Isolated Incidents
Fergus Sinnott
The woman in the house across the street decides to leave for good. A man walks out of a bar and disappears. In California, half a million people all look up at the sky, and find that there is little to be scared of.
On the shoulder of a highway two brothers kiss in the back of a car while their father sleeps in the front seat. Another man in another car, going forty miles an hour in a one hundred-mile zone, shakes his head at something being said on the radio. A house in the middle of nowhere, recently foreclosed: the wallpaper in the living room slowly peels away.
Two bodies are dredged from Lake Arrowhead on New Year’s Day. The story doesn’t run. No one boards the city bus at its penultimate stop. The global surface temperature increases as predicted, but in half the estimated span of time. Someone stands on the edge of a precipitous slope, considers jumping for a moment, before wondering whether or not they remembered to turn the oven off.
Someone shuts a door but forgets to open a window. The blue curtains turn out to have actually been periwinkle.
A one-legged rabbit lopes along an unpaved backroad. Someone wins a million dollars and proceeds to tell everyone they know. The most important piece of information known to man is uncovered, written down and filed away for future reference. The answer turns out to have been E, all of the above.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” someone asks. “Yes, of course,” says someone else, far away. In Westchester County Jonathan Miller becomes the first person for whom all possible variations on his name are already taken on all known email services. He tries multiple variants, substitutes the ‘O’ in Jonathan for a zero, the ‘I’ in Miller for a 1, to no avail.
A million pairs of hands are wrung under a million tables. The glass is half-empty, because she says it is. The lawn is mown. The rain continues to be the only noun for which the word ‘torrential’ is an appropriate descriptor. A tree falls in a forest. It has happened before. We wonder whether we will be around to see it when it happens next.
Fergus Sinnott is an emerging writer from Melbourne/Naarm. He studies English and Theatre Studies at The University of Melbourne and spends more time than he'd like to admit trying to rank the films in the Saw franchise.
