Aaron Kowalski had chosen cautiously, as was his way. ‘Kowal’ was close enough to feel like his, but distant enough to keep something back. Nobody in the forum knew about Water Street, or Helena’s bigos, or the dormer above the garage. They knew Kowal—the moderator who kept things civil, who could see an inconclusive argument before it started, who always came back to the same principle: be useful, be honest, leave things better than you found them.

He liked the distance. It made things cleaner.

Soleil was different.

She had never proffered her real name, and he had never asked—this was their shared etiquette, the unspoken contract. But over six months of threads, replies and the occasional private message, he had pieced together a picture from the details she let slip. Vancouver. A window facing west. Night coffee, not morning. A father who had worked the docks. Unfamiliar music he came to know after the fact.

He knew more about Soleil than he knew about most people in Meadville. That thought arrived one night and refused to leave.

The latest thread had started as a technical discussion. Open-source licensing, the kind of discourse that generated more heat than light. Soleil had come in late, reframed the whole argument in two paragraphs, and then added a line at the end that had nothing to do with the licensing:

“I think the internet makes people braver and lonelier at the same time. Most of the time I’m not sure which one wins.”

Aaron read it over, desperately trying to decode Soleil’s words in his favour. Still not sure, he opened a private message and started typing.

Aaron had written to Soleil privately before, mostly technical stuff, moderation decisions, the occasional question about a thread. This seemed different, and he knew it before he finished the first sentence.

Delete. Start again.

Three rewrites. Each one too much. The fourth pass was better:

“That last line. I’ve been thinking about it. I think you might be right — but I’m not sure lonely is always the wrong thing to be.”

He sent it before reconsidering.

The forum clock read 11.47pm. Helena had been asleep for hours. The dormer was quiet except for the modem’s occasional click and settle — the acoustics of the connection reminding itself it was still there.

Soleil replied at 11.52. A whole five minutes of anticipation and uncertainty.

“Lonely is fine. It’s the brave part that gets complicated.”

Aaron sat with it. Outside, Meadville was doing what Meadville did at midnight — nothing, quietly, and without apology. He thought about the hardware store. The Steelers loop. Helena asking if he’d slept.

He thought about the window facing west in Vancouver.

He typed: “Tell me something true.”

The cursor blinked. Once. Twice.

Her reply came slower this time, seven minutes, which in this space was an eternity.

“I moved here from somewhere smaller. I thought Vancouver would feel like arriving. It mostly feels like waiting.”

Aaron read it twice. Then he wrote the longest private message he had ever sent. Not about licensing, not about the forum, not about anything useful or honest or leaving things better. Just his own version of the same truth, shaped differently, arriving from Meadville.

He didn’t sleep that night. He didn’t mind.

By Autumn, the forum had grown.

Forty regulars had become sixty, then eighty. New voices arrived daily—some useful, some not, most somewhere in between. Aaron moderated with a light, deft hand, the way he always had. Flag the bad faith, give the good stuff room to breathe.

What he had was working. The threads were longer, the arguments sharper, the sense that something real was being built together stronger than before.

Soleil noticed it too.

“You’re building something here,” she wrote one night. Not in the forum — in a private message, unprompted. “I don’t think you know how powerful this is.”

Aaron read it twice, as he normally did. Had anyone ever said something like that to him? Not about something he’d actually made.

Helena was proud and supportive in the way mothers were, which was different. The hardware store didn’t notice. Who cares.

He wrote back: “We made it. You and I.”

She didn’t reply for two days.

When she did, it was one line:

“You should take the credit, Kowal. Just this once.”

He smiled at the screen in a way that nobody saw but him.

It was around this time that a new handle surfaced: Dusk47. The first few posts were unremarkable — technical how-to questions, a comment here and there, nothing that raised a flag. Aaron processed them the way he processed most new arrivals: noted, assessed, moved on.

There was something in the tone, though. A sharpness that sat just inside the rules. Not enough to act on. Enough to notice.

He noticed.

Then Soleil replied to a thread, and whatever tension Aaron had felt disappeared.

He should have stayed with the noticing.

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

His grandfather arrived from Kraków in1923, following the steel and the sniff of work. He found both, briefly. He stayed for the community—the Polish catholic church on Water Street, the smell of his wife’s bigos on Sundays, the comfort of being understood without explanation. Aaron Kowalski grew up on those stories. He understood, earlier than most, that belonging was something you fought for and built—it wasn’t a given; it needed to be earned.

Aaron was nineteen in 1996. Most mornings began the same—navigating the narrow stairs from the garage dormer, Helena already at the kitchen table with her coffee and newspaper, the same headlines cycling through similar anxieties. She would ask if he’d slept. He’d say enough—she wouldn’t push, knowing that wasn’t entirely true. Helena was quiet and patient, a permanent presence in her son’s life.

The hardware store on Cabot Street opened at seven. Aaron was usually there 15 minutes early, keys in hand, the smell of timber and machine oil meeting him at the door like an ageing argument. He didn’t mind the work, the order of it, the way things had their place, the customers who came in knowing exactly what they needed. What he didn’t like was the smallness of it. Not the store—the conversations. The weather. The Steelers. The same loop, every day, dependable, but equally grating.

By five he was home. Helena’s cooking filled the house—pierogi on Tuesdays, bigos on Sundays, a rotation as reliable as a Swiss clock. They ate together, the Tribune folded to one side, the television off. She asked about his day. He answered. She told him about hers. It was a good ordinary life, quiet and functional, and Aaron understood this without quite being able to say it.

The dormer called; it always would.

A computer came in 1994. A previously owned IBM, slow and serious, acquired through three months of savings from the hardware store. The modem followed. And then—the internet.

Not the internet as it would become. The internet as it was—unfinished, ungoverned, full of people who were there because they chose to be. Forums. Bulletin boards. IRC channels that felt, improbably, like rooms. Real rooms, with regulars and in-jokes and the occasional argument that ran for days and resolved nothing and somehow made everyone feel more connected for having had it.

Aaron found his place quickly. A community built around open-source software and the radical idea that information should be free. Thirty, maybe forty regulars. A few he knew well enough to consider friends. He understood their rhythms—who posted late, who disappeared on weekends, who could be trusted to defuse an argument before it turned.

One—a woman in Vancouver who went by the name Soleil—he considered something more, though they had never met and likely never would. She wrote in long, careful paragraphs, always considered, occasionally funny, and once—in a thread about whether the internet would change everything or nothing—she wrote something that kept Aaron at his desk late into the night, composing, deleting, and composing again.

He didn’t send what he wrote that night. He sent something shorter. Soleil replied immediately.

He began contributing to the community. Then moderating. Then, quietly, without anyone making it official, leading—setting the tone. Enforcing unwritten rules—be useful, be honest, leave things better than you found them. His grandfather’s rules, he realised, applied here too.

It was 1996. At nineteen, he built his first world with keystrokes, patience, and a modem that danced every time it connected. The internet was still more promise than place. Aaron Kowalski was someone trying to make it one—one forum post at a time.

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

Sunday evening. Jamaican goat curry—an ode to past adventures. The scotch bonnets were generous. Perhaps too generous. Kev was blowing a gasket, the way men do when they don’t want to admit the heat was too much. Rosie winced with every mouthful but said nothing and smiled as she always does—a picture of dignified suffering.

It wasn’t planned. I should have de-seeded the scotch bonnets—I didn’t, and we all suffered in different shades of silence.

Kev eats quickly. He has a decent head of hair—it’s mostly all I saw.

Rosie is the conversationalist. She likes books, which immediately puts her in good standing. We covered varied ground—the kind of Sunday evening conversation that wanders without agenda and lands somewhere unexpected.

Beer for starters, then wine. Kev prides himself on having a decent cellar—mainly reds—and mainly stuff that falls off the back of the truck. He’s not wrong about that.

Rosie made gluten-free flatbread. Delicious—soft, warm, the perfect foil for the curry; I couldn’t get enough of it. Kev didn’t know what “gluten-free” was—I could have told him it was a horse that ran in Sydney. It didn’t stop him from having his three.

Then the golf.

Kev has developed an unhealthy habit of talking up his own game. At length. With conviction. I’ve played with Kev. He couldn’t hit a barn door from the inside. I said nothing. Some battles aren’t worth fighting over a good red. Rosie nodded, as she does. I knew she shared my scepticism.

They’re very good to me. And I appreciate that. Kev packed me a container to go. He butchered the raita and yogurt, but who cares; I won’t have any taste till Wednesday.

The perfectly mismatched couple. Still perfectly mismatched.

Till next time.

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

https://www.nycmidnight.com/—NYC Midnight hosts international, timed writing competitions where participants use randomly assigned prompts under tight deadlines while keeping their full copyrights. I said thoughtful, and it was; I think Anne might have overestimated my writing skills!

I didn’t participate, but whilst doing a scratchpad spring clean I came across NYC Midnight again and found this short story by Chloe Paige, who also calls Geelong home. In line with the writers keeping their full copyrights—here, I am merely sharing Chloe’s story for you to like, or like more. I enjoyed it.

Roo Sprayers

by Chloe Paige

A dozen trips. We’ve done this before.

A dozen trips back and forth on the B79 between Broken Hill and the hospital, and Jack’s pulled us over twice that many times to spray-paint a cross on some car-whacked dead thing. And while Sadie was kicking my ribs sore from the inside, Jack was opening pouches of the unchecked and unsprayed dead roos in case a joey lucked out and lived.

And this dead roo’s like any other we’ve found—stiff in the dirt and dark, bleaching under our headlights. But Jack’s gripping that wheel all white-knuckled like he’s done every sprayed-pink roo we’ve passed since we left the hospital two hours ago. And I’m shredding apart their business card, salty wet fingers smearing the handwriting on the back and marking me like a roo outta luck.

A dozen trips.

Jack sighs. Pries his hands off the wheel. Opens the door and the interior light floods us in sickly yellow. I wanna snap don’t bother checking that pouch and shut the bloody door so I’m not all lit up like that roo, but I haven’t made a peep since the hospital. Jack’s always doing the rough work anyways: shaking redbacks outta my gumboots; haggling down greasy salesmen at the car dealership; bellowing bloody listen at the nurses when Sadie hadn’t kicked me in days.

Each yellow hazard light flash sallows those leathery cheeks the sun’s given him. His glazed stare makes me drive the sharp corner of the business card under my nail and pierce the quick. I drop it almost gasping. I try not to think about where it fell, on the stretched-out loose folds of my jumper making rolls on my tummy, the pink wool carrying that memory when I’m tryna not think about it.

Jack’s crouching in the dirt by the roo, headlights making shadows on it. Out there it’s all just death and saltbush, and this worn-out stretch of asphalt we’ve driven dozens and dozens of times that I’m not thinking about while I brace myself for Jack to stand, to confirm the worst, to hold another limp thing, but what he’s cradling is kicking and squealing like it’s just learned breath.

And I’m clawing to open that passenger door, falling outta the car, wailing like it’s my first time breathing too. Wailing at the ink on my fingers, that business card, the number for a shrink scrawled on the back slid over a fluorescent light-bleached desk with mechanical sympathy and nobody even gave me a fucking pamphlet.

And Jack’s holding me while I’m spluttering all over this cold brown lanky wriggling critter that’s littler than I thought with its too-big ears, too-thin fur, and too-damp black eyes peering at me like we’re separate halves of different wholes.

And I’m back sitting in the passenger seat. Jack’s opening the boot for our pink spray paint. I’m not thinking about the dead roo while the joey scratches at the loose folds of my jumper, searching for a pouch.

Have a good weekend

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

https://www.nycmidnight.com/stories/roo-sprayers

He built his first world at nineteen, in a dormer above his mother’s garage in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Not with wood or nails—with keystrokes, patience, and a modem that danced every time it connected.

It was 1996. The internet was still more promise than place. And he was one of the people trying to make it one—one forum post at a time.

Then he was gone. And the internet didn’t wait for him. It got faster. It got richer. It got hungrier.

When Covid hit in 2020, the whole world migrated online overnight. And somewhere in western Pennsylvania, a forty-three-year-old man with nothing ahead of him and even less behind sat down at a keyboard for the first time in two decades.

He didn’t recognise what he found. But he recognised what it was doing to people.

Netizen — coming soon.

Nick

Share

I say short story, but then I’m not really sure what defines one, and equally, I’m not sure my previous efforts have done the genre due service.

The attempts so far have been varied. Bob, my friend, the tone-deaf cat one street down, who gave me a lift every morning until he didn’t. Deano, the quiet type at smoko who took his time before offering a Hahn low carb. Thursday Night—Jeff, ordering an unpasteurised Carlton Draught schooie at the end of a restless evening. Rosie and Kev, the perfectly mismatched couple commanding quiet reverence at the end of the bar. The Dun Cow in Durham, 1997—a sliding door, the smell of real ale, and Howay Man, you better get in there. Pat Donnelly in South Boston, somewhere between fact and fiction.

Whether any of them qualify as short stories in the literary sense—George Saunders would likely wince—is another question.

It’s a sampling. Actually, I’ve resisted giving them a proper home—we could add a short story section, fancy that—you know what, in Bob’s honour I will, a proper resting place for an ol’ mate—just need to figure it out now.

And the definition:

From what I can tell, the short story owes its origins to an older tradition, emerging from oral storytelling through the ages. In way-back times, short stories existed as parables, anecdotes, fairy tales and fables. Now, short stories continue to be written, as well as microfiction and flashfiction—and in my case, notverygoodfiction.

Decent players in this space include—my favourite, George Saunders. Then there’s old guys like Anton Chekhov and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote the shortest of short stories, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Six words—sad words. But hey, there’s hope for us all. And more recently, Alice Munro, a Canadian who excelled in the space.

Nearly forgot, knew to me via Shunter and 8-Ball—Cormac McCarthy—a writer who used little or no punctuation because there was no reason “to blot the page up with weird little marks.” He avoided semicolons entirely, labelling their usage as “idiocy.” Ring a bell. Haha.

Anyway, I better be off, footy to watch, goat curry to make—over at Rosie and Kev’s tomoz—and I need to sort that stuff for Bob.

Stocking filler? That’s my two-word short story.

Happy Saturday.

Nick

Jeff’s witching hour had gone; it was a little past eight. The night was still and cold; he’d been listening to footy—the Bulldogs and North. Decisions. Baton down the hatches, or stretch the legs—we know what that meant—a bevvy or two watching the second half. Or he could stay home, eat, footy, and bank an AFD. Jeff needed company—a stroll it is.

Arriving he was met with trivia patrons departing the scene—Robbie ran Thursday trivia. Most players scran down, boffin out, then fuck off—lamenting their inability to know that Germany is Europe's largest country. Annoying and not cashable. The hotel staff seemed happy to see the back of them, already rearranging the furniture, restoring the layout to normal hotel mode.

More questions. Which TV? Where to park? Solo, or find a conversation? Jeff started solo, positioning himself between two adequately sized screens. Animated discourse between two locals, enough to be heard, was near by—best to dodge for now. Focus on the order.

“What ‘re ya afta?” The boss lady asked.

Now, to be clear, Jeff is a contradiction in terms. He yearns and thrives in non-formality and the comforts of anti-establishment behaviour—but then can be so prim and proper in actions and words. He slipped to the latter.

“Actually, I’m not after anything. I would like to order a drink, though.”

“So wat ya afta?”

“Is the Carlton Draught unpasteurised—from the tank?” He knew that, but…

That was it. The trivia crowd had fluffed, and Jeff came in with the closer—a straight right that landed flush on the chin. A cheap shot!

The boss lady exited left, asking a colleague to look after Jeff.

“Can you sort this guy—he’s off his friggin’ rocker.”

Another lady. Just not the boss kind.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Yeh, give us a schooie of fucking draft, will ya.”

That’s Jeff.

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

Kev and Rosie’s union oscillates between at least two worlds: the relocated baby-boomer, with all that comes with this privileged space, and the scaled-down socialite, alternating between upmarket entertainment and plain old pub life.

I gave them the widest of berths at first. Now less so. I’m beginning to understand their contradiction of being.

The language can be so proper, and then from the street. Some stories are cold sober, others pleasantly lurid. The jokes—Kev’s domain—are always belly-busting. Just don’t tell him!

Kev drinks cans—he has a habit of squashing them after the last drop, a signal for refill maybe. Rosie flits between non-house red and London gin — actually, she doesn’t mind Four Pillars. I chuckle when she points to the back bar, signalling she only drinks the good stuff. This is often misinterpreted by new servers, who disappear thinking Miss Rosie is dismissing them to lesser rigours.

I’ve seen them eat at the bar—who doesn’t love a meal next to the taps—and then use the dining room. This is when Rosie switches to New York mode. Kev plays along, reluctantly.

I like them now. The barflies? I think so too, although they don’t spend quite as much time psycho-analysing the perfectly mismatched couple.

Anyway, they’re here. I have to go.

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

Deano sits a top of the table, normally nut down switching between sangas and hot coffee, phone on Facebook mode. He's an improving bowler—lawn bowls, not cricket—I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He doesn't say much, but everyone knows he's listening.

Tuesday was the same. Wednesday I had off—Melbourne, cricket stuff. Did I miss smoko? Not really. It's fucking freezing in there.

Thursday: time to break the shackles. “Deano, hello, how ya rolling ‘em?”

“Yeah, not bad.”

That was it. His eyes returned to the phone and whatever it was he looked at. Not even the slightest nod. I knew he'd played cricket back in the day. I had an inkling he knew I'd done similar, to better effect—can I say that? Fuck it, he gave me nowt, so yeh, I can say that. Deano stood and went back to putting together machines that help harvest canola. I went back to doing something similar with no idea of how it all worked.

A week or so went by, the weather improving. I'd let go of the Deano interaction. Truth is, I might have been fishing for comeback compliments on my previous life—what a wanker I can be. I did feel insecure in the foreign environs, though. Deano is well practised in this space. Consistent, metronomic, he did his job without fuss or fanfare. A given in these parts.

Friday came around. Smoko came and went without flurry. By now I had delayed my smoko window to let the first wave do their thing—it gave me more room and cleaner craic. I thought.

Lunch next, and the company address. With BBQ smoke still heavy in the air, the bosses did their motivational thing: machine assembly updates, harvest projections, where they were going. I just stood there like the imposter I was. They did call me Coach. Was that a compliment? I'll take it.

I want to mention Archie, but it will take this effort from a diabolical short story to a novella. He's Filipino. Archie is one of the nicest people I have ever met. We'll leave it there. I love Archie.

Back to what I did—I can't tell you, because I don't know. Snick, my offsider, did all the thinking. I was dreaming of brown envelopes. Some things never change. Haha.

Clock-watching now. Forty-five minutes to go. Deano drifted past the table we worked on. He stopped—I thought he’d left something behind.

No. He fixed a gaze my way.

“Hey Nicko, you staying for a drink tonight?”

Progress. “Yeah, why not. What time?”

“Four bells. A coupla Hahn low carbs to get you going.”

Hahn fucking low carb. Is he serious?

He was. They were fine. The craic was good. The initiation might be over.

We’ll see how Monday smoko goes. I might go back to the earlier window with new confidence.

Nick

Share

Subscribe now

On the bright side, it was Thursday.

“Gerard, yes, hi, hello,” said Mrs. Dwyer, the nurse’s assistant sanctioned to hand over the Perlman headpiece and the big green pill and the smaller red one that activates the green one.

“How was the week?” she asked.

“Same,” I said.

“Oh, gosh, sorry,” she said.

In Treatment Room 4, she checked with the calliper to make sure the pressure foot of the Perlman was seated correctly.

It was.

She seemed a little nervous today.

“Green first,” she said. “I know you know that.”

I took the green.

“Good,” she said. “Now the red. Then the agua.”

I took the red. Drank the water from its pre-measured vial.

“Sit, wait, enjoy,” she said. “May this bring you healing.”

“Thanks,” I said.

My guess is that Saunders drops us into Gerard’s world without explanation or apology. A treatment facility—the Perlman headpiece, the calliper, the pre-measured pills. Clinical and procedural, yet strangely tender. The nurse follows her script: “May this bring you healing.” Gerard follows his: “Thanks.”

We don’t know what the treatment is. We don’t need to. Do we? What we know is that Thursday is the bright side. That “same” is the honest answer to how the week was. And that whatever Gerard is about to return to—home, family, the ordinary chaos of his life—this room, this ritual, is either the best part, or the worst.

Assuming the treatment works—Gerard drifts back, not randomly, but specifically. Plymouth Street. Summer. His sister Clara beside him on the lawn, thirteen and ten, watching clouds. Saunders renders the memory with an almost unbearable tenderness—the robin on the fencepost, the Nabisco vanilla on the air, the distant lawnmowers “cross-bellowing like enraged crewcut men in dispute.” Pure Saunders.

But it’s more than nostalgia. Lying there, Gerard felt—genuinely felt—that his generation would be the one to finally fix things. That all of human history, the sandals and sabres and ravishments, had been leading to this moment. To them. To Clara and him on the grass.

“Or so I felt, lying on my childhood lawn beside my sister, Clara.”

That last line is the whole story in miniature. The “or so I felt” doing all the quiet, devastating work.

And then Gerard comes home. Home to my favourite part of the story.

Soon I would go inside for a drink. I knew this. I had done so back then and therefore must do so again. I was, mostly, the boy I had been that day: thirsty, sweet, self-pleased, ignorant of the future, the right side of my face slightly more sun-warmed than the left. But I was also, fractionally, the older person I was now, cringing at the thought of what he, that boy, would find inside.

Which was: Dad pummelling Mom (joyfully, playfully at first, then with increasing rancor), while Uncle Rod pummelled Dad (in an attempt to quell Dad’s pummelling of Mom) and Aunt Staci also, somewhat performatively, pummelled Mom. (It was unclear what offense Mom had originally committed.) Clara had followed me in and was cowering near an upended coffee table. Now and then one of the adults would step away from the brawl to ingest more of his or her drink. It was all as confusing as it had once actually been. And yet I knew dimly that, within the hour, all would be well, Rod, Staci, Mom, and Dad restored to conviviality, gleefully flinging chairs down from the second-story deck as if to celebrate the intensity of the earlier round-robin pummelling, while Clara and I, in an attempt to reëstablish normalcy, played a terse game of Chinese checkers in the mayhemic space that was the post-pummelling living room: couch tipped on its back, several broken light bulbs lying there, like ivory eggshells out of which exotic baby birds of light had just burst, among a loose flotilla of eight or nine pink party hats, which had come from a neat, hopeful stack, a stack now jammed beneath the radiator, as if it had tried and failed to escape.

Noteworthy were the adjustments our young minds were already making. On the first level: shame was upon us, of course—embarrassment, resentment of this mode of being, awareness that others in our peer group likely did not live in such a low and volatile milieu. On a second level, perhaps contradictorily: denial that this pummelling was odd or indicated any defect in our family. We were, that is, stretching to see this behavior as a manifestation of our parents’ enviable lust for life; the other children and their non-pummelling parents were mundane squares, never moved by passion into this higher realm of uncontrollability.

We were trying this attitude on for size, one might say.

And, alas, I saw now, we were in the process of being molded. Pummelling would, ever after, be one of the choices available to us. Pummelling had been put on the menu, so to speak. To some, pummelling was unthinkable. To Clara and me, henceforth? Quite thinkable. We had seen these people we loved and respected engaged in it, and therefore, forevermore, pummelling would be something we ourselves might consider doing should we be placed under sufficient duress.

Because this was such a signal family event—a moment of peak emotional intensity—I would often, in the years to come, find myself waiting, as it were, for an excuse or opportunity to pummel someone, in much the same way that, I would imagine, a young person raised by virtuoso musicians might, on first finding an instrument in his hand, feel that the moment had arrived for him to begin pursuing the family business.

As for Clara, in the future, she would, more than once, find herself being pummelled and not objecting to it, in the belief (the seed of which had just been planted) that being pummelled did not mean she was unloved and, in fact, might very well mean the opposite.

It was bitter, being back here.

I could have wept for those two children, sitting still as bunnies before that ancient, long-ago-landfilled Chinese-checker board as, the supply of chairs up there having apparently been exhausted, couch cushions began raining down from the deck.

---

The drink Gerard knew he’d take as a boy leads him inside. And inside is where Saunders changes gears.

What follows is rendered in Saunders’ signature deadpan—the word “pummelling” repeated so many times it becomes both comic and confronting. Dad pummelling Mom. Uncle Rod pummelling Dad. Aunt Staci, somewhat performatively, pummelling Mom. Clara cowering near an upended coffee table. Adults stepping away from the brawl to refresh their drinks.

Then—within the hour—everyone restored to conviviality, flinging chairs from the second-floor deck as if to celebrate.

Saunders doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t explain. He just shows you the living room afterwards: couch on its back, broken light bulbs lying there “like ivory eggshells out of which exotic baby birds of light had just burst,” pink party hats scattered across the floor.

Pummelling—is there a better verb or word for the action? Priceless.

“It was bitter, being back here. I could have wept for those two children.”

The distance between the lawn and the living room. Between the vanilla air and the upended coffee table. Between who we thought we’d become and what we were quietly being made into.

Saunders doesn’t tell you what the Perlman headpiece does. He doesn’t need to. Thursday is the bright side because Thursday is the only hour Gerard gets to lie on that lawn beside Clara before he has to go back inside.

Go and read Thursday. Then read it again.

Nick

You might need a sub from the New Yorker here. If you have trouble, let me know in the comments and I can email you the pdf.

Share

Subscribe now

My mornings are mindlessly predictable. A gradual emergence from forced slumber regulated by the Melbourne train running between South Geelong and Geelong stations. No need for a clock. The first one I hear is just after 5am, thereafter at 20-minute intervals. A standard Australian train approaching a level crossing emits two long blasts, one short, one long. Reassuring. Three trains equals an hour of snooze time. I block out the inbound ones.

I really don't want to walk to the bathroom. Five trains might be a personal best in toilet avoidance. Before I do, the pattern is inevitable—a short curl-up to warm exposed feet, two side-tosses, the sinker, a stare left in hope. And then a fixation on the perfume bottle that remains a lone token of what used to be.

I want to bury the perfume. But it was oh so expensive. We had such wasteful tendencies. “Just bury the fucking perfume.” The forced metaphors of fallen relationships. The bedroom is now so mediocre.

Flush the yellow. The day has started.

I need to get to places where I should be. The Kitchen. Hopefully not enough rain to flood the floor—didn't put the buckets out. Where's the phone? Doesn't matter. The kettle is more important. Hot tea, milk, sugar. What's better? When someone else makes it.

Where do you go for news? I'm still drawn to Twitter/X but finding what you need is a shit-show. TV is an option, but I don't want the YT rabbit hole, and the ABC hosts make me want to go back to bed. I don't hear the trains now.

Fuck it. Just go to the shower. Whoever fitted the bathroom window must have come straight from happy hour. Summer affords a cooling breeze; winter, it’s just plain frigid. The water's warm but you have to run around to get wet. It's a train-wreck.

Maybe this is my solace. After the chaos, I get to sit and write whatever the fuck comes into my head.

This morning it was meant to be another play on numbers. Instead—morning routines and emotional honesty.

That’ll do ‘til the day after today, when we’ll do it all again.

Nick

Ps. Sorry if I started you on the wrong foot; don’t mind me, have a great Friday.

Share

Subscribe now

Bob.

I look for Bob most days. Seeing him gives me a sense of care and connection. I’m unsure if he feels the same, but I hope so. That said, I’ll never know. Bob meows loudly, only when you’re in eyeshot — he’s tone deaf and just turned 19 years old. Bob’s a cat, he lives one street down, although he has several feeding houses! He loves the sun and will always scarf cake if I have any. I see him on the way to my coffee stop. He’s a friend. Would I still go looking for him if the shop closed? Yes. Because Bob gives me a lift.

Bob’s gone.

I’ll miss him. Though I’ll still keep looking for him. Why? Because Bob always gave me what I needed. Nothing changes. I’ll keep walking past his place, nursing the coffee on the way back, and I might even drop some cake to see if he’ll come running. There was nothing wrong with his nose, just his ears.

If I ever house a cat, he’ll be called Bob.

See you ‘ron my friend.

Nick

Share

Ps. To commemorate Bob, I plan to start a short-story section on the website. Maybe I will try to find some more stories. We’ll see. For now, ‘Bob’ and ‘Bob’s gone’ will be there.

Being surrounded by friends and family is wonderful; you’re never searching for contact. If and when this fades, you’ll truly value what you had. Too often, in the moment, it’s lost on us.

I didn’t plan to post, but sharing this yarn might give me a lift, and hopefully you too. It is the shortest of short stories.

I look for Bob most days. Seeing him gives me a sense of care and connection. I’m unsure if he feels the same, but I hope so. That said, I’ll never know. Bob meows loudly, only when you’re in eyeshot; he’s tone deaf and just turned 19 years old. Bob’s a cat, he lives one street down, although he has several feeding houses! He loves the sun and will always scarf cake if I have any. His main place is on the way to my coffee stop. He’s a friend. Would I still go looking for him if the shop closed? Yes. Because Bob gives me a lift.

Keep looking. Stay connected. Instances like this can nourish the soul.

Nick

Subscribe now

Share