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MILK AND FILTERS

Luke Lawson

By Luke LawsonPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 5 min read
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IT WAS ANOTHER night at the typer. Writing nothing of value, or even worth if you can separate the two ideas in your head. All the judges wanted to be artists, the coffee makers wanted to be scientists, the children wanted to be whatever made the most money, and the people who were so severely mentally impaired about the whole thing wrote about it and they just wanted to be dead, or at best asleep.

I couldn’t stand it. I needed some cigarette filters for this cheap as shit tobacco I’d been smoking for seven or eight years. Under the counter stuff. When you’d buy it the cashier would just say “cash only” and then put the money straight in his pocket and smile. It was a good deal though, something to smoke “organic tobacco” they called it, and it was $25 when a pouch half the size from the service station was $80.

Anyways, I was walking to get these filters and the service station light gleamed under the clouds in the night sky. Nobody was out except for one person: old Temp. He’d been living in this suburb for 30 years or so, alone, in a store that sold nick knacks, and music related things. He’d split beer and cigarette ash on almost all of the things he had in there but somehow he sold the odd vinyl record to someone or another who thought it was valuable. The thing was, if they wanted to listen to any song, it could be done on your phone for a penny these days. Owning and maintaining a record player and a collection of records was a luxury that made no sense; but such is the theory of possession. What I mean is, you think you possess things but ultimately they possess you; and they’re indifferent about it whereas you aren’t.

I hadn’t seen old Temp for a while. We’d have a falling out every couple of years or so and then somehow I’d end up back at his shop taking to him about shit until I couldn’t bear it anymore and didn’t want to see him for a while. I mean, when you get lonely enough though you’ll take a conversation from anybody.

On this particular occasion Temp was screaming at the night sky about New Zealand. He stopped for a moment, yelled “HEY I KNOW THAT GUY!” and then followed it up with, “yeah you wanna fucking …NEW ZEALAND!!!” or some such. I couldn’t get the real jist of what he was trying to make out. I’ve never been to New Zealand personally.

I stopped at the service station window. After hours they locked the place up good. I pressed the buzzer, then pressed it again and a man walked out doing up his fly with the hair on the back of his head sticking up.

“Yeh?”

“May I please have some menthol cigarette filters and one of those two litre bottles of milk please?” (You see, it was $2.50 for one litre of milk here, but $2.80 for two litres so, I dunno; you do the math – more is better right). And since I was out of work and down on life that milk would make me enough coffee to keep me going for a while. Water, milk, and a teaspoon of freeze dried coffee grains – it never made me feel good but I kept drinking it anyway.

The man put the milk in a big schute with the filters and put an EFTPOS machine up to the window. I slid a few coins under the rectangle next to the shute instead and he wiped them off the bench and threw them into the cash register. He pushed on the other side of the shute and the milk was sitting there on my side of the window with the filters sitting underneath; plastic covered in condensation.

“Just like in prison I suppose” I said to the guy but he just walked off and closed the door.

On the way back Temp was still being vocal about whatever it was. I don’t know if he was concerned, mad, or just simply crazy from isolation – I thought the latter of the options. People in this town rent out these mixed use spaces. They’re shops at the front and they have kitchens and all the things you need to live in them out the back. The constant trouble is whoever ends up taking one tends to go mad after a while. Temp had been in his for 30 years or so; sitting alone cleaning vinyl records, then making them dirty again, drinking from morning to night, and chainsmoking. He screamed out "I was the first damn person to move to this derelict suburb!"

I looked up at the night sky. No moon, just clouds and wind. I heard the sound of synthetic material shuffling around in a bush. It was Jimmy. He was searching for cigarette ends so he could squeeze the last little bit of tobacco out, add it all up and then smoke cigarettes at home for a while. I knew he had a home, and a girlfriend of twenty-five years. He was very proud of that. He told me on other occasions that he’d sit at home at night and then get up and say to his girl “I’m going lookin’ for dumpers’ and then he’d go walking around the streets picking up whatever he could find. The next day you’d see him sitting out the front of the local supermarket with his hat on the pavement; a few coins were always in there.

I don’t know what you’d call Jimmy’s situation. From one perspective he had it all – somewhere to live, no job, a partner; but from the point of view of those who walked past him and worked jobs all day, to pay for continuing to work those jobs, Jimmy was the crazy man in the synthetic jacket searching for filth in the bushes.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Luke Lawson

I am Luke Lawson

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