Free Bite The Wax Tadpole by Phil Sanders

designer hair cut.
    “Oh, my God... yuk!”
    The woman-being-addressed-as-Roxy put a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh and Crispin, the man- whose-name-appeared-on-the-credits-under-the-title-of-Director, turned a darker shade of vermillion as his blood pressure soared up into that zone beyond which cardiologists defer to the Almighty. The First AD shouted “Cut!” and the crew, some laughing, some as pissed-off as Cris as they saw the morning’s shooting slipping away, ran towards the two actors. A Wardrobe Assistant started rubbing with a tissue at the impressive amount of lime dripping off Karl’s head, Karl being the real name of the-actor-playing-Damian. “They say it’s supposed to be lucky”, said the Wardrobe Assistant as she wiped away.
    “Getting shat on by a bird is lucky? How do you work that one out? What if an elephant crapped on you? How lucky would that be?”
    “Say cheese.”
    Karl looked up. Rosanna, the-actor-playing-Roxy, was pointing her mobile phone at him.
    “You just dare, you bitch!”
    “Priceless”, purred Rosanna as she dared and turned away.
    “Put that on the internet and you are seriously dead”, Karl yelled after her.
    “Seriously dead”, repeated the Wardrobe Assistant who had an ear for the finer points of the English language. “The very worst sort of dead in my opinion.”
    Cris had, by now, returned to a shade of red on the softer end of the Dulux colour chart.
    “Please, please, children, can we stop fighting? For christ’s sake if not mine?”
    And so the clock was rewound, the actors and crew moving back through time to when a handsome young man with designer stubble etc sat in his car as a beautiful blonde and so on approached. He got out of the car again, she feigned surprise again, he declared his love again. No bird plop interrupted the flow as he took her hand with one of his hands and with the other hand, the one that wasn’t holding her hand, took a small jewel box out of his pocket. As he took the ring out from where it lay on its velvet cushion, the lessons Rosanna had so assiduously learned at the Mary Mackillop School of Performing Arts in Wagga Wagga came archly into play. Her eyes grew wide, her lips trembled and her nostrils flared. It was the nostril flaring that proved an emotion too far. For, as he held the golden ring with its sparkling diamond setting softly between thumb and forefinger she sneezed like a Lascar stoker who’d just inhaled a lump of coal.
    “Jesus!”, cried Karl as the spray hit him. The ring dropped from his fingers and hit the ground with a heart-stopping tinkle. Many of the watchers agreed later that it seemed to pause as if checking its options before deciding to bounce and tumble towards the drain that opportunistically lay just a few yards away.
    “It’s a fake, isn’t it?”, said the hopeful Cris to his Assistant. “Paste. Ten dollars max.”
    “It’s on loan from Angus and Coote. They get a mention at the end of the show. You know, jewellery supplied by Angus and Coote. Shall I call someone?”
    A little while later as, just out of sight, the local council’s crack squad of drainage technicians operated as silently as an SAS squad infiltrating a terrorist cell of Trappist monks, they reached the same point again with Damian successfully placing the Wardrobe Assistant’s engagement ring on Rosanna’s finger. She looked at the stone with the astonishment usually reserved for seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time and opened her lips to speak. Karl stopped her with a gentle finger to her lips. “Don’t say a word, Roxy. I want this moment to last.” And with his hand softly caressing her cheek, the right upper to be precise, he leaned in to kiss her. A soft feathering of the lips at first before his tongue began to probe gently like a honey-bee searching for nectar in a beautiful but delicate rose...
    “Aagh, euh, yuk!”, Karl reeled away from her as though he’d touched an exposed wire on a faulty