Reading: The Tub
I was lucky enough to join a group at Conflux this year giving readings from recent stories. I read from The Tub and maybe got a little too into it… (photos by Cat Sparks.)
The Tub
We found the tub in the wastes out back of the Kwik Fit tyre place. A dark overgrown no-man’s-land of dirt and weeds between the back gardens and spiked fences of Richmond Road, and the mountains of bare, burst or burnt-out tyres in the Kwik Fit yard. Ivy, crab apple and cow parsley grew wild in that narrow space, unowned and shut off from the world. But me and Dave knew a way in—a secret way—down in the corner of the neighbourhood recreation ground.
We was bored and summer-holiday aimless, hungry for distraction. Some kid in Dave’s class swore blind his brother found a stash of Reader’s Wives in a Tesco’s bag somewhere off the rec. So we was sort of on a quest for porno mags, but also not really—just happy to be out of the house, out in the sun, with purpose enough to make an adventure of it. We’d skirted the bushes behind the little-kid’s playground, climbed the spiked iron railings and trampled the clumps of bramble and stingers what grew up against the tyre yard’s high tin fence. There, at the corner, was a sheet of tin curled up at the edge. Under this we’d crawled into the dank wonderland beyond, that shady in-between place with its weird smell of creosote and compost, of sunshine and rubber. From one side, blackbirds and Radio 4. From the other, workshop clangour and the distant hum of main-road traffic. We didn’t find no porno. What we found was the tub.
It was one of them old-fashioned bathtubs, with feet like a lion. The legs was ornate, clawed paws wrapped round with snakes. The base was ringed with designs: grape bunches, vine leaves and the like. White enamel it was—or were. It was so dingy with grime you couldn’t imagine it’d ever truly gleamed. It lay askew, one foot inches off the ground, the other corner sunk in the dirt. Ivy’d grown all over and through, tangled between the legs and half covering one side. Must’ve been there an age.
But the tub was nothing compared to what was inside…
Read more in Issue 16 of Midnight Echo.
Australian Shadows Award winner!
On The Line
The toy phone shrilled and shrilled.
Mike watched his daughter from behind the Sunday paper. He’d started on the crossword, but the sound of the phone hacked at his concentration like jagged glass. He tried to focus on the grid, at the handful of words inked in blue biro, but his attention was across the room, on the play mat with Janie and the damn phone. She’d found it in the 50c box at Vinnies, a lump of red and yellow plastic moulded to look like an old-school flip-top mobile. She loved that toy phone almost as much as Mike hated it.
With every chirrup, Mike felt his tenuous calm splinter. Janie had been playing with that bloody thing non-stop since they got back last month, and it was really starting to grate.
“Hello, Janie speaking.”
It didn’t seem to bother Mandi. She had a talent for tuning out all that was unpleasant in the world, leaving only those details that kept her happy: coffee, music, the mysteries of the human heart, and the wonder of their angelic, sandy-haired Janie. But he just didn’t have Mandi’s patience. No matter how hard he tried to ignore the bleeps and ditties of every bit of plastic crap Janie was given each year, something always cut through, always managed to jangle his nerves, sustaining that constant of low-level stress, which along with the never-to-be-satisfied hunger for sleep, seemed to define Mike’s experience of parenthood…
On The Line was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story in 2017.
Read more in Issue 12 of Midnight Echo.