Digger

There's a tiny green digger at the construction site out the back, turning pocket circles in the yeti-footprints of the yellow digger. I could park it in a corner of my garden and play Scoop the Gravel. The crew is building walls now, handsful of square-edged baked clay one on top of the other while the cement mixer turns white-noisily.

I don't remember my thoughts. I move things around the house and try to imagine where another bookcase could go. I go to the stationer's and buy little boxes to keep the medicine-cabinet things in, because I don't have a medicine cabinet. Pay a bill. I talk to Pluvialis, who is spinning lines of silk between a thousand things which she sometimes thinks are ferrets. I clip bookmarks together and eat leftovers and make piles of books I'll have to move later and make notes on some things, colonial collections, Australian folk stories, Man from Snowy River, cockatoos, invisible possums, ghost gum, bunyips, Tiddalik the frog who wouldn't laugh.

I find my hairbrush and the thermometer in another bag of paper. I don't have a fever. I brush my hair. I pick up things and put them down. Sometimes somewhere else. Sometimes not, and I put them down again. It is chaos, but the little house doesn't mind. It knows that sometimes it is a soft-shelled crab.