"Oh Shut up and Read."

By Sarah Rutherford

"Shut up and read," is a compilation of 19 fiction short stories ranging from around a 1,000 words up to 10,000 words in length for the last, and 23 x 500 word short stories. A mix of observation, humour, and a few darker ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shaggy Dog Tails
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645114706

Book preview

Lost pleasure.

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Succinctly, Kate declares, I hate winter, detest rain, despise the wind and gales and absolutely loathe and vehemently resent being cold. She shivers involuntarily and shakes her head. Outside, the harsh westerly wind and rain is hitting hard enough to bend the trees, plants and remaining few flowers in the front garden outside of her small study window. She can’t see any birds and wonders where they are in such foul weather. If they have any sense, she muses, they should be digging deep tunnels under large trees, or knitting their own thermal underwear and pyjamas from redundant spider silk and uncollected local papers, all piled up like a distress cairn rotting on the lawn-cum-swamp.

She watches in fascination as the thirty metre palm tree next door almost doubles over as an angry squall pushes against it. This horrible cold robs me of my energy, my feeble muscle strength and even more disgusting - my poor hyperactive bladder, struggling to retain its younger capacity, independence and former reliability. Wriggling from side to side in her chair she repositions the square cushion behind her aching lower back. The cynicism of age resents such cold, she continues grumbling, feels its intolerable bite and penetrating impingement. She looks at her twin ginger and white cats. Long haired Bella, asleep in her top right hand drawer and short haired Babe, sprawled out across the left side of the desk.

"All it takes is one puff of wind in my hair and it creates a struck by lightning appearance, each thin and frail hair sticking up and out as if poleaxed into immutable rigidity; the very essence of a rigor mortis hairstyle." The girls take no notice of her whatsoever and why should they. After all, aside from the fact they’ve heard her complaint many times before – they have their thick winter fur coats on.

She watches the rain intensely, and contemplates other setbacks and objections to the misery of a colder than usual winter. Being forced to dress heavier than an Inuit in a draughty ice igloo at the North Pole. Necessity requiring thermal underwear, scarf, gloves, Ugg boots and surrendering to common sense practicality, any respectable and identifiable female – human shape, trimness or recognisable body. Instead, the resemblance is a shuffling alien blob, an indefinable and awkwardly animated object for the derisive amusement of others, who, because of their insensitive youth or multiple and dense dermal layering, actually feel nothing, relying instead upon others to feel the cold for them.

I must be losing my thick skin, she grumbles. I swear it gets colder every year, so I don’t understand where this global warming thing is happening. It’s not in this suburb that’s for sure. A deep breath. I could use some extra global warming right now.

Bella half opens one eye for a few seconds, long enough to assess any immediate mood swing or impending deluge of expletives as Kate might feel inclined to vent. She closes the eye and within seconds is snoring loudly and contentedly.

I - hate - winter, Kate complains louder, after several minutes of silence. The light becomes dreary and dull, colour tones disappear into a soggy grey and the magic of autumn dissolves into a vague seasonal memory. The idea sounds pathetically melodramatic. Pulling her heavy cardigan tighter around her shoulders has a momentary effect on her warmth. Dark shorter days enforce electrical illumination, or risk stepping on a cat’s tail and discovering how many claws and white pointer size teeth they possess, to sink into her leg. Her involuntary domestic incarceration and evening confinement to the lounge is inevitable, given it’s the only room with heating, and into that den of seasonal foreboding are crammed all of her survival requirements for the duration. Of course if she used the spare oil column heater it could heat the study, but that would require a second income to cover the end of quarter bill.

She turns to the girls again. It’s all fine and rosy for you two idle-burgers but for me winter nights entail hiring a team of Himalayan Sherpas, an ice pick, crampons, strong rope and anti-whiteout glasses... just to venture through the house to the loo – yet return to bed and it’s feeble warmth – only to discover my bladder is still dissatisfied. She smiles at the idea, as ridiculous as it sounds.

She unwinds the rainbow coloured soft fleece scarf from around her neck, only to return it exactly the same way it was before, in the vain hope that somehow the little warmth it offers might increase. Her pension does not go as far as to permit lavish expenditure on winter heating – a government oversight she tries to believe, so, leaving the lounge fire off during the day is the only way she can keep the gas bill down.

An enthusiastic winter inevitably requires using more heating fuel than it probably takes to launch a rocket from Cape Canaveral, if her quarterly bills are to be taken seriously. She has to plug in the electric blanket mid afternoon to defrost the bed and make it warm enough to sleep in at night. Doing so also means fighting for that warmth in what little space the cats permit once they have established their sleeping territory – by high jacking most of hers. How fortunate it is then that she has cats, and not Great Danes! Momentarily, she contemplates the cost of purchasing and feeding a Pyrenean mountain dog, and a large cask of genuine Napoleon brandy; for medicinal purpose – of course.

Another look at the girls. Maybe... maybe I should get a big fluffy dog to keep me warm. Both cats open their eyes, give her a – don’t be silly woman – stare, before returning to their slumber.

Trying to stay warm in bed without using the electric blanket does not bear thinking about. It would mean putting every blanket as can be found, sheets, towels, rugs, carpets, clothes, wallpaper, indeed anything that can add even the slightest fractional degree of warmth, onto the bed. The silliness of the notion brings another brief smile to her face. Sleep would, she was informed by a friend, be best achieved by remaining perfectly still and relaxed in bed. Easy enough said, but given the weight of everything possible being dumped on the bed, sounds more in the way of having a pregnant Gorilla driving a dune buggy loaded with bananas and capsicums stuffed with garlic curried cottage cheese on top of her. Movement would be impossible, as would be getting physically tense enough to be able to try any technique to relax.

Listening to the radio weather forecast, Kate suspects winter showers conspire to collude and become cloud bursting downpours, whereas rain, when predicted, better translates to people wisely visiting the local library and asking for an idiots guide instruction book on ark construction. Government budgetary constrictions would no doubt dictate that immediate flood relief for victims might get as exciting and useful as – issuing water wings and free-swimming lessons.

A small grey and tatty looking bird alights on the window ledge. Both cats are instantly awake, eyes wide open, bodies flipped onto their stomachs, heads down, backs arched and bums up with tails wagging irritably from side to side. Completely unaware of any potential threat to its wellbeing, the bird flies away up into the large palm tree in the neighbour’s garden. The cats revert back to their previous positions and are instantly asleep. Flop, drop and snore mode thinks Kate, ever amazed and envious that the girls can so... effortlessly relax and continue slumbering as if nothing has happened to disturb them.

Kate pursues her thoughts. The forecasting also comes with meteorological sheep grazier warnings, and she mischievously imagines such a warning generating some literal social panic and the dread of actual sheep graziers dropping from the sky, damaging roofs, chook houses and delicate fishponds.

Day after day rolling thunder storms obliterate all normal sounds and are loud enough to warrant – due to frequent and unannounced sudden frights, the changing of several pairs of clean undies. It’s not that she doesn’t like thunder and associated noises, just the damned unpredictability of it. Drying washing dangles from every hanging point around the house, increasing the humidity to tropical level and no doubt encourages mushrooms and other fungi to sprout on the floors and under the furniture.

A thin layer of dust rests on the window frames. Dust and cat hairs, she is sure breed expeditiously under furniture, beds and on bookshelves. While from the ceilings, dust webs descend like stalactites... stalagmites? She pauses, not sure which is which. Whatever, I know what I mean to mean. One other consequence of the cold is that in unheated rooms mould spreads rapidly, like racing snails after a meal of Jalapeno chillies, across all surfaces and furniture not already fungoustically engulfed. Is that a real word? It sounds legit’.

Via a myriad of gaps between doors, window frames and other unexplainable orifices and cracks of the old house, draughts howl their delighted intrusion like a chill and indignant southerly blowing up across a bleak and frozen Antarctica. If Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson abruptly staggers into the lounge dragging a sled, it would hardly be surprising. For the previous two nights somewhere in the darkness, across the suburban tundra, a neighbour’s yapping Chihuahua sounds more akin to a lone timber wolf keening at a full super moon.

Looking up at the sky, Kate notes the burgeoning black clouds hanging so low above the houses and prompts her to wonder if there’s any risk of drowning in low lying ozone. Way above the clouds her creative imagination envisions soaked and depressed angels in thermal beanies and flannelette night shirts, chipping the ice off of their harps, with small fallen stars. She pauses – If they’re above the clouds, why are the angels soaked? She smiles, weak bladders?

I REALLY, REALLY HATE WINTER, she declares loudly. The cats open one eye with mild disapproval. It’s such a familiar whinge associated with her frustration, and yet... one morning, just a couple of days before while driving to the shops through mist and sheet rain... That was the other annoying thing about excessive rain, it served only to encourage car rust to grow its own rust... She saw - well – pure joy.

It was only a fleeting reminder that winter was once enjoyable, fun, an anticipated change and challenge. A time to see the water that falls into the catchments, eager to fill the reservoirs, top up depleted water tanks and ground water, saturate and help break up autumn leaves and plant waste, returning nutrients to the soil and feeding the flora that had suffered but survived through the long and dry summer heat. Trees reaching out to welcome the refreshing rain; appreciating every drop. She sighs. This winter of my contempt... hmm, where have I heard that line before I wonder? This winter, renewing, refurbishing, stocking up for the next spring, so utterly precious a time for all life. It has, she realises, revived her appreciation of the validity, purpose and value of natural diversity, of the manipulation of the seasons to guarantee the next spring happens successfully.

Yet this was not the thing that held for her the greatest fascination, nor imposed upon her senses the most impressive impact. It was rather, the diminutive and lightly clad five-year old girl, in her iridescent pink rubber ankle boots, jumping up and down like a kangaroo on a trampoline, in the water gushing along the gutters at the side of the road. Elatedly getting totally drenched, ecstatic in every moment of the experience. Kate then remembers, winter, long ago, when she yearned for and welcomed with eager and total abandonment so simple a lost pleasure.

**

A drover’s wife?

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Saturday – at last. It’s been an interesting week blog followers, despite it starting disgustingly badly. Monday morning and English class. Literature, really, first lesson of the week? Talk about boring – and books – in an age of online books and the internet, who the hell reads ancient physical books? I mean real paper pages and endless words in tiny fonts and no distracting images or amusing backgrounds. Urgh, seriously mundane stuff, which is the same as boring only worse.

Essays? Like, do all high school English teachers spend every waking hour planning and plotting how to make our lives even more boring, literally? Clever pun that. Get it? Whatever...

So, Miss Jeffers, insists our latest literary project should focus on looking back in time, and in particular our family ancestors. Ancient history. Is she sane? Hello, it’s the 21st century, why would anyone want to, or have to look back in time? I’m 16, not a 116. I’ve more important things to waste my valuable time on, instead of digging up ex-family members well past their used by date?

Whatever. The teacher rules, right. She’s got it well sussed and as always, gets right up our noses. Honest, if she had a brain the old bird would still be 99 cents short of an interesting dollar. Like mum, she’s pushing 40 and that’s ancient. So, we have to dull down our intellect and take a squiz at our ancestors – seriously old farts in the dark distant and probably primitive past.

I’m well expecting her to waffle on: In our day, and When I was your age, or, In the good old days when we rode dinosaurs to school. Whatever... Honestly, where’s an alien spaceship collecting specimens when you want one?

After school I ask mum about her family, but she’s far too involved in the present to bother looking into the past as well as do the week’s washing, milk the cat, paint the budgie’s toenails and feed our dog his dinner, whatever, yeah yeah, talk to the hand mum. You know what? I reckon mum is off. I mean who in their right mind calls a dog, Alligator. Mum did. It’s an insult to cattle dogs yeah? Should be bloody illegal, right?

Dad’s no help. Forget it, is his reaction, he’s hasn’t the time. He has to fit his new sheepskin car seat covers. If I was a boy - would he have the time?

Gran’ on the other hand almost bounces out of her comfy chair with excitement. Not only is she well chatty but up to it, and Stories, she’s got bucket loads. She can also still remember and recite at least twenty poems (yawn). A great memory for an old fossil though.

So she waffles on for an hour while I scribble notes of family hatches, matches and dispatches, locations and what details she can muster to mind without having to plug her ears into the electric mains to liven up her surviving, working brain cells. Inevitably though, Gran’ nods off to old fart’s nap nap land. I jump on the tablet, get online and start shovelling.

In no time I’ve dug up all Gran’s details and then, then I get into something potentially useful. It’s a family tree, already done, and it’s ours. Apparently the neat work of some distant Muppet cousin who’s into this stuff in a serious way. Talk about an exciting lad – not. Probably end up in accountancy or politics, either way, as dull as a stale plain doughnut. His info is useful though and saves me a torturous search and a lot of work.

I plunder his data without conscience and would you credit it, but what do I find? My Great Granddad was... wait for it... a drover, so far back in time they probably paid taxes to the Romans. Seriously, is that insanely sane or what? He makes my Gran’ sound more like a spring chicken, as opposed to her being a sprung chook.

Having done that I wander outside to the spare shed for a quick junk inspection. There’s a heap of boxes filled with all sorts of stuff, but only one box holds my interest as inside I find lots of promising bits and pieces and to make it even sweeter, there’s some antique sepia photographs. Beneath these is a black and white magazine with an article and photo of a painting of my Great Gran’, done by some bloke name of Drysdale. Sounds more like a long lost Adelaide suburb, or a new kind of vacuum cleaner.

Does it matter? Is it important? Hardly, but I stare at them in turn mildly amused by their chance discovery.

Okay so, so I’m getting curious and into this stuff now while rummaging through hoping to find gold. At the bottom of the box are several really old bits of paper. I pull them out and have a quick squiz. The paper’s dark yellow, a bit brittle and crinkly wrinkly. Like Gran’. I handle it carefully, not sure if it will disintegrate in my hands. Like those Egyptian mummies when they’re unwrapped, also like Gran’.

Hang on, hmm... Hey blog followers, how about this for an idea. Whenever Gran’ gets around to turning her toes up, instead of spending thousands of dollars on an over priced funeral, I wonder if it’d be legal to have Gran’ stuffed and mounted instead. At least then she’d still be useful, as a door stop. She’d also scare away the religious callers and sales irritants fronting up to our door.

Anyway, as I flip through the papers I find a hand scribbled draft of a story by some bloke called Lawson, which at first I reckon is a reference to a cricketer, only it turns out, like Gran’, he’s also ancient, oh and a writer.

The story’s called ‘The drover’s wife’. You’ve guessed blog followers, just like my Great Gran’. For all I know, it could be a story about my ancient crinkly wrinkly. This makes me wonder how far back my mum’s family goes. It would be fully sick to find an even more ancient rellie. If we had a colonial convict or two in our family tree that would be excellent. Something juicy, a granny skinner or a sheep stuffer for example.

By now the realisation hits that I’m seriously interested, but Gran’s got over twenty boxes of stuff, the remnants of her life in her own home before it got too much after hubby wandered off the planet to join the choir eternal... yeah, as if. Given the tales I’ve heard about him and if there’s an afterlife, granddad is probably where it’s toasty warm, where all the good food and great single malt is, along with lots of woman, dancing and his favourite lively jazz music.

Dad comes in unannounced and gets uptight about me messing his neat shed, it doesn’t phase me. I just ignore his whinging. There’s nothing wrong with me being justifiably nosey. No harm in being curious and after all Dad, it’s for my school essay. Can’t argue about that, can you. Build a bridge, alright?

A little treasure this box. No, serious, as it turns out, no - whatever... at all. By now I’m so wound up, I can hardly stay focussed. Right at the bottom of the box, squeezed into a corner, is a thick brown paper bag. Inside is a rolled up, very dry and frail black snake skin, with some notes by Gran’ describing how her mum, my Great Gran’ killed the thing with a stick. Funny that because I remember Gran’ telling me years before, when I was a kid, about