Bits And Pieces

Kia Ora: This is bits of fictional attempts at trying to draw fictional characters. I am a fan of Kurt Vonegutt but with none of his black humour. Anyway here goes;

1

She looked like a toad when she was drunk; her head and neck sunk into a wide torso. She waddled around looking for a chair to flop into and sleep. Good. The rest of us could enjoy our beer. I don’t know why she drank, especially since her husband Alf died last year. He drank and she mainly ate. That’s what killed him prematurely. And it will surely kill her if someone didn’t take her in hand. But, who would? No one else was that lonely.

2

My cousin Flora bought a car before she got a drivers’ license. She thought it came with the car in the glove box, and anyway if she could drive a Fergusson tractor on the farm, how hard is a car? She reversed the tractor over her husband and killed him. It was an accident but she sold the farm and set herself up in town; house, car and all. But, she still had no driver’s license. I talked Flora into hiring a driving instructor. After the first lesson he refused to take her on again. He changed his mind when I told him that at 35 she was very well off financially and if he was still single, well…….She was attractive too; not slim but comely. He was back the next day and gritted his teeth for a week, one dead cat, a squashed dust bin, many near misses and the rear lights shattered, later. She got her license, fell in love with the Instructor and they married. After a month of bliss she caught him in bed with another much younger learner-driver. She backed over him in the drive way, and he died later. It was an accident.

3

I had another cousin called Waimarama. She was as beautiful as her name; slim, rounded in the right places and so on. Most heads turned when she walked into a room. For men it was with admiration and for women, with envy. She had one defect. Her physical brightness was personal not intellectual. On dates she had nothing much to say and apart from a wide, warm smile and girly giggle contributed nothing else to discourse. Even in bed they say she had little more life than a corpse and contributed nothing except a body. Everything was done for her. Anyway, Joe persevered with her mainly because he reveled in the impact that a beautiful young woman had on other men as he accompanied her into the pub, on the street, or at socials. At dances she had few moves. They moved in together and from all accounts Joe was the happiest of men. Anyway, one day neighbours heard Joe screaming with fear and pain. The police were called and they broke in. Joe was dead by then. She still held the knife and there was blood all over the bed and room. She sat there smiling and giggling. The knife was pried from her hands and she was taken by the police to the cells. In court she looked so beautiful people were stunned and forgot about the victim. When the Judge asked how she pleaded she said she did it because Joe had used up all the shampoo. And could she please have some in the cell? She said all this with a devastating smile and not a hint of evil. Everyone in that court nodded and agreed with her. Joe? Who was he again?

4

That’s enough about my whanau. I’m sure other people have cousins equally sane. What about George whom we called Hori? He was only a distant cousin; my wife’s uncle to be precise. Hori was the ultimate optimist. He’d wake early look out the window and it didn’t matter what he saw. If it was raining he knew the grass would grow. If the sun shone his lawn mowing business would do well. The more often the sun shone, the more he knew he’d sell more ice cream from his Tip Top van by the popular Onema Beach in summer. Life for him was buoyed by optimism and nothing could go wrong. He had fingers in many enterprises and he darted from one to the other. There just wasn’t anything he couldn’t turn his hand to. Neither could he turn down an opportunity. One came along in the form of a cyclone that bowled over some beach front houses at Te Onema. He was part owner of a demolition business with a mate Jackson and they got the contract to demolish and take away the debris of one house. The house was well built but the cyclone tore it to shreds. As they removed the layers of debris they carted it off a truck load at a time to their yard to sort later. Hori did most of the supervising and stood aside from the grabbers and diggers. Soon nothing was left. The workers and Jackson disappeared to the yard along with their machinery on a large truck. Hori was left to do a final inspection. In the middle of the empty section he stumbled over the lid of a metal box. These days you will find Hori tending the vines in his own vineyard in the wine country of NSW, Australia.