Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

Slim said he would gladly share a prison cell with me because I listen and I remember what I listen to. A single tear rolled down my face when he paid me this great roommate honour.

Slim said he would gladly share a prison cell with me because I listen and I remember what I listen to. A single tear rolled down my face when he paid me this great roommate honour.

And I follow him because there was care in his voice just then, his love was in it and I will follow that feeling anywhere.

and the garden hose was the harpoon that he stabbed into the whale’s side and we grabbed onto the hose rubber for dear life as the whale dragged us into the abyss and the hose water became the ocean that would take us down, down, down to Poseidon, god of seas and garden hoses.

‘Don’t worry,’ he whispers. ‘A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.’

‘Don’t you know the biggest rats are always closest to the cheese?’

‘I’d tell you, Tink, but I don’t eat no cheese,’ he says.

Maybe we’d all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more. * * *

‘The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.’

The man in the grey coat steps casually and calmly to the side of the scene, watches Teddy with a puzzled look on his face, something like a panther, I realise just now, making way for a donkey.

Stretching a moment in time to the infinite. Details, Slim.

‘What is for you will not pass you by,’

will remember the end through the beginning.

“Unlike any coming-of-age story I’ve ever read. . . . Trent Dalton paints scenes with words that explode off the page.” —Criminal Element