Fluffy Little Freak

A Monologue

It’s not like I ever liked that dog. I won’t miss him. I didn’t even choose him, if I wanted a dog bothering me all day and eating my food I would have got something strong. A muscled monster of a thing to scare everyone away. A Pit Bull. My uncle had a whole horde of pit bulls, always took them to the dog fights on saturdays. I was only a kid then and the fighters scared me, alright. The bitches didn’t though. They had dull, tired eyes and saggy bellies. They had the same scars as the fighters, but their fur was always falling out in tufts and caked in dust. 

This one though, my mutt, had chosen me. He wasn’t really a mutt either, he probably had a pedigree longer than the train line we traveled together. Some nosy little person told me that once. He said my mutt was a pomeranian, from Germany, and that he was really a very good example of the breed. One of the best he’d seen, perhaps. What did I care? All I knew was that this fluffy little freak had turned up one day, dragging a genuine leather leash behind him, and never left. Well not until a few days ago. He could be an amusing little thing, sometimes. He looked so comical with the puffball face and those tiny little ears. He made me look ridiculous, but he was pretty good for company. But I don’t miss him. Why should I? I was fine before he came, on my own. 

On the Scale of Elephants

This morning I was in a small boat, a makeshift raft of sorts, floating in a silty sea. The water slapping the sides of the boat was a sludgy yellow, the sky bleached of colour.  I was in a sulphorous valley, sunk beneath reality. There were ruins sunk into the sea, towering walls of concrete casting shadows that spread to the horizon. These were the ugly survivors of a past world, and disappointed with their fate, they glared at all below them with a vitriolic menace. Lumbering under the concrete monsters were creatures of a whole different material. They were giant, elephantine, tortoises wading through the watery caramel ocean, with legs so long their feet trod the dusty sea floor, with their hard-shelled bodies seeming to bob along the surface. Watching them through my sleepy, poisoned eyes, I wondered when the last time they had seen their own feet had been. 

There was a man with me, I had a feeling he was bearded, but I could only see him through the corner of my eye, perhaps he was not there at all. He was telling me that these tortoises had destroyed the earth, that they had existed since prehistoric times and were nearly the only beings alive today. 

"You and I, of course, don't count. We don't exist at all, never have," he said. I tried to think about this, but felt my mind haze over. It is quite difficult, after all, to conceive of one's nonexistence. He said it wasn't the tortoises' fault, they were just so clumsy, and at their size they couldn't help knocking over buildings, unsettling venomous pits in the earth's skin that wiped out civilisations and ecosystems with mysterious, ghostly coloured vapours. 

The poor monsters had sad faces: great watery eyes framed by drooping wrinkled skin, their heads swinging low on heavy, trunk-like necks. It was easy to believe that these creatures did not die, and had seen every atrocity the world had to offer, through all the histories. I could only feel sorry for them, wandering through the wasteland they had created. 

Raspberry Rapture

It's like an image, refracted and distorted.

There's me lying on the concrete verandah, in the late afternoon sunlight, as bright as midday, but from another angle. My eyes are closed and I am facing the sun. One tear has squeezed out of one eye and is rolling down my temple. My hands are lying flat, palm down with the freshly applied polish blistering on my nails. Raspberry Rapture. It is supposed to smell like the summer fruit but instead smells sickly sweet and chemical-ly, reminding me both of childish cosmetics kept alongside my Barbie dolls and high school chemistry classes. Reminding me of things I have forgotten. We had to describe things in those classes. We felt it was important to pin down the exact colour, we would forget what the colour meant, but felt triumphant in our exactness. Fuchsia, grass green, salmon pink. We would say one chemical had the aroma of a $2 dollar shop, another of caramelized bananas. 

My hair lies beneath my head, I would like to say fanned out, but I doubt it is. I cannot feel where my hair ends, or where it spreads exactly. I can only feel where it starts, and that is no use to me. It is dyed pink and purple in patches, I'm still not sure why. I wonder if I will become the girl with brightly coloured hair. I know how it works, how people make judgements based on one glance, quickly apply labels with a glue that takes some time to wear down. 

Some people pick their own labels, with great care. Peeling them off a preprinted sheet with a manicured fingernail, smoothing them down on their left breast, just above the heart. I never did this, instead I kept my ears pricked with avid interest to hear the labels others had chosen for me, hoping to see who I really was, through the eyes of others. But these were always devastatingly superficial. People would say about me, "she has legs," as if most people don't, or that I was the tall one, the skinny one, the quiet one. From these descriptions I hardly seemed like a real person, more a fiction of girlish adolescence.

I said some people really do believe that men and women are different species. He said he used to think so, before he met me. 

She's a Romantic

When did you start to stop where you are?

She's got a nice guy, and she's turning him wild. 

She thought that high school would never end.

She wore bows in her hair and cut her hem short.

She said she'd try anything once.

She chooses not to see the irony.

She's searching for prairies filled with soft grass that reach to her thighs, for houses with hidden rooms and secret pasts.

She wants to live forever and die a tragic death.

She has no pictures in her head, but there are words in her heart.

She's busy writing love letters to people she's never met.

I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter

Dear Hannah,
                     This is a list of all the stuff you like about the world. Please remember it next time you watch a scary movie and convince yourself that the world is full of hate and evil and that cute little bird singing outside your window probably wants to eat your unborn children.

1. UNICORNS! Remember the time you read an article on the Human Centipede and panicked and asked your boyfriend to tell you something nice and reassuring? The only thing that worked was the fact that unicorns exist. Well that's why this list is necessary.

(Handily, this picture - I actually typed photo first because this is clearly documentary evidence that unicorns do exist - contains FLOWERS, a RAINBOW and a BUNNY. I just killed four children-eating birds with one pictorial stone!)

If you're worried about unicorns not actually existing physically, then perhaps you could think of narwhales? Or possibly even Manatees, the connection is a bit tenuous but you just have to think about it: manatees live under the sea, so do narwhales, narwhales have horns, OMG so do unicorns. So you see, manatees are a lot like unicorns. 

Manatees are also a lot like mermaids because they have fishy tails and apparently cradle their young close to their chest like women do. And to 15th Century sailors deprived of many months of intimacy I'm sure a manatee looked a perfect vision beauty. Yep, Manatees are awesome!

... I was writing a list wasn't I? 

2. PUPPIES 

Look how happy you are! Puppies are positively prelapsarian. (remember you like ALLITERATION as well) They are also ridiculously cute. 

3. FRED ASTAIRE AND GINGER ROGERS  (also Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone and Cole Porter, Bing Crosby etc etc etc)

Make yourself a cup of tea and listen to some music from the 20s and 30s. Listen to it in french if you want, on a summer's day. Or listen in english and plan to take classes and dance like Ginger.

Seeing as I accidentally included my four main points in #1, this list is almost over, but there are plenty more things to make you happy:

4. Cherry blossom
5. Old couples that look completely in love
6. Summer
7. The way Cassie from Skins says "wow"
8. Chocolate
9. Opening up every single spice jar in the pantry and smelling them
10. Agatha Christie novels

I honestly think you're sorted now.
Much love, your past self

Zombies!?

My brother gave me some new music today. It's the kind of music that makes you feel like you can't hear anything. It's the sort of sounds that play in your head when you're running through a burning city. A city you've never seen before. But one that feels like home.

The last time I felt like this I had rushed onto a dance floor with a glass in my hand and man's arm around my waist. I had begun to hate this guy, but I wanted to dance. As soon as we were absorbed into the bodies, my two friends just in sight, I realised that there was no sound. There was nothing besides my own voice, which was a poor muted sound, as quiet as a mouse, strained with the urgency of screams.

I looked down at my hand. The glass was gone. The glass was falling to the floor. I watched it spin slightly, the glass shatter and fly as it hit the ground, the glinting brown liquid make a wet seeping pool, spreading with the speed of a cobra. I tried to tell someone, but suddenly I wasn't there any more, the world had shifted and there was no glass on the floor, never had been.

Why were all these people dancing with no music? I didn't understand but soon I was dancing too, held up by the crammed dance floor itself. Moving because it would be impossible not to.

Ok, I started writing this a few days ago and have no idea were I was going. I think it had something to do with zombies. It was going to be awesome. Too bad.

OMG *sneeze*

It's springtime!

There are good and bad things about spring. On the good side there are flowers and sunshine and a little more warmth generally. Personally there is also the triumphant feeling that I have survived winter with only a small amount of post-traumatic stress. I hate winter and I love summer. If I had the money I would probably swap hemispheres every six months and forget the strange appearance my toes take when I've forgotten to wear socks and then forgotten that my feet are cold because I can't feel them anymore and they look a bit dead and lifeless, actually.

So spring is good because spring means the end of winter, but it's also bad because winter isn't going to let go without a fight.  Here in weather-schizophrenic Melbourne, winter puts up quite a valiant show, occasionally overpowering the blue skies with violent downpours, turning nice romantic walks in a sunny park into... well, icy romantic walks in a cold, wet and rainy park. (see that pun? I kind of did that by accident and then laughed when I noticed, so it's staying there and I'm sorry) This happened the other day and my boyfriend made a tent out of his own body to protect me from the rain. It worked surprisingly well; I didn't even notice how badly it was raining till I touched his drenched back. But what better season than spring for chivalry?

Another reason to dislike spring is hayfever. It's not a problem if you don't get allergies, but I do. Every itchy-rashy-sneezy one there is. I spend every spring in a haze of watery eyes and conversations interrupted by sneezes. My mum says I look like kitten left out in the rain when I have a cold or something similar, but I think she's being nice, that's a far too picturesque image to use.

I watched an episode of Inspector Rex once (I used to watch it every week before he went to Rome and it just wasn't the same...) Where Moser met a charming young lady who sneezed when she got excited. At least that's what the subtitles said, they were speaking in german so maybe she said something a lot more saucy and the translators were having a joke on us poor Inspector Rex viewers. I hope not, because I sneeze when I get excited too, but I think it's mainly coincidence.