None of Us Knew What to Say
“They became opinionated and we grew bored.”
—coffee cups, glasses, plates, kitchen things mostly, smashed or flung or thrown. When someone had wanted to say something but could not find the words, or perhaps wanted them to be louder. Afterwards the glass was always swept, the holes plastered over.
here, here, and here.
—they stopped having children long ago. When we remember what it was like when the young people were here, we can hardly believe that we miss them. Truly, it was intolerable. They rolled their eyes at us; they shook their heads; they thought they knew better. My god, those egos! The way they’d walk around with shirts untucked and underwear hanging out, the girls with their breasts spilling over. All that public kissing and licking, their “try before you buy” attitude to intimate relations. It made us squirm. Not to mention all that gender nonsense. All of a sudden boys couldn’t be men and girls refused to be ladies. The way they’d go about shouting and swearing. Just lousy, provocative behavior. Bad hair and bad attitudes to boot. Don’t get us started. They looked ridiculous, like something left over from the apocalypse. They looked like little cockroaches crawling out after a bomb. Incompetent, sullen, and mumbling—that’s how we remember them.

Lauren Aimee Curtis lives in Sydney. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlas Review, The Lifted Brow, Two Serious Ladies, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Book Review, and elsewhere. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize.
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