Furin Chime Press™

Author: TONY RECK

  • Dog Days

    Dog Days

    Not long after I moved into the rooming house there was a problem with the hotwater service. Out of their rooms they came: The Swine, Vladimir the Caretaker, and Bruce.

    While the other tenants postulated, Bruce proposed a flashlight.

    “A flashlight…?” The Swine said.

     “What are we gunna do with a flashlight?”

    “Well…” Bruce said.

    “We can get down on our hands and knees and see what’s going wrong in there.”

    The Swine snatched the flashlight out of Bruce’s hand and threw it across the yard.

    “Now, get back into your hole and don’t come out until I say so.”
    His six foot four-inch frame hunched over, Bruce did as he was told.

    It seemed reasonable enough. Something was wrong with the hotwater service. Perhaps the pilot light was out. So get a flashlight and have a look. Try and solve the problem. The Swine was out of order, throwing Bruce’s flashlight across the yard like that… If he ever did anything like that with my property, well… But The Swine hadn’t done it to me, he’d done it to Bruce. It was Bruce’s problem, not mine.

    “I saw what happened…” I said.

    That same afternoon, I was hanging socks on the clothesline when I came across Bruce rummaging in the long grass.

    “A nasty thing to do with someone else’s property.”
    Bruce did not respond.

    “Yes. A real nasty thing to do… If he had have thrown my flashlight across the yard like that…”
    I plucked a pair of wet socks from the clothes basket.

    Stylized aerial view of a rooming house, with four figures standing in the yard, as well as a clothesline with washing.

    “Can you hear me?” I said.

    “Do you want some help looking for your flashlight?”

    “No,” Bruce barked.
    And that was that.

    It’s always the same. Offer to help someone less fortunate than yourself and it’s never appreciated. But a person has to show some empathy. Without the power of empathy human beings would be animals. Scratching out a meagre existence the way a dog scratches for a bone. But human beings aren’t animals, we’re human beings… So I gave Bruce the benefit of the doubt and when next I saw The Swine on the doorstep studying a formguide, I challenged him over his treatment of Bruce.

    “A bit rough that…” I said.
    And made my way to the letterbox.

    “A bit rough what..?” The Swine said.
    I removed a wad of junkmail protruding from the letterbox.

    “You wouldn’t treat a dog like that…”

    “Dog…?” The Swine said.

    “This is a rooming house. No pets allowed. Except for that animal who lives out the front… Mongrel ought to be put down.”
    (Bruce lived in a box tacked onto the veranda).

    “The man’s not a bloody Golden Retriever.”
    The Swine looked up from his formguide.

    “Be careful sonny,” he said.

    “I’d stay right out of it if I were you.”

    The Swine then buried his nose in his formguide and without saying another word unleashed from his throat a low-pitched trembling growl.

    ‘Sonny’? Who did The Swine think he was calling ‘Sonny’? I was about to give The Swine a piece of my mind, a real dressing down. Instead, I went back to my room. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. I was above petty minded incidents such as that.

    I secured the wad of junkmail under one arm and unlocked the door to my room. I threw the junkmail on the coffee table but it slid across the brown veneer surface onto the floor. I picked it up and was about to throw it in the bin when in among the material advertising cut price sausages, home gardening and other paraphernalia, I caught sight of a picture of a small dog. I can’t remember what they’re called; they’re fluffy and white, but they don’t bite. All they do is yap. Yap. Yap. Yap. It was a rough photocopy on cheap paper. There were prices, special offers and free quotes. Right at the bottom was the catchphrase:

    We Will Treat Your Dog Like A Human Being

    Now a dog might be Man’s Best Friend, but treating a dog like a human being was cruel to animals. I thought about calling the Animal Protection Society and making a complaint. And I would have, except I didn’t have a phone. (Who can afford to pay the bill when you’re on disability pension and haven’t worked for years? Forced to live in a rooming house with a person like The Swine. A man who believed it was his right to treat less fortunate human beings with contempt and call them ‘Sonny’). I would have called the Animal Protection Society, but I didn’t. Instead, I threw the junkmail into a rubbish bin; except for the flyer advertising the dog grooming business. I pinned this up on a wall of my room in case I changed my mind and made a complaint. Then I lay down on my mattress, curled up and went to sleep.

    A week or so went by and I made an effort to stay away from The Swine. I didn’t speak to Bruce either. The best thing for a poor boy like me to do was mind his own business. If I played my cards right and stayed out of trouble I could live a nice and easy life in the rooming house.

    But the hotwater service failed once again. This time, The Swine went off his tree. He ran around the yard squealing that potatoes would sprout from his ears, that the dirt under his fingernails would be there forever and he would never be able to get them clean. Eventually, Vladimir the Caretaker came downstairs and gave The Swine a few reassuring pats on the head. But The Swine refused to listen and continued to froth at the mouth, so Vladimir threatened to evict him. On the spot. The Swine quickly settled down and Vladimir got out his spanners and screwdrivers and began trying to fix the hotwater service.

    Vladimir tapped away at the pilot light mechanism with the tip of his screwdriver. Then, against the best advice of The Swine, he dismantled the pilot light. It lay sprawled on the garden path: springs and knobs, buttons and washers, copper pipe and metal housing. None of it in any particular order. Everyone had a theory as to what might have been wrong with the hotwater service. But nobody, not The Swine, not myself or Vladimir, knew how to put the pilot light mechanism back together again. Then around one corner of the rooming house came Bruce. In his right hand he carried the same flashlight The Swine had snatched from him a week earlier and thrown into the grass.

    Everyone saw Bruce coming, except The Swine.

    Vladimir quickly gathered up his tools, did a complete about face, and pretended he was fertilising his chilli plants.

    “Where’ya goin?” The Swine said.

    “Someone’ll have to fix the hotwater service.”

    Bruce lumbered to a stop and clicked his flashlight into the ON position.

    “Let’s get down and have a good look at it.”

    “You…” The Swine said, as if about to blow his top.

    “Moron. Idiot. Fool. You wanna get down and have a look at it, then do it.”

    “Do what?” Bruce said.

    “Do it… IT…”

    “It…? What do you mean, it?”

    In all the rooming houses I had lived in I had never seen another human being behave in the same way The Swine then behaved toward Bruce.

    He grabbed hold of Bruce’s neck and tried to force him onto his knees. Being a huge man, Bruce just stood there; and for a while, it looked like The Swine would never shift him. Bruce did not fight back, for he didn’t have any fight in him. He just remained there, like a tree.

    “Get down,” screamed The Swine.
    “Get down on your knees.”

    Bruce just clicked his flashlight into the OFF position.

    “What’s the matter with you?” he enquired of The Swine.

    Stylized aerial view of a rooming house and yard, with a clothesline hung with washing. Four figures stand in the yard: three at the corners of a triangle, the fourth lying on the ground between them.

    With his face swollen like a bloodplum, The Swine began unbuckling his belt. It snapped out of his trousers and leaped into the air above his head.

    “What’s the matter with me?” The Swine half asked himself.
    Bruce saw the snapping buckle and turned his back.

    “It’s what’s the matter with you that’s what’s the matter with me.” The Swine said. “That’s what’s the matter…”
    And down came the venomous buckle across Bruce’s back.

    “Get down… Get down on your knees…” yelled The Swine.

    The sharp buckle split the fabric of Bruce’s pink cotton shirt. He fell to the ground; partly because of the blows from the belt buckle, but also, as if he were eager to appease The Swine’s rabid commands. He pleaded and screamed, but The Swine just lashed him harder. Bruce cried and whimpered, then the poor man wet himself. But the sight and smell of urine only spurred The Swine onto greater heights.

    “Cry like a dog, you swine…” he said.

    I did not believe what I saw next. In the face of lashings of leather and steel and instead of protecting himself, Bruce rolled onto his back. He then stuck his hands and feet into the air, and began to yap. Bruce was a human being on his back going:

    “Yap. Yap. Yap.”

    And The Swine just lashed out harder with the belt buckle. This time, ripping into Bruce’s underbelly.

    I still don’t understand why, but I tackled The Swine. Made a running jump and brought him to the ground. Grappled with him, tore the belt out of his hand, stood up, and was about to administer the same punishment he had unleashed upon Bruce – an almighty whipping – when a twisted cackle exploded in my throat. I whipped the belt buckle into the air and watched as The Swine rolled into a protective ball. Then, after a brief pause, released the belt from my hand and let it fall to the ground. The Swine saw his chance, jumped up and disappeared. Bruce, still with hands and feet in the air, continued to cry and whimper.

    I’d spent a lot of time in rooming houses, but I’d never seen a human being act like an animal. I’d seen people who lived like animals. An elderly woman, mentally ill, who refused to wash her clothes until her skirt was so caked in dirt it became stiff around her thighs. But Bruce lying on his back in the grass, hands and feet in the air… Well, what was a person supposed to make of that? I imagined that sometime in his past, Bruce had adopted the persona of a puppy, one that couldn’t fight back. As the years had passed and Bruce had become a man, he’d also become a dog. A big lumbering dog capable of nothing less than loving its owner to death.

    And as I thought about Bruce lying on his back going:

    “Yap. Yap. Yap.”

    I began feeling like a dog; one with an innate pleasant personality that had tried hard to remain loyal to its master and show the world it really was a trustworthy animal. An intelligent dog capable of a career and a family. A spotted dog that one day might become a fine civic leader; its gallant chest swelling as it signed away on new housing for the homeless, or a new facility for the mentally ill. A Dalmatian, one able to ensure the general public that the trains would run on time… But in spite of all these canine aspirations my Dalmatian had somehow acquired sad eyes. Glassy brown orbs staring out the window of its room as it watched the world pass by while German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Dobermans and even Pit Bull Terriers were idolised. Unable, then unwilling to participate, because there was no longer any room in the world for a dog staring out a window with sad brown eyes.

    As the end of winter turned to early spring a plumber arrived and refitted all the knobs and screws, the washers and metal housing to the hotwater service. He then fired up the pilot light. And it seemed to me that once the residents of the rooming house could wash and keep themselves clean, our spirits picked up. I even said hello to The Swine and he grunted in return. A begrudging grunt, but a grunt all the same. The only person that hadn’t surfaced was Bruce. Nobody had seen him. Until early one morning, about 2.30 am, I was woken by the sound of snapping undergrowth in the yard. When I looked out my upstairs window I saw a flashlight wavering in the darkness.

    It was some time before my eyes adjusted, but once they did I saw that the figure holding the flashlight was Bruce, naked, except for a towel wrapped around his waist. I watched through my window as he wandered around the yard, spraying his flashlight into bushes: stopping for a moment at one location, then moving on to another as if forever unsatisfied. I pulled on my jeans and boots and made my way downstairs. When I asked Bruce if everything was alright he jumped into the air.

    “Can’t find it…” Bruce said.

    Stylized aerial view of a rooming house and yard at night, with a clothesline hung with washing. Four figures stand in the yard: three at the corners of a triangle, the fourth with a flashlight between them.

    “Find what…?”
    Bruce crashed through the shrubs and long grass

    “It,” Bruce said.

    “It…? What do you mean it?”

    The towel fell from his waist. There were black welts on his thighs and backside.

    “The Lost Dogs Home. Can’t find it…”

    I was about to take Bruce’s arm and lead him back to his box on the veranda, when somewhere in the early morning night a cat unleashed a wail that sounded like the cry of a lost child.

    Then Vladimir the Caretaker sparked up in the darkness.

    “3.00 am in morning… What going on here?”

    “Don’t worry,” I said.

    “But man is naked.”

    “Don’t worry,” I repeated. “Go back to bed.”

    There is something about the title of Caretaker, that when given to a human being turns a good man into an animal. Vladimir was no exception. He was also a regular attendant each Sunday at the local Russian Orthodox Church.

    “But man is naked…” Vladimir said again. “Like ape…”

    Pretty soon, The Swine arrived.

    He sniggered, while Vladimir tried to cover Bruce with the towel. But Bruce kept pining for the Lost Dogs Home and spraying his flashlight into the air. The dog next door began to bark. Lights came on in windows in apartments overlooking the yard, and a couple wearing red and blue silk robes emerged upon the balcony of their unit. I don’t know why, but the growl and bark of the dog next door, the way I imagined its drooling jaw snapping shut upon a hand, I don’t know why but that dog’s presence invaded my mind. The sad Dalmatian I had previously felt like became a domestic dog gone wild in the mountains on a moonlit night.

    “Get inside,” I shouted at the couple on the balcony.

    “Both of you. Get inside now.”
    Vladimir stared at me.

    “Me caretaker here. Not you, me. Understand?”

    I understood alright. And as I could see so clearly, I decided the others, especially Vladimir and The Swine, also needed to acquire some understanding. So I threatened to rip Vladimir’s throat out if he continued to harangue me.

    “No worry. I fix you,” said Vladimir.

    Still sniggering, The Swine began removing his belt from his trousers. But before he could raise it into the air I clipped him on the chin and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

    Next morning, there was an official notice under my door explaining that I’d been evicted.

    I pinned the eviction notice onto the wall of my room alongside the flyer advertising the dog grooming business. It seemed to me there were more similarities between animals and human beings than I had previously understood. A domestic animal will not attack an injured person and devour that person’s flesh. A domestic dog will slobber and lick and love a person to death. But look into the sad brown eyes of a Dalmatian and there always remains in those eyes a faint trace of the wilderness. And a person imagines they can hear a wild dog howling at the moon on a starless night as it prepares to travel thirty miles down a mountain path, enter farmland, and rip a lamb to bits for no other reason other than it likes the smell of blood. But perhaps the death of one lamb is the life of another and this is what human beings mean when we use the word ‘Survival’.

    Stylized aerial view of a rooming house and yard at night, with a clothesline hung with washing. One figure stands on a path inside the yard, reading a sheet of paper.

    I was given a week to vacate the premises. But as I had little in the way of belongings, a suitcase, some personal bits and pieces, I left on the day the eviction notice was issued. I suspect Bruce still lives in his little box on the veranda. And I suspect The Swine continues to stand over Bruce. While Vladimir the Caretaker probably attends the Russian Orthodox Church every Sunday, cleansing his stained soul after watching Bruce stumble naked around the yard while searching for The Lost Dogs Home. Yes, I suspect not a lot will have changed in that rooming house. In much the same way as not a lot has changed in the rooming house I live in now. A single room, four walls, one window, a mattress on the floor, and never any visitors. But just the other day a young man moved into the room next to mine. A young man who reminded me of myself when I’d first moved in seven years earlier. Not really a man, just a kid. All quiet, scared and watchful with sad brown eyes when I saw him staring out his window while contemplating the wilderness within – like a dog.

    © Tony Reck 2026

  • The Tar Machine

    The Tar Machine

    Eulogy for an Unfinished Cat

    Dressed as a cat I traipse through the streets and lanes of yesteryear, a mystery of mind so despised, so unperceived, that this territory marked by squirts of indifference (over many years) has never been gained at all.

    A quiet squat in the crepuscular light. Who am I but an indistinguishable feline made final by fractals of form? By the moon’s shifting gleam, its play of light perfect upon this silver-blue fur. Desolate, quiet, pin-prick final, cutting to the quick of my core.

    This one’s for the cat-people. For those made lonely by the dysentery of experience, or time’s dismal episode flickering on TV like a brain that does not matter. This one’s for the long-distance lovers sifting through their screens. Searching for solace within a shame that reverberates beyond the data-stream and which connects us by our sorrow.

    I have seen the man who walks these streets carrying cane and dressed in black. I watch him through a knotted hole in a wooden fence. This Catherine Wheel dream circulating beyond the vapour rising from my ejected waste. A territory marked, a form found; (one in keeping with my inevitable demise). A sigh, then relief … A moment during which the transition to humanity begins, then is at once complete. This eye is glass but the orb is deep. The flesh advances, putrefies … My troubled tail collapses from one too many lashings. This cat, in all her fractious wonder, finally, she sleeps.

    The Tar Machine

    home


    family


    mother


    father


    sister


    brother


    strap


    leather strap, spray, wind, the leather strap lets fly like the tail of an angry puma, black cat, yellow eyes, her name is holly, holly stares at her surroundings from the safety of her cane basket, the black and white tiled kitchen floor is a precipice that requires the most sensuous negotiations of the four paws of a cat, even if there was a mouse dawdling along the skirting board holly would not be interested for survival is foremost in her cat’s brain, all mice can wait, there will be time to play when the job is done

    inside the house seen through the yellow eyes of holly the cat, she stands, she expands both this way and that, the fur on her back like iron filings drawn to a powerful magnet secretly implanted in the ceiling, holly’s fur, it has a life of its own as it leaves her spine, a flock of fine hair scurries along the walls of this sullen room, and i, in my decrepit bed, i wake from dreams of long ago anticipating some relief, shake the sleep from my eyes, and discover for the forty thousandth time these bluestone walls and the sound of an unseen creek trickling outside, i do not rise from this mattress of straw, it is as if i must lever this body across time, and i can no longer remember whether this exacerbated cat was once a childhood pet or has always been a black and hissing figment in my mind, my hair, black as well, yet inferior to holly’s, it hangs across my face, oily, traces of grey, how long have i been in this room, did i arrive yesterday on a star descending past the moon as it streaked across the universe, no matter, these walls, the sound of that creek, and holly’s tail insinuating itself into my ear, her unclipped claws hooked into the flesh around my shoulder blades, and rip with a flourish, and rip with another, and my skin descends toward the base of my spine in curlicues that gather between the pads of holly’s paws, i once administered pain, i have spilled blood and drank it and rubbed it across my chest, created a pattern from someone else’s misery, only to have their misery become my own in this room, behind these walls, with holly on my back inside my mind tearing strips from me, exposing the ribs of a time that seems so ancient, if only i could find words that would adequately express this sinister dream inside a mind rupturing within the remembered blood of someone else’s misery, these words i cannot find are walls to the sound of that trickling creek i imagine runs through a field on the outside of this room, daisies, sunshine, these words are so inadequate, they do not inspire, and my dream drifts back into this room, behind these walls, exhausted, i dump my body back on this bed and realise the idyllic creek outside is just the sound of metal coils contracting beneath my weight

    rupture, jenkins, and yes, i run my fingers through my hair, feel the greasy touch of whiskers covered in human oil, and yes, i remember a man named jenkins, his soul split by experience, and yes, jenkins, he wore black horn-rimmed glasses like antelope horns belonging to the twisted cape of some disfigured shaman, and his stories, they were of the blackest kites swirling in a cumulonimbus sky, jenkins stories breaking his listeners bones, scooping out the marrow they believed in, replacing it with a dowel of the blackest type, until it was jenkins who was able to make his listeners fly upon recitals of his disfigured shaman’s dreams, this story of green leaves turned grey, decomposed and banking up along the seams joining the walls inside this bluestone room, and jenkins, you sit here now, your grey hair in strands across your scalp, leaving the slightest freckle revealed, what is inside your head jenkins, what sits beneath that freckle, is it a manifestation of the sprinting cancer inside your body, talk to me jenkins, tell me stories from inside your room, is it like mine jenkins, or are there many rooms, one containing a kitchen table, a silver room jenkins, you are a lucky man, let me hear the story of your silver room jenkins, tell me jenkins, explain the specifications of your room, talk jenkins, i will listen, i will abide by your regulations, it is fortified with steel, your wife stands by an ironing board, her tongue extends toward you, entering your ear, you feel the sound of her tongue entering your ear and your perceptions are momentarily disfigured, a split of the soul jenkins, your wife, she has control, for it is your ear inside her mouth when she swallows, and yes jenkins, your story is one of love floating high on air clouds whipped by currents into a cumulonimbus sky, and jenkins, what has become of this thing, this globule of ectoplasm that we thinly, that we inadequately describe as a soul, is it spread amongst green fields inside the highways and streams that make up the vascularity of your interior, are you totally diseased jenkins or is this infection confined to the flesh beneath your missing ear, talk jenkins, i will listen, talk jenkins, speak, and you are silent, and i am feeble, and jenkins, we shall sleep now, and continue our disfigured dissertation when we wake

    silver room, silver lady, the lady inside the silver room dances with a broom extending up her arse and out her ear, she thrashes at experience, sweeps life into a time when her mind was frozen, when sand gathered in the corners of this bluestone room, she visits me now, the lady inside, she leaves her silver room and crawls from jenkins sleeping ear, i wake, her arms and body heave and sway in front of me, inside the mountain with a thousand caves that is her torso, those ribs, the ribs of the lady inside, semicircular, smooth ivory ribs, bones of experience, i want to extend my hands through her pink flesh, to visit the interior of her torso and run my fingers along those ribs, like whalebone, the lady inside, her ribs, engraved by the finest cartographer, diagrams as yet unreadable, must get closer, leave this forlorn room of broken dreams, and yes, feel the edge of my dirty fingernail trailing along the inscriptions etched into those ribs, of pathways to the sea, of men in ships, their beards flaying in the wind, of diagrams incised upon the life of the lady inside, and it is the ship that i must see, for it is the vessel that transported my father to this house of hawthorn brick, his memories, his experiences, his fantasies inscribed upon my spine, that spineless act of pissing in a gumboot for fear that your father would rip his love away from you, and yes, it is love at the core of these wretched dreams, it is love that was ripped from me in that house of hawthorn brick, at first, its doors and windows were open to the sun, that house sucked in the juice of spring, dispersed pollen along corridors that degenerated into sand and dust, now, i sit inside this bluestone room, these cold walls, these walls made from thick ice, where memories leak into the general surrounds, memories of a man named jenkins, he sleeps next to me, the freckle on his head alive with the sound of his disfigured brain turning each thought over, each memory, of the woman inside, jenkins wife, who bit off her husband’s ear for fear that he would become contaminated by the goings on inside this bluestone room, these walls, the sound of incessant dripping, gaining speed, becoming a trickle, outside i hear the creek become a river as it races towards the sea, the swirling waters of the mouth of a river regurgitating its soul into the sea, come jenkins, find your feet among the grime, do not slip, struggle jenkins, take your hand away from the place that once held an ear, listen, force yourself to listen as we chip holes through these walls of ice, feel the fresh air of a future life seep into the stale degeneration of this bluestone room, sniff, taste, hear, touch a life that lies paved and spread before us, extending through green fields into the distance, a small creek running alongside us jenkins, running with us, smooth stone experiences to come jenkins, let us walk, and when we are tired we shall sleep once more

    and yes jenkins, do you see the stag, its velvet covered antlers a complex of possibilities, presenting pathways jenkins, which path do we choose, it is your turn to choose jenkins, you, the man who turned up that lucky wildcard, your life jenkins, what a laugh, it always seems to rise from somewhere at the bottom of a deck, on a ship, etched into the rib bones of the lady inside, my father, jenkins, jenkins, my father, i walk with you into walls, our heads, our eyes confronting one another yet all this time those pig eyes of yours have prevented me from seeing that you jenkins, you are that father that ripped your love from me and spat it into that bluestone gutter outside that house of hawthorn brick, i love your disfigurement jenkins, want to press my fingers into the pulp beside your temple and elicit strands of love from inside the recess of your brain, a tendon of love jenkins, i suck your love through my lips, it slithers down my throat, it burns the oesophagus, i will eat your entire mind jenkins, my father, i will eat the worms in your mind and shit them back into the sea, in the hope that, in the hope, there is no hope, there is only you jenkins

    Tony Reck © 2025

  • Long Death Last Breath

    Long Death Last Breath

    Tony Reck’s Long Death Last Breath is a work of intense psychological fiction, written in a fevered, stream-of-consciousness style. It traces a man’s descent into obsession, self-harm, and moral disintegration, interwoven with moments of tenderness, delusion, and deferred violence. In support of its themes, the language itself destabilises: syntax stretches, referents blur. Some readers may find the story disturbing.

    ⁓ MG

    Long Death Last Breath

    Light reflected off the surface of the river and caused him to reflect; yes, memories of that house. But traffic on the bridge was thick and he forced himself to concentrate. Little Cindy and Loopy Sally were strapped into the rear seat. Little Cindy smiled and sighed; she was born with wisdom. Loopy Sally waited for her next opportunity. And if that meant waiting for her sister to fall asleep so she might dribble into Little Cindy’s ear, then so be it. He had driven across the bridge many times. One day he would stop. On that day, they would remember him forever.

    The western suburbs of Melbourne sapped the required determination. He would speak with her and she with him. They would smile at one another, and the daggers would rise between them. The traffic cleared and he planted his foot as bitumen receded and an exit loomed. He turned left: a pizza joint: a pub: a supermarket: a dealer in antiques. Each establishment displaced by a windscreen that deferred his eventual destination.  

    The house that once belonged to both of them malingered half-way down the street. There she was, arms folded across her breasts. That shock of peroxide hair fractured at its ends, splitting every soul that sought entry to her home, and the home that Little Cindy and Loopy Sally lived in. Five minutes may as well have been five years. She would have her revenge simply because she could. That’s what love was: an acrobat fallen the wrong side of the net; a failed possession.

    ‘You’re late.’

    The children tumbled out of the car.

    ‘Inside.’

    The girls were gone.

    ‘This won’t go down well with the magistrate.’

    ‘You’re joking.’

    ‘No joke,’ She said.

    ‘Next week …?’

    ‘Not if I can help it.’

    He removed his daughters’ possessions from the vehicle: clothes, smart devices, a Monkey doll. It had three hands, twelve fingers and three thumbs. Each appendage excluded its other, but the formality of love betrayed was conspicuous between parents who hated one another. The front door followed the gate slammed shut. The moon was up and lunacy illuminated a wall.

    He slammed the door of his vehicle. A driver manic with fear – tyres whistled, an intersection loomed. He did not drive, he careered: experienced the lubricated shift of transmission; appreciated cylinders displaced, pistons tuned, and brake fluid mediated by the irascible edge of steel. He steered the vehicle beyond the shopping strip. A hard right onto the freeway, unnecessary speed, and he was back on the bridge. The city skyline strained a ventricle in his chest. Concrete, electricity, and pollution masquerading as cloud, distilled in his brain.

    He liked murder and murder liked him.

    Several days passed during which he performed the functions required of him. He answered the phone, ate his meals, attended work, and laughed with colleagues during designated breaks. But his laughter belonged to another and a voice infiltrated his ear. Later, he walked home and was obsessed by streetlight and a disturbance he believed was about to occur inside his unit on the 25th floor of the Brunswick St. commission flats. His unremarkable suit shone in the moonlight. He walked, smiled, and deliberated. He sang:

    Turn your mobile phone on.
    Your ID consists of sand.
    Feel the pulse of phallic-matrix
    vibrate in your hand.

    He had seen the light, and momentarily he was an angel. A Crown of Thorns encrusted around his head leeched blood from wounds that tasted like wine. But this inspiration was a flicker and he remained the creature he had always been: obese, effeminate, selfish, and inconsiderate. He sought retribution for the sin he believed had been committed against him. And as a sinner sinned against, the commission flat he occupied became a sign. Once inside, his desire for retribution would begin.

    Screaming was common on the 25th floor of the Brunswick St. commission flats. A cut-throat razor and an awl required sterilisation, while cotton thread might incite infection. But pain procured by a ten-centimetre incision inflicted upon his right hip was suppressed by a sock inserted between his teeth and a mega-dose of paracetamol. The day then passed in deference to the sin committed. That afternoon, Mary Kyrikilli called and questioned his commitment. He placated Mary’s presence and terminated her call. But Mary Kyrikilli was most insistent. She demanded he drive his vehicle across the bridge. Approximation would not suffice; the exact distance had to be ascertained. By evening, Mary Kyrikilli had persuaded him that he must complete this mission.

    Divinity accumulated within traffic lines that receded on the bitumen.  He braked: a car horn complained, patience was obliterated, and a driver abused him. But sufferance was to be expected from those critical of the divine, and he was saved from a broken nose by selflessness. (Give a sinner what he desired, and transcendence was his forever.) He alighted from his vehicle. An infusion of brilliance followed him to a safety platform. Disbeliever aside, no truth was more telling than that which emanated from within.

    He estimated the distance between bridge and river. (A document retrieved from his smart device had proposed fifty metres). But he remained sceptical of the digital realm because he believed it was populated by pedophiles, washed-up rock stars and other degenerates. The divine light would ascertain that which the digital realm failed to quantify; it accumulated in his oesophagus and descended toward the river. Fifty metres exactly, and never mind a document obtained online and tyrannised by an algorithm. The intelligence was artificial, but the bias was human.

    Exact distance obtained, he steered his vehicle toward an off-ramp. His left hand was on the steering wheel while his right hand caressed the suture on his hip. He suspected an oscillation had invaded his thoughts. But failed to recognise he was alone in this perception. Mary Kyrikilli had spoken: words: viscera: muscle: bone: marrow; each throbbed in time with his predicament. (His doctor was ambivalent when prescribing fentanyl; a dilemma resolved by a gathering of clinicians who, post-consideration of the patient and the wound inflicted, concluded he be certified then discharged him into the community.)

    Driving through the streets of Altona at night, he was once again obsessed by light. On this occasion, however, the luminosity resided beneath the waistline of his shirt. He muttered the word ‘Child’, but was immediately saddened by how the word presented itself. The vehicle dashboard was luminous, as was his crude incision. Two weeks old, tender and putrid, the suture vibrated. His vehicle sped past the previously mentioned pizza joint and its shopfront was made disingenuous by an extrusion of unlit neon.

    The antique dealership was also closed. (Nobody, not least his desecrated self, expected an antique dealership be opened at that time of night.) His car crooned, as would any vehicle emaciate before that which was inevitable. A hard left onto a minor arterial and there: his domain. Little Cindy and Loopy Sally were not simply his children: they were his ‘Child’. He had not liked the way in which the word had presented itself. But he muttered it again, until the offending noun was flushed beyond the driver’s-side window.  

    He parked his vehicle as did his vehicle park him: an organism comprised of flesh, blood, and viscera. Considered in reverse, he was a machine; or, perversely, tumescent flesh, iron-ore, and a crucible containing both, designed for the manufacture of neither. He sat there, headlights diminished, motor cooled, and listened to music – Stravinsky, although he could not say which work. He waited patiently, aware of that which he most desired. And when the opportune moment arrived, he capitalised.

    Immersion within the divine had damaged the wound on his hip and information assembled there became algorithmic. He stared through the windscreen and ruminated upon his children. Intelligence was autonomous: numbers calculated: code written: commands received. He had been unhappy with the word ‘Child’ as this had escaped his lips. But his suture concealed a radiance that only he could interpret; or, his tongue, a rendition of lithium, cobalt, carbon fibre and diode, unravelled from his mouth and sought release from his vehicle.

    He released the door-handle. The night was warm, and cloud carried precipitation from the west. A globule of rain found his nose. Madness was a tropic of the mind; a mind in Tropicana, so to speak. And if the suture on his hip existed, then reality was made, not procured. He scaled the high fence. The veranda was a minefield of bicycles, pot plants, a brutal mezzanine, and domestic despair. He was surprised that domestic despair persisted, for he mistakenly believed that despair, domestic or otherwise, belonged to him alone.

    Powered by the moon, he imagined he was a feline apparition and it occurred to him that entrance could be achieved in multiples: a door, a window, a floor, a ceiling. Ferocious, he crawled beneath the front doorstep. The underside of her home was not defined by cockroaches and beetles and, as precision was life, he crawled with ruthless efficiency. At 3.23 am he was capable of committing the atrocity required by the creature he had become and the phantasmagoria that consumed him.

    But he returned to his vehicle.

    The night had contracted to a greasy humidity. He had crawled beneath the floorboards of his ex-wife’s home and an excommunication was in order. The arterial was separated by a nature strip. He removed his clothes, hastened toward a sprinkler, and danced within the repeated thrusts emitted from an automated mechanism that cleansed perspiration from his arms, chest, legs, face and neck. Liberated, he returned to his vehicle, patted himself down with a dirty handkerchief, declined within the driver’s seat, and caressed the accelerator toward a poorly-lit intersection.  

    The next day came and went, as did the day that followed; an excess of light does that to a person. Ensconced within the kitchenette of his commission flat, he might have performed tricks: a deck of cards snapped to a flourish and a palmed ace apparently discovered behind his left ear; a card trick discouraged by his mother, but taught to him by his father. He might have performed tricks and thereby desecrated the memory of one parent but satisfied the demands of another. Rather, he sat, waited and ruminated. Five days later, Mary Kyrikilli had not called and his paralysis remained unresolved.

    He gazed beyond the kitchenette window as the sun disappeared behind a nearby apartment. The night progressed; he slept, and dreamed a candle luminescent ignited the entrails of a curtain. His dream erupted in flame. A window exploded outward and the offending protagonist was transported by ambulance to a hospital burns unit.

    His childhood had been spoiled by his parents’, but he was not a supernaturalist. He woke, and interpreted the dream as a sign.

    He was ready to kill; now, he would spread the word.

    Mary Kyrikilli pinged on his smart device. She did not crackle and click or advise him to commit atrocities. And she did not appear as a nightmare he had experienced fifty years earlier. Mary had become a slick communicator, a politician, and she made him fly upon dissertations of her disfigured shaman’s dreams.

    He was that flicker of light: the same flicker he had studied weeks earlier, when he had stopped his vehicle on the bridge and ascertained the exact distance between safety railing and river.

    And he considered himself a civic individual, even if he was about to murder his children.

    His vehicle ran a red light at St. Kilda Junction and Mary Kyrikilli communicated with him via the luminance within his right hip. He floored the accelerator. Perforated white lines disappeared into the darkness and the inner suburbs of the north east soon became the outer suburbs of the south west. An off-ramp; a pizza joint, a supermarket, an antique dealership. A right; a left, a right. He was the pathetic individual he had always been but the luminous voice that belonged to Mary Kyrikilli disavowed empathy. A poorly lit street faded to its inevitable conclusion, as he did to his.

    He alighted from his vehicle and it expired before his eyes. But he remained convinced its algorithm would crystallize and transport Little Cindy and Loopy Sally to their final destination.

    He threw himself over the high fence, crashed through a branch of Ti-Tree, and feared he may have woken Lucifer himself. He held his breath, and pressed his hands together in prayer. No alarm was forthcoming and the house remained dark. A side-entrance had been reinforced so as to prevent unauthorised access. But tools secured in a satchel were procured, and he flipped the latch with a tyre lever. Several years had expired since his failure to complete external renovations. But he interpreted the incomplete side-entrance as a sign that he remained welcome in the home he had destroyed.

    Little Cindy and Loopy Sally slept in the Little Room. He removed a screwdriver from his satchel and inserted its tip beneath a window. The window screeched. He retrieved a jar of petroleum jelly and lubricated the offending surface. Loopy Sally’s face upon a pillow was made luminous by moonlight, and Little Cindy’s breath exited her lips amidst a radiance that illuminated the Little Room.

    He woke Little Cindy.

    ‘Daddy.’

    A kiss on the cheek.

    ‘Get dressed.’

    She did.

    Eternity was anticipated.

    If we were meant to live forever this night would never end.

    Long death. Last breath. Expire.

    A dressing table installed within the room was a teak contraption. Two angular mirrors positioned left and right of a sheet of reflective glass revealed a triptych of the person he had never intended to be: a monster once a father who had since become a human being.

    Little Cindy returned to sleep.

    Loopy Sally was a light sleeper.

    She glared at her father.

    The new moon descended into the Little Room, aspiration was elevated, and malevolence diminished.

    He climbed out the window and returned to his vehicle.  

    Mary Kyrikilli was silent.  

    The dashboard radiated across his face.

    An algorithm calculated kilometres travelled and fuel consumed.

    His vehicle ascended an on-ramp.

    The skyline of the city of Melbourne was a Mohawk beneath the cavernous sky.

    The distance between safety-railing and the river had been ratified. The radiance he believed illuminated his right hip was nestled between flesh and bone. Traffic accumulated, but he was headed in the opposite direction. He stared beyond the Yarra River and across Port Phillip Bay. Maritime light flickered in time with his pulse. He looked out, and he looked down. He saw the faces of Little Cindy and Loopy Sally splayed across the surface of the river.

    Fifty metres.

    He looked out, and down, and in. To an observer standing on the deck of a boat, or the planet Venus, he was a man who scaled a protective railing; the father of two daughters who had taught him that the person he might have been no longer existed.

    A foghorn bellowed in the distance, and he was gone.  

    Tony Reck © 2025

    Images generated by AI

  • Razor Viking: With a Twist

    Razor Viking: With a Twist

    • Tony Reck recalls one of many arduous treks. The Razor-Viking wilderness is an isolated and rugged mountainous region in the Alpine National Park, about 380 kilometres northeast of Melbourne. It lacks vehicle access, signposts, and track markers.

    It was November 2024, the Melbourne Cup weekend, and we had four days to complete the Razor Viking circuit. After spending Friday night at Muttonwood camp, twenty kilometres north of Licola, we drove over Mt Tamboritha, along the Snowy Range, and arrived at Howitt car park.

    Having just met the party of nine, I kept my head down and watched for indications of a group dynamic. Our leader, a tall, bearded man of Dutch descent named Jopie, produced a set of scales from his white Subaru Forester, and each member of the group rushed to obtain an accurate reading of the weight of their packs.

    Jopie’s pack weighed 16 kg, John’s 15.5 kg, while Rod’s four-day masterpiece barely recorded a reading at 11 kg.

    There was much conviviality among those with light packs as they struck out at speed through the snowgums on Clover Plain toward Macalister Springs. While the unenlightened, myself included, brought up the rear under a humid sky and wondered what secrets in weight strategy had been denied us during our formative bushwalking years.

    Two trekkers cross a stream

    Lance, a nuggetty man with a wild afterburn of grey hair, had decided not to chance his hand on the Razor Viking circuit. Instead, he would spend the following four days exploring the Howitt Plains area. We said goodbye at the top of Devil’s Staircase and Lance hot-tailed it along a well-defined track toward a comfortable night in a hut situated at Macalister Springs. For the rest of us the opposite was true. There would be no well-defined track and no hut to retreat to if the weather soured during the following days.

    From the top of Devil’s Staircase, an untracked spur led north-east, then east, during a one thousand metre descent into the valley of the infant Wonnangatta River and our first campsite. We would then cross the river, climb steeply out of the valley, circumnavigate an unnamed 900-metre hill, descend once again, and cross a tributary of the river; then locate a narrow ridge running north-north-east, ending at a 1,300-metre-high point, south-west of the South Viking.

    But first, we had to do battle with three hundred metres of skin-scratching scrub and a stubborn two-metre tiger snake.

    It was past midday, and a significant change in the weather was apparent. Rain was forecast: developing that afternoon, persisting the next day, then clearing the day after. As we scratched our way through corrosive scrub, the cool alpine breeze that had been present above fifteen hundred metres was replaced by a greasy humidity. The scintillating morning sunshine was consumed by a diffuse curtain of grey cloud. Perhaps the sun’s disappearance was a reason why the two-metre tiger snake refused to move. Rod, the man with the unbelievably light 11-kg pack, warned me of the snake’s presence as I stumbled through the scrub.

    A tiger snake disappears into scrubby grass

    “That’s alright,” I said. “It’s probably more frightened of me than I am of it.”

    Rod was not convinced.

    “That might be so, but the snake isn’t moving. So tiptoe around it.”

    And there it was, splayed across a rock, as thick as a sapling. Calm, but possibly dangerous.

    A big snake moves quickly, and I was not about to be bitten. I took Rod’s advice and tiptoed from stone to stone, giving the snake much space. If a wall had been present I would have had my back against it. But the big tiger seemed unconcerned, confirming the maxim that left alone, most snakes are harmless. It was the most impressive tiger snake I had seen in quite a few years.

    That night, camped in light forest with the southern bank of the Wonnangatta River close by, I recorded the day’s events in a notebook. The walk across Clover Plain had been a pleasant jaunt and our thousand-metre descent had come off as planned. We were camped in an isolated spot, and the next morning, we would embark upon an 800-metre ascent that would take us into the heart of a spectacular mountain wilderness. Yet already, something seemed to be missing from this trip. What it was I could not say: the wilderness without is often as intangible as the wilderness within. I was in little doubt that this absence would be filled over the next three days. Not, as often appears to be the case, by a single event. More likely, by an accumulation of experience, one in which the entire trip would coalesce. That moment when the old path on which a walker treads ends, and a new path unfolds.

    It rained all night, and when I woke the next morning it was still coming down. Reluctantly, I emerged from my sleeping bag and pushed my head beyond the vestibule of my tent. A grey sky with an ominous green hue and not a single break between the clouds. It now looked like this rain would continue throughout the day.

    Then the rain stopped. Tents began to quiver and the sound of several pressure stoves blossomed in the gloom. Hans emerged: a Swiss carpenter, his handlebar moustache and superhero emblazoned cap indicated he was ready for action, and it wasn’t long before the group gathered at a site one hundred metres upstream, where we intended to cross the rising Wonnangatta River.

    There Jopie outlined the day’s route. We were aiming for a campsite at Viking Saddle, a small clearing situated between The Viking and The Razor. The distance wasn’t great: approximately seven kilometres. However, it would take a full day to arrive as we climbed eight hundred metres and attained two distinctive summits, before negotiating The Viking’s north-western cliff and descending two hundred metres through uprooted mountain ash in an area decimated by a recent winter storm.

    There are various methods for crossing a fast-flowing, swollen river. Hans, that Man of Action, and being a carpenter, could not contain a biblical impulse. Fully clothed, he entered the river on the south bank and exited via the north like Moses parting the Red Sea.

    Majestic scenery of the Australian Alps, with two trekkers showing tiny in the foreground

    Soon, we had all managed to successfully cross the river and regrouped on the north bank, while considering the next — and perhaps most difficult — obstacle of the entire walk: a ‘1 in 2’ climb (one metre ascent for every two metres walked), out of the river valley to a small ridge running east to west and separating the Wonnangatta from one of its myriad tributaries. Steep, but short — yet combined with a 22-kg pack and overbearing humidity… well, I need not say any more.

    Once the tributary was crossed we fought our way through a patch of dense, wet fern and other harsh vegetation, before emerging on a pleasant slope — the beginning of the climb to our first 1,300-metre highpoint, south-west of the South Viking.

    As we followed the spur upward there occurred several changes in the landscape. The spur narrowed and turned to rock. Sub-alpine grasses and mountain ash were replaced by tufts of spinifex and the ubiquitous snowgum. The thick humidity present at seven hundred metres was swept away by the snap of an alpine wind. Cloud coagulated around us, the mist rolled in, and one of our party, Michael, a visitor like myself, disappeared from view.

    The ‘1 in 2′ climb straight after breakfast had curbed the group’s enthusiasm but Michael appeared to have suffered a little more than the rest of us. Having some inclination toward the mysteries of first aid and that almost transparent 11-kg pack, Rod left the leader’s group and joined him at the rear.

    Nobody in the party had traversed, or knew of anyone who had traversed, this route to the South Viking. (I had dropped off the summit once before, opting for the relatively gentle descent of a broad spur further east.) We did not know what to expect as we approached the South Viking in heavy mist until the sight of a perpendicular bluff made its presence felt, appearing to block any further ascent. Momentarily, it looked as if we would be forced to spend excruciating hours battling scrub in hostile country by pushing horizontally east — until Jopie’s navigational skill eased into gear.

    Viewed from a great height, we must have resembled a procession of colourful ants teeming over stonework as we negotiated an interconnected system of channels in the escarpment, soon reaching the summit of the South Viking. The difficult aspect of the ascent was over. The South Viking and The Viking were connected by three low-lying saddles. We hurried through each one and arrived at the summit of The Viking. There we hauled packs through a rock chimney, picked up the track to Viking Saddle, and descended through an apocalypse of trees ripped from the ground by a mini-tornado.

    Rock outcrop in foreground of panoramic view of Australian Alps

    I was thankful not to have been camped in the saddle on the night that monster tore through the bush. Hearing a fully grown tree hit the ground is unnerving enough. To have fifty or so crashing around a tent at night would have been a bushwalker’s nightmare.

    A large group had already arrived at the saddle. With the inclusion of our eight tents, a small colony appeared. The sky cracked open once again — and this time the rain was permanent. Confined to our tents, we were wet, hungry and tired. But we were well and truly alive. Not that there was any question about the safety of the party. It’s just that city life dulls the senses and a sophisticated urbanite soon forgets his primal origins.

    After an hour of heavy rain, the weather shifted. A noticeable breeze blew into the saddle via the headwater of the West Buffalo River. At dusk, a break appeared in the eastern sky. Someone from the other group had persisted in the rain and lit a campfire. A strange shamanic conduit, it drew others to its primal dance. Shadows flickered across faces alive in the darkness, smoke rose into the night air, and I fell asleep and dreamed of prehistoric times.

    As predicted, the rain cleared overnight. We were off early, picking our way through fallen timber as we climbed toward The Razor. To my surprise, there was such a thing as a promising grey sky. But an hour later, as we emerged from the forest and scrambled up the conglomerate slabs of The Razor, low cloud still enveloped the northern face of The Viking.

    Even so, it was the first unrestricted view we’d had of the surrounding area for two days.

    Standing on the crest of one of many conglomerate slabs, we could see the many sloping spurs and interconnecting ridges descending north toward the remote Catherine River. To the west, the Australian Alps Walking Track fractured as it struggled along intractable rock towards Mt Despair. This was to be our intended route for the day, the objective being Mt Speculation. Jopie had other ideas.

    Having walked the circuit several times, I had never reached the summit of The Razor. Once on the summit, after a slow kilometre of rock hopping through trackless terrain, the side-trip proved eminently worthwhile.

    An increase in temperature flushed low-lying cloud from The Viking’s north-eastern flank. The cliffs marking the Australian Alps Walking Track’s easterly descent to Barry Saddle appeared. Vertical, and like the weather-beaten brow of a forlorn, lost explorer, the mid-mountain cloud closed in once again and The Viking disappeared.

    An hour later, after reclaiming our packs, we were back on the walking track leading west toward Mt Despair. Despite slow going along the southern crest of The Razor, the mood of the group had lightened. The most difficult aspect of the walk was behind us. Hans was telling tall stories once again. We would soon be setting the pace along an obstacle-free track over Despair and down to Catherine Saddle, a headwater of the Wonnangatta River. As a gash in the cloud widened and blue sky appeared for the first time in two days, we discovered there was no irony intended in the name ‘Mt Despair’.

    It was a relief to finally see the sun. But why had it chosen to appear, and why had the temperature increased just as the ascent of Mt Despair had begun?

    Rugged rocky ridge with Australian Alps blue in the background

    In the past, a solid rest after considerable physical exertion had always left me ready and willing. However, the cumulative stress produced by carrying a heavy pack through rough country for three days was beginning to tell. And we still had the severe climb from Catherine Saddle to Camp Creek prior to the summit of Mt Speculation to complete.

    It was well past 5.00 pm as we descended the grassy, sun drenched western slope of Mt Despair. After a hard day, this was not a great time for preparing to climb one of the higher mountains (1,630 metres) of the Wonnangatta Moroka sector of The Alpine National Park.

    At Catherine Saddle, two routes presented themselves.

    A foot track headed straight up the northeastern flank of the mountain while the old Wonnangatta Track (ambitiously referred to as Speculation Road) followed the twelve-hundred-metre contour around the same flank, then ascended Camp Creek via a shallow valley.

    Bob and Michael chose to follow the contour. I was tempted, but on a blind impulse followed Jopie, Rod, Tim and Hans over an embankment and up the hill.

    Halfway up, I wished I’d chosen the contour. Without exaggeration, I thought my lungs would pop. But after twenty years of bushwalking, during which I had walked the entire Australian Alps Walking Track and been whacked by second-stage hypothermia on Mt Anne in South West Tasmania, I had integrated into my bushwalking a highly sophisticated technique for dealing with mind-altering pack-carries up the steep flanks of mountains.

    Growling.

    Believe me, growling will get a beaten walker to any summit, any time — although the worried look I received from Hans suggested I had completely lost my marbles. But growl I did, and once again it got me up the mountain. Yet I was grateful that Tim, a trainee nurse, was also present in case my growl became a heart murmur and I collapsed in cardiac arrest.

    Finally, we reached Camp Creek. After some slow tent-erecting, during which I found it difficult to recognise the front end of the tent from its rear, water was obtained from Camp Creek.

    Rugged ridge showing trekking route in the Razor-VIking circuit

    Bob and Michael arrived, a small fire was lit, and once again, cloud descended upon us, dampening everything except our spirits. We settled in for a restful night as the temperature hovered at five degrees.

    We were high in alpine country, directly beneath the summit of a 1,600-metre mountain. We may not have been able to see past our noses, but our bellies were soon full. For the first time during the entire trip, the opportunity presented itself to sit around the fire and share what was already a memorable experience. From intimations of shamanic ritual and prehistoric dreams, to a bushwalker who chose to growl, instead of howl, when confronted by cardiac arrest. But soon, we were all so tired, each one of us silently slipped away, disappeared within a lick of mist, and quietly went to sleep.

    Birdsong broke the silence; what species of bird it might have been, I had no idea. Instead of going back to sleep, I lay on my back in the dark as the bird’s repeated rhythms crystallised thoughts in my sleepy brain. Somewhere in the valley below, a second bird of the same species responded to the first bird’s solo. A fugue ensued; something was afoot in the natural world. I could feel its aura surrounding my tent.

    A high mountain sunrise was one thing, but this show was otherworldly. Tim and I were up and out of our tents, captivated by a violet streak illuminating the tip of a distant mountain. No one else was awake. We were two children watching the birth of a new world. I had seen many a sunrise during my forty years in the mountains, but this was THE sunrise.

    After an hour frolicking in the mellow light of a glorious mountain morning, it was time to get serious. Before us lay the Crosscut Saw: a ten-kilometre rocky spine separating the Wonnangatta and Howqua rivers, leading back to Macalister Springs. Our trip along the Razor Viking circuit was concluding.

    From the summit of Mt Speculation there would be that descent through the bluff at Horrible Gap during which Bob would lose his footing and hang suspended in mid-air from a rickety tree branch. There would also be that climb to Mt Buggery, the name of which would elicit a grim laugh from Tim as he encountered its sharpness. Without doubt, there would be the pain derived from four days of stress upon a body that failed to recover after the climb to Buggery’s summit. Every step, every adjustment of the load upon my back, every swivel of the hips and resulting unobstructed view into valleys east and west would evoke within me an ecstatic sense of the Victorian Alps — their inspiration, my infatuation, and the wonder that makes bushwalking in those alps an exhilarating experience. There would be all this and more as we cracked jokes after meeting up with Lance on the heath at Macalister Springs, before arriving to fresh fruit at Howitt car park.

    But that moment of truth all bushwalkers strive for had passed.

    As we left Camp Creek and climbed toward the summit of Mt Speculation, the old path had ended and a new trip had begun.

    RAZOR VIKING: WITH A TWIST by Tony Reck © 2025
    Photos: John Terrell © 2025

  • Nightshift

    Nightshift

    Driving through the streets of Fitzroy at night you become obsessed with streetlight and the sound of an imagined disturbance occurring in flat thirteen on the twenty-fifth floor of the Brunswick St. commission flats. In daylight, there is little to see but a urine stain on a tram shelter seat. An old stiff with a grey beard named Jimmy calls to you unintelligibly from the other side of the street. You wish you were somewhere else; perhaps wandering along a path beneath a mountain in the bush…

    But no.


    You are up against a brick wall. Forever waiting to be released from the pain that is synonymous with the stiff named Jimmy who sits the day out on Death Row while trams travel along gentrified Gertrude St.

    Jimmy isn’t a bad man, but he’d snip you for twenty dollars if he could. He sits in his tram shelter, one foot across a thigh, digging splinters of glass out of the soles of his bare feet. The memories emanating from the grey hair covering his scalp are all he has for company. Nobody bothers about old Jimmy, so he creates imaginary friends in order to deflect the pain circulating in his head.

    Jimmy once drove a cab at night. One morning, when the encroaching daylight had washed another junkie’s brains into the gutter, he drove home and had breakfast. While sitting at the kitchen table he saw what he believed was a worm wriggling in his buttered toast. He placed a finger in the marmalade jar and dabbed a touch of ginger in the direction of the worm’s mouth. It promptly slurped the marmalade off his finger, smiled, and in Jimmy’s mind, thanked him for the secretion. The worm then crawled beneath his fingernail and entered his bloodstream through a crack in his skin. Jimmy quietly explained this to his mother; she blessed herself, kissed her son between the eyes, then made him a dish of pear and pineapple pieces hoping that something fruity would prepare her son for the nightshift.

    After breakfast Jimmy read the Neos Kosmos. As the heat of the afternoon drew near he retired to his bedroom and studied an old high school history report. He dropped off to sleep riding the gratification obtained from reading a comment his teacher had made:

    ‘Jimmy is a very bright boy who does no work.’

    As he dozed the worm that he believed had earlier entered his bloodstream fused with the memory of Mrs. Logan’s words until a further sentence was tacked onto the end of the history report:

    ‘Jimmy is a very bright boy who does no work. For punishment, he must clean up the streets.’

    His mother woke him at 4.00 pm. She knocked on his bedroom door then marched into his room and checked him for dysentery. (Her husband had been killed fighting the fascists in the mountains of Northern Greece. He had been a Greek resistance fighter, who, when captured by the Italians, had been forced to sit unchecked in a cell for nine months until an Italian soldier had walked in one morning unannounced and asphyxiated the prisoner using Jimmy’s father’s own excrement. Since the knowledge of that foul act had reached Jimmy’s mother she had remained petrified by the presence of faecal matter. She sensed it everywhere: under the stairs, in the refrigerator, hiding out surreptitiously under the model bridge Jimmy had constructed in the backyard of their home and which acted as a monument over the fish pond he had built in memory of his dead father). Jimmy was free of dysentery, but the worm that he believed had burrowed beneath his fingernail earlier that day had increased in size during the five hours he had been asleep. He now heard and felt Mrs Logan’s command circulating in his arteries and forcing its message through veins, onto blood vessels; which then pumped her command into each muscle of Jimmy’s body until his arms, legs, head, toes and feet were ready to put this command to work and quote:

    ‘…clean up the streets.’ Unquote.

    Later, Jimmy sat at the kitchen table, breadcrumbs clinging to the sleeve of his shirt, gazing at his features in a handheld mirror his menopausal mother had once used when plucking her eyebrows and waxing her bikini line.

    His mother entered the kitchen through a rear door with orange worry beads clasped in her left hand and muttering ‘Hail Mary’ in unorthodox Greek; this was Jimmy’s cue to hit the street. He placed the mirror on the kitchen table and dismissed the furrowed brow that now followed him through the flywire door — Jimmy unaware of its presence between his black Kalamata eyes — and into Vere St.

    Outside, a local street urchin dangled the entrails of a ginger tom cat on a bamboo stick, saw Jimmy, twirled the mess several times, and released it. The entrails slapped on the driver’s side windscreen of Jimmy’s Silver Top Holden Kingswood.

    Jimmy could have murdered the child; indeed, should have murdered the child. This kid, along with all the other kids that played in Jimmy’s region, who refused to play anywhere else, was a constant reminder of his semiconscious desire to kill off ‘The Child’. If Jimmy wanted to achieve this ambition he would have to transcend himself and become a red-eyed battalion of tungsten, human protein, and simple stainless steel, put together and integrated with various weaponry, some obvious, some not so, into a two tone, white hot, come as you are to the party killing machine.

    The sun slithered across the roofs of houses and all its grace and splendour was lost in sawtooth alcoves and sheets of rusty corrugated iron. Jimmy held the ginger tom’s entrails in one hand while its pancreas remained lodged between the taxi’s wiper blade and windscreen. He hurled the entrails after the retreating child then lunged for the pancreas with the intention of removing it. Unluckily for Jim his intellectual faculty kicked in and he was quietly impressed by the proud pancreas’ emanating theoretical value. As the saying goes, and this is not one I would use in any other context I assure you, Jimmy was about to ‘Bust his Pooper’.

    The worm, which that morning had slipped beneath Jimmy’s chipped fingernail and manoeuvred its way into his bloodstream, penetrated his mind. He now believed it had receded, recidivist worm that it was, into the compartment in his brain that contained traces of zinc, iron oxide, lead, sulphur and bauxite, and which had been secreted there by the monumental amount of illicitly made amphetamine Jimmy had injected in a previous attempt at killing off ‘The Child’. With worm and heavy metals in tow — and an undissolved preservative attached to a jelly crystal he had eaten as a child — Jimmy was ready to inflict harm upon the nearest pederast he could find.

    The sun was completely hidden in alcoves and side streets as the nightshift began with ginger tom’s pancreas flapping insistently on the windscreen; a constant reminder to Jimmy of the fun filled days he had been forced to spend with his mother. All of which culminated in a desire to whip the blade of his paint scraper across the carotid artery of ‘The Child’.

    A voice cackled into life on the two-way radio. It was Mary Kyrikilli, the depot manager’s wife. The job involved picking up an elderly couple in Surrey Hills wanting a lift to the over seventy five’s dance in Canterbury. What Jimmy heard was this:

    ‘You have a function to fulfil at 666 Fitzroy St. St. Kilda. Be quick, for the scum is sliding off the street and receding into drains then catching the first train to outer Elsternwick. We applaud your meticulous preparations for performing the task of killing ‘The Child’. We respect your commitment to cleaning up the streets and replacing unredeemed low life with flesh powered by pink spark plugs. We recognise your brain’s ability to assimilate organic material, heavy metal, and static electricity. We admire the organism you have become Jimmy: your quilled fingers, tungsten breastplate, metal teeth, and plumber’s worm for a tongue. We implore you to unleash this flexible spike from your mouth and reach into the decadent minds of the scum who surf Fitzroy St. You are the future Jimmy… Do you read me?’

    Mary’s voice fractured into an orangutan’s outraged scream that pierced Jimmy’s skull, ramming the shears into the soft skin beside his forehead. His eyes crackled with green intensity. He pressed the cab’s accelerator to the floor, picked up the receiver, and responded to Mary’s call:

    ‘Clear as the night sky seen from the planet Venus.’

    
His cab rocketed past a sex shop in Smith St. just as its pot-bellied, red moustached proprietor stepped out for a breather.

    ‘That’s odd.’ The proprietor lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘There’s a cab without its lights on.’


    Excessive exposure to the Kama Sutra, jet-propelled semen, and pink pelvic interiors pierced by nuts and bolts, wooden pegs, and surgical steel curtain rings eventually overwhelm the most sophisticated thinkers. The proprietor stepped back inside, but not before carelessly flicking his half-finished cigarette into the sky — and there it remained, frozen. The city skyline wheezed while in St. Kilda, Fitzroy St. seethed with discontinuity and shallow breathing as Jimmy’s murderous thoughts sharpened the shears.

    Number six hundred and sixty-six Fitzroy St. was a Malaysian Hawker’s joint. The restaurateur and a Labrador-Deerhound cross he kept in a kennel in the kitchen studied Jimmy with similar expressions when he walked into the restaurant and proclaimed he was on a mission from Mary. The restaurateur shrugged:

    ‘Sorry. Not on the menu here.’

    Then resumed tossing squealing noodles, broccoli, and tofu in a wok. In his left ear Jimmy heard the depot manager’s wife and temporary radio operator Mary Kyrikilli. She sang a song he remembered singing in primary school. The words were unfamiliar: a jumble of disconnected nouns, verbs and present tenses, but Jimmy recognised the tune. His mother had hummed the same tune while sitting in a chair as she tried to conceal from her infant son the homesickness and accompanying despair she felt for the mountains of Northern Greece.

    Jimmy’s vision of the Labrador-Deerhound’s curling upper lip, revealing pink gristle and canines capable of inflicting a serious incision, was blurred by melancholic feelings rising through his gullet and intersecting with Mary Kyrikilli’s pursed lips whispering in his ear. The restauranteur slipped his hand beneath the dog’s frothing muzzle, grabbed its leather collar, and demanded Jimmy exit the premises post haste. Instead of ramming the shears as he had planned, Jimmy turned and stepped onto Fitzroy St.

    Next door, a fight erupted in the bar of the Prince of Wales Hotel, and spilled out over cascading chairs and tables onto the footpath.

    Jimmy became involved in the fracas.

    The bouncer, a bald-headed gorilla, stomped up and down on Jimmy’s head until a member of the Scottish clan celebrating St. Andrew’s Day in the bar intervened, and hit the bouncer with a Bolo combination that cracked the bouncer’s rib and broke his nose.

    The other Jocks drinking portergaffs at the bar broke into a chant for Glasgow singing:

    ‘Here we go… Here we go… Here we go…’

    But their striker’s score on the bouncer was soon equalised by a door bitch well versed in Zen Do Kai, sadism, and the cultivation of azaleas.

    In retaliation, she KO’d Jimmy with a Liverpool Kiss.

    Jimmy sat cross-legged amid the chaos, losing blood from his right ear, and pleading for help to find his glasses. He was unable to do so, and feeling rather discontent, until one of the Scottish revellers finally bought him a beer.

    ‘There you are my good man…’, said Jock to the unremitting Jimmy. ‘Drink up, for you are about to meet your maker.’

    He walked down Fitzroy St. dressed in his stove pipe suit. When he reached The Esplanade the sound of waves breaking on St. Kilda beach accumulated in his mind. He sat down on the dirty sand, stared across Port Phillip Bay, and saw a silhouette of the You Yang Range in the night sky. He pulled his beanie over his eyes and saw an image in his mind of a man not unlike himself. That man wore a tungsten breastplate emblazoned with a moving image of the Serengeti Plain. Jimmy now believed that he was wearing a tungsten breastplate that contained a moving image of the Serengeti Plain. Then, in spite of the worm beneath his fingernail, and the cat entrails on the windscreen, Jimmy murdered ‘The Child’.

    He had wanted to go to the milk bar and buy another ice cream, but his mother had disallowed it, so he had placed a chair beside the window in his bedroom, stood on the chair, and beat his little fists upon the pane of glass until it smashed. He had seen the ice cream stick in his mind, sailing through the sewer beneath the suburb he had grown up in, while hiding under the bed and staring at his mother’s bare legs as she tried to coax him into the open. But Jimmy had refused to come out from under the bed under any circumstance for he knew this meant a beating, so his mother had sent the straw broom under the bed in an attempt to dislodge him. He felt the scratch and tickle, the rip and sickle like feature of sharp straw upon his bare thigh. He squeezed further into a hole between the bed and the wall and slashed his elbow open on a protruding bed spring. He cried and his mother screamed, while the real culprit leant against the wall. The straw broom, diffident, composed, quietly calculating the amount of blood the boy’s wound had sprayed upon its handle.

    On the night of his breakdown, Jimmy struck fourteen people on the head with an engineer’s hammer. When his cab sideswiped a telephone pole in Richmond he ripped a piece of metal from the cab’s rear door and tried to dig that worm out of his ear. A gardener found him in the Botanic Gardens at 8.30 am with the metal shard protruding from the wound in his head. The worm was nowhere to be seen, but Jimmy had mumbled something about a bloated maggot wriggling down Batman Ave. toward Flinders St. According to Jimmy, his extraterrestrial partner had boarded a train, gained six kilograms on the trip by eating leftover packets of potato chips, then got out in Ringwood.

    Jimmy was sentenced to three and a half years in jail, during which he was raped by one inmate, beaten by two, and poleaxed by a screw. Upon his release into the community he lived with a fervour only countered by the ecstasy derived from watching an Old English Sheepdog urinate against a pole. Yet Jimmy did not complain, or if he did, then it was a complaint directed inward — to that black hole he has remained in for the past twenty years.

    Jimmy sucks hard on a cigarette butt. A tram stops alongside his shelter in Gertrude St. He is preoccupied with swatting flies in and around his beard, but the combined stare of the tram cuts him to the quick and he is invigorated.

    ‘Come ’ere…’, Jimmy says.

    He waves an alighting passenger in his direction, hoping to score a fag or some coins for a bottle of turps, but the elderly woman blows disgust at him then disappears into a Voluntary Helpers shop to do her bit for charity. Jimmy’s moment of clarity dissipates in his air of lost connections.

    I watch Jimmy from across the street, sitting in his tram shelter, one foot across a thigh. I am aware of a certain similarity that exists between us.

    Turpentine is not my poison, but living is.

    His mother is asleep in the bedroom of her commission flat. She dreams of water sliding over rocks that cascades into a silent pool. Alongside one another Jimmy and his mother sit waiting for the Achilles Laura to sail back home to Greece. Outside, she can hear Jimmy’s voice, or another voice belonging to one of the hundreds of stiffs on Death Row, sitting in tram shelters on cold nights, sleeping beneath the All Ordinaries Index printed on daily newspapers, or simply fighting off the demon that is Mary Kyrikilli emanating from a microchip Jimmy believes has been implanted in his cerebellum.

    From the twenty-fifth floor of the Brunswick St. commission flats there is only the night sky. The stars try to force the clouds apart, but it is the clouds that contain the pain scintillating in Jimmy’s mother’s mind. She lies on her back in the dark, listening to the tick of an alarm clock, along with her son, sitting in a tram shelter in Gertrude St. He shouts obscenities directed at nobody in particular, yet which she feels are reserved for her. She cannot go out and embrace him or bring him in for moussaka; he is lost to her. He screams:

    ‘Come ’ere gamisou…. La, la, la…’

    His mother takes earplugs from the drawer beside her bed and inserts these into her ears to deaden the obscenities.

    All is quiet at 3.53 am.

    This is the son she was unable to love who has returned to torment her.

    When the early birds rise the squeak they make is an expression of ornithological glee at the penetration of a starling’s beak into the green heart of a cicada. Jimmy’s mother wakes, hurries to the kitchen, and prepares a Turkish coffee.

    NIGHTSHIFT by Tony Reck © 2025

    Selected photographic art is by Jr Korpa, a prominent photographer based in Spain, at Unsplash | @jrkorpa. His surrealistic vision echoes the fractured streets and restless minds within Tony Reck’s narrative. See more of Jr Korpa’s work at jrkorpa.com