Mid-afternoon at the market library was congenial among all the earnest Chinese, never mind the fin./marketing focus. En route Huss had detained outside the pokies.

Shortly before Faisal had revealed the Deaf’s mother had died recently, been killed in fact after what F. assumed had been a drug deal gone wrong. The punch Faisal had right; not the particulars. Huss was the man for those.

There he was thirty metres away leaning against a pole, can in hand. No, it was no drug deal that did for the Deaf’s Ma; rather an encounter with a man walking a dog that blew up somehow.

She was a real…(bitch), Huss hesitated to voice properly.

A nasty exchange of some kind. Smash. Bang. And dead shortly afterward.

The source of the story could not be revealed. H. could not finger the person.

The death had had a positive effect on the son, Huss quickly and surprisingly went on.

Opened his heart, he added.

Words that were confidently spoken and followed by a two-handed gesture on Huss’s chest, like a clam being prised open.

…See there!

Just then the tall, lanky lad was coming along on the path.

See how he’s walking?

Often in conversation with Huss you were riding a bronco.

Those long, exaggerated strides had been seen before in the young fellow, but that might have been since the death. Three or four months before, after a brief shrieking match, the lad had punched and kicked his mother, sending her to the ground just opposite Faisal’s place. Naturally the event had created a great stir among the Africans in particular.

She’s in heaven now…God had wanted her, Huss continued, looking skyward after the earlier sharpness.

Faisal always delivered any local news promptly. Lunch had been taken at his place every day that week, the fuul with F.’s marvelous homemade falafel. It was possible this death had only just gotten out; or else it was the young lad’s presence outside the shop when the bill was settled that prompted the information.

The tail end here with Huss was a muddle about idioms. One Huss had never been able to understand; the other we discussed briefly. Saved by the bell.

The gloss Huss was given on it left the man unsatisfied. Huss had heard the expression came from a period of strife in France. Not from a time of war, something else it had been where they were killing their own people.

When the Revolution was suggested that chimed for Huss. Some wry smiling & chin-wagging. Huss knew the way of the world.

After the burials following the French killings, some of the supposed corpses were found to be alive, Huss reported, as if from the field. Eventually a sentry with a bell was stationed beside the grave-diggers and the occasional half-dead saved.

African Village, Melbourne

 

Pavle Radonić is an Australian writer of Montenegrin origin who has spent ten years living in SE Asia. Previous work has recently appeared in QU Literary Magazine, Airplane Reading, Superpresent Magazine, New World Writing & The Wrath-Bearing Tree.