Instalment One Hundred and Eight

Starting out I was lost, I never knew where to go or which way to turn. After bad decisions and a number of failures I became convinced life was a maze. A huge, complex maze but a maze to be solved nonetheless. Once you know you are in a maze however, it isn’t such a challenge, you start thinking about the problem like it has a solution. I’m in a maze I will make choices to solve this maze, you think. Carefully look left and right, weigh your decisions and head toward your goal. I was vigilant, I was alert and I was focused, life would not defeat me, I would conquer it. However the more I progressed the clearer things became. There were no hidden passages, no different paths. Success did not flow from choice but from perseverance. My decisions were illusions, the only thing that worked was persistence. So I trudged on. And on. Forever round corners, another birthday another corner. Still I pushed on. Only when I reached the centre, a dead end, did I see life for what it is, a Labyrinth. Without the energy to return to my beginnings, finally I lay down to rest.

Instalment One Hundred and Seven

By far the easiest and quickest way to insult the intelligence of a complete stranger is to walk up to a crossing they are already waiting at and push the button yourself.

That one small action says so much with so little effort.

It says, just from the brief glimpse I have had of you, based only on your appearance and how you hold yourself, I have made the decision that it’s entirely possible you are mentally incapable of understanding, let alone operating, simple pedestrian signals. So I am doing it for you.

BANG!

BANG! BANG!

Ridicule hits the button hard, three times while looking me in the eyes.

“Yeah, I had already done that,” I explain to him.

“Oh, well I heard if you press it again it thinks more people are waiting and changes quicker,” he replies.

“Firstly, it doesn’t think anything,” I say, “and second, if you believed that were true wouldn’t you keep on pushing it?”

Instinctively, his hand shoots out again.

BANG!

“I didn’t know if you had pushed it,” he says.

“What, am I waiting for a gap to run across?”

BANG! BANG!

“Well you know… I didn’t want to risk it,” he replies.

Instalment One Hundred and Six

Refrigerator sat in the corner and hummed. This was done to annoy me. The room would be silent, I would just be falling asleep when…

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

What? I would enquire.

Nothinngngngngngngngngngngngngngng.

Why do you do that, randomly make that noise?

It means I’m workingngngngngngngngng, came the reply.

After a while Refrigerator would randomly stop the humming.

Sometimes Refrigerator would start flicking the light on and off.

It was my fault, we had no privacy.

We lived in a house without a fourth wall, I had broken it early in the lease while drunk, exposing us to each other, the elements, the outside world and to anyone reading this story.

Is it a fridge or a real person? a reader asked.

I haven’t decided yet, the worried author typed unsure how this story got away from him so quickly.

I squeeze the pillow to my head in an effort to dampen the chatter. When I get too tired I forget things.

How this all started. My name.

“You’re a character,” my father would say when I was in trouble as a child.

You are a character typed the relieve author.

You are Character, he retyped as correction.

I’m Character I mumbled.

Instalment One Hundred and Five

The dead had risen. They were coming down Main Street before anyone spotted them. The first scream should’ve been a warning, by the time I was at the window that scream became a chorus and I knew something terrible had happened.

Mind you, I was busy with my own problems.

I had been up half the night sand-bagging the house before coming to town to protect the shop. The flood waters hit around noon. Sandbags at front and back doors, the stock on tables and the electric pump running to bail out the water. My first mistake, the power went, so I was down to buckets and brooms to save the shop.

It was dusk when I heard the screams. The flood waters had come from the south of town through the cemetery, a cemetery that serves five counties.

Coffins are full of air, polished pine and oak makes for a fine sea going craft and sitting water softens freshly dug soil.

As the last month of funerals bobbed down Main Street, carried by rising flood waters, the Town of Resurrection gather at our windows to farewell them a final time, each worried that we would soon join the parade.

Instalment One Hundred and Four

After years of name calling, cursing, in-fighting and outright hatred, we all finally sat down in a room to sort out our differences.

Yesterday Me, Current Me and Future Me, eye to eye at last.

I was supposed to be the mediator between Yesterday Me and Future Me, to keep it civil, but I had a horse in this race too, Yesterday Me is a screw up and I wanted to make a few points myself.

“Look, firstly no yelling. I’m tired because somebody decided to stay up watching ‘just one more episode,’ til’ three in the morning,” I said.

“Ha. You two are both as bad as each other!” Future me yelled, “You do the same thing again tonight.”

“It’s not like YOU get anything done,” Yesterday Me shot back at Future Me. “I will do the taxes on the weekend, you say to ourselves, and do you do it? No. You sit around on Monday morning blaming me for not doing something on Saturday, when I am hung over because mister live in the moment here had a huge Friday night.”

“We need to get organised,” Future Me sighed.

“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Yesterday Me say in unison.