If you stop looking down

Just now, I didn't see the saxophone player who was practising four-note riffs into the pendulous roots of the Moreton Bay Fig when they were mowing the lawns of the park last week, or at least supposed to be mowing the lawns, as there are still those thicker islands of more luxuriant growth, which make walking tricky if you stop looking down.

Even the less used end of the table

During the rains -- when we were still calling it La Niña even though everyone had said that La Niña had already finished -- when the mould grew high on the rabbit's droppings and even the less used end of the table had a milky film -- our neighbours were leaving the shells of their melamine chipboard cupboard components out on the verge (none of them actually all of the cupboard, it always seemed: just the split and rotten parts), like cleaning a mouth.

No person at all involved

Surely, catching sight of someone else's eyes in a bus or train window does not constitute catching sight of that person, we said; the reflection of the projection of their seeing intersects with ours, and ours with theirs; the illusion that is the reflection of the projection. No person at all involved.

The glowing beauty of the world

She pointed out to me the way the dog turd made a perfect soft-edged crescent against the petals of the camellia flower on the verge. Is that why the owner never removed it? we wondered. Not a negligent owner of a dog at all, but one who in the least significant places, sees the glowing beauty of the world.

Neighbour

Every day I walk past where, just three weeks ago, my neighbour installed a white enamelled shutter – permanently closed – over his window, and a perfect moon of grey-primed pine board over the fanlight above his front door. I often see him out walking – usually in long, slow diagonals, crossing a road. His house, I have thought, is the centre of his extended, seemingly purposeless excursions.

I try to avoid him. He is nearly deaf. He has pedantic ideas about the Taiwanese government and the women in Shanghai.

For months now he has been bringing me the mail that the postal worker has been leaving mistakenly in his box although mine has never been left in his. Once he changed the bulb in my car’s left headlight. God knows how he did it without a key.

The dead seal

Obviously it wasn't really a dead and desiccated seal lying along the fence by the building site on Broadway, the sand seeping out of the gash in its side, its fur grown sticky from the rain that runs until it drowns something, day after day after day, and then, just as fiercely, disappears.

Baker's Game Easy

I have an addiction to playing Baker’s Game Easy on my iPhone. Actually it is not so much an addiction to the game itself or to the elation of winning or even the anticipation of winning, but an obsession with trying to locate the shift during a game when I know for sure either that I am going to win it, however mindlessly I play from that moment onwards – or lose; a moment that is experienced as much as a disappointment as a thrill.