Contemporaneous: Chapters’ 14 – 15
I sit back to read the opening of Melody’s manuscript: 14. Tianna was named after Tiananmen Square, her Chinese mother romanticising the homeland before she fled to Australia – or West Australia, to be precise, where she met Dylan Copley, a mail sorter sorting mail in the city’s central post office, although at different stages of his life he had aspired to play lead guitar in a band, become an actor, to be a stand-up comedian, before life’s little cruelties had sorted his aspirations into the impossibles basket. Of course, Tianna knew none of this as she picked at her lumpy mashed potatoes during family dinner. Mother insisted…
Contemporaneous: Chapters’ 2 & 3
2. “How was your day?” she asks me. I hate this question, although not because she asks it (although she knows how I dislike the question), but because my day was like the day before it, and the one before that, and the one before that. You get the idea. If anything different were to happen, anything spectacular, anything worthy of mentioning, then I’d mention it, but working as an editor in a small publisher doesn’t exactly offer the excitement of, say, working in the bomb squad. “The usual,” I tell her. I know she hates that answer because she’s a sharer. She’ll detail everything that happens throughout her day…