Arms clasped behind bent backs, the retirees emerged as the sun came out from behind a cloud to slowly pad about their front yards, pulling out weeds and eyeballing skateboarding teenagers.
The oft-revolving glass pool gate held the smudged fingerprint ledger of excited children and adults in perpetual tow.
Vic never picked fights with his wife in the morning, especially after she’d applied and not yet blended her bronzer and blush, which looked identical to war paint.
The alarm sounded somewhere outside of Jeremy’s subconscious. It was looking like one of those sleeps where he would not only have to remember what day of the week it was, but also who he was.
A bloke, sat on the back steps of his house, flicks ash from his cigarette in the direction of the passing train beyond his back fence. He smiles vaingloriously, safe in the knowledge that no-one on the train would know why he was smiling so.
There was a hierarchy of who to avoid first in a ressies game – first and foremost of which were fat, old blokes frothing at the mouth with white line fever.
After losing the cliff diving championship by a single point, when she was finally alone, Karina’s tears came; beneath the diving platforms of two sets of dead-straight fake eyelashes, the pools glistened and overflowed.
Marilyn Mammary didn’t decide to become a pornstar because of her name, but it sure helped her make her mark.
Though Kelsey arranged almost everything by the colour of the rainbow, like books, records, clothes and desktop icons, she was a raging homophobe, and disliked the LGBT+ community’s supposed theft of the colour scheme.
Stuck as she was on a desert island, under a beating sun, Sasha slipped into a daydream of a raft of desserts on her island bench at home.
Brady was broke but well-toned; he chased his gambling loses about as hard as he chased losses to his body fat.
Gustavo wasn’t keen on the ocean. Not because of the risk of drowning, sharks or hypothermia, but all thanks to a very specific vein of thalassophobia of the unbridled fear of a nuclear submarine eerily sliding through the gloom beneath him.
The security guard was really just a scarecrow in a high-vis vest. Except that a scarecrow couldn’t scroll TikTok the way he did.
Being the hardcore Italian he was, Romeo always brought with him extra-virgin olive oil whenever he went for a massage. The one and only time they’d used coconut oil, he’d broken out in hives and had to go to hospital.
And just like that, after three and a half years, Dakota’s girlfriend rattled off a series of farts on the couch as they were winding down watching CSI. There was not a peep from Delilah; she didn’t even take her eyes away from the TV. Three and a half years of downstairs silence came to an unremarkable end.
With her trusty clipboard and high-vis vest, Cathy was the master of the backstage, off-limits or staff-only entry.