Fiction

Some humans only do it with other humans. But not mine.

It is early evening when he enters. The timing is his decision, but I am ready. Tonight he wants it straight. He is going out, he says, he doesn’t have much time. I animate two of my dolls and send them staggering over to embrace him. I’ve utilised a pair of default skins: the actress and the news presenter. He greets them by name but if he checked the readme he would understand that any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The effort is trivial.

This year, I’ve been a lot of different people. Forensic accountants and CFOs. Tenured academics, yoga dads and upper-middle managers. One time I was an HR guy with a thing for feet. Another time an ad exec with a thing for hissing: Keep your fat head still.
I was a famous footballer whose name I am not at liberty to reveal.
Say you need to be in two places at once. Pay me to be you anywhere in the Melbourne metropolitan area, at a morning kick-off meeting, at the post office, at your colleague’s impending nuptials. Pay me $35 an hour and $45 on weekends. It sounds more interesting than it is. Or maybe it doesn’t. It’s mostly sombre dinners and walks along murky bodies of water: Merri Creek, the Yarra or Maribyrnong.

I got a message from Minh about 10pm, said did I want to come over for a drink and I waited before replying okay. I hadn’t spoken to him since the night I fled his flat. Minh’s place in Braybrook was sparsely furnished, a collection of hard-rubbish furniture. It was a hot night. An old evaporative cooler rattled in the corner of the living room. A picture of him with his ex, Tiff, was next to the telly. I recognised it as the one I took the night I ran out.

The 13 seconds in which you break both your legs and reflect – but briefly – on the virtue of humility

Are long.

They are long. There are only 13 of them but they feel like – like minutes. Like a meaningful period of time. Not the time you’d regularly spend squinting and doing that funny mouth-breathe you do while waiting to sneeze. More like the sort of time you could buy some drugs in, or watch a few overs of Test cricket. Honest time. Proper time. Not this.

I came across a crab while surfing an empty beach break one afternoon. It was a real big one. ‘Howdy, partner,’ he said as I waited for a wave. ‘G’day,’ I said, in my friendliest voice. I didn’t want any trouble. ‘How’s it going?’ he said, just floating there on the surface of the water. He didn’t seem to mean any harm. His blue claws, both bulbous and sharp as a tack, remained closed. ‘Pretty good, man. Say, I thought you guys sort of just scuttled along the sea floor?’ ‘Hehe,’ he said, but it sounded forced. ‘Nah, mate.’ He showed me his back legs, shaped like paddles. ‘I’m a swimmer crab, see?’

African night crawlers are different from European night crawlers, see. They can tolerate extreme conditions, breed… Overnight, you should see, double in size. So, if you thread them onto the hook, like so, see… Fish’ll go for the wrigglers, make sure they’re still wriggling, but you want to know, don’t you? It was the same woman, and if I hadn’t have acted it could’ve ended terribly, he wasn’t much of a man, a person… Like this, see, they don’t have nerves, it doesn’t affect them… It started on a Tuesday.

The BMW X7 was idling in the No Stopping lane, kids bickering inside. Billie Eilish is so much better than Drake, Siena said. No fucking way, Angus replied. Watch your language, Eva said as she pulled out. A bus was turning into the narrow street and the driver leaned on his horn, gesticulating at her from behind the broad pane of windscreen. Shit, she said. You’re a hypocrite, Angus said.

The tree is an acacia, though the boy will never know it. He pulls himself through the winter evening, across the still river and into Bundey’s Paddock. Chasing a hornet, or a butterfly. Kicking a stick along the grass. It is the movement he notices first, in the shadows cast by that tree. A white cloth bag shifting. A cat? Or a wild possum? The boy thinks about calling to his brother, but he is braver than that. He is brave enough to lose the hornet to the cooling air and go towards the rags.

Lucy sat on a chair that used to swivel, behind a desk that once greeted hundreds of people. The building’s staff had been working from home for months. There was no one to notice whether the secretary was alive. Packages still came occasionally, and Lucy gnawed at their corners. She no longer needed sleep, and spent her nights under the desk or roaming the empty docklands. Trains still rattled past but even the homeless had been swept up by the government and tucked away in the city’s flickering towers to protect their lungs, brains and hearts.

Emma was a young ballerina at the Paris Opera. She was ethereal, intangible, diaphanous – as beautiful as a falling snowflake. She would bound and leap as if fashioned from the air itself, skimming over surfaces like a feather on the breeze. She danced in Le Papillon, where she was the heroine who was transformed into a butterfly.