This is a tale told a few years ago, as part of my daily writing habit - using six randomly chosen words to write something, anything, in 30 minutes. Raw and unedited. Enjoy!
minute valve tweezer ruffle appetite brink
‘Julie, hand me that valve gasket cover, will you?
‘Um, what’s that?’
‘Right in front of you, dummy’
Julie never liked helping Jimmy with his car repairs. It wasn’t as if he was even a mechanic. Mostly he liked to use his short course at TAFE on car maintenance as if it were a PhD. His feathers would get ruffled if she handed him the wrong tool or part, and he would glance sideways at her, shaking his head, as if she were an idiot. Over the years she’d become a serf without even being aware of it. Handing him even the tweezers to pluck his eyebrows. You would think being a hundred kilo bogan with a long red beard and sideburns wouldn’t be so fussy about the unruly caterpillars that hovered above his placid blue eyes, but…
She handed him the somewhat cumbersome part. Wondering when she might ever get a starring role in this relationship. Of course the writing had been on the wall when she first met him, as after their first dinner he took her neatly manicured pinkie finger and used it as a toothpick. She was shocked at first but then Julie had thought it funny and quirky and as she hadn’t had much experience with blondish/reddish buff surfer boys out in the fibro wasteland of the Western Suburbs, where car wrecks and rusted playground equipment was the norm, she put up with it.
When they’d first got married, she’d accepted his behaviour, because as her mother said ‘happy hubby, happy wife’ – she didn’t realise at the time that the expression was supposed to rhyme. Now that the kids had left home – Billy to the city to realise his dream of being a Reality tv star and Jemima also to the city to assuage her gargantuan appetite by becoming a pastry chef, it was her time – me time, as they often said in beauty ads on tv.
Now Julie was on the brink of freedom – all she had to do was pluck up the courage. Now or never – or if not actually free…her mind wandered, off into places she hadn’t been for years – sunning herself on the beach, reading a paperback without having to apply Jimmy’s sunscreen or wax his board. Going off to the country – driving off aimlessly without having to have a destination – not having to make Jimmy’s lunch and listen to him complain the bread was cut too thick – or the beer was too warm - she was sailing off on a cloud of optimism when his voice cut through it.
‘Hand me that bloody wrench, Julie, how often do I have to ask?
When the paramedics arrived a couple of hours later, and poor Jimmy was declared non-responsive, Julie explained that the garage had always been a mess, and unfortunately the tool in question had fallen from one of the shelves Jimmy had rigged up without following the instructions on the box.
