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Aug 28th, 2015
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  1. From beneath the gazeebo he could see plainly that the afternoon was warm, but here it did not touch him. The tree in his yard had long since grown gargantuan and beneath the overgrowth a cold had settled into the place that slowly killed the grass and left only a frigid paddock of dirt that indicated some case of pneumonia in the earth. The gazeebo, too, suffered: a useless shelter that he himself had built years before as a gift to his Mother who had always asked him for some shade in the backyard. It was a series of wooden posts sealed with concrete into the ground, support beams drilled between them and a dark green mesh laid and zip tied over the square frame, just big enough to fit an outdoor table set beneath it. Though it had been nothing then, it was now even less, a dirty shell of rotting wood and mesh that befit him perfectly while he sat there beneath it – as he had for years - also rotting in the cold. The back door of the house was left wide open and through it he listened to the football from the television inside, leaning in his plastic chair and idly disturbing the cool dirt beneath him with his bare feet. He called to one of his nephews to bring him another beer and rattled his can to produce the sound of suds and the loose tab echoing against empty aluminium. The call went unanswered but after a moment he faintly heard the old fridge ringing with glass bottles that had been left empty in the shelves of the door for who could say how long, and then, called familiarly by a boy’s voice: “There’s none left!”
  2.  
  3. He had guessed already that he might be due for a walk and was not bothered by the news. He leant forward and rested his elbows on the outdoor table taking his time as he liked to do, understanding that he would come to the task eventually but enjoying each moment he spent not doing it. He lit a cigarette and would leave when he was done with it; in the meantime he let his eyes glaze over the yard and he listened to the football, struggling to form a picture of the game in his mind given only the television commentary that presumed the listener was already watching half of what was happening. He tossed his butt and went through the door to find his wallet somewhere in the house. The bottom room had become the children’s who were too often around the place and all of them were laying one way or another across the couches and the floor in front of the television watching the game.
  4.  
  5. “You boys seen me wallet?” He asked.
  6.  
  7. “Yeah, I seen it in the kitchen.”
  8.  
  9. “Good boy, want anything from the shop?”
  10.  
  11. “Get us some ice-creams?”
  12.  
  13. “All of yas?”
  14.  
  15. “Yeah.”
  16.  
  17. “No, I’ll get a tub maybe and you can share.”
  18.  
  19. “Don’t worry about it then.”
  20.  
  21. They had not broken from the football and he left, found his wallet in the kitchen and headed out the front door passing his mother in the living room on the way, her watching the game as well.
  22.  
  23. “Want anything from the shop?” He asked her as he went.
  24.  
  25. “No” she said.
  26.  
  27. “Alright, I’ll be back.”
  28.  
  29. He walked down the street on the gravel beside the bitumen that separated the road from the footpath. When he felt the cold he remembered watching the afternoon from his backyard and thinking that it seemed warm out here, but the day seemed grey now, or colourless, lit just barely by something that seemed unlike the sun from behind a curtain of caliginous cloud; the evening had come quickly to the rest of the world while he was inside. Coming in his direction was a man also on the gravel and the two looked much the same: thin, once sinewy men, wearing thongs, short shorts and polo shirts that were both too large and by now well-worn. He thought of the man as a kind of derelict kin to him and when they passed each other he nodded and asked him how he was, but the other man only passed his eyes over him and turned away from him not crudely or in disgust, but arbitrarily and as though he had to do so all too often. He stopped and turned.
  30.  
  31. “Is there some problem, mate?”
  32.  
  33. But the man only kept walking and he kept on as well, feeling certain that from behind carefully shifted blinds all the neighbourhood's residents had seen his embarrassment. He came to the bottle shop after a time and inside he bought a carton of Victoria Bitter which he seldom drank and at the counter the young attendant remarked upon his choice.
  34.  
  35. “Dole day isn’t until Wednesday” he gave as his reason, taking strange pleasure in the uncertainty of the boy’s smile, not bothered in the same way by the opinions of working men as he was by those of his own caste.
  36.  
  37. He walked slower on the way home, holding the carton on his left shoulder and on the surface of the thin cardboard was a hole from which he had already drawn himself a drink. He drank too much and was forever pissing because of it and was now at his limit, which he knew well. He moved beneath the weeping of a thin willow that grew from the grass footpath not far from the bottle shop. Inside the branches, malleable and pulled to the ground by the weight of the leaves, he held his own privacy and while expertly balancing his can on the carton that still sat on his shoulder, he relieved himself against the base of the tree. He made his way home and by the time he arrived at the front door it was dark and from behind its glass shade the patio light seemed to barely settle on the surface of the steps and railing that ran from the doorstep, emitting only a scant yellow haze that depressed him and reminded him he was home. He moved through the house unobserved and stored the beers in the fridge, then sat down again under his decaying shelter, kicked off his thongs under the table and resumed his existence there. Later, filtered segments of light passed through the house, the fence and across the backyard as his Brother pulled into the drive-way. He felt relieved at least, that the kids would soon be heading home but did not look forward to seeing his brother who would no doubt come to gawk at his misery. He could hear his mother clearly even from the living room; she welcomed her son warmly and commented on the children and their behaviour as though they did not gallivant around the place every afternoon of the school week. When his brother came through the back door he stood half behind the wall to say that he did not intend on staying.
  38.  
  39. “Oi” he said.
  40.  
  41. “How are ya?”
  42.  
  43. “Not bad, been doing much?”
  44.  
  45. “Nah mate,” he presented his beer, raising the can as though it were a congenial testament to something better than him and all the rest of us - “nothing.”
  46.  
  47. His brother shook his head and left him there; pretending to be some kind of father figure deeply disappointed and at a loss with this hopeless son, but it was with some pity that he watched his brother condemn him. He had come to understand by now that this farce his brother played was born from a cruel obsession with some lost or never borne dignity that compelled his desire to see someone for once as the rest of the world saw him. He guessed at where his brother would be inside the house and he thrust his middle finger at the wall.
  48.  
  49. “Cunt.”
  50.  
  51. His mother came much later and stood at the door to see him drunker than he had been all day. He could see her there from the corner of his eye but stared ahead and kept drinking, pretending he was oblivious. She closed the door and turned off the lights inside but left the back light on for him and went to bed. Being drunk, a euphoria ran through him that was becoming part of a queer routine in which he felt himself slowly transitioning into a reality somehow truer than his own despite its need for his intoxication. There in his seat he saw the night, and beyond the fence that bordered his yard, all the permutations of possibility in existence and he understood, that for whatever reason, it had become his purpose to be at the centre of it all as an observer doomed only to observe the dead yard in which he sat as the linchpin to the entire thing. He had experienced this epiphany with no less surety for a number of nights now and as he had done so the night before, he drank more to invite this complexion he had until he slept and dreamt.
  52.  
  53. He dreamt he was formless then, but still enlightened in the truth he had adjudicated. He rose from his seat, through the mesh roof of the gazeebo and above himself. He saw their neighbourhood and suburb as would any bird, a place of slow decay that hinted at a dereliction that was soon to come. Beneath him and outward spanned streets, all planned and connected with plots of land between them to accommodate the houses, which owned their own yards and all of them were identical and seemed to him as cages or remote pockets of existence for their inhabitants to idle safely. He looked down and seen himself through the gazeebo, lying in his plastic chair with his neck hung over its edge and his jaw hung slackly; not as some sacrificial enabler who must exist for the sake of all, but as a thing dying slowly in a backyard of wet dirt that might even take initiative and kill itself for the simple sake of productivity.
  54.  
  55. He woke in the morning, depressed and unsure why, besides reasons obvious to him. He remembered, not well, a resolution he had come to in the night; a distorted sliver of surety that had come briefly and then stored itself somewhere in his memory, just out of reach so that he could only brush its surface and recall vague abstractions of its quality. His mother opened the back door and stood there looking at him, she turned and went back inside and he followed her, to take a beer from the fridge and return to his gazeebo to chase the thought he’d woken with, but it had already faded into the obscurity of the morning where he knew it could not be retrieved.
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