The Mad World

My friend Stace gave me a bunch of words and I wrangled them into a story.

Future Fund

Janice was getting married. Janice was thirty-five, which was universally agreed as a pretty good age to get married. Janice worked five days a week, she sweated regularly at the gym, and she ate salad for most of her lunches. Janice deserved this marriage. She deserved happiness and contentment and most of all she deserved never having to work again because she was marrying someone who was about five thousand times richer than she was.

Janice deserved this rich husband, and this rich, gleaming marriage, because Janice had worked for this marriage. She had done ridiculous things to ensnare the affections of her soon-to-be husband. She had partaken in activities like fox-hunting and antiquing. She even went on a cruise around Somalia, under duress, where she spent a lot of time worrying about pirates, but most of her creative energy was focused on one thing.

Her future riches.

She would be heavy and groaning with wealth. She would jingle wherever she walked, not with coins but with fiscal potential. She would shuffle to and fro, shuffle delicately and femininely, with her money-laden legs, her cash-lined trousers. And it would be a heavy undertaking, it would be difficult and all-consuming and there might be some chafing involved, but these sacrifices were worth taking. For money.

She would work to build on this burgeoning wealth. Not work in the sense of nine-to-five, sweaty employment, of course. Not work in the sense of standing in front of a hive of itchy school children, writing the word ‘principal’ on the blackboard with a piece of crumbling chalk. Oh no, those days were certainly over. But in a non-employment sense, in a non-nine-to-five sense, she would attract more wealth. She would be a wealth-magnet. She would do things like instead of requesting wedding presents, ask for one of those horrible Wishing Wells at her wedding, the kind of present-surrogate that tells your friends “We don’t want your personal taste, we don’t want your awful projection of what our married life requires, we just want your money. Give. Us. Your. Money”. She would give money to literacy programs and receive tax benefits. She would donate to Cystic Fibrosis and buy slinky dresses to wear to Cystic Fibrosis galas. She didn’t even know what Cystic Fibrosis was, but their galas were always the richest.

Janice was ready to dive into this new beginning, this pool of opportunity. Within the crystal water, the future gleamed, like a shiny coin. The future waved, like a flapping note. She leapt in, her slinky dress cascading behind her, her crumbling chalk floating away.

1. When the dog’s water bowl is empty, and she goes to drink from it, and her tongue scrapes against the grainy bottom of the bowl and your insides turn cold in a moment that can only be punished with self-flagellation but WHAT SORT of self-flagellation will be best?

2. When you forget the dog is outside eating a chicken wing, and you leave the dog outside, and ten minutes later you go to the screen door and there she is, huffing and panting because she’s been OUTSIDE for ten minutes, and that chicken bone made her SUPER THIRSTY, and she goes over to her water bowl and this time YOU ENSURE that her water bowl is absolutely brimming with clear, fresh water, you push her head aside and try to beat her to it, and fill it up with your own Mount Franklin bottle just to be sure, because giving away spring water helps to assuage guilt or something like that.

3. When the dog is half blind and fully deaf and can’t tell the difference between roads and grass, and so on her morning walk, she starts bumbling unknowingly towards the road, and she’s about one paw-length away from making herself vulnerable to the whooshing-by of cars, cars whose owners are in a big rush to get to Byron Bay CBD and buy some embroidered handbags, or overpriced sarongs, or 200 bucks worth of marijuana. Or, even if there are no cars around, there’s still the real and ever-present concern of the elderly dog being unable to tell the difference between height levels of pathways and that of road, and the dog toppling ungainly from higher pathway to lower, AND GRITTIER, road, and hitting her soft sweet grey head on the hot tar of the road.

4. When you go out for two hours JUST TO BUY YOUR MUM’S BIRTHDAY PRESENT, WHAT, I’M NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ANYMORE???, and you come home and the dog is heaving with excitement to see you’re back, she’s so excited she starts dog-coughing, wheezing like her larynx is crammed with furry caterpillars, and you wish your presence was less exciting but DAGNABBIT what can you do.

5. When you try to make the dog wee before you go out, and she won’t, so you go “FINE THEN, DON’T” and then you come back 2 hours later from buying your Mum’s birthday present and let the dog out with a chicken wing to eat, and the dog needs to wee SO BAD she doesn’t even look at the chicken wing, she dumps it on the grass and then goes to the other side of the garden, away from her food, because she is CLASSY LIKE THAT, and does the longest wee in the world, and for every second that she stays in that crouching-sitting-meditating longest-wee-in-the-Northern-Rivers position, you feel little acupuncture needles of guilt in your lungs.

OH MAN now I feel better.