Striking Back from Down Under (eBook)

26 short stories where the underdog prevails

Bob Rich (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013
120 Seiten
Modern History Press (Verlag)
978-1-877053-05-4 (ISBN)

Infos

A common theme runs though this otherwise very varied bouquet of short stories: a sympathy for the victim. Contemporary crime, science fiction, fantasy, historical adventure, all of them can be found here. A kaleidoscope of villains and heroes follow each other, waiting to entertain you.
Mrs Jones leads her Takamaka Freedom Fighters to rescue thousands of prisoners from the 'Happy Hen Poultry Farm'; an artist trapped in a twisted body finds a unique revenge when the beautiful blonde treats him with scorn; and Cynthia saves the Earth from invasion by an organism that wants to give pleasure to every human being.
Bob Rich is an Australian, and many of his stories are colored by this unique and fascinating land. In another place, Cecil Tripp might manufacture bombs. Down Under, he lights a bushfire. Only in Australia could Tim O'Liam be punished in just the way described in 'Let the Punishment Fit the Crime'. And Sarah and Andrew find out about their different world-views in the beautiful Australian bush.
Other stories could be set anyplace where one person preys upon another. The difference from the norm is that, in these stories, the victims show how to strike back, how the powerful and arrogant can be made to lose. Having been on the receiving end himself, Bob's sympathies are always with the victim.
Stories are meant to entertain, and these stories do just that

Textauszug

1. Cruelty and Compassion

Young women are a sweet agony, a toyshop I’ll never enter. I’m a moth, forever singeing the wings of my soul, stupidly circling toward destruction.

Courting ridicule, courting rejection, I instruct my prison on wheels to advance across the Esplanade, stopping against the wrought iron railing.

And there’s my other love, the one giving me nothing but joy. Way out, the rollers rise, turn from azure to turquoise, relentlessly rush the shore until their front is an impossible incline, and their tops boil with foam, until they break and fall with a roar of thunder. The concrete under my wheels vibrates with the shock of their ever-repeated assault.

A thousand times have I seen the beach, in all its moods, and always it is different. A dozen times have I tried to capture the grandeur in my paintings. Others praise my work, even with the ultimate praise of a purchase, though they know nothing of the twisted wreck I am. To me, my attempts are ever short of the real: the living sea meeting the immovable shore.

The beach is an expanse of gold sprinkled with people. Wherever my eyes roam, they light upon rounded breasts seeking to escape skimpy restraints, flaring hips, flashing legs, hair of gold and chestnut and anthracite blown by the breath of the sea.

Torture.

Someone casts a shadow. A head intrudes between me and the sun. “Disgusting,” a cold female voice says. “They should lock things like that away.”

“Don’t be unkind.” This is from a higher voice, perhaps even younger. “He can hear you.”

A tinkling laugh follows, a musical sound of amusement that chainsaws into my heart. “Who says he can even hear? Or if he can, would he understand? That thing?”

I should pretend. I should be the idiot of her supposition. I should sit, mute and immobile and invisibly bleeding, and wait for them to move on before returning to my lair. But my lips click the control and my tongue turns the little ball. My chair spins on the spot, and I face them.

Long, shapely, suntanned legs end at tomato-red panties so brief that little blonde pubic hairs peek out each side, mocking me. Smooth brown abdomen stretches to luscious red-clothed swellings above, the nipples outlined against the material. Still higher, a heart-shaped face is framed by hair of deep gold, lighter at the tips. The cruel, scornful eyes are blue, blue, bluer than the sea. A little, pert nose, a grimace of distaste on the full lips I’ll never kiss.

Beyond, long straight hair of burnished bronze partly hides a plain face, covered with freckles. Her eyes, same color as her hair, look through thick blue-rimmed glasses. She wears a shapeless white T-shirt and a pair of shorts, but even these don’t hide the chubbiness of her torso. There is no cruelty here, but I see worse: pity.

Language is a snail. Better than a picture, better than a photograph, all this I’ve seen in an instant, and it will be with me for all of my life. Fate has imposed the cruelty of cerebral palsy but was kind with eidetic imagery: whenever I choose, one glance gives me a record I can see at will, and later examine in the minutest detail. This is my liberation, my sanity, my ecstasy, the tool of my work.

During that instant, I see the red-haired girl start forward. She is past her friend, then between her and me, and she bends. The salty breeze strokes my face with the tips of her hair, then her lips touch my cheek. “Please forgive her,” she says, her breath on my skin, then she is past, she is gone, and the two of them walk down to the beach, down the stairs, that impassable barrier to wheels.

Not pity. Compassion. I can accept compassion, the hand of one sufferer held out to another.

That night, and for many nights after, my futile dreams are about red hair and a freckled face.

I turn my chair to face the beach once more, to track them across the sand. The red-head turns, her glasses flashing the sun into my eyes, and she raises a hand in farewell.

When their shapes have dissolved into the distance, into the crowd, I work my little control wheel, telling my chair to return home. I trundle up the driveway, up the ramp, and bump through the back door.

I pass Harker, who is helping himself to some milk. “G’day, Wyn,” he says, open face smiling. Harker is two years younger, my brother, my mate, my liberator. He chose his occupation, his life’s work, so he could design electronic wonders for my use: the chair, the bed, the six devices that together allow me to paint.

I spit out the control. The chair stops. “I’d like to start a new painting,” I tell him. Of all the people in the world, only two understand my words: Harker and Mother.

He carries his glass and walks beside me to my room. From here, the beach is a distant background through the eastern window that’s half a wall. My wonderful bed is against the west wall, under the ceiling rails of the lifting machine, now parked over the bath.

He takes the current, part-finished painting off the easel. It’s four A4 sheets, the top left-hand quadrant complete. One day, if ever I return to it, it will be a yellow rose with bright sunlight caught in little droplets of water.

Harker leans the board against the wall, and looks at me with a question.

“Eight by four,” I say, and he whistles in surprise. I’ve just asked him to set up several months of work.

While he is fetching a board of suitable size, and adjusting the easel, and tacking up sheets of blank paper, I stop the chair at my work station, facing the screen. This screen is worth more than the house.

The computer control sits on a flexible stalk. I spit out the chair control and after a few attempts “swallow the mouse,” an old family joke. And for hours at a time, every day I work on the two girls. Each of thirty-two sheets is eight frames, and a frame might take me an hour, or a day.

I look at the easel with its numbered pages, and I can see, projected onto it, the painting as it will be. I choose a page, and a segment of it the size of a business card. I start a blank frame, which is a ten times magnified white sheet on the screen. Click, click, I use the marvelous tools of my graphics program to create electronic brush strokes that fill the screen with living color. Three hours pass, as pixel by pixel I create the left lens of the glasses, half a minute to modify a mirror image for the right.

When the eight frames of a page are done, I activate the printer, Harker’s printer that uses acrylic paints, and when all the layers are dry, Mother or Harker glues the sheet into place, and I move onto another tile of my mosaic.

***

I’m resting. Through the window, I admire the winter storm that’s lashing the sea into fury, so that the house shakes in sympathy with the pounding surf. Behind me, on the easel, the painting is all but complete: two blank pages remain, both of them mostly background.

Headlights stabbing through the rain, wipers working hard, a white Mercedes eases to a stop before our house. A blue umbrella pokes its tip above the driver’s door, on the far side, then advances with quick little bumps around the front. I can now see it in full, providing inadequate shelter for Ingrid, who is wearing a matching blue raincoat. She scurries toward the front door, and passes out of my sight.

Ingrid is my agent, a middle-aged fount of enthusiasm and energy, encouragement and advice, the buffer between the world of art and the secret of my accursed body.

I turn my chair and wait. The door opens, and Mother leads Ingrid into the room. She has shed her raincoat, but her cream-colored slacks are wet below the knees. She is rubbing obviously cold hands together, her face a friendly smile. “Been a while, Wyn,” she says. I watch her face as her eyes are captured by the easel. She stops, even her hands stop their rubbing. She takes a deep breath. “Cruelty and compassion,” she says at last. “It’s your best so far.”

The painting shows heads only, both in three-quarter profile. The girls face away from each other. On the left is the blonde. I’ve painted her beautiful, even more beautiful than real life, but as you look at her lovely face, it becomes ugly: cold, rejecting, crippled within as it is perfect outside.

The redhead on the right is the opposite. At first, your eyes slide over her plain, ordinary visage and are instead captured by the other. But when you return, you see Goodness, and Love, the universal Mother though she is young; I’ve painted her younger than she is.

“Wyn, I love you,” Ingrid says. She hurries to me, and bends to give my cheek a kiss. I breathe in her perfume. She straightens, stroking my hair with a delicate hand. “Finish it, and we’ll enter it in the Archibald.”

The Archibald Prize is an annual event. Artists from all around Australia submit portraits, mostly of the famous. But the identity of the model doesn’t matter. It’s a painting competition, not a parade of people.

Of course, I won’t win, but I’m happy to be in it.

***

More months have passed. I have completed two more paintings, and last week Mother had taken me on an outing to the bush. I’ve absorbed the Spring awakening of the Australian landscape. Oh, it’s not as showy as that of other lands, its beauty is...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.7.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Anthologien
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: action • Adventure • Australia • Australian • Fiction • literary collections • Oceanian • Short Stories • single author
• ISBN-10: 1-877053-05-8 / 1877053058
• ISBN-13: 978-1-877053-05-4 / 9781877053054