Mysterious Ways

By Sue Bagust

This is my third collection of short stories, written as homework for the Pomona Writers Group in 2014 and 2015 covering topics from Barking Butterflies and Swan Uppers, to Gold Tops and Cabbies Who Knew The Way. I hope you enjoy this collection as much as I enjoyed writing them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sue Bagust
• Release date: Jan 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311329219

Sue Bagust

Sue Bagust is an author, playwright, advertising copywriter and Reiki therapist/trainer who lives in SE Queensland, Australia, with her husband, cats, dog and a few noisy geckos.. Sue previously published two Reiki workbooks and also writes plays.

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Mysterious Ways

A collection of short stories by © Sue Bagust 2016

Published by Sue Bagust at Smashwords

Thank you for downloading this ebook. It remains the copyright property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author.

This book is a work of fiction, a collection of short stories which were written weekly through 2014 and 2015 as homework for the Pomona Writers Group. Names, characters, places and incidents have been produced by the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, or to any actual events or precise locations is entirely coincidental or within the public domain.

My sincere thanks go to members of the Pomona Writers Group for making me welcome and for generously sharing their expertise. Even bigger thanks to Pat Ritter, my big-hearted mentor who encouraged me to publish my stories, and thanks especially to my husband Roy who listens and gives a truthful reaction.

Sue Bagust

www.ideasunlimited.com.au

Mysterious Ways

Any Mysterious Way is usually just a facet of Universal Law, but we humans persist in regarding Universal Law as mysterious because we prefer to think of our world as being someone else’s responsibility instead of something we create. When troubled we look around for a responsible adult to take charge and if we can’t find an adult we invent some all-powerful being that we can blame even though we all know deep inside that where attention goes, energy flows. There’s nothing mysterious about it, it’s just common sense or if you prefer, Universal Law.

Like the day when Roy and I called into the Atherton Club for lunch and stumbled on a promotion where Scotty the MC gave gamblers a raffle ticket when they scored a win of $2 or more on the machines. It was fun. That day I won five or six of the dozen prizes and joined in the laughter at Scotty’s jokes made about my winning streak but this escalated to wholesale hilarity when Roy exclaimed as I went again to choose from the showcase of prizes Not the pink thing. Please. Not the pink thing.

For the first time I noticed the pink thing that Roy disliked so much. I must admit it was a horrid article. A circular pale pink cloth folding laundry basket, that concertina’d back into itself to be held flat with pink satin ribbons. As soon as the ribbons were released the thing sprang exuberantly to life, expanding immediately to three feet tall with a gaping mouth on top for dirty laundry. Scotty must have been desperate to have chosen that as a prize. It was both useless and ugly.

When only four prizes remained and one of my tickets won again, Roy was not the only one chanting not the pink thing because a number of Club patrons had joined in the fun, urged on by Scotty. I did consider choosing the pink thing just so I could give it to Roy, but the pink thing was so ugly I couldn’t do it but chose the kitchen utensil pack instead.

Roy sighed in relief, the next two winners chose prizes but rejected the pink thing despite Scotty entertaining us with his ideas on why the pink thing was such a terrific prize to win. When Scotty drew the final ticket all eyes swung between me and Roy, waiting to see if I had won again. I think some people even forgot to check their own tickets they were so caught up in the fate of the pink thing.

When Roy groaned everyone looked at him, and he held up a ticket and gloomily admitted that’s mine. The Club erupted into cheers and yells of Not the pink thing.

It was a grand day – but also proof positive that what you resist, persists. There really wasn’t anything mysterious that Roy won, I do believe that his single-minded focus on the pink thing is why he won. Or it could be that there is a God, and She has a sense of humour.

Gold tops

Once upon a time, last century when Australia was younger and less sophisticated and so was I, milk came in a glass bottle with a gold foil top. The gold foil tops made great Christmas decorations when washed and strung to glitter on the Christmas tree and the glass bottle was home delivered by a milkman who rode in a milk float with open sides which wasn’t refrigerated. Somehow most of us survived these unhygienic practices and the horror of warm milk. The milk bottle with the gold foil cap didn’t have a use by date either, yet most of us knew not to drink sour milk and survived without use-by dates. Maybe our species was smarter then?

The bottle of milk home-delivered to sit unrefrigerated and unprotected on the front step until the household woke up had a thick layer of cream on the top, which my mother carefully drained off to use in salads and desserts. Those days we didn’t have the shopper’s paradise of supermarket rows of whipping cream and pouring cream, thick cream, sour cream or yoghurt. We only had that cream that my mother poured off thickly from the top of the home-delivered milk bottle into my great-grandmother’s little china jug used only for cream and carefully put aside to use in cucumber and apple salads or to pour over sliced banana and pineapple as the sweet finale to the main evening meal.

Then civilization arrived in Australia in the form of supermarkets, who preferred milk to be delivered to their refrigerated shelves in neat rectangular cardboard packs instead of in glass bottles with gold foil tops. Rectangular cardboard packs with neat sides could be stacked more easily than glass bottles, and best of all could be thrown away after one use so didn’t need collecting and washing like the old recycled glass bottle. All that cardboard provided an instant billboard for advertising the product even though the consumer had already bought into the neat cardboard container idea by buying the neat cardboard container, and the world turned to the next big step forward in milk production: the use by date. You see, customers couldn’t see through cardboard like you could through glass, so people found that they didn’t know when their neat cardboard milk went sour. The only logical thing to do was to put a use-by date on the container. This still didn’t stop the milk souring in cardboard containers, but it made us all feel safer.

Today we are spoiled for choice when every supermarket offers refrigerated rows and rows of neat cardboard containers of milk, with many different colours and typefaces and logos decorating the container and all with a legal use-by date, and all containing exactly the same product – yet I still remember the days when we drank locally-produced milk that was home-delivered, those halcyon days when we were smarter and didn’t eat frozen berries imported from China. I miss the early morning clink of the home-delivered milk bottle with the gold cap.

A Blast from the Past

When the Boss Cocky announced this week’s topic, I thought Fair Go Mate, don’t be a galah. I had Buckleys and was light on ideas with a