Exclusive!

Conrad Myer was at the supermarket considering which packet of toilet rolls gave the best value per wipe and heading towards the beer chiller.  He manoeuvred his trolley past the magazine racks glancing at the covers with beaming celebrities with stories about their families or their dogs or their latest cause.  Tossers, he thought, enjoying his relative anonymity from playing football or at least the sort of invisibility a contract worth eight hundred thousand dollars a year provided.  This was not including endorsements for Chunkos pet food, Rolling O tyres and Jaguar, ensuring a new set of wheels every year. Being gifted at kicking a ball had its advantages and despite the intense training and aches and pains, life was still good.  He could grab a takeaway coffee without creating too much distraction except for the occasional request for a selfie or two.  As the saying goes, men wanted to be like him, women just wanted to be with him. 

Fast forward fifteen months, it all changed.  At a movie premiere, Jessica Townsley, the hot new it-girl literally fell into his lap after tripping on her flowing designer dress.   Dozens of flashes captured the brief but intense meeting of eyes, the moment ultimately destined for the following week’s ‘Women’s Own’ and ‘Entertainment Now!’. The unfortunate nip-slip undoubtedly heading for less salacious mediums or at least in the same women’s magazines but with a superimposed basketball over the offending nipple and some line like ‘only one point for Myer.’

Conrad’s football career flourished and the money and endorsements flowed; Jessica’s television presence grew and movie offers were forthcoming.  The wedding date was kept under wraps and finally arrived along with every sporting celebrity and local television celeb who was anybody, only if they could be prised free of their mobile for the duration of the ceremony.

They drove out to the airport, the previous three days a whirlwind of excitement and anticipation.  Two boys on skateboards whizzed by the roadside bus stop, one drawing the attention of the other to the blown-up cover of a smiling Conrad and Jessica with ‘Exclusive!’ at the bottom.
 
He’s sure he can see the younger one yelling “Tosser”!


Andrew Hawkey

The 'Auckland Housing Crisis'

It would make for a better story if it had been Meng Jiangli’s grandmother who had terrified him with ancient, eerie tales of ghosts and demons and ox-faced, soul-eating deities, but there was the small matter of the egregious Mr Mao and his revolution and then his cultural revolution – ‘smashing the four olds’ – to consider. What could his grandmother possibly know of ancient tales? It was, rather, Meng Jiangli’s sister who had read to him stories out of Pu Songling’s book, published in 1766, ‘Liaozhai Zhiyi’ – stories of shape-shifting foxes, the dead who rose and ate the faces of their kin, Xing Tian whose nipples were all-consuming eyeballs, enemy of the supreme deity . . .

In his new homeland – island nation with the population of a suburb and air so clean you could see through it – the Moon shone as bright as had the Sun in the Shaanxi Province of his childhood. It had been not just the continuous roiling columns of satanic industrial coal smoke that had rendered the Sun at noon a pale white disc, there had been also the fine dust lifted high in the air in the eroded west that filtered down – a brown talc – over everything. Women with large besom brooms had swept all day outside their shops.

Shanghai had been cleaner if morally more corrupt, but gun violence and knife fights had long been part of the underworld of that most cosmopolitan of cities.

It was in Shanghai that Meng Jiangli started working for Mr Lu.

In his new homeland it seemed almost unnecessary for Mr Lu to be accompanied at all times by a pair of armed fighters but it had not been so in Shanghai.

In Western Springs Park at 11.30 p.m. the southern Moon shone brightly. Su Dongpo and Meng Jiangli, with Mr Lu, entered the silent, empty park from the Great South Road side while the other ‘businessman’ and his thugs entered from the far side by the Auckland Zoo.

In the middle of the little, humped bridge over the dark lake the two suited men met while the ‘muscle’ waited at opposite ends of the bridge. Business.

After this, thought Meng Jiangli – retirement; a health-supplements shop; a nice, newly built house; his mother happily installed from Shaanxi. Surely here, in this innocent place, he would be free of hungry ghosts, flesh-eaters, the angry dead. But out at Ihumatao, the surveyors were driving stakes into the heart of the land and bulldozers were crushing the bones of the ancestors as they fabricated new suburbs from tapu land.


Barnaby McBryde

That One Day

The flyleaf inscription rekindled memories of their final day together. Eighteen years of news crammed into barely twenty-four hours. The London book shop. The skirt.

“Do you like this skirt?” Emily had asked, waving the green Indian print. “I loved it so much I bought three.  Take it, I want you to have it.” No refusal accepted.

Typical Emily, generous and insistent. Air hostess, computer programmer, musician, teacher, she’d packed more into her forty-nine years than anyone Leah knew. She studied French Horn until she could play professionally, sang, penned poems, cajoled and encouraged, and organised her world to conform to her ambitious vision.  Her life, lived con spirito, brillante, left Leah breathless.

They’d met in an opera chorus and counselled each other through blooming love. Six devoted years, before the long silence. Today it would be called a 'boundary issue', Leah thought. Back then, it was simple, sudden, sad. Her husband managed an orchestra. Emily wanted work and was bitter when Leah would not advocate. The aching silence which followed ate a hole in Leah's heart.  Emily moved half a world away, and over the years scraps of news arrived third-hand. She was divorced, alone, then ill.

“I want to buy you a book,” Emily had declared that one day, and between appointments, they escaped the antiseptic hospital air. “Something to inspire you to write.”

Leah opened the book at the inscription, as she did every year on the anniversary of Emily’s death. No real need; she knew it by heart.

To Leah,
Lost for many years, who made it all up in one day and came to chemo with me.  24 hours of joy – as it had always been! Now write a play – you know you want to.
Love Emily (always) xxxx


Rosemary McBryde

January

Welcome to 2017 short short stories - for anyone who likes to read and / or write very short fiction, prose, essays or poetry.  The project started last year. Writing of 300 - 500 words is welcome from any contributors. Each month a given theme or starter idea will be posted on the 1st of the month, to ignite the creative spark.  This month, the starter is "New Beginnings".  Email your writing to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com and it will be posted in the final week of the month. Happy writing!