Creative Writing - Sample Stories

The Guard

Trevor Randall stood on his nature strip and put a blue plastic lunch bag into his son's hand. Anthony smiled back through his shaggy beard, motioning for Trevor to hug him. Trevor held his son and Anthony grunted. Anthony couldn't speak, but Trevor always knew what he was saying.

Don't watch me Dad. I can do it.

Anthony waved his father away and Trevor squinted up and down the road. He saw no traffic, missing the Holden Calais that turned out of a side street. Trevor's back was turned and he was about to open the low iron gate at the front of his house when he heard the screech of tyres and the dull throb of metal on flesh.

The Calais's door flapped open and its driver sat on the edge of his car seat. Anthony was face down on a nature strip further up the road, the blue plastic bag beside him.

                                                                   *

A few weeks later, Trevor pushed his breakfast bowl away and opened one of the envelopes on his kitchen table. It was a card with a picture of flowers in a vase and the words, Thinking of You on the front. Come bak SOON was scrawled in red pencil on the inside. He took it to the lounge room and placed it with the others arranged on the tile mantelpiece, next to the framed black and white photo of his late wife, Pamela. She was sitting on the beach at Ocean Grove, cuddling Anthony when he was a boy.

At the kitchen bench, Trevor spread margarine-not too much-on four pieces of white bread, then cut the crusts from them. Outside, trucks rumbled and horns blasted, long and threatening.

Before his son's accident, Trevor had worked for 12 years as a lollipop man at Windmere Primary School, a few streets from his home. Children said hello to him as he stood in the middle of the road in his white pants and overcoat, a beardless Santa blowing a whistle. He said G'day back to the kids, but when parents greeted him, he only nodded or sometimes offered them a muffled, Hi. When adults spoke, Trevor felt like he was a boy making sandcastles at the beach, watching waves knock them over. He avoided the parents' eyes and smiled at the kids. But not for too long: he had to concentrate on the cars.

He met their eyes first, the front headlights, then their mouths, the cars' grills. He kept those cars back, the whole milling crowd of them, kept the children safe. Then, once it was clear, he let the cars run off to wherever they had to go.

The kettle bubbled and Trevor poured hot water onto a teabag. He gathered lettuce, cheese and tomatoes and put them on the bench with the buttered bread. He couldn't break the habit of making lunch for Anthony at the hospital, even though a nurse had explained that it wasn't necessary.

‘You see those, Mr Randall?'

Trevor had nodded, eying the thin tubes in his son's nose and mouth.

‘They're feeding him. He can't eat any real food because he's in a very deep sleep.'

But Trevor had still made the lunch. He had taken it to the school crossing in his coat pocket then, when he got home from his afternoon shift, he'd stored each one in a cardboard box in the garden shed. The smell was terrible now. He hoped it wouldn't waft across the fence and into his neighbour's yard.

                                                           *

When Anthony had been little, they'd had doctors and experts offering all kinds of advice. ‘If we can just keep working on Anthony's ability to recognise and react to facial expressions, it will really help...' one specialist had told Trevor's wife.

‘Yeah, I know,' Pamela had said. ‘I've been trying. But it's hard, it's just...'

The specialist had glanced at Trevor. Pamela had looked at him too, then back at the specialist.

‘I'm doing me best,' she'd said, and the specialist had nodded.

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