Differing obsessions

In the class she had some trouble trying to explain to her partner that the work she wanted to do in the future was to design prostheses (she no longer liked ordinary drawing, she was saying, it now made her bored), but when her partner explained his own unattainable dream, she couldn't understand him either -- it being a question, not so much of English vocabulary, as of differing obsessions.

That was only last week

It was a smell, she told me. She'd been standing in the shop, just waiting around because the afternoon had been slow, when a smell she had smelled at the time of the accident slid into the space -- whether in through the vents or the lungs of the change-rooms -- such a physical, palpable smell, as if thick with scurf from the tyres, the brakes, the airbags expanding, or even the rent in the dashboard as the hot metal dark had belched from the body of the car. She could no longer stand or sit or talk or think. The boss sent her home for three days, with no pay of course.

That was only last week.

Getting pulled from below

At the very end of the concert a laundromat only a few paces away but around the corner from the building exploded into flame -- but this, as we all discussed afterwards, had happened without any of us noticing. Not even when a fire truck passed us, as we stood on the footpath delaying our departure from this, the final concert, did we think to expect that the fire was somewhere close by. No-one expects to see the actual fire, I heard someone say when we went round the back and our throats began to catch on the orange lit smoke that was funnelling upwards from where we had just been and then, in a matter of minutes, began to seep through glass and brick to fill our houses with a smell that should have been scalded shirt but instead impersonated the floury ash of a gutted gumtree that was nowhere nearby.

And meanwhile, quietly, white suds running down the gutters into the stormwater drain, quivering in a tower for several seconds and then getting pulled from below.

In a single, short experience

It was a hot breeze, but it was also cold, I explained to him on the phone. The wind was blowing my hair all over my face and this made it hard to notice what it actually was. I need to be still and calm to distinguish a wind that's hot from one that is cold in a single, short, experience.

Clearly impossible

I heard them disagreeing about the woman on the bench who was conversing in a loud drunken voice with a bearded man on a cafe stool: one saying the fact that the woman was without feet or hands and yet still able to smoke and even talk as she was smoking was something that, curiously, heartened her; the other that the continuing existence of this woman, who was also substantially toothless, and whom she saw week after week in a similar spot on the street, not so much depressed her as made her fearful because she often imagined the woman following her as she went up the hill to the station in the mornings and calling out her name -- and then wrestling her to the ground in that blank part of the underpass, which was clearly impossible, and vile.

With only a slight bewilderment

I heard how it was sad: how instead of interminable lectures about the Pritikin diet, Rife's discovery of excitable pathogenic spores, Jesus in India, the supposedly misleading Kyoto Protocol, the danger in fluorescent tubing, coffee, natural gas, pasteurised milk, the need to reverse and then eliminate poverty, droughts, osteoporosis, religious misunderstanding and to aim our nuclear weapons at the sky for the comets which are coming, he sits in his chair and listens with only a slight bewilderment to the kind of conversation he would never have understood in any of the past decades of his long long life, and when someone leaves the table, he shuffles on after them as if afraid to miss an occasion for something --  but at least, as she said, these days he is able to joke.

Two houses along

When the rainbow lorikeet feeds its adolescent young in the tree two houses along, it's like a cat is hissing or someone with a leaking lung is trying to speak.