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.
