Free Slights by Kaaron Warren Page A

leaving, giving me personal little presents, each with a private story I'd think of every time I looked at them.
      That's what should have happened. This is what did happen; I got changed into my street clothes, walked out. Said, "Bye, Luke," to one of the guys.
      He said, "Yeah, see ya, mate," and I was gone.
      I didn't want to find another job. I hated the process; dressing up, getting your hair just right, wearing pantyhose, all the pretence which makes them love you.
      I could have left, then. Moved overseas, gone to another state. But there were the bones. I was trapped.
      I went home after getting the sack and started to dig in my backyard. I thought, "More jasmine. I'll dig further up the back, plant more jasmine."
      I found the bones on the fourth day of digging. I dug up my backyard with the intention of planting a sea of jasmine but found bones, instead, and relics. Remnants, reminders, mementoes and rubbish. I hadn't planned to dig so deep.
      I was out there early in the day, feeling the sun move across my body, sweating, breathing that dust smell, and I didn't have any music blaring to destroy my concentration. My train of thought. The yard proved a goldmine of memories. I piled all the things by the back door, until it began to look like a child's stall at a make-believe market. I found chicken bones bitten white and some slightly larger; then I found bones too big for us to have tossed there as meat detritus. I found bones in a shoebox with "MUFFY" written on it. Snails had eaten most of the letters. She never did dig her way out of the cave, where Mum told me she'd gone. I left her in the shoe box and buried her again. I had my own special service. I loved that cat. I tried to say the right things but I'd never heard them said before. Somehow I'd missed all the family funerals.
      I kept digging, and I began to pile the bones by the tree in the middle of the yard. It didn't occur to me to stop. For three more days I dug and discovered bones. Two hundred and twenty-three that week.
      There were more the next week.

    There are clumps of old jasmine left still, a legacy from my grandparents, and I remember it as a smell from childhood; I can close my eyes when it is in bloom and still picture the backyard clearly. I can close my eyes at the end of the street, stumble along blindly, and still know where to turn into my place. The rest of the street had carefully groomed roses. I can smell jasmine everywhere, even in the smell factory that's the kitchen.
      While my bedroom was often warmer, being right over the kitchen, it often filled with secondhand cooking smells. Something happens to the smell of food when it travels away from the source; it becomes sickening, rancid. When you're in a fish and chip shop the smell is wonderful, hot fat, vinegar, sea smell of the fish. Three steps away and you wonder why anyone would eat there.
      It made me feel sick, early in the morning, or late at night, when Dad would cook up some fatty feast. I'd have to breathe through my pillow and that didn't work, so I'd poke my head out the window and suck in the jasmine in the backyard, if it was in bloom.
      When I'm on my own in the place I can be surprised by smells. I cook cheese on toast downstairs and by the time I go to bed, hours later, my room smells like curdled milk and a house burnt down. And the jasmine saves me again.
      I was digging down deep to find things, it was dark, but always the jasmine led me back to the surface with a scent trail.
      I found a piece of coal carved into a panther and a scissor blade. I could smell the shit pile when the wind blew right, but it was the smell of home.
      Peter called to ask me to the movies, but the movie was crap so we walked out. We tried to get into another movie, get our money back. The woman behind the desk said, "The show is sold out."
      "What show?" I said.
      The woman had not left her seat. She preferred to keep her seat. Her