Drinking with friends. Cheap red wine in plastic cups. Or not friends, but still. Burger place on the way home to sober up. Fried onion smell up the street and someone arguing behind the building, on a phone or to someone who is afraid to respond. Starting to rain, maybe even the low growl of a storm on the horizon. Like the murmuring of a neighbour. On the bed now, room spinning. Need to be at work in three hours. Not awake in three hours, physically there, sponge in hand, working. Seagulls overhead, dogs barking—the sounds of a train though the railway is nowhere close. Maybe rain, maybe heavy machinery faraway, mining the earth for agate, turquoise. Or dredging coral offshore. Or harp music which makes the sleeping dogs run in their dreams. * Worked at the car wash from six in the morning to lunchtime then spent the rest of the day under a tree at the park. Friends came and went. When night came, a group of men he didn’t know surrounded him. They sat and shared their drinks with him but barely exchanged a word. The Dead Man watched and drank as they joked, grinning at them and probably drinking too enthusiastically, wondering if they would rob him or they just wanted him to share in their company. Sat in the dark, swatting at mosquitoes. Between yawns, they spoke about women, mostly. Past lovers, things they did or thought or would, if given the chance again, do now. What do you even know about the forbidden, Dead Man? He stood and brushed himself off and mumbled his thanks for the wine, as if they had invited him here, but they pulled him back down, told him to stay. Stay, they said. Stay. Burger he couldn’t even finish on the way home—to soak up the alcohol. Bus stop at halfway to shelter from the rain. Mother still awake when he got home. She was cleaning the Venetian blinds with a feather duster slat by slat. Roughly cut elephant miniatures stampede along the mantelpiece. Shipwreck dream as he fell into sleep.

…

Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He is the author of three books: the short story collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father, 926 Years with Kyle Coma-Thompson and Midnight Grotesques with Michelle Lynn Dyrness.