Paper Cutouts of Little Girls

Helter

It never seemed so strange to negate something so strongly opposed to what we detested. It never seemed strange the day he ironed the table cloth so we could use it to protect our bottoms from the wet grass. We did not even consider that to be an odd curiosity. We had met a few times. He told us all about himself, and not because we asked. At the time we just figured he was awkward, and didn’t know what to talk about. Perhaps he did not have experience in social situations at all, and this kind of situation was a particularly strenuous one.

He told us all about himself, and occasionally asked questions about us, but he never waited for the answers. We did not particularly like talking about ourselves so we thought this a god-send, should there be a god. We never noticed the difference between spell check programs demanding that god be spelt with a capital letter. We just accepted it as cultural difference, not cultural demand. You never stayed.

They kept breeding. He kept saying that it was an accident, and their god did not believe in termination. Even as she faded away he began to make alternative arrangements for the continuance of his gene line. As soon as she passed, he would bring in the other women and their abundance of children, eventually moving to a large amount of land that he had purchased some time after the war. The women loved the way he spoke, the way his eyes dilated when he gave them their orders for the day, the way he would grab their arms if his rice were to ever touch his sauce. The way the bruises would remind them of him when they were forced to sleep in one of the many cold tents that littered the property should he have chosen another woman for the night. They never questioned it.

Isn’t it strange how we’re all sitting in the same field, how we will look at the same fucking cloud but in no possible way will it ever look like the same cloud to the person next to us. Everything is from a different angle. Even out at the property she died on, the clouds looked different to her.

They asked them to leave, and we fought for their ability to stay. To live the way they chose to live. Never once did we wonder why the amount of house calls we made in regards to maternity never quite measured with the amount of children we would see running around the property. Or not running. We were virtually pathetic, lost in the picnic blanket and those stupid fucking clouds.

He asked us when our birthdays were. It was a question we could answer, because it revealed nothing of what we were. Just how far away we were from our original residences. He asked us when our birthdays were, and on that day, we received a list of names we could not recognise. It was a way to a dream where these children once resided, a nothing time, another day.

He liked to light things on fire some days. When the sky was particularly clear and the smell of spring was excruciatingly unbearable. It was two years after the last birthday we celebrated, and that day, in the bushland, where there once was a property burdened with the lives of un-noticeably oppressed fallibles, he lit our picnic blanket on fire. And we lay, and looked at the clouds. Suddenly the smoke obscured our perception and one tiny cloud appeared to me as it did to him, and we were unburdened.

I Am A Woolgatherer

I went to a beach and there were many boats with people drinking on board. I was jealous. I knew it would be easy to recreate a collapsible boat so I left to make plans. Somewhere along the way I did something or saw something bad. A memory card was sent to me and had scratches on it. I had my original one. They both had the same date written on them, but I knew only one was legitimate, because it was dirty and old looking. These were supposedly photographs of what happened that day.

Dirk came in a four wheel drive, to my parents place, where I was staying. He came to pick me up. He had a little sister, a male friend who was a bit odd and a girlfriend. We were going to the movies to see a terrible film that I knew neither of us would ever want to see, but his girlfriend wanted to see it so it was okay. It was some sort of pixar rubbish. We were late. I did not want to stay in the movie as it was terrible, but as I walked away I fell down the stairs of the cinema and it was quite embarrassing.

Dirk sat with me on the steps to the cinema and offered to take me home. Finally, I honestly didn’t want him to. I wanted him to go to the life he had with this random guy and his perfect little sister and his girly idiot girlfriend who he would one day marry and drive to his highway hotel honeymoon in his four wheel drive where they will commemorate the rest of their life together. What fun.

Years later I was working in some sort of scientific facility, and Dirk would suddenly appear, also working for said scientific facility. We had not spoken since that day at the cinema but I heard his wife had recently died in some sort of odd plague that occurred outside of the facility. It had a lot of windows. Looking outside of the window saw an unidentified flying object crash into the other side of town. I advised everyone at the facility to close the windows as the crash had damaged the land which was putting off some sort of gas. I could see it was dissipating so we wouldn’t be stuck inside for long.

This would have been the case, except, the object rose again and began to suck something, perhaps the plague, out of the earths crust. The entire world shook, and it felt as though we were going to fly through the universe. I crushed my eyes closed and awoke at a different time.

Hiding in a hallway, we were able to see some oddly green and long legged fellows running around the now dilapidated facility. One of them stopped and turned towards me. He appeared to be wearing women’s clothing, and this disgruntled him. He asked me if perhaps we could swap clothes and I could take his place in the bone battle. This did not sound appealing to me at all.

Six Years Later

He had become a bit of a pain in the derriere, since he got back from visiting his father in the hospital. He had always been a sullen citizen. A good week in the penitentiary might have sorted him out.

On the days he was not feeling particularly morose, he was guided by whim and fancy. I only wished that his inclination for jerked meat might have been saved for the days when I was not so desperately lonely.

He was always selfish, and I wished that maybe someone would tell him this, because he never listened to a word I said. I thought perhaps he could write a book, or complete any one of his previous attempts. He would need to learn how to write dialogue, as it was never his strong point. Dialogue was always our thing, and if he abated this instance it would be the final indication that ours was a friendship of ineptitude.

After thinking over our time together, I realised that our story would most likely be very boring. It would be riddled with insobriety and addiction to eyelash plucking. He taught me to do this, on the very last day of spring one year. He knew it was the time I was at my craziest, and convinced me that the loss of eyelashes might keep us cool. He never apologised for these kinds of things. He never apologised for anything. Sometimes he would just wait until I was no longer tempestuous, and act like nothing had happened.

I never heard him say thankyou either. He felt embarrassed saying it, so he always said gracias, merci or dank instead. It felt as though he never really meant these words, even though he said them often. Similar to how the word tree lost its meaning for me many years ago. He never really appreciated anything we did for him.

I thought maybe it was because his life was served to him on a proverbial silver platter, even if it wasn’t at all the life he wanted. We thought the trick might be to not get drawn down by him, or at least make better predictions as to when he was about to sink. It never worked.

When he was down, I spent more money, I stopped talking to my brothers, I watched more television, I read less and wrote more. I took apart toy weapons and rode my bike up and down the street with flat tires. When he was down, I tried to make myself crazy to understand where he had gone. Being dragged down was so much easier than living on like normal. Sometimes, in order to find someone, I suppose you have to lose yourself. Like tug of war.

Neither of us was successful after school. I tried harder and loved what I did, but my future was never guaranteed, and when I failed to find employment in my chosen area, I sort of gave up. He finished a law degree and got a job cleaning old records in a musical restoration shop on Auschwitz Avenue. I was convinced he chose to work there only because of the name, which was congruent with how much he loved my cat. If there were a law firm in the same street, he may have chosen to work there instead.

On many occasions, I wished he would just listen to me when I told him to leave me alone. Not once did he listen, obviously. I ran, many times. I made new friends, who always loved him. I got new jobs, which he would visit me at. I moved towns, states, countries. He always came within a few months. It was never enough time to forget the past. I always emphasised that history meant nothing if the present was in dystopia, but of course, I was exaggerating. He always said we were never meant to be happy.

I was cleaning up old drawings from before I knew how to draw, and this left me with many old, cardboard cylinders. I remembered a poster from many years before which gave a list of ideas to reuse cardboard cylinders. I sat and smoked exactly ten cigarettes, thinking of the best use for the cylinders that were so filled with charcoal and other personally redundant forms of illustration.

I collected every photograph I had ever had printed of him and neatly placed them in the bottom of one cylinder. I closed it up and wrote our address on the front.

I collected every drawing I had ever made of him and rolled them into another cylinder, which I then wrote our address on the front of.

I spent four days obsessively searching for every instance of him on the backups of every computer I had ever owned. I printed them all out, and donated one hundred dollars to a forest replacement organisation, because recycled paper still came from somewhere. I put them into ten separate cylinders and wrote our address on the front.

Finally, I found the invitation that began everything. I wrote goodbye on the back, and put it in a cylinder.

After sending the cylinders, I sat outside our house at ten o’clock in the morning, every day, for thirteen days. I watched him sign for each one, and then I left. He didn’t follow.

The only way he was ever going to listen to me was if I acted in neurosis, the only pathology he seemed to understand. Six years later, I realise, we were never meant to be happy.

Theoretical Furniture

Arm chairs attached to vintage suit cases.

Couch made out of an old bathtub.
Draws built into chairs.
A toilet coffee table. Glass top. Could probably put junk in the toilet.
A bed as a kitchen table. It would have a glass box covering the mattress so it wouldn't be all fluffy. Poof chairs and a pretty picture frame that has utensils in it.
Bar stools made out of ceiling fans.
A room divider made with empty toilet rolls. Some of them could theoretically have actual toilet rolls, provided you could be bothered pulling the whole pole out to replace them. They would have tiny little hooks under each roll which would be like hanging hooks so you could probably adjust their heights. Obviously this is meant for a bathroom.
Bookshelf built into a vintage fridge. Has bits cut out of it and replaced with glass or perspex. I imagine it would have some sort of cool interior light which you could turn on from the outside.
A hat rack used to hang clothes. Has draws built into the bottom part.

Television stand made of pot plants. Has holes cut into some of the pots so you can store things in them.

Cranes

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