Max collects bugs. Crickets, cicadas, stick insects, one golden Weta. Rae helps him to catch moths and butterflies, North Island Lichen, Monarchs, Common Coppers and Long-Tailed Blues.
Max whispers apologies when he pierces their heads and pins them to a cork board. He stands back to admire his collection. “Like it?”
Rae says she doesn’t mind the butterflies, but the others give her the creeps. Together they mount the board on his bedroom wall. It covers a patch where Max drew stick figure families on the paper.
“Why don’t you hunt the slugs and snails that lay waste to my vegetable seedlings?”
Max puts his head on one side like Rae does when he’s being silly. “Slugs and snails are gastropods, they’re not the same thing.”
At ten, Max starts a collection of shells. He scours beaches for cats’ eyes and pipis, spirulas, cockles, and tiger shells. He prizes paua, carbuncled and grey on the outside, secreting slick luminescence inside. He lines kina shells in graduated size on the edge of his book shelf. Sometimes he stacks them, so they look sculptural or like multi-tiered pin cushions.
Rae suggests he paint them yellow or red to look like a Kusama artwork.
“That wouldn’t be right,” Max frowns. He never stacks the kina again.
Later it’s records he sources from flea markets, op shops and garage sales. He examines the discs for warping and scratching and goes for sleeves with giddying bold graphics. He organises them by artist and style. Blues, disco and funk, ska, folk, rock and punk.
“You could go digital,” Rae says. “Then you could listen to music any time without all this mess. You could use earphones too.”
“You don’t get it,” Max crosses his arms and asks Rae, quite politely, to please leave his room.
Then come the girlfriends. Different hair and skin colour, but uniform in the doe eyes they make at Max, their unrequited need. They come and go so fast Rae never remembers their names, so she jokes and calls them all Jane.
At dinner Rae suggests, “How about you try a Jane for a few months rather than weeks, I might get to know them then.”
“It’s me they want to know, not you,” he says not even looking up from his vege lasagna.
Now Max is collecting distance. Kilometres or miles, whatever measure is used. He’s so far away, Rae sees sun during his night, and he’s wrapped in thick clothing when she strips off for a swim at the end of a hot humid day.
Rae’s left collecting memories. She dusts the butterflies, moths and the shells, keeps the records away from the sun. She paints a kina she finds under the bed in tangerine, dotted black on the raised radial bumps. She’s not sure she likes it.
Sometimes she plays Max’s records and dances alone. She’s careful to let the needle down gently, knowing she must avoid any scratching if she wants Max to come home again.
Emily Macdonald has stories published with Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Free Flash Fiction, Roi Fainéant and The Phare amongst others. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award in 2023 and 2024 and was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024 by Raw Lit. Her collection of driving related stories, Wheel Spin and Traction, was published in November 2023.
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