The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

  I was out gardening and pulling weeds when the van rumbled into my driveway at half-past twelve. It was a shoddy looking thing, clinking and clacketing long after the key was pulled. On one side, a large scuffed and peeling label: POOLJUNKIE. A decrepit, pale looking man slinked out of the vehicle. He looked sixty-five, seventy, and downright sickly. Under his scraggly, wiry grey hair and above his gaunt, bony cheekbones lay two sunken eyes. Not the concave, needly-pupil eyes and sockets that came from very old age or a long-lost love for work. They came from trauma. “Guessing you’re the pool guy?” I asked, popping an index finger to the label on his van. He shuffled toward me in his overalls. “Yes… Yes. I’ll head on to your backyard.” “Hold on, man.” I smiled. “You want coffee? Tea?” “I appreciate it, but I should really get started.” His voice was as rustic as his vehicle. I turned and gestured him an open hand and watched him g

  Nothing is what it seems on Craigslist, or so I should have known. That’s on me. Bill came through the door in an ill-fitting black suit that could have fit a donkey. He was a plump man that busted at the seams, his chin still sprinkled from the donut or pastry he had for lunch. “Sorry I’m late.” He straightened and fixed his belt below his belly. “Had an emergency.” People with greasy slicked-back hair and seedy disposition are destined to be used car salesmen. Unfortunately, this one was my real estate agent. He took me on a tour through the apartment. It was a rundown place, sure, but nothing out of the ordinary. The ceiling sunk in places, mold saturated the walls and air. It tasted like mossy growth, and things were quite damp. Though, it was certainly not deserving of the cheapest place in the city. There was something I wasn’t seeing. “Eh… As you can see,” He hobbled around the lounge making wide gestures. “Couple things to fix

    The Lazarus effect was the one that really got to me first - a term used to describe the way a patient’s arms would move involuntarily upward and cross at the chest once the brain had died. Pale mummies folding away for the long sleep under flickering clinical lights. After that came agonal gasps – the dreadful, straining breaths one takes post-mortem – a last-ditch effort of the brainstem begging to breathe. These were the two things that haunted me when I started at the hospital. But we began to reduce these incidents. See, I wasn’t a doctor. Hell, if I were, I wouldn’t be able to recollect it anyway - my memory had turned to shit after my accident. Despite this, I was luckily enough to be brought on for an easygoing monitoring role at Saint Kelly hospital. ‘Coma counsellor’ they called me. I had rounds talking to unresponsive patients and their grieving families at their bedside. Either way, it was always a one-sided conversatio

    I’m a sleazy motherfucker, I’ll be the first to say so. When I was young, I was the one in the schoolyard stealing Pokémon cards, when I was older: in the carpark leaving dents but never a note. Real slimeball. God, I hope my two kids don’t grow up to be like me. I hope my kids grow up to be more like Timmy. Or rather, what he could have been. Alone in my home office, I leaned back on my chair. The best writing that comes out of me is when I hear only the keys of my typewriter, or the sweet, sweet lullaby of whiskey rocks tumbling against my glass. But on nights like these, I hear a third sound, distant in the recesses of my mind. I hear him scream. And so, I write. I don’t want my son to suffer like Timmy did. On an unsuspecting Winter day twenty years ago, I was staying at Tim’s home over Christmas Eve because my parents were busy with the divorce. Hell, I don’t blame them, with a kid like me it was probably my doing.

  You always remember where you were when something truly horrible happens. That afternoon I was sitting at my desk, feet up, cola in hand, not a care in the world. I flipped my notebook to a blank page and took a sip of my drink. A few taps of the keyboard, and LECHALL8B from year 2020 became LECHALL8B from year 2019. And lo and behold, I, Michael, the world’s first technotard turned technowhiz, was in. See, finals were next week, and the recordings were missing. I had scrounged around the site and found a couple of posts from students complaining that the lecturer had been slack in recording them. I had a trick these whining suckers didn’t, though. The end of the URL of the recording read: LECHALL8B-12-14-20.mp4. You see, when I DID skip class, some were simply not uploaded, as a result of technical difficulties or otherwise, and I began to miss out. But the trick here: you could change the site’s address to a year prior, and fun