Four short prose pieces
It is raining fish
The wild melons growing in summer over the black soil plains of north west New South Wales are called paddy melons. I once told some of my Sydney friends how it rains fish out here in the violent late summer, late afternoon thunderstorms. They refused to believe me. No bullshit, fair dinkum, it rains little fish, about a quarter to half an inch long, sucked up from waterholes which have not dried out in the hot sun with strong updrafts to be dropped again into puddles and waterholes, squiggling and drying out in the small and medium sized puddles to become fish emulsion fertilizer and surviving in the larger lagoons to again be sucked up and fall with the rain down onto the plains. Bobby cod, they are called, and that is how fish spread across the plains. A cowboy has left a note for me to meet him in the beat across the road from where I live. We leave our felt tip truths on toilet walls. That is how we meet. There is nothing as sensual, as erotic as making love to a cowboy in the swishing black mud as the late afternoon summer storms belt heavy fish rain onto our wet bodies.
