Untitled so far...

I lazily opened one eye and tried to judge what the time was by the amount of light filtering into the tent. I reckoned that it must have been around 6am. Once you have been to enough music festivals, you learn to read these sorts of things.

It was the first morning of the four day long party called Thornfest. I clambered around the mess that was my tent until I eventually found my phone. It read 06:12am. I was close enough. ‘Rise and shine’, I thought to myself, ‘don’t let the fact that you have only had two and a half hours sleep get you down,’ I found my jacket and a pair of sunglasses that didn’t belong to me and stumbled out of the tent. ‘Good morning.’ said my neighbours. I could tell by looking at them that they had not slept. They looked a little worse for wear and were still gulping down beer.

I always like getting up early at festivals to do a bit of people-watching. You can see people that have fallen asleep on stranger’s camping chairs because they could not find their tents and those who are awake, all be they horribly intoxicated, and still trying to find their tents. It’s a little sad to see but in their defence, when you have thousands of tents all stuck up close to each other, it’s a little difficult to get around and all of them are either brown, green or navy-blue.

My drunken neighbours offered me some of the bacon and eggs that they were merrily frying up and I accepted. Who am I to turn down a free breakfast? Halfway through my much-needed meal I heard a rustling in my mate’s tent and greeted her with a big smile. As she stepped out she gave me one look and greeted me with the universal hand signal for ‘please don’t make such a noise, I’m hung-over’.

 ‘Sorry’, I said to her “How did you sleep? Or should I say, did you sleep?’

‘I think I passed out at about 5am.’ She replied while holding a cold bottle of water up against her forehead.

I held out my plate and offered her a bit of bacon but she gave me a sideways glance and shook her head. I feel sorry for people that go over-board on the first night. They don’t seem to bear in mind that it is a four day long festival and they don’t need to squeeze four days into the first ten hours. Another person suddenly popped his head out of my friend’s tent. I had never seen this guy before and knew better than to ask her so I just smiled.

I reached my hand into my handbag and grabbed the bands list. One hundred bands play at this festival and there were only a handful I was interested in watching. I put six drinks into my cooler bag and gave my friend one.

‘Drink up, girl,’ I said, ‘tonight we do it all again.’

Middle America.

It was a typical Friday afternoon when I took my usual seat at my usual booth in the diner I always went to before carting my tired body back to my motel room for another night alone with my pizza and budget beer. The heat was stifling as it always was at this time of year and I was sure that if I wrung out my shirt, I could fill a cup with sweat. It would probably taste better than the shit they serve here.

I always liked to people-watch. I could sit at that table, staring out of the window for hours while the world bustled by and that revolting film formed over the crappy coffee that I ordered but never planned to drink. I had to order it or they would impolitely ask me to leave the premises to make place for the over-weight family with screaming kids who enjoyed gorging their pimpled faces on the piles of discoloured grease that this fine establishment marketed as hamburgers.

The place smelled of old oil and cigarettes and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ was crackling through on the busted AM/FM on the corner of the counter. I stared at the piece of ribbon caught in the air-conditioning unit and found myself thinking, if this gets anymore ‘cliché, Mickey & Malory and going to walk through the door.

I had my head down, staring at the stains on the table when Amanda the waitress came waddling up to my table. I didn’t need to look up to know it was Amanda. After this many years of visiting this place I would know that cheap perfume smell and those varicose veins anywhere. ‘Just coffee.’ I said. She grunted. I was not a big tipper.

A young girl walked in closely followed by a relatively well dressed boy. First date, I thought. It had to be. No one ever got dressed up to crawl around this shit-hole. The cockroaches were cleaner than half the scum here. For some reason I took comfort in this.

I didn’t recall seeing the young couple before. Being a bit of a voyeur on these sorts of matters, I watched. She batted her eyelashes, stroked her auburn hair behind her ear and naughtily licked the ice cream off of her spoon. She had done this before. He was smitten.

Unfortunately, I was not the only one who had been surveying this ‘young-love scene’. There was an elderly man sitting at the counter with that all-too-familiar twinkle in his eye. ‘He likes them young’ I thought to myself.

Before long, the old-timer came up to the love-birds’ table. ‘How’r ya doin’ sweetheart?’ he said to the girl, ‘this boy treatin’ ya well?’ Every hair stood up on the boy’s body as these words slid off the tabbacco-stained tongue of the pervert that had taken place standing behind the girls left shoulder. He is staring down her shirt, I reckoned, now captivated by the scene.

The boy politely told the old snake where he could stick it but the man would have none of that. He stared the young boy straight in the eye as he slowly, with his gnarled left hand, lightly swept the girl’s dress sleeve off of her trembling shoulder and motioned it down onto her pert breast.

‘FUCK YOU, YOU PERVERT!’ screamed our hero as he leapt forward and struck the old man on the jaw.

He fell.

She stood.

‘WE’RE GETTING OUT OF HERE! C’MON!’

She stood.

‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?’ asked the boy now trembling from adrenaline.

Still she stood.

Lifting her dress to expose her pale, silky thigh, she reached higher up her leg and then lowered her hand revealing a small hand gun. She pointed it at the boy and fired.

‘That’ll teach ya to hurt my papa.’

Good for You...

Why couldn’t she just let me have my one slice of the pie? It was a pretty big pie, there were a good number of slices but she had to stick her grimy fingers in every last one.

Bitch!

I felt my blood boil as I stood beneath the partial shade of the tree. It was early spring and only a few of the leaves had crept slowly out of hiding to greet the sun and cast a dappled shadow on the patch of ground on which I stood. I hate the sun. It is only the beginning of the season but already far too hot for my liking. I thrive in a cooler climate. This sticky heat and the insects that came with it were never for me. I would rather be inside with a fresh air-conditioned breeze cooling my clammy skin but I had to hear this.

How could she?

I had recently gotten my claws into doing work for a design firm, which I had just as recently realised was a dream of mine and I was bloody good at it. I was not getting paid yet but this was a stepping stone and one that I was very excited about. I had broken the good news to the very same people that I now saw sitting at the table in front of me but all I got was, ‘Ah, nice. Can you get me a drink please?' but not her, she had  gotten those pie-covered paws into the very same free-lance work that I had and now they were wrapped around every word she said to them about her recent ‘stroke of good fortune’.

Get you a drink? Sure, I’ll get you a drink. . .

No one seemed to even notice I was standing under the tree looking on like some off-duty voyeur. I stubbed out my cigarette against the bark and let the butt fall to the floor. Slapping my smile back on, I walked to the table. They were all getting pretty drunk by now. Perfect. I felt a devilish smile creep across my lips but stopped it dead as I opened my mouth to speak.

‘I hear our lady-friend here is going to be joining me.’ I said, with faux excitement. ‘How about we celebrate? I have a surprise for you.’ I offered them jelly shots that, being the good party/drinking buddy that I was known to be, I had prepared a little while earlier while they were engrossed in this woman’s bragging. No table of drunken young adults is going to turn down free celebratory jelly shots. ‘Who wants some?’ Every hand went up.

So predictable.

I fetched the shots and walked back outside to great applause. Too late for that I thought. As I neared the table I assured myself that they were going to down them so fast that there was no way they would find the little surprise I had hidden in the luminous green jelly.

My little friends.

My little shards of glass.

Black Coffee.

“What the hell is that smell?” I thought to myself as I paged listlessly through a brain-numbing ‘glossy’ that I bought from the news stand along with a cup of brown liquid. Coffee they called it.

It was hot. It was liquid. It was not coffee.

I could never understand why people would spend their hard-earned money to read about some starlet’s latest failed relationship and who got snapped getting out of a limo wearing a mini skirt and no underwear. Does Gucci not make g-strings?

Reading, or at least pretending to read, this drivel was only slightly more entertaining than trying to decipher the graffiti that adorns every flat surface of this train station. Once a beacon of togetherness and prosperity, the Gautrain had gone the way I always knew it would, to shit. 20^th century hieroglyphs are not my thing.

What is that smell?

 I snapped out of my thoughts just in time to look up and make a split second’s worth of eye contact with a young girl that sat down between me and the smelly homeless guy to my right. I was pleased she came along. She formed a much-needed barrier between me and homeless guy. He smelled like a chemical spill over manure and he kept mumbling something about ‘tuppety taleev’ (or at least that’s what it sounded like between the coughing up of phlegm). Whatever he had in that Styrofoam cup was obviously not doing him any good. ‘Try the coffee’, I thought.

Tuppety taleev.

It smells like. . .

She was a sad-looking girl from what I could tell in that split second that I had to examine her face. Her cheeks were blackened, whether from wept-off mascara or bruises, I could not tell. A sweet smile on a dirty face framed by blonde hair. She smelled of broken promises.

I turned my attention back to my magazine. Ah, Madonna has another ‘foreign investment’. This one is from Tanzania and its name has not yet been released to the media. Fascinating stuff.

Tuppety taleev.

It smells like oil.

The homeless guy stood up and moved slowly in front of the ‘broken blonde’ next to me. I was about to chase him off when he calmly poured the contents of his Styrofoam cup over her head and flicked a match.

It was oil.

The more she screamed and tried to slap out the flames, the more her flesh burned.

The homeless guy stood there calmly, flames dancing in his eyes and said...

Too pretty to live. . .