Gill was a door-to-door salesman. What Gill sold, essentially, were lawnmowers. However, being reduced to travelling up and down deserted streets, attempting to sell backyard apparatus was not the thing above all else that made him unique. What cemented Gill's complete and utter uniqueness was this: Gill was the actual Last Mohican.
He had lived in the foothills of motherland America as a child, both his parents becoming increasingly sickly as time progressed. So it had seemed rather blatantly obvious, to Gill anyway, that when his parents finally and vocally passed away into the expansive hunting ground in the sky, he should traverse his way to that most recognized of enormous fruit – the Big Apple – and "make a man of himself".
Unfortunately, NYC had been named far too accurately: the Big Apple indeed; one large conglomerate mass fouled with bruises and inner worms. Gill had lived for the tribal tradition of encamping beneath the stars. However, after getting restrained and arrested for erecting a tepee in the centre of the freeway, he'd discovered homogenized America was somewhat different to the burgeoning hills of canopied forest that he'd known a long time ago, buried beneath an embittered and palpitating past. In New York City, you were prohibited from catching live fowl and decapitating them with a flattened stone. And apparently it was considered taboo to do such a thing inside an establishment known as a "hotel". Ludicrous.
The more Gill observed of "civilized" cherry-star-spangled America, with its skyscrapers, and immense cloudscape of miasmic fog, the more Gill became irredeemably homesick. He began to miss the feel of the soil beneath his bare feet, the open spaces in which to run liberated. Gill was nothing other and none else than one more brick held in the wall of American utopianism with the mortar of the law.
So Gill had conceptualised the idea to rebel against that symbol of American consumerist comfort, that item of the domestic household which restricted the average citizen from frolicking in the open air, beneath a hotblooded lunar moonscape, that through which his ancestral inklings attested to was healthy. In brief, Gill had a fetish for destroying furniture.
He'd personally deduced that sitting in the mould of a couch, viewing some horribly monotonous television emission, had progressively brought about the emergence of apathy. And apathy meant lack of freedom. Thus, when Gill knocked upon people's doors to sell them a lawnmower, he would hastily walk into the premises uninvited, and commence breaking the proprietor's futon.
This home that Gill was now standing before, quaint and ideal in disposition, with its nauseatingly cute shrubbery and various pottery garden gnomes, was different. It was different because the front door was ominously open. Gill rang the door bell repeatedly and made a hesitant coughing sound into his first. No-one materialized so Gill preceded to enter the house cautiously. The homeowner was responsible for owning a sofa, Gill saw, and this sent a volatile eruption of aggression into his brain.
Gill circled the lounge menacingly and then proceeded to kick it. The more Gill pondered with predation upon the raping of the Americas that he once knew, the more Gill began to exact revenge upon the sofa. By the time he had concluded, the piece of abused furniture was lying in fragments all over the living-room carpet. Gill crowed in triumph.
It was, however, about this time that a pair of armed criminals decidedly made their way from the upper level of the house, with an ineffably large painting held between them. The two thieves were about identical in size and disposition: rodent-faced and husky, in voluminous greatcoats. One of them was holding a pistol directly towards Gill.
Unnervingly, Gill grinned weakly. 'Er, would either of you be interested in purchasing a lawnmower?'
The pair of criminals made a series of indistinguishable muttering sounds and then, in a rare depiction of truly organized crime, rushed at Gill, flames emblazoned in their eyes. Unfortunately, it was about this time in the rather lucid sequence of events that one of the miscreants accidentally shot his friend, and consequently became impaled upon a piece of lounge shrapnel. Both criminals fell to the ground in pools of streaming bodily fluid.
A few days later, Gill received a modest monetary reward for recovering an expensive antiquated painting and combating a pair of irascible thieves. No-one auspiciously deduced what became of the extremely nice sofa, but all in all, Gill was a marked and crusading man, a grateful hero.
As he made his way out of the station, and peered towards the grey horizon, encircled by the pinnacles of buildings, Gill, the Last Mohican, saw a world of apathy and ugliness. Nonetheless, it seemed, it was a pretty place upon closer inspection. For the first time since his arrival in New York, Gill found the city a place of liberation.
He made his way to an adjacent house, beaming wide, lawnmower leaflets clenched firmly in his hand.
About the author:
Kirk Marshall has contributed to Laudes Deo magazine, QUT's underground Riff-Raff 'zine, Amazon.co.uk's reviews, JJJ Radio Station's online music reviews, The Zoetrope Virtual Studio, 2002 St. Laurences College Annual publication, The University of Melbourne's Politics and Power 2002 Essay-Writing Forum, Deakin University's DeScribe Writing Group open-mic. performances, Brisbane band Denvar's Work.Sleep.Die. EP promotion feature article, Brisbane band The Club's prospective Out With the Truth EP album-leaf content, Utopia, Urban Verve, Frankie, Semper Floreat, Roustabout, Edit Red, Undergrowth, Word Riot (February, 2008), The Flasher, The Slow Review, Other Terrain: an electronic journal of the textual, The Universe of Logical Unsanity quarterly, the short-story anthologies before the young get eaten and The Death Mook (published by Vignette Press), The Wilderness Society's 2006 SEQ Wild Rivers legislation protest spoken-word performances, and he was the first-prize recipient of the Brisbane Short-Story Competition for youth under the age of 17 in 2000. Presently, he lives, studies, writes and scales trees in Melbourne, Australia.
© 2009 Word Riot
