like any other summer morning. The sun was cheerfully annoying anything that may have had a slight hangover and was also busily producing insidious glare on the roads of Sydney. A gentle breeze rushed over ground, shaking hands with preciously trimmed leafy shrubs and the small portions of manicured green that accommodated them. The summer flowers danced in synchronicity with the busy morning traffic, the city and suburban birds sang songs of captivity, the cicadas screamed a cacophony of death chants and the spider webs glistened wet with polluted street nectar.
The first thing the lift mechanic remembered about this morning was being yelled at by his digital alarm. The actual source of the alarm had proven elusive until he discovered which end of the bed he should have been facing, corrected it, and then subdued the alarm by giving it a swim in the fish bowl at the head of the bed. He immediately flopped back onto his bed and covered his eyes from the world and his particularly less than delightful condition. When he finally submitted to the task of uncovering his eyes, he peered through this pain heavy slits long enough to see a fish bowl and a miraculously functioning digital alarm. Reassured by this guarantee of Japanese technology, he lay motionless while his brain and body told him how upset they were about last night.
A blurry vision of the digitally expressed time – medium red numerals – began to fade in and out, back and forth, gently wafting through his damaged neural network.
7.34am and a fish began to float swimmingly around and around – lulling him and soothing him back to sleep. Suddenly, he leapt out of his bed and onto his unimpressed feet. The rest of his body caught up within a millisecond and remained, collectively, just as unimpressed. He was just about to be told how really pissed off his viscera were before he distracted them by instinctively taking another look at the clock. This time it cheerfully and perhaps a little sarcastically – as only a submerged alarm can – displayed 7.45 and a fish.
“Fuck, shit, hell”, and other panic related exclamations streamed one after the other as he stumbled through the previous week’s discarded clothes, walked blindly into his wardrobe door and only after nearly pulling the whole thing down on top of himself, wrenched the door open and clutched at a new set of clothes.
While the mechanic was busy groping and tugging at things on coat hangers, the phone decided to ring. And so it did. A faint ringing could be heard coming from some point in the room. It was obviously well camouflaged and the mechanic was quite sure he didn’t have time to look for it. He allowed the phone to ring and ring and ring… until it only got as far as “ri” and was silent. He would have done well to answer this call because it would have saved him a lot of bother. Oblivious to this, he continued to search for his Wednesday uniform.
To be continued… or burnt.
A short Story
-
AudioIrony
- Posts: 889
- Joined: Mon Mar 26, 2001 4:00 pm
- Location: Mood Ring Umbrella Satchel
