This is the summer my mother isn’t always on the bus, and I used to dream about that. No more of my mother burping and farting and creaking like an old house with all that gas in her. My mother cracking those lame boozy jokes no one gets and smelling something like old fish. She’s a bit of an embarrassment. My mother sits in the second row on the bus and takes up the whole seat, but mainly on account of her knees. They’re quite far apart, so there’s no room for anyone else. She sits on the window side, but her right knee gets most of the way to the aisle. It’s the chafing, her thighs chafing. That’s what she says, and she says chafing’s hell and she doesn’t say anything about hell unless she means it. She says if they wanted to make hell hell they could forget the eternal fire and just go for a long hot summer with lots of chafing. Summer’s when the chafing’s at its worst and she sits on the verandah sometimes, flapping the front of her dress to make a breeze, and she says it’s raw as a skinned possum in there.
What do You think about Making Laws For Clouds (2012)?
