This system for herself

My neighbour described how from being initially scornful of the way, as she said, this young girl who lived in our street walked along -- swivelling her hips in her slender, long jeans, the pale of her wrists turned forwards and her arms moving loosely alternately with her legs -- the whole effect, as she said, of a model stepping out in casual attire -- how, from feeling annoyed by this girl who never seemed to carry any kind of bag (as if she never had any errand but her walk along the catwalk of the street), this neighbour two doors along from my house (near the park) had taken to copying the girl's way of turning the pale of her wrists forwards and swinging them loosely as she walked since she could attest it had already begun to improve her posture -- already she felt years and years younger; much taller; even slim  -- and so now she could see there was a system in the walk (no doubt a secret of the catwalk) and that she was pleased that she had begun to learn this system for herself.

Curious and interesting facts

My colleague recalled how she had once given offence to a young waitress at a café near one of the more exclusive beaches in the Sydney region when she had observed the 'curious and interesting facts', as they were called, that decorated the menu (and were researched by the owner, the waitress had said, on the internet) reminded her of the trivia that was printed on Libra sanitary pad wax paper strips, but once said, she told me, you couldn't take it back.

No way of knowing

As I walked past a young couple sitting out the front of a cafe in the early evening I heard the girl say, I have Crohn's disease, do you know what that is? and the boy said, yes he did, but I kept on walking and so had no way of knowing how their conversation developed from such a beginning.

Deus Ex Machina

Although we laughed when we heard how she had overheard some people on the bus as they passed the cafe and motorcycle shop on Parramatta Road, Deus Ex Machina -- with one of them saying, what was this thing from China, this thing about eczema from China, and the other saying it was only the name of a website (which was how it was written in fact, the words running together, and the dot com dot au) -- the thought that this was what they made of such a sign, and such a sign outside such a shop, was as bizarre as it was also depressing, as one of us said before standing up to leave. For her the word sex had stood out most of all.

And yet

And yet, she added, whenever she has seen identical twins together - or at least people she has taken to be identical twins - it has never been the similarity that she has noticed, but only the near similarity; the difficulty in ascertaining whether it is the similarity or in fact the lack of similarity that she is noticing.

Only an aunt

She told us today about the twin grandmothers she sees with a stroller in her street in the afternoons - that the slight differences in hair length and shirt prints only serve to emphasise the identical cut and colour of their hair, the identical cut of their shirts and even their swaying way of walking, and she can see that their lives until this point have been led in completely different places (their differently printed shirts give this away), and how therefore it is a miracle that two otherwise very separate beings, through the strange workings out of luck and choice and geographical distance, can nevertheless come to this: one of them the grandmother, surely, and the other only an aunt.

For the letting of blood

When it came down to it - out of the two alternative careers that others were suggesting in the wake of the collapse of our industry - two careers we could take up after only a very short period of training - one of us admitted to preferring the real estate option, and the other: phlebotomy, the practice of opening a vein for the letting of blood.