Jacinta Takes A Walk

By barbar

© 2026

 

Jacinta decides she needs to go for a walk. She ends up in a different place from where she started, but that is the outcome of most walks. This story is more about the journey than the destination.

 

Caution: References to sexual violence and abuse.

1: Aftermath

 

I needed to go for a walk.

 

I hauled my ass out of the arm chair. The room spun for a moment then settled down. A bowl that had started the evening containing snacks was upended on the floor, the remaining crumbs scattered around it on the threadbare carpet. Trying to step over the bowl, I lost my balance. After staggering sideways, I half-fell into the tattered couch. I slurred out a thanks to the couch for saving me from hitting the floor. After resting for a breath or two, I tried again to stand up and then to walk. Neither task as easy as they should’ve been.

 

My route out of the room was blocked by a half-naked dude lying on the ground. His shirt was gone and his trousers were around his thighs, revealing a pair of pale blue boxers. The shorts were soaked across the front. The wet stain spreading on the carpet underneath him suggested he was already lying there when he pissed himself. He was clutching a mostly empty beer bottle to his naked hairy chest like it was a kid’s fluffy bear or whatever. I didn’t recognise the man. My memory of the last couple of hours was kind of blurry. I had no idea how he got there, even though I probably should’ve seen it all happen from where I was sitting.

 

I stepped over the man and tried to walk through the doorway. I missed and slammed my left shoulder into the wall.

 

That should have hurt but I wasn’t feeling any pain.

 

“Shit!” My voice sounded weird in my ears, slurred and broken.

 

The room spun again so I leaned against the wall in the hallway. Once the crappy wallpaper came back into something like focus, I used my hands on the wall either side of me to steer my way down the hallway toward the back of the house. My hand knocked the framed map of Australia that had hung in the hallway for as long as I could remember. My knocking it had skewed it to one side, but I was too far gone to straighten it up again. Australia would have to stay tilted to the left. If I’d been more sober, I might have laughed at the political comment the map was making. I left the map as it was and continued to stagger my way down the hallway.

 

Voices sounded from the kitchen, a man and a woman. It was a couple from across the street. They were leaning against the counter and arguing about some dumb shit to do with the share market.

 

I propped myself in the doorway. “Party’s over,” I slurred. “Time for you two to piss off back home.”

 

They acknowledged me with a wave and went back to arguing. I decided I didn’t care that much and left them to it.

 

The door to the main bedroom was open. A naked pair of legs extended out into the hallway, attached to a woman’s naked ass. Judging by the butterfly tattoo on the left butt-cheek, the legs and ass belonged to my step-mother. I stepped closer. Jackie’s upper half was revealed, lying in the entrance to the bedroom. Her upper half was also naked, with the sole exception being a wide bangle bracelet on her right wrist. Jackie snorted and smacked her lips, then went still again. I carefully stepped over her legs and proceeded further down the hallway.

 

The door to my room was closed. I leaned against it. The handle wasn’t cooperating. It took me two goes to get it open. The door gave way suddenly, and since I was leaning against it, I staggered into the room.

 

A tall thin man with a straggly beard and long greasy hair was standing next to the chair where my dirty clothes tended to pile up. His shorts were around his ankles and a pair of my used undies was wrapped around his dick. He stopped wanking and stared at me in shock.

 

“Hello, Merv,” I said, slurring my words. “What’re you doing Merv?” He didn’t move. “Merv the Perv?”

 

I could almost see his brain ticking behind his eyes. Would he flap his dick at me and increase his jollies by flashing a sixteen-year-old? Or, would he tuck it away and bluster his way out of the room. I was hoping he would choose the second option but he seemed to be stuck trying to decide.

 

Frodo slipped through the door and sidled up beside me, hissing and baring his fangs at the intruder in my room. I dropped my hand down to pet his head and reassure him, but didn’t take my eyes off Merv.

 

Deciding it was up to me to break the impasse, I reached over to my desk and picked up a pair of scissors.

 

“Get that dick out of my room, or I’ll cut the pathetic thing off and mount it on my wall.”  

 

I snapped the scissors at Merv. He scuttled out of the room, trying to drag his shorts up as he went.  

 

“Jackie’s out cold in the hallway,” I shouted as he scuttled past me. “If you ever wanted to fuck your sister, now’s your chance while she’s unconscious.”

 

He’s probably too much of a coward to actually try fucking his sister. But I guarantee that a perv like Merv has thought about it plenty of times.

 

I slammed the door shut behind him and dragged my desk over until it blocked the door from opening. Given my current condition, that took a shit-ton of effort.

 

Once I was done, I turned back to look over the rest of my room. The pair of undies Merv had been using for his wank lay crumpled and abandoned in the middle of the tattered carpet. I kicked them over to the chair to join the rest of my unwashed clothes. Judging by the amount of splooge that I’ve found when I did my washing, that wasn’t the first time Merv had wanked off using my undies. It was the first time I’d caught him at it, though, so that counted for something.

 

On the wall above where my desk usually sat was a wooden shelf with a single plastic trophy. The little plaque at the bottom was coated with a layer of dust but I didn’t need to see it to know what it said. “Jacinta Mells, 2nd place, Under 10 Tap, UMBC Dance Competition, South Australia.”

 

Dad had built the wooden shelf for me to keep all my trophies on. That’s what he’d said. He said I had talent and would soon get enough trophies to fill the shelf to overflowing. It was the last thing he did for me before he died. A crappy wooden shelf is my memorial for my father.

 

My whole life turned to shit when Dad died. I quit dancing. I quit trying to do good at school. I quit trying to be a good girl. They don’t give you trophies for quitting so that dance trophy was destined to stay on its own on Dad’s shelf. I keep it there because it symbolises how shit my life has been since then. It’s not like I’m proud of my tap-dancing skills from when I was nine. Truth is, I was shit at it. Just that the other girls were worse than me.

 

There were three things Dad was really bad at. One was his ability to choose a decent woman to fall in love with. Two was his ability to hold down a decent job for more than a year at a time. Three was his ability to drive a car at a decent speed without veering off the road and over a cliff. For better or for worse, I wasn’t in the car when he did that. Driving off a cliff and then being trapped inside while the car sank in the river is probably a shit way to die. They never told me that, of course. But it doesn’t take much imagination to picture what that would be like. I’ve had enough nightmares since then to confirm for myself that I sure as shit do not want to die that way.

 

I walked over to the mirror Dad had fixed to the wall when we’d first moved into this shit hole of a house. It hadn’t been so bad back then, but it was a shit hole now. We still paid rent but the owner only cared about getting his money. He couldn’t care less if the house was falling down around our ears.

 

I looked into the mirror. The denim skirt I was wearing was looking worn and frayed. That wasn’t surprising, it was my favourite skirt, and I wore it all the time. The black crop-top was newer. I’d picked it up recently. I mean that I quite literally picked it up. Some girl had left it on the floor in the change-rooms at school, on one of the days I’d bothered to go to P.E. It probably fell out of her bag when she was getting changed. The top had gone into the bottom of my bag. Right now, it was fitting quite snugly over my growing tits and displaying a fair amount of bare skin above and below.

 

I’d started the night with a jacket so that I only hinted at the bare skin through the gaps of the jacket. With the jacket on, I thought I’d looked trendy or something. Without the jacket, I looked trashy. No doubt the jacket was somewhere in the house. I’d find it eventually, provided Jackie didn’t steal it back. It was hers in the first place, but I’d taken it months ago and she never complained, so that made it mine.

 

The sneakers I was wearing had seen better days, too. They were a cheap knock-off and, like most cheap knock-offs, had started looking old the week after I started wearing them.

 

My shoulder-length brown hair had started the night gathered back and held in place with a scrunchy. At some point in the evening, half of my hair had escaped and now dangled loosely down the side of my face like a wilted and dying fern, while the scrunchy still bravely clung onto the last few clumps of my hair. But now instead of being at the back, the scrunchy and the hair it held skewed drunkenly to the side. I pulled the scrunchy out of my hair and tossed it onto my old and battered dresser, where it joined several others of its kind.

 

I looked at my face. My eyes looked like shit. The eye shadow I’d put on earlier did nothing to conceal how shit they looked. Brown hair, blue eyes and freckles. I hated that combination. If I wanted to hide the freckles, I had to use so much makeup that it made me look plastic. And makeup isn’t cheap, unless you use the five-finger discount, so mostly I didn’t bother.

 

When I was eight, Dad told me I was the spitting image of my mother. At the time, that made me feel warm inside. Now that I’m sixteen, I think about him saying that and wonder if Dad was a perv too and married an eight year old who was four feet tall and had no tits. I wondered if my egg donor mother had as many freckles as me. If that was the case, those freckles would probably never go away. That was a depressing thought.

 

Through the mirror, the room behind me looked tinged with pink. I swiped across the mirror and the pink didn’t go away. I turned around and looked over my room. The thing I was looking at seemed fine, but everything else would turn slightly pink. The walls were covered by old crappy tan-coloured wallpaper. It was torn in the places where I’d ripped down the posters the nine year old me had liked but the twelve year old me had rejected. I never got around to replacing them. The torn wallpaper looked vaguely pink.

 

“Shit!” I sat down on the side of the bed and looked around my pink-tinged room. Had I taken something? I’d been drinking beer. I didn’t remember doing any pills. I tried to avoid taking any of Jackie’s pills these days. I’d learned the hard way. At least I thought I’d learned. Maybe not.

 

Despite the muddled condition of my brain, I realised that the added colours had been in the background of my vision for a while. The colours were now getting stronger so I could no longer avoid noticing them. “Shit!”

 

I had to piss. I looked at the desk currently blocking my door and thought about the effort involved in getting to the bathroom. Not to mention that Merv the Perv was somewhere on the other side of that door. He was quite possibly standing in the hallway, looking at his sister’s naked ass and finishing the wank I’d interrupted. I decided to go with plan B.

 

That meant I needed to go for a walk.

 

I went to the pile of clothes on my chair and tipped some of them onto the floor until I found the windcheater jacket with the zip front that I was looking for. It was usually pale blue but right now it looked more like fuchsia. I stepped over to the window and yanked my curtains apart. That’s funny. They aren’t usually fuchsia. The faded flower pattern of the curtains actually looked better with the fuchsia washed over it. I opened the window, sat on the windowsill, then dropped to land on the fuchsia-coloured concrete path below. Actually, the colour of the concrete was more of a magenta. I landed badly and went sprawling on the magenta concrete.

 

“Shit!” That should have hurt but I wasn’t feeling any pain.

 

I staggered back to my feet. The world spun around me. The colours of the night swirled in crazy confusing patterns. I put one hand against the wall of the house and used it to guide myself along the path and to hold myself upright. No longer content with being a single colour, now my vision was infused with a swirling pattern of various colours mixed together. It was, like, psychedelic or something.

 

With the aid of the wall, I followed the narrow path to the back of the house. The flywire screen door had holes in it big enough to put my head through. Come to think of it. One of the holes came from me sticking my head through it. I opened that and the slightly more solid door behind it. Neither door was locked. They were never locked. I stumbled into the laundry and opened the door into the bathroom. The catch on the bathroom door had been broken for years. The door opened just by pushing on it.

 

Inside the bathroom, I stumbled to a halt. An oversized middle-aged woman was sprawled on the toilet, her undies around her ankles and her knees spread wide, giving me a perfect view of the matted jungle of hair that covered her twat. Laila was wearing a button-up dress but the buttons were all undone and the dress gaped loosely open. At some point, Laila had a tumor removed from her left tit and as a result, her left tit was a weird shape and only half the size of her right tit. Usually, Laila hid that deformity with a padded bra but the bra was gone and both her tits were on full display.

 

Laila’s face had been slack and unfocused but now she recognised me and her face slowly transformed into something resembling a smile.

 

“Hello, doll,” she slurred. She lifted up her one full-sized tit and offered it to me. “Do you feel like sucking on my titty?”

 

Laila was normally an uptight, righteous woman with strongly held views about the wrongness of just about everything. She would loudly proclaim that sex was for procreation and anything else was perverted. Except when she got really drunk. When she was smashed, Laila was a sex fiend who would fuck anything that moved and quite a few things that didn’t. Laila and my stepmother, Jackie, had been besties since primary school. I’d lost count of the times the two of them would lez out on the living room floor and slurp on each other’s twats like it was their favourite brand of icecream.

 

It was by copying something Laila did that I learned how to wank myself using an old plastic doll that was a relic of my childhood. It was by watching Laila that I learned how to suck a dick, and lick a twat, and do a few other things that are probably too gross to mention.

 

Laila’s was the first twat Frodo ever licked. I think I was eleven. It was a party and everyone, including me, was flying high as kites on some of Jackie’s pills. She thought Frodo was Jackie and jumped on Frodo. Before anybody could say anything, Frodo was 69ing like a pro. Laila and Jackie had given enough public lessons so everyone knew what to do. I don’t think she remembered it afterwards, but I did. Frodo loved it and couldn’t wait to get Laila totally off her face drunk again so that they could repeat the experience. I’d stopped letting that happen a couple of years ago.

 

Every time she had a big O, Laila’s one remaining nipple would spurt a tiny amount of milk that was warm and sticky and sweet. I’d sucked on that tit a time or three, back when I was going wild.

 

It was a measure of how far gone I was that when Laila offered that tit to me, I was seriously considering taking her up on it, for old time’s sake. But then I remembered that I needed to piss more than I needed to suck on a tit.

 

“Party’s over, Laila,” I said. “Time for you to go home.”

 

At that moment, Laila was hit with a bout of explosive diarrhoea, complete with all the sounds and smells that go with that. I guess that explained why she was sprawled out on the loo like that.

 

“Sorry doll,” said Laila, with a drunken chuckle. “Guess I’m not goin’ nowhere.”

 

“Well, shit,” I said.  

 

I used the doorway to turn myself around and leave.

 

Time for Plan C. That meant I had to keep walking.

 

I staggered back out through the back door and across the three uneven paving stones that represented our back yard. I scrambled up onto the top of a broken and abandoned washing machine. From there it was easy to lift myself onto the roof of the shed. It groaned and tilted slightly under my weight until it was stopped by the back fence. A few steps and I was dropping down off the roof and over the fence to land on top of a wrecked car. This was a route I’d taken numerous times. Normally I could take that landing like a cat. Tonight, I stumbled and collapsed in a heap.

 

I would have happily lain there and gone to sleep but the urgent need to piss drove me on. I slid down off the car and staggered into a corner of the junk yard where I was completely hidden by a small mountain of old car tyres. The yard was deserted at this time of the night so I could have squatted in the middle of the yard and nobody would have seen me but habit made me go into the corner where I was hidden.

 

I folded up my skirt and lowered my undies before squatting. Judging by the smell, I wasn’t the only one who used this corner to piss in.

 

When Merv was in the house, the broken catch on the bathroom door meant there was nothing to stop him wandering into the bathroom when I was in there. Sometimes, I didn’t give a shit and let him watch me in the shower or on the loo for a moment before I felt compelled to yell at him and chase him out. Other times, the thought of him watching me would creep me out and I would do without a shower or I would come over here to piss. Fortunately, Merv didn’t visit every day.

 

The first time I can remember Merv groping me was back when I was eleven or twelve. He grabbed my ass and squeezed it and started roving his hand around the contours of my ass like he was modelling clay. I kind of liked it, the caressing touch was something I almost craved. I’d sit on his lap and let him squeeze and stroke my ass and my back until I felt like purring like a cat. He never did anything beyond fondling my ass and my back. I was so messed up that I might not have objected if he’d tried but he never did. Even that didn’t happen all the time, just every so often, but it went on for a couple of years.

 

Then for some reason, I don’t remember why, one day I decided I didn’t like it, so I turned around and kicked him so hard in the nuts that he limped for a week. Since then, if I don’t like the way he’s touching me, it only takes threatening to kick him again and he pulls his hands back like they’ve been burnt. But his eyes are always sliding down my body, trying to get a glimpse of my tits or my ass. And I can see in his face that he’s imagining doing stuff with me. He’s never going to actually try it, though, which means he’s pretty harmless. I’m not actually scared of him. His wandering eyes sometimes creeps me out, that’s all.

 

So what if he sometimes wanks into my undies? His splooge washes out easy enough. The upside is that I can usually get money out of him by talking nicely to him and smiling like I actually like him. I’ve even offered to suck his dick a couple of times when I really needed something. Both times he looked scared and gave me what I wanted without me having to do anything. I don’t usually call him Merv the Perv to his face. Hopefully calling him that tonight hadn’t cut off my supply of beer and cash.

 

I finished what I was doing and pulled up my undies. No paper, obviously. I sometimes envy dudes who can just shake the piss off the end of their dicks and not need paper. I shook my skirt back down into position and stepped back out of the corner. It should have been mostly dark out here but instead everything was a kind of swirling burnt orange, with large swabs of deep purple smeared through it. Picasso would’ve been proud.

 

“I hate my life,” I told the night.

 

I couldn’t face going back into the house, and facing the aftermath of the party.

 

I decided to keep walking.

 

2: Back to School

 

Despite the swirling colours, I was able to navigate my way through the junkyard. Then I climbed over the fence, with the aid of an old dining table. It had a missing leg and was propped upside down against a disused gate. The route up the back of the dining table and over the fence was familiar and routine.

 

Once in the street, I stood blinking for a moment. I was face to face with a bright yellow rhinoceros. We stared at each other without moving. The thing’s horn was pointing straight at my forehead. I felt like the rhinoceros only had to lean forward and it would spear my brain.

 

Suddenly, the rhinoceros coughed and then vomited all over the front of my windcheater and down the front of my denim skirt. Given all the colours swirling around, it didn’t surprise me that the vomit truly was all the colours of the rainbow.

 

“Well, shit!” I said.

 

“Well, shit!” said the rhinoceros as it wiped the vomit away from its mouth.

 

I turned away from it and started walking along the street. I stunk of beer and vomit. Did it vomit in my mouth? I could taste vomit in my mouth. I leaned against the wire fence beside me and spat a few times to try to clear the taste out of my mouth.

 

I heard a pitter-patter coming up beside me. I glanced to the side and saw that what had been a rhinoceros was now a horse. It came up to about my shoulder. It was mostly sky blue but it had a patch of glowing radioactive green along one side and down the back leg.

 

“Hello Frodo,” I said.

 

“Frodo,” said the horse.

 

“Last time I saw you, you were a spider,” I said.

 

“Spider,” said the horse.

 

“You and your friends hung on the wall of my bedroom and watched me have nightmares.”

 

“Friends,” said the horse.

 

The patch of glowing green spread and soon all of Frodo was radioactive green. We walked down the street and the green started coiling up off Frodo and swirling around me. My legs turned green and started to rot. I might end up crawling if I don’t get to where I’m going soon.

 

If only I knew where I was going.

 

Half-way along the street, I turned left onto a track that cut through an empty block. This was supposed to be a park but somebody forgot to put in any actual plants. Instead, they let the weeds grow. Now the park was filled with weeds the size of bushes. In one corner was a children’s playground. It was fenced off because it had become dangerous after not being maintained properly. I walked along the path with Frodo walking beside me. Everything was green now. Not nature green, but violent iridescent radioactive churning green.

 

The flesh had fallen away from my legs so now all I had down there was bones.

 

“Don’t worry about that,” said Frodo.

 

“Okay,” I said. I figured if Frodo wasn’t here to reassure me, I might be screaming in terror. Instead I looked at my leg bones with curiosity. They kept carrying me along as if there were still muscles moving them. How does that work?

 

A dude stepped out of the swirling green. He wasn’t much taller than me. He was wearing dark jeans and a button up short sleeved shirt that bulged where it was failing to contain a beer gut. He had a five-o-clock shadow on his jaw and was mostly bald on top with short hair around the sides. A half-empty carton of beer bottles dangled from one hand.

 

“Hello, pretty lady,” he said.

 

“Can I have a beer?” I asked.

 

He thought about that for a second. “If you suck my cock, I’ll give you a beer.”

 

I didn’t want to suck his dick, but I did want a beer.

 

“I’ll do it,” said Frodo. “I’ll suck your dick if you hand over the beer.”

 

I watched as Frodo knelt down on the grass in front of the man and undid the zipper. Frodo pulled out the man’s dick and started to suck. Frodo knew what he was doing. He’d obviously done that before. I stood there swaying and watched as Frodo kept sucking until the man was good and hard. Then Frodo dug his fingernails into the soft skin covering his balls and twisted. The man squealed and tried to lift up on his toes to get away from the pain. Frodo stood up and took the carton of beers out of the man’s hand.

 

“Thanks for the beer,” said Frodo.

 

“Thanks for the beer,” I said.

 

Frodo pushed the man and he staggered back. Then we turned and walked away into the dark.

 

There was a bellow of rage. The man loomed up out of the dark, trying to grab me from behind. Frodo saw him coming, so it was Frodo that the man tackled down to the ground. I was knocked over and ended up on my hands and knees watching from the side.

 

The man had Frodo’s hands pinned with one hand. With the other hand, he pushed up Frodo’s denim skirt and then used hooked fingers in attempt to drag Frodo’s undies out of the way. Frodo was struggling and squirming too much for that to happen.

 

“Fight him, Frodo,” I whispered. “Don’t let him do it. Rule one is always fight!”

 

Frodo whispered, “Fight.”  The man didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to get his dick where he wanted it.

 

Frodo lifted his head up and bit hard into the man’s nose. The man screamed and reared back, which gave Frodo the room to bring up one leg and slam his knee hard into the man’s balls. The man screamed again and rolled off Frodo. Frodo jumped up and started kicking at any exposed soft places on the man that he could reach. I ran up and joined him and the two of us kicked and kicked. The man was curled up in a little ball trying to avoid our kicks. Then he sprang up and staggered away, clutching at his balls.

 

I picked up the carton of beers. There had been two bottles in the carton, but one of them got smashed in the struggle, so there was only one bottle left.

 

“Shit,” I said. “We lost one of the beers.”

 

“Shit,” said Frodo. He straightened his denim skirt.

 

I knew where I wanted to go.

 

“I’m going back to school, my old school. The school I was at before my life turned to shit.”

 

“Good idea,” said Frodo. The colours swirled. Frodo was now a goat, complete with horns and a beard.  

 

“Go back to school,” said the goat. He bleated and then started to fade away. Dissolving into the swirling night.

 

“Thanks for the save,” I called out to the disappearing goat.

 

I watched him go, then I turned around and followed the path through to the other end of the park. I crossed the road and that brought me to the fence surrounding my old primary school. The colours swirled around me. My head spun. I clung to the links of the wire fence until the world stopped spinning.

 

Once I felt a bit more stable, I followed the fence away from the normal school entrance since that gate would be locked.  I followed the fence until I came to where the fence turned a corner and went away from the road. It ran alongside the house of an old woman who hardly ever stepped outside of her door. A series of overgrown shrubs lined the boundary fence between her property and the school. I squeezed in behind the shrubs and found where the wire of the fence was loose enough for me to crawl underneath. The fence had been like that for many years. At least going back to before I started primary school. The trail behind the bush and under the fence was well worn by generations of kids taking this shortcut into and out of the school.

 

Now that I was inside the school property, I walked along the inside of the fence until I came to a small group of benches, set up in a triangle facing each other. Back in another lifetime, I’d sat here as a child during countless lunchtimes. I’d had a circle of friends in those days. We’d sat here, crowded onto the benches, squeezed in tight so that we all had somewhere to sit. We chatted about whatever weird stuff came into the heads of little kids. We’d sit here and giggle and laugh about farts and burps and who had ticklish toes and what parents did in their bedrooms at night.

 

From these benches, it was a short walk to the monkey bars which we’d climb up and over or we’d swing underneath. Or we’d hook our legs through the bars and hang upside down so that the blood rushed to our heads and our hair hung down in long trails pointing at the ground and if we were wearing skirts or dresses, they would flip inside out and hang down around our ears, leaving our undies exposed to the uncaring crowd.

 

These benches had been the safe zone for endless games of tag. They’d been home base for expeditions setting out to explore the Amazon, or expeditions to the school tuck shop for supplies of liquorice straps which would stain our teeth black or for cartons of flavoured milk which would stain our uniforms when they were spilled, which happened more often than not. The benches had been the stable base for flips and turns and cartwheels and lifts that would invariably go wrong and leave us collapsed on the ground in piles of bodies that squirmed and giggled.

 

So many memories started or ended on these benches. Now they stood, solid and unmoving, ageless, abandoned and alone in the cold and the dark.

 

I sat down on one of the benches and cracked open the bottle of beer. I took a sip and swirled the beer around in my mouth, then spat it out. The beer washed the last taste of vomit out of my mouth. The front of my clothes were still covered with vomit and I stunk but at least I wasn’t tasting it any longer.

 

I looked around and admired the way the colours formed kaleidoscopic patterns, reflecting and repeating then dissolving only to reappear. Out of the swirling chaos I saw shadows from my memories. Long forgotten faces of those who’d left me behind, or those that I’d walked away from when my life spiralled out of control.

 

I sat there in the dark, tripping out and drunk and friendless and alone.

 

3: Labradoodle

 

I woke up with a start. It was dark. I was stretched out on one of the benches at the back of my old primary school. The wood of the bench felt solid underneath me, but it wasn’t wide. If I wriggled, I would fall off. I looked up and the sky was alive with stars. All twinkling happily. A few of them danced slowly in intricate spirals, defying the general trend of stars to more or less stay put. Directly above me, a nearly full moon hung in the sky, looking bloated. It pulled a weird face. Then it stuck its tongue out at me. I groaned and it laughed at me. The good thing was that the moon was back to a more normal colour so maybe whatever I’d taken was beginning to wear off. Or maybe not.

 

I stunk of beer and vomit.

 

I sat up and instantly regretted it. The world around me tilted and swayed from side to side in a most alarming way. An empty beer bottle dropped out of my lap and bounced on the ground. I kicked it away and it rolled across the beaten dirt until it stopped at the foot of one of the other benches.

 

I heard a panting sound. As my eyes adjusted, I made out the dim shape of a dog, sitting, watching me and panting. Its eyes seemed to glow faintly green out of the dark. When I’d kicked the bottle, the dog stopped panting and turned its head to watch the bottle roll. Once the bottle stopped, the dog turned back to look at me and started panting again.

 

“Hello Frodo,” I said.

 

Frodo didn’t say anything.

 

I pointed a finger at him. “You need to decide what type of animal you are and stick with it. This thing you have of changing shapes all the time is messing with my head.”

 

Frodo looked at me and panted.

 

“You’re a dog now, so you’re going to stay like a dog. I insist. Is that understood?”

 

Frodo looked at me and grinned.

 

The night air was chilly. I needed to get moving so that I could warm up. Walking would do it. That’s right. I needed to be walking.

 

Looming up out of the darkness, a tree stood itself up straight and waved its arms at the sky, the moon waved back.

 

“Come on then,” I said.

 

I levered myself to my feet and started walking along the line of the fence. Frodo the dog walked beside me. It was hard to walk in a straight line. I’d take a few steps forward then stagger sideways for a step. Frodo walked beside me, patiently waiting every time I staggered to a halt. The tree with its waving arms trailed along behind us, silently begging for food, or attention, or a scratch over its eyes. It tended to loom suddenly out of the dark and then fade away again at random intervals. That was disconcerting.

 

After a short walk, we came across a gate in the fence. The gate was held closed by a thick, heavy chain secured with a padlock that had long since rusted solid. Nobody was getting through that gate. The wire in the fence next to the gate had come away from the posts and curled back, leaving a person-sized gap beside the gate. The gap in the fence made the idea of locking the gate completely ridiculous. I tried to step through the gap and tripped on the bottom bar of the fence. That sent me sprawling onto the ground.

 

“Shit!” The fall didn’t hurt but it probably should have.

 

I scrabbled about for a moment before getting up on all fours and then staggering back to my feet. Frodo had stepped through the gap daintily and was now waiting patiently for me to be ready to continue.

 

The tree waved goodbye and turned to sadly make its way back to where it belonged.

 

We were now in a thin strip of land, about 20 metres wide, that ran in a straight line for a long way. I don’t know how far. It was mostly covered in long grass and weeds but an unmade path trailed its way along one side. The reserve was there because of a buried gas main that ran along underneath the ground. On both sides were the back fences of people’s houses. We walked along the reserve for a while. There were no lights in the reserve, but the moonlight was enough for me to pick out the gravel and dirt of the path.

 

The moon kept humming tunelessly to itself, but I ignored it and kept walking.

 

Occasionally, the reserve crossed a side street. There would be a simple metal rail fence to stop cars driving into the reserve and a gap in the rail for pedestrians to get through. The side streets were lit by occasional streetlights. They gave me enough light to see that my companion was one of those labradoodle dogs with the tight curly hair, a cross between a labrador and a poodle.

 

I smiled when I saw that. “I always wanted a labradoodle,” I told Frodo. “And now look at you.”

 

Frodo hung his tongue out of the side of his mouth and panted. He still didn’t say anything, but I was okay with that. Talking took way too much concentration.

 

In front of me, large shapes loomed out of the darkness. A herd of brontosauruses were casually grazing on the grass of the reserve. They were mostly purple with patches of green on their bellies. I had no desire to be mistaken for a bush and eaten by dinosaurs so I stopped, swaying on the spot.

 

“That one’s name is Barney,” said Frodo. “And so is that one. They’re all called Barney.”

 

I swayed on the spot and stared at Frodo, then I looked back at the brontosauruses called Barney.

 

“I thought Barney was a tyranosauros,” I said. “And that there was only one of him.”

 

“Not any more,” said Frodo. “Now all dinosaurs are Barney, and all Barney’s are dinosaurs.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “Do you think we could get Barney out of the way, so I can keep walking.”

 

“I’m a labradoodle, not a border collie,” said Frodo. “I don’t herd animals.”

 

I frowned at the Barneys. My way forward was blocked so that meant changing direction.

 

I turned to the back fence of the nearest house. Peering over the fence, the house was completely dark. It had a pool in the backyard surrounded by a low fence, with a little open sided shelter looking out over the pool. A couple of pterodactyls were perched on the top of the shelter, but they seemed to be sleeping so I didn’t worry about them.

 

That shelter looked inviting. It would keep the wind off me and keep me dry if it rained, or if there was a dew in the morning. Maybe there’d be something padded I could lie on, or something I could wrap over me for warmth. It would also protect me from the pterodactyls if they woke up and started hunting for food. Being pterodactyl food seemed like something to be avoided.

 

I scrambled over the back fence and fell to the ground on the other side. I landed on my shoulder and my hip. It should have hurt but it didn’t. I staggered back to my feet and stood there waiting for the world to stop churning. There was a thump and some scrabbling noises as Frodo jumped to the top of the fence and then scrambled after me. I walked over a short stretch of neatly cut grass and climbed over the pool fence. Frodo followed. The area between the pool and the pool fence was covered with a pattern of tiles. I started walking around the pool towards the open sided shelter.

 

While I was beside the pool, Frodo bumped me hard with his shoulder. Losing balance, I fell into the pool with a splash. I was expecting the water to be cold. It was cool but not nearly as cold as I was expecting. I stood up in the pool and that brought my head and shoulders above the water. I stood in the water and coughed and spluttered for a moment. Then I wiped some wet hair out of my eyes and looked around. I could see the silhouette of Frodo sitting beside the pool and watching me.

 

“I guess you thought I needed a wash,” I said to Frodo. “You might be right. I stunk.”

 

My clothes were now drenched but I didn’t care. I ducked down and swum under water to the edge of the pool near Frodo. When I came up, I had to cling to the edge of the pool as it was deeper here. After a couple of seconds, I pushed off and swum to the other end of the pool. When I got near the other end, it suddenly got really shallow, like wading depth shallow. I turned around and swam back into the deeper part of the pool. The swim made me feel better, but the chilly water was getting to me. I decided I’d had enough. I swam over to a ladder at the side of the pool and climbed out. While I stood dripping on the tiles, I looked at Frodo.

 

“Now what? That wasn’t smart. I’m soaked and I’ll get super cold. I don’t want to go home.

I need to get somewhere a bit warmer and get out of these wet clothes.”

 

I looked at the shelter, but now the pterodactyls were awake. They stared at me and spread their wings wide. Their wings were coloured like butterfly wings, bright swipes and swirls of different colours. They opened their beaked faces wide and hissed at me, their bright blue tongues lashing out of toothy maws. I stepped back from the shelter and they settled, pulled their wings in and closed their mouths. But they still watched me with beady eyes. The shelter was denied to me.

 

I looked over at the house. It was dark and silent.

 

Between the pool and the house there was a shade cloth that was strung up over a picnic table and a collection of those long, low beach chairs made with wooden slats.

 

I walked over to the gate in the pool fence and let myself through the gate. Then I walked up to the main back door, which was a floor to ceiling glass sliding door. It was locked. The room inside was dark. I tried jiggling the glass door to see if I could get through it, but it didn’t budge.

 

Behind me, the water in the pool was stirring, and then there was a sloshing sound as something large and ancient started crawling out of the pool. It cast it’s head around and a long, yellow, forked tongue emerged from its mouth and flicked around tasting the air for my scent. I realised I needed to get inside quickly or I would end up as food for whatever that was. Being eaten by an ancient, lizard-like thing that crawled out of swimming pools seemed like something to be avoided.

 

Off to the side of the main glass doors, there was a smaller solid door with a glass window. It was locked too. I could just see the catch on the inside, below the window. I picked up a small rock from the garden bed and used it to smash a hole in the bottom corner of the window. I kept using the rock to make the hole bigger until I could reach through and unlock the door from the inside.

 

I heard somewhere that when they make films, they use a type of candy that looks like glass. That way, when the window gets broken, nobody gets hurt and you can eat the broken glass. I tasted some of the broken glass, but it tasted like glass.

 

Breaking the glass had made a bit of noise but nothing happened. No lights came on. Nobody shouted. Nobody came thumping down the stairs to investigate. But the thing in the pool, turned its glowing eyes around and they locked onto me. It let out a low snarl, full of hunger and fury and a terrible desire for revenge against the puny humans who had taken over its world.

 

I threw the rock back in the garden bed and entered the house, carefully stepping over the broken glass that covered a small area near the door. Frodo jumped neatly over the glass and padded into the middle of the room. He stopped and held a listening pose for a moment. Then he turned and looked at me. I took that to mean that Frodo couldn’t hear anything. I closed the door and the thing outside hissed in fury and dissolved into a cloud of green smoke.

 

There was enough moonlight coming through the windows that I could make out that this was a laundry with washer and dryer and folding table and a row of cabinets for storing things.

 

Two clean and folded towels sat on top of the dryer. I looked back at Frodo and said, “Score!”

 

Towels were exactly what I needed. I stripped off my skirt and windcheater, dropping them into a wet pile on the floor. I also kicked off my drenched sneakers and socklets. One of the towels was soon in action as I tried to dry myself off. I was able to get mostly dry, but my undies and top were soaking wet. I hesitated, then stripped them off as well, adding them to the collection of soaked clothing scattered on the floor. Now that I was completely naked, it was easy to dry the remaining areas. The swim had made me feel better, and it had gotten rid of the stink, but it was good to be dry again. After dropping the used towel on the floor with my wet clothes, I wrapped the spare towel around me, knotting a corner to hold it in place.

 

Frodo had sat on his haunches and watched all of this with a bored expression on his face.

 

“You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” I whispered. Whispering seemed appropriate inside this silent house. “You don’t stare at me and make me feel creeped out.”

 

“I’ve seen your body before,” whispered Frodo. “Many times.”

 

“You don’t make nasty comments about my freckles. I hate my freckles.”

 

“Your freckles are a part of you,” whispered Frodo. “You can’t escape them. They can’t escape you.”

 

I had a brief mental image of my freckles crawling off my face and flittering away. It didn’t happen. No such luck.

 

Frodo turned his head to look around the laundry. “Can we go now?”

 

I set out into the rest of the house. The laundry opened into a back room. This room had the glass sliding doors I’d seen before, which opened out into the back yard. Enough moonlight spilled through the glass doors that I could navigate fairly easily. From there, a hallway led to a bathroom, a kitchen and possibly other rooms closer to the front of the house. I found a stairway leading up to the second floor. The house was dark and quiet. Now that I was away from the big windows, it was really dark which made the quiet even quieter.

 

I saw a movement at the top of the stairs and nearly died of fright.

 

“Shit!” I whispered. “What the hell is that?”

 

The shape moved again. A pair of glowing green cats eyes appeared out of the dark. It seemed to be an extremely large cat, maybe a panther. It stood and watched me silently as I stopped uncertainly on the stairs. I got my breathing back under control and finished climbing the stairs.

 

The cat shrank as I approached it. It stirred and stepped delicately out of my way. By the time I was walking past it, it had shrunk to normal cat size. It let me walk past without making a noise. Frodo stalked past the cat and they ignored each other. Frodo moved to the centre of the landing and adopted his listening pose. He was still for a moment and then relaxed. He turned to me with a goofy expression on his face. I took that to mean he couldn’t sense anybody.

 

There was a landing with a bunch of doors leading off it. I pushed open a random door and saw a bedroom. Moonlight poured through the window, where the curtains were tied off at the sides. There was a nicely made bed, complete with throw pillows, and a closet and a bedside table with a lamp. It did not look lived in. There were no discarded clothes, no knick-knacks on the bedside table. I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like a guest room.

 

I dropped onto the bed with a sigh. Frodo flopped down on the floor near the entrance to the bedroom and watched me. The bed was sooo comfortable. I abandoned the towel and, as naked as the day I was born, but maybe not as small, I wriggled under the covers. The sheets were clean and dry and comforting. They felt awesome against my skin. My head sank into the pillow and I had time to wish my own bed was as good as this before I zoned out.

 

 

4: Goldilocks

 

I woke in a strange bed with a hangover from hell. Sunlight was blinding my eyes, my was head being split open by an awful wailing sound, and I had an uneasy feeling that someone was staring at me. My eyelids were glued shut and it took an effort to get them open. I immediately wanted to shut them again as the offensive quantity of sunshine coming through the window did horrible things to my head. I peered out between mostly shut eyelids and saw that Frodo was lying on the foot of the bed and staring at me. He saw me looking at him and then turned his head to look at the door. A cat was standing in the door and wailing at me. It had a white chest and forelegs. The rest of its coat, including its face, was in patches of orange and black.

 

The wailing coming out of that little cat was horrendous and I put my hands over my ears in an effort to muffle the sound. “What do you think it wants?” I asked Frodo.

 

“She’s hungry,” said Frodo.

 

“Hungry,” wailed the cat.

 

“Well, that’s too bad,” I said to the cat. “I don’t have any food.”

 

I looked around the room. Apart from struggling with how bright everything was, I was no longer seeing swirling colours. I could vaguely remember the events of the previous evening, but the details were hazy.

 

“Whatever I took last night really did a number on me,” I said to Frodo. “It seems to have worn off now though, so that’s good. No more hallucinations.”

 

“That’s good,” said Frodo. He grinned at me and did a slow blink. “That’s very good.”

 

I crawled out of bed and limped my way to the door. The cat saw me coming and stopped its wailing while it got out of my way. Outside the bedroom door was a landing. There were stairs going down and a number of identical looking doors. I started opening random doors until I found a bathroom. It looked very fancy but right now I didn’t care.  It had everything I needed, a toilet and a shower and a sink. Sure they were fancy versions, but they still worked the same as the type I was used to.

 

I sat on the toilet and peed. Even the toilet paper was fancy. Then I went over to the shower and stepped inside, pulling the sliding door behind me. The good thing about sleeping naked is you don’t have to mess with clothes when tackling bathroom things. The tap was weird and it took me a bit of fiddling to get the water going and at a decent temperature. I stood under the shower for a while, letting the power of the water massage my skin. I discovered I had minor bruises and cuts and grazes on my legs and on my arms, and I think I could feel something similar on my forehead as well. It looked like I’d been in a fight, but I couldn’t remember being in a fight. I did remember falling over once or twice. That’s probably where the bruises came from.

 

There were three pump bottles on a little shelf. They were all the same brand and were labelled as body wash, shampoo and conditioner. They had a soft herbal scent. The fragrance wasn’t horrible. I wasn’t complaining. I made liberal use of all three in the appropriate order and rinsed thoroughly. By the time I stepped out of the shower, I was feeling the cleanest I’d felt for a very long time. And I smelled nice, so that was a bonus. I still had that hangover from hell, but no amount of showering was going to wash that away.

 

I stepped out of the shower and stood dripping on the floor. There were two towels hanging from a rack. I grabbed one and started drying myself. I stopped and stared at the towel. It was soft and fluffy and felt sooo good against my skin that I thought I must still be tripping. I wanted to lay it on the floor and roll around on it like a cat. I didn’t know they made towels this good. But there was this one in my hands and a second one on the rail. I took a deep breath and decided to just enjoy it. Once I was dry, I wrapped it around my body and then tied the dry towel into a turban to contain my still-damp hair.

 

As soon as I stepped out of the bathroom, the cat started wailing at me again. “Hungry!”

 

I ignored the cat and went back to the room I’d slept in. I was feeling the need to be wearing more than a towel as I walked around the house, so I opened the closet and had a look inside. There were about eight or nine fancy looking dresses hanging there. Some of them were shorter, like cocktail dresses. Others were longer, like formal gowns. Judging by what they looked like on the hangars, each one was more beautiful than the last. A single one of them was probably worth more than everything I owned. There was nothing else, just the fancy dresses. I checked every other part of the closet and found some nice shoes to go with the dresses, but I wasn’t interested in those. No underwear, no casual clothes, just fancy dresses.

 

Who only owns fancy dresses, and the shoes to go with them, and no other type of clothing? This was weird.

 

A burgundy dress caught my eye. I took out the hanger and walked with it over to the mirror. I dropped the towel I was wearing to the floor and held the dress in front of me as I looked in the mirror. It was an A-line dress with spaghetti straps. It looked like it was for a woman slightly bigger than me, but not by much. It was mostly backless but with a pattern of ties that would hold the back together. On me it would come down to about my mid-calf.

 

I stepped into it and spent a few minutes adjusting the ties and pulling them in before tying the knot just above my ass. The bust was a bit too big for my unimpressive tits but by tightening the ties at the back, it was only a tiny bit loose. The hem of the bust line sat just above my teats. If I leaned forward, it would drop and show my entire tits to anyone in front of me. I shrugged. If they wanted to stare at my tits, good luck to them. There was a slit up the left side that nicely exposed my left thigh. If I was going out in public like this, I’d have to be careful how I sat, or people would get to see that I wasn’t wearing undies. Or I could be careful how I sat so that people would see that I wasn’t wearing undies. I guess it would depend what mood I was in.

 

Once I had it on properly, I got rid of the towel on my head and then spent a minute or two posing in front of the mirror.  The posing including quite a few twirls and arm flourishes. My enjoyment of the moment was somewhat spoiled by the cat which was still periodically wailing at me. Not to mention my head splitting headache. Those twirls were definitely a bad idea.

 

Eventually, I couldn’t take the wailing any more. The cat was hungry. And I was too. I left the bedroom and walked downstairs, enjoying the feel of the dress clinging to the front of my body and wafting out behind me. The cat scampered down the stairs past me and made a bee-line for what turned out to be the kitchen. On the floor, in a corner was a water bowl, with water, and a food bowl that had been licked clean. The cat was now sitting beside the empty food bowl and wailing at me.

 

On the closest corner of the kitchen table was a bulky white envelope with the letter “J” sprawled across the front of it. The “J” obviously stood for “Jacinta” which meant that it was clearly left there for me. I opened the envelope and tipped it up, spilling its contents onto the table. There was a folded page of typing, plus a set of keys and one of those prepaid credit cards. My eyes lit up when I saw the credit card. “Score!”

 

I looked over my shoulder at Frodo. “I might come out of this ahead,” I said.

 

“Greedy,” he snorted.

 

I unfolded the page and started reading. “Hello beautiful.” I certainly felt a bit beautiful wearing that burgundy backless dress, but the hangover was getting in the way of me enjoying the moment completely.

 

I kept reading. “Thank you so much for offering to house-sit for me. You’re wonderful. Not much has changed since last time you did this for me, but I’ve printed it all out again for you.” I glanced down to the bottom of the page and saw that it was signed, “Hugs and kisses, your Uncle Alex.”

 

I smiled. “You’re welcome, Uncle Alex. Hugs and kisses to you, too.”

 

The rest of the page was a list of instructions on how to do different things, including the pin for the credit card which Uncle Alex was supplying so that I could pay for some food to eat and cover any emergency issues that came up. There were also instructions on when and what and how much to feed Luna.

 

I looked at the cat. “You must be Luna. Hello. Uncle Alex has told me how to feed you.”

 

I carefully followed the instructions to prepare the food for Luna. I’d never had to look after a pet before, so this was all new to me. Luna was watching me closely and still letting out a pitiful wail every so often. At last, it was ready. I put the bowl back on the floor in the corner. Luna immediately stopped her wailing and started eating.

 

I washed my hands in the sink. There was a tea-towel hanging over the handle of the oven so I used that to dry my hands. Then I opened the fridge and had a look inside. A carton of orange juice caught my eye. I found a glass and poured myself some juice. As I was sipping at the juice, I looked around and saw Frodo sitting in the door of the kitchen, watching me. As usual, he had his tongue hanging out and he was panting.

 

“Do you want to eat something, Frodo? Are you hungry?”

 

“Hungry,” said Frodo.

 

“Yeah, me too.”

 

I pointed at the water bowl on the floor. “You’ll have to share the water bowl with Luna if you’re thirsty.”

 

“Thirsty,” said Frodo.

 

I found some bread and slid a piece into the toaster. I found an apple and sliced it up. I fed a slice to Frodo and then ate a slice myself. I kept alternating until the apple was gone. By then, the toaster had popped. I considered looking through the cupboards for some sort of spread to put on the toast, but my hangover told me that the raw toast would be better. I sliced up the toast into thin strips and Frodo and I alternated eating strips of raw toast. I drank some more orange juice. I was still feeling hung over, but I was starting to feel a little more human.

 

“That feels better,” I said to Frodo.

 

“Better,” said Frodo.

 

I wandered out of the kitchen and to the back of the house. The big glass sliding doors were letting in so much light that it hurt my eyes. I turned left into the laundry room. My wet clothes from last night were still sitting there, scattered over the floor in sodden lumps. Over next to the door, there was a scattering of broken glass on the floor. And there was a big hole in the window of the door.

 

“Well, this is a mess,” I said to Frodo. “Uncle Alex is relying on me to look after the house. I can’t leave it like this. I should probably tidy things up.”

 

The washing machine was sitting right there so my next step was obvious. I started picking up the wet clothes and throwing them into the machine. I put my wet shoes outside in the sun so that they would dry. I used the towel I’d dropped on the floor to dry off the wet patches where my clothes had been sitting, then I threw the towel into the machine as well. I added a scoop of detergent and started the machine. It gurgled and started doing its thing.

 

I opened a couple of cupboards until I found a dustpan and brush which I used to sweep up the broken glass. I took the pan outside and tipped the broken glass into the council wheelie bin. Once I’d done all that, I put the dustpan and brush back in the cupboard. The machine was still doing its thing with my clothes, so I could do something else.

 

I stood and looked at the hole in the glass of the laundry door. I scratched my head and tried to think what I should do about that. If I was at home, I would tape it up, so it made sense to do that here. I hunted through the cupboards in the laundry and found a roll of sturdy plastic and some of that wide strong tape. It took me a few minutes to cut out a big square of plastic and tape it over the hole. Then I made a big “X” with the tape over the entire window.”

 

I stepped back and looked around. The machine was still gurgling and thumping away, but the rest of the laundry now looked decent. “Well, that was a shit ton of work.” I said to Frodo. “Who knew skipping school would mean doing more work, rather than less.”

 

I assumed I was skipping school. I couldn’t really figure out what day it was. My memory of things like days was shot to hell. Not that skipping school worried me. School was the place you went to when you wanted to get out of the house. Since I was already out of the house, I didn’t need school. I guess I’m exaggerating. I’d actually been trying to do better at school for the last couple of years. It hadn’t seemed to do much good, but at least I wasn’t failing every subject. So that was progress. But following all the rules was hard for me, so I often had to take a day off to sit in a park and chill.

 

I looked at the window I’d fixed. If this had been at home, I would have done that, and it would have stayed like that for at least six months before someone got around to calling the window man to come and replace the glass. Or maybe, it would have stayed like that forever. But this was a nice house and Uncle Alex was relying on me to look after it. I wondered if I should call the window man. I had the prepaid credit card, so I could pay for it. My only problem was that I had no way of looking up a phone number for the window man.

 

As I wandered through the house, I saw that the hallway wall was coated with framed photos. Most of them seemed to be of family groups or weddings and so on. Some of the older photos were of one family with two boys and another family with one girl. The father of the family with the girl was always in a military uniform and standing very straight. The newer photos showed one of the brothers grown up and married, then with first one, then two, then three kids. The other brother was shown getting married to the girl from the earlier photos, but now grown up. The second last photo showed the same woman, in a white uniform standing all stiff and proud beside an Australian flag. I think it was a naval officer uniform, but I could be wrong. I’m not an expert on such things. The last photo showed the two brothers standing together with linked arms. They had each had their wives next to them, and the three kids stood in a row in front. Everybody was smiling and looking happy.

 

My wandering took me into the front room where my attention was drawn to a big entertainment system. I found the button for the sound system and turned it on. A little screen lit up and blinked for a few seconds, then it said “ALEX023 NOT FOUND.” It was trying to connect to Uncle Alex’s phone. I found the button to cycle through the options until “CD Player” lit up. I hit play and it started playing from a CD that was apparently already in the drive. The song it started playing was fairly old but to my surprise I recognised it. I’m not sure of the name, or who the artist was, but it was a woman singing and she started with “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”  

 

I figured I was dressed right for dancing, with my fancy burgundy dress on, so I started moving to the music. The chorus came up with “You got me begging you for mercy.” and I thought maybe I’d heard the song before, but I could be wrong. I danced around the room, singing along with “yeah, yeah, yeah,” whenever it came up, which was quite often. Twisting and writhing my body felt great in that dress. The way the material slid over my skin and flapped around my legs was awesome. And without an audience to judge me, I felt free to pull out moves that I would probably avoid doing in public these days. The last time I’d danced this freely, I’d been high on Jackie’s pills and not caring too much about who was watching or what they were thinking.

 

I recognised the next song that came up as well. I knew the singer this time. It was a Lady Gaga song but one of her older ones. When it got to the chorus, I heard Poker Face, and remembered that was the name of the song, “Poker Face.” I had a great time dancing along with that song as well. Again, nobody was watching, so I felt free to really go wild. This was music from before I was born, but I’d heard it played around the place, or in the soundtracks of movies or whatever.

 

The next song was a rap song. I’m not sure of the artist or the song, but they kept repeating “I’m a bee,” over and over, so that might be in the title somehow. I wasn’t in the mood to dance to rap so I walked away, leaving the music playing in the front room. I was breathing a bit heavily after dancing for two songs. That was the down side of being less active. I was definitely not in good condition, compared to a few years ago. Maybe all those pills had kept me skinny. Who knows?

 

I strolled back past the photo wall and checked in the kitchen. Luna had cleaned out the food bowl and wandered off somewhere. Attached to the fridge with magnets were a bunch of different brochures and things. One of them was for a maintenance firm. The brochure made it clear that they did windows. I dialled the number and asked if they could replace the glass on a window. The woman said they could send someone the following afternoon. How big was the window? I didn’t know but I described how it was a standard sized outside door with a window in the top half that needed replacing. The woman said she knew the size I was talking about. The worker would be able to trim it to fit exactly. She wanted my address. On the fridge was a power bill, so I read her the address from that. She asked me if I was the homeowner and I said that no, I was house sitting for my Uncle Alex. The power bill said Alex Binter, so I gave that name. She told me how much it would cost and that I would have pay on the spot since I wasn’t the homeowner. I told her I had a credit card and so that would be fine. I wrote a note to myself on the brochure how much it would cost and the time the window man would come because otherwise I would probably forget. I put the brochure in the middle of the kitchen table so I wouldn’t lose it.

 

I went through to the laundry and discovered that the washing machine had finished its cycle. There was a clothes dryer right there next to it. It was nice to take my wet stuff out of the washing machine and throw it all in the dryer. We have a dryer at home but it hasn’t worked for two years, so mostly it functions as a shelf. When I wash my clothes at home, I hang them on a rack and put the rack out on the front porch and hope nobody pinches my undies. Yes, Merv, I’m talking about you. But he’s more interested in my undies before they’re washed rather than after, so mostly he leaves my washing alone. I started the dryer going and watched through the little window as my stuff rolled round and round. I was fascinated by the way they tumbled over each other and it gave me glimpses of one item, then another.

 

I wandered into the back room with the big glass doors looking out over the pool. There was a cupboard that held all the chemicals for the pool. The instructions on testing the water were in the letter from Uncle Alex. According to the instructions, I shouldn’t need to do that for a couple of days.

There was another cupboard that contained a stack of towels. I decided that a swim would be good. I carefully took off the burgundy dress and draped it across the top of a bench where it wouldn’t get ruined. Since the dress was the only thing that I was wearing, that left me naked. I wrapped one towel around me and tucked a couple more under my arm.

 

I had the keys to unlock the glass doors sitting in the kitchen, so I had to take a brief detour before I got the glass doors unlocked and slid open. From the front of the house, I could hear a woman singing “Wake me up inside.” I recognised that song too, but I couldn’t remember the title or the artist.

 

I walked out onto the back patio and let myself through the gate in the fence protecting the pool. The water looked so inviting. I dropped the towels on the tiles, including the towel I was wearing, and dived in. The water was chilly but not so cold that it hurt. I swam up and down the pool a couple of times. I’d missed swimming. Dad used to take me to the council pool all the time when he was alive. We even went to a beach a few times, but that was a longer drive. It was nice to feel the water flowing over my skin.

 

It occurred to me as I put some power into my strokes that I was skinny dipping. I’d heard about people doing that, but I’d never done it myself. The people at the council pool get really uptight about everyone wearing the proper swimwear. I rolled onto my back and floated. I decided skinny dipping was okay, but nothing special. It was different from wearing bathers. The wet bathers would normally cling and pull. Without bathers, the water just smoothly ran over my skin. I took a breath and let myself sink underwater. Then I twisted and used my arms and legs to gently move myself around. I changed my mind. Skinny dipping was cool. Not having the bathers pulling and dragging was awesome. Feeling the water sliding so smoothly over me was awesome.