izzy

Quentin Tarantino wakes feverishly, looking for something to hold onto. He is skewed across the basement couch, sandwiched by a blow-up Nicki Minaj doll and a Vulcan BF50 nerf gun. His suit is crumpled. He wipes saliva from the corner of his mouth and pushes his hair off his forehead. Sunlight creeps through a chink in the curtain and he squints at it with swollen eyes. The birds are at it again. He staggers to the balcony, rips open the door and yells some abuse over the fence. Alan Ball mustn’t be home, because he doesn’t come out to defend his squawking brethren. Tarantino slams the balcony door, and the glass shatters. The noise of the exotic birds eating, fucking, chattering saunters in. The doorway stands open like a gaping jaw and the noise can’t be filtered out. Out, damn spot. Tarantino sits bowed over an enormous panelled wooden desk with his forehead on the cool desktop, and cries. His sobs mingle with the sonic refuse of the feathered jerks next door. He will not write today. He will not write tomorrow. The sound of the birds has become his only reality.

*

sarah

We winter inside our doona cocoon. Spiders of ice snaking across the fitted sheet. It’s coming out at the corners. It’s always coming out at the corners. The mattress won’t be shackled by a faded brown fitted sheet marked with cum stains and period leaks. I sigh in your arms.
Dear I, I say.
Dear I?
It’s like dear me, except I used the wrong pronoun.
You laugh for a full minutes, fall silent and then start hooting again. You make me write it down. I do not think that I am funny, and so making you laugh fills up my insides. I wonder how big comedians must feel when they feel the weight of ten thousand laughs hit their stomach at once. They must feel like titans.

*