Mr Ordinary Dons a Disguise (eBook)

Benjamin Allmon (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
222 Seiten
Odyssey Books (Verlag)
978-1-925652-04-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Talking
fruit. Time reversing. A scheming liver. A lighter's journey. Vengeful teddy
bears. Vending machine salvation. The Annual Meeting of Words. Everyone on
Earth moving six feet to the left.

Escape into vivid worlds, populated by everyday - ordinary if you will -
characters facing unique challenges... when sometimes the mask becomes the
face. From horror to humour, Speculative to literary fiction, Magic realism
to psychological dualism: Fifteen stories that linger in the mind.

Textauszug

The Karma Tree

This story first appeared in Aurealis #53, August 2012

Artwork by Lynette Watters

Back in ’08 I lived in a share house where this crazy girl pretty much ran things. She’d been there the longest; I know that counts for something, but otherwise she was pretty fucking dumb. She had this plant growing by the front door. A Karma Tree, she told people when they first moved in. It never needed water, apparently, just grew if the housemates did good deeds and withered if we didn’t.

‘How does the plant know?’ I asked on my first day tour of the house.

‘It just, like, knows, you know?’

‘Right.’

‘You’re full of shit, Kerryn,’ yelled the Wizard from his place on the couch. The whole time I lived there he was permanently ensconced between the cushions. We called him the Wiz.

‘Who is the plant to determine what’s right and wrong?’ he continued. ‘What if I did something that hurts one person but saves hundreds?’ He picked up the remote and flicked through channels with blinding rapidity before coming to rest on the gleaming bonce of Dr Phil. ‘Or, I dunno, run naked through the middle of town. I say it’s good, but the cops’d bust me ‘cos the law says it’s bad, and what the hell happens to the fucking tree in that instance, you stupid hippie?’

‘Shut up, Wiz,’ Kerryn muttered.

‘Hey, let’s smoke the Karma Tree,’ yelled Rebecca from the kitchen. Rebecca was always stoned, as I came to find out.

‘Shut up, Bec,’ Kerryn muttered, then took me by the arm and led me on the rest of the tour.

Kerryn had a cat she called Karma Cat, and explained to me it worked on a similar principle as the Karma Tree.

Do good—happy cat.

Do bad—angry cat.

There must have been an awful lot of evil perpetrated in that house, because that cat was one pissed-off motherfucker. Whenever it saw anyone it would scurry forth and latch onto an ankle, its claws and teeth like needles in the thin flesh. The Wiz must have booted the Karma Cat for all he was worth on a daily basis, but the little fucker never learned.

So there was the Karma Tree, the Karma Cat, and Kerryn. She, like most New Age idiots, was an idiot. She’d talk about saving the planet, and then get into her shitheap of a car that belched black smoke so thick you couldn’t make out the sticker on the bumper that said ‘You can’t hug kids with nuclear arms’. She’d talk organic this and environmentally friendly that, but couldn’t seem to sort the recycling and always left her bedroom light on, sometimes for weeks.

Rebecca was a much better housemate. Apart from being permanently stoned, she was a fabulous cook and easy on the eyes. I guess being a good cook is a natural outgrowth of having the munchies 24/7, but man, some of her dishes were out of this world. You’d come home and before you even walked up the steps to the front door and punted the Karma Cat out of the way, an armada of scents would assail your olfactory and set you to drooling. You’d stick your head into the kitchen and there was Bec, the mistress of the armada, hand on the tiller (or wooden ladle, in this instance), hair done up in a loose horsetail, a joint poking out between her lips and a dreamy, faraway look in her red eyes. You’d say, ‘Hey Becs, whatcha cookin’?’, and she’d say ‘Chili’ and there you’d go. Bowls of chili for the next three days, and as anyone will tell you, chili is like wine: it only gets better with age. When Bec wasn’t cooking or laughing at pencils, she worked at the local video store.

* * *

I went in to rent a video one night about a year after I moved in, and she didn’t recognise me at all. Her eyes were red slits; a serene grin floated on her face.

‘Hey Bec,’ I said, ‘busy?’

‘As a bee,’ she replied after some time. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Bec, it’s me. Oliver. Ollie. From home? Our home?’

‘I don’t think we have that, but I’ll check,’ she said, not moving. Her hands traced the counter, briefly pausing over changes in the topography—a pencil, a hair-clip, a small rubber effigy of Ronald McDonald. He was grinning, too. I thought about renting a movie, but all that grinning unsettled me, and I left.

When I got home, the Wiz was on the couch. He didn’t look particularly arcane in his tracksuit and mismatched socks, and the beanie wasn’t much of a magician’s hat when you got right down to it. He was watching netball.

‘This sport is fucked,’ he said as I entered the living room, sidestepping the attack of the Karma Cat, whereupon its clawed feet carried it skittering past on the polished floorboards, flying out the front door and into the night.

‘It’s not so bad.’ I shut the door and went to the fridge to see if there were any beers left.

‘Nah, it’s too fucking hard to understand,’ he replied, but went on watching it anyway, one hand fondling his genitals through the track pants. I decided to take my beer out onto the back balcony.

* * *

The house was an old Queenslander, wooden floors all the way through, even the bathrooms. It was bitterly cold in winter. You never went anywhere without socks on; the floorboards were like ice. It had a big balcony that overlooked a run-to-shit lawn out back. The clothes line poked out of the long grass and the feral blackberry like a withered steel tree.

I sat in one of the plastic chairs and drank my beer, looking out over the rioting lawn. The full moon had washed it a silvery non-colour and a soft breeze whispered through the long grass. The Wiz said he’d seen a family of wallabies living there last summer, but I doubted it. We were in the western suburbs of Brisbane, and I thought the chances of a flock (or a pod, or a frolic—who knows?) of wallabies spending a whole summer in someone’s backyard were slim. The Karma Cat would have been into them, for one thing.

The wind gusted a little harder, and the clothes line moaned on its rusted axis like a bad idea. A shiver ran through me. I’m not into premonitions and precognition—that was more within Kerryn’s purview—but that groan and the cold night wind seemed like a bad omen.

There was a knock at the door, loud enough to be heard over the Wiz bemoaning the mysteries of netball and the sound of Michael Franti (whom I heartily despise after my time in that house) rapping through the walls of Kerryn’s room.

‘Can someone get that?’ yelled the Wiz, even though his couch was three short steps from the door.

Franti kept telling us that everyone deserves music (his, presumably), and the knocking came again, louder this time.

I sighed and got up, carrying my beer back into the living room. The Wiz was right ruminatively kneading his junk and squinting at the television.

‘Someone’s at the door,’ he said as I walked past.

‘No shit.’

I figured it would be Bec, baked and unable to remember where her key was, despite the fact we never locked the door. The last time this had happened she had had the key in her hand, blinking at it owlishly as though it was some mysterious artefact.

I opened the door and for a moment I thought it was Bec. This woman was about the same height, but that was where the similarities ended. Where our housemate was vague, smiling, and never quite there, this woman was alert, agitated and—when she grabbed my arm, burying the fingers into my shamefully soft bicep—very much there.

‘You’ve got to let me in,’ she said.

‘Wha …?’

‘Please! You’ve got to help me, quickly!’

I allowed her to push her way in, feeling slow, stupid and acutely incapable. Guys on television—like those in the Acronym Bunch, CSI, NCIS, CI, SVU—always seem to know what to do in crises despite any adequate understanding of the situation, and always seem to get it right. All I could do was stand there flat of foot and make inquiring, vowel-heavy noises.

‘Aaaa, haaa, oooo …’

‘Hi,’ I heard the Wizard say companionably. ‘Do you understand this fucking game?’

She turned to me and I noticed she was quite cute, terror notwithstanding. Short brown hair and large brown eyes, she looked a bit like an elf.

‘Shut the door!’ she said.

‘Gaaah!’ said I, and pushed the door shut with dreamlike slowness. She was still clutching my arm, and although painful, it was quite nice. It had been a while since my last female contact.

‘Doesn’t it lock?’ she asked, incredulous.

‘Aaaah … don’t. Know. I mean, that is, we’ve never tried.’

She let go of my arm and ran fleetly across the floorboards to our rudimentary dining set. Picking up one of the mismatched chairs, she ran back and wedged it under the doorknob. I looked at her, then at the Wiz to see what he made of this bizarre turn of events.

‘What, so you can’t move once you get the ball? Is that right?’ he hollered at the room in general.

‘Um, hey, are you all right?’ I said, having recovered the power of intelligible speech. I reached out to her tentatively. She checked her improvised lock, and then turned to face me. I couldn’t get over those eyes. They were so large, fringed with long lashes. She was wearing a pink t-shirt and jeans.

‘No, not all right,’ she said, running a hand through her close-cropped hair. ‘I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, but I had to. I’ve...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.8.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Bilderbücher
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Spielen / Lernen
• Schlagworte: Horror • Humour • magic realism • Short Stories • speculative • unique challenges • Weird
• ISBN-10: 1-925652-04-1 / 1925652041
• ISBN-13: 978-1-925652-04-8 / 9781925652048