My Life and Other Exploding Chickens

by Tristan Bancks

  I am sweating and panting, but I am alive.

  ‘You look like you’ve been bitten. What happened?’

  ‘Zombie socks,’ I say, enjoying the coolness of the tiles on my skin.

  ‘You’re a strange child, Tom. Let me have a look at you. And where did you get all those socks?’

  There are about 30 socks on the floor – fluffy, hairy, sad little things. But they are lifeless now. All the fight’s gone out of them. They no longer squeak or squirm.

  I push myself up. Bando continues to bark into the mouth of the dryer. I poke the socks on the floor with my toe but they don’t react.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Back from the dead.’ I’m not sure if I’m talking about the socks or me.

  ‘I hope you’re not coming down with something. Go and have a lie down.’

  ‘Can I have my pocket money now?’ I ask.

  ‘Well …’ She picks up the pile of socks and tries to think of a reason why not.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say before she has a chance to respond.

  I give the socks one last look. They lie limply in her arms. I must be going mad. I head out of the laundry and down the hall. Peace and pocket money have been restored. Mum will receive the ugly crystal horse in the morning and I will, once again, be her favourite child.

  I stumble into my room, skin still stinging all over. I flop down on the bed, wishing that I was just a normal, dumb kid without an imagination who didn’t have things like this happen to him all the time. Zombie socks, I think. Mum is right. I am a strange child.

  I hear a scream.

  ‘Tom!’ It’s the voice Mum uses when she sees a spider and needs me to catch it. ‘TOM!’

  I jump off my bed and run into the hall to see the most hideous thing I have ever seen – my mother’s body riddled with zombie socks.

  ‘TOOOOMMMMM!’ she howls.

  Scab Collection

  I have the most epic collection of scabs, but I’ve never shown it to anyone. I’ve always been worried that someone will break into my house, steal the collection and sell the individual scabs on eBay for thousands. But I found an old safe when we went to the dump last weekend. That’s where I keep my collection now, so there’s no chance of anyone stealing it. Unless they take the whole safe. It’s not very heavy. And the door doesn’t close because the lock is busted.

  But anyway … I welcome you to peruse my priceless collection of crispy, wafer-thin blood-biscuits. They each have a name. Naming scabs is one of the most fun things in the world. It’s like cloud-gazing, trying to work out what each scab looks like and then – BOOM! – it hits you: ‘Taylor Swift’, or ‘double-decker bus’, or ‘killer magpie driving its beak through my skull’.

  So, here it is … the world premiere of Tom Weekly’s Epic Scab Collection. Enjoy!

  * * *

  Continued from Click here

  * * *

  Revenge of the Nits

  (Part Two): Lice-ensed to Kill

  I fall headfirst from the window ledge onto the concrete path beside Lewis’s house. The dog-sized nit falls from the window behind me. It slams down on my chest and stretches its bloodsucking feeding tubes towards my scalp. Its eyes swirl, hungering for human blood.

  I look up the path to check that Lewis isn’t watching, then I punch the giant insect hard in the nose and throw him to the ground. I grab the camera, get a quick shot of the louse doing a backspin on the path, then scramble to my feet and bolt towards the front of the house. Lewis and Jack have stopped dead in the front yard. Jack squeals like he has seen something truly terrifying.

  He has.

  A plague of hungry, salivating lice swarms from the front door of the shabby weatherboard house and into the overgrown yard. I film it all. The long grass is alive with scurrying knee-high nits; it’s like they’re running through a lush green head of hair. When they see us, or smell our blood, they charge.

  ‘RUUUUUN!’ Jack screams.

  Lewis and I are right on his heels.

  ‘Fire station!’ Lewis shouts. ‘On the corner.’

  I can see the fire station two blocks away, next to the police station. About 300 metres from here. If you want to improve your short-distance running times, I highly recommend inviting a horde of killer head lice to your next sports carnival.

  We slow at Tennyson Street for cars to go by and Jack calls, ‘Cop!’ He points straight ahead and, sure enough, driving towards us on the other side of the street is a police car.

  ‘HEY!’ I shout, flinging my arms in the air to wave the car down. ‘STOP!’

  When the traffic clears, we dash across the street, the nits almost upon us. The police car pulls up at the Give Way sign. The officer at the wheel is eating a sandwich. He drops it and his mouth forms a capital ‘O’ when he sees the mutant nit army bearing down on him. I rip open the back door and the three of us pile in. Jack slams it shut.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the officer demands. His mayonnaise-spattered moustache wiggles when he speaks. I recognise him right away – Sergeant John Hategarden, the officer who arrested Mr Skroop for chopping up my football and eating the prize scab from my collection.

  ‘Nits!’ I tell him, breathing hard from the run. ‘They’ve mutated.’

  ‘I just saw one eat a cat,’ Jack says.

  ‘As if!’ I say, just as a nit the size of a small horse appears at the window. It fogs the glass with its breath. It has a furry grey-and-white tail hanging from its mouth.

  ‘I think that’s Cookie, the cat from next door,’ Lewis says.

  Cookie’s tail looks bristly and lashes from side to side like my cat Gordon’s when he’s ready to pounce. The nit makes a loud sucking noise and the cat’s tail disappears like a string of spaghetti.

  ‘Poor Cookie,’ Lewis says.

  ‘Anyone know how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on a nit?’ I ask.

  Then the nit convulses, its mouth jerks open, and it coughs the cat back up, like a giant furball, onto the road. Cookie screams across the street and up a palm tree, clinging to the trunk with its claws, shaking nit spit off its coat.

  We cheer and the monstrous nit slams its hairy claw against the glass. Another freakishly large louse leaps onto the front of the car, denting the bonnet. The insect stares in at us with its cold, grey eyes. It pulls back its alien head and smashes it against the windscreen, sending a spider web of cracks shooting out from the centre of the glass. Jack, Lewis and I scream and hug one another in the back seat.

  Hategarden panics and boots the accelerator, gunning the car across the intersection, right through the head lice swarm. The nits, quick on their feet, scatter to the side of the road. We speed back up the street. The mutant nit on the bonnet has its extraterrestrial face pressed hard against the glass. It grips the wipers in its pincers and glares at me in a way that says, You will pay dearly for this, my little friend.

  Hategarden slams the brakes at about 70 kilometres an hour, sending the mini-beast flying backwards off the front window and onto the road. It rips off the windscreen wipers, hits the tar hard, bounces, skids and bowls the nit army over like tenpins.

  Jack cheers and claps. ‘That was awesome.’

  Lewis punches him in the arm. ‘I think he just knocked over Todd and Millie – my two favourite nits.’

  Jack and I look at one another, suddenly more scared of Lewis than we are of the head lice.

  ‘Do you think they’re okay?’ Lewis asks.

  ‘Whaddya mean?’ Jack fires back. ‘He would’ve sucked out our brains.’

  ‘Nits don’t eat brains,’ Lewis says.

  The other lice scurry to the injured nits’ rescue. They assess the damage … then they eat Todd and Millie right there on the road in front of us.

  ‘But it looks like they eat each other,’ Jack says.

  Lewis covers his eyes. I capture it all on camera. This will either win me the ‘Most Disgusting Documentary Film’ award at the Oscars, or it will get our movie banned i
n several countries. Maybe both.

  Hategarden starts to drive off but the lice get vicious now. They swarm the car, attacking with their razor-sharp claws. Hategarden revs the engine but the car can’t move under the weight of the lice. There are so many nits on top of us that it’s almost dark in here.

  ‘I don’t wanna diiiie!’ Jack cries.

  ‘We’re not gonna die!’ I yell at him over the noise of the nits jumping on the roof and beating at the windows. There is a loud POP! as the rear tyres explode, then the front ones go. I can smell fuel, too.

  ‘Okay, maybe we are going to die,’ I tell him, ‘but not without a fight.’

  ‘Mayday, mayday!’ Hategarden barks into his walkie-talkie. ‘Sergeant John Hategarden and three children trapped in a police vehicle on Keats Street. Immediate assistance required. Repeat, immediate –’ His words are swallowed by the smashing and pounding of lice trying to rip the vehicle open like a tin of beans.

  ‘They leave me no choice,’ Hategarden shouts. He pulls his firearm from its holster.

  ‘NO!’ Lewis tells him. ‘They’re my pets!’

  ‘I’m sorry, son,’ Hategarden says. ‘I’m an animal lover, too, but these aren’t animals. They’re monsters. Block your ears!’

  We do, and Hategarden fires three shots into the roof of the car – BANG! BANG! BANG!

  Red and green lice blood oozes through the holes. The lice leap away, daylight returns, and the terrible scratching sound of nit claws on metal falls silent. They leave a three- or four-metre ring around the car, watching us like a gaggle of angry, nervous lobsters circling a boiling pot of water.

  ‘GO!’ Jack pleads.

  But within seconds the nits close in on us again, slamming us from both sides, buckling the car doors with their rock-hard heads. This is what life on Lewis’s scalp must be like – savage and treacherous.

  Hategarden fires three more shots into the roof and the lice flee again. He revs the engine hard.

  ‘Ha! See ya, suckers!’ Jack shouts. Then the motor chokes and dies. ‘What happened?’

  Hategarden tries to start the car again. I am very aware of the sharp stench of petrol.

  ‘It won’t …’ Hategarden spits. ‘They’ve drained the tank.’ He slams his foot up and down on the accelerator, turns the wheel left and right, and twists the key – but the car will not start. He bangs the wheel as though that might make the car move.

  ‘How many more bullets do you have?’ Jack asks.

  Hategarden glances over his shoulder at us with a look that says, None. I take the camera away from my eye, realising what this means.

  The circling nits look ready to attack again.

  ‘I want my mummyyyy,’ Jack says.

  ‘QUIET!’ Hategarden screams.

  ‘Let me speak to them,’ Lewis says, nervously kneading his hands together. ‘I can do this.’

  ‘Lewis.’

  ‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  I look out at the slavering jaws on the circle of six-legged assassins.

  ‘I’m not sure they want to talk,’ I say.

  Lewis starts to rock back and forth gently in his seat.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

  He breathes deeply, in a husky whine. Jack and I look at each other, worried.

  ‘Lewis?’ I say.

  He makes the loudest, scratchiest, screechiest noise I have ever heard. A sound that could cut glass. I block my ears and beg him to stop, but he won’t.

  ‘What are you doing, kid?’ Hategarden demands, blocking his ears too, but Lewis keeps rocking and screeching, his eyes wide open, trance-like. I’m waiting for his head to start spinning.

  ‘I think he’s scared,’ I tell Hategarden. ‘He’s losing it.’

  In the background, one of the lice starts to make the same noise that Lewis is making, but maybe higher pitched, like a cicada. Seconds later another nit starts up, and another, until there is a chirruping nit chorus all around us.

  Lewis reaches across me and opens the door.

  ‘Don’t,’ I tell him, but he won’t listen.

  The door scrapes, metal on metal, as he shoves it open.

  ‘STOP!’ I yell, grabbing him by the arm, but he tears himself free and walks away from the car, towards the festival of lice.

  ‘I never liked him much anyway,’ Jack says.

  I whack him on the arm.

  Hategarden tries to open his door, but it’s buckled so badly it won’t budge. ‘Hey!’ he shouts. ‘Get back in here. You got a death wish, kid?’

  Lewis walks slowly, fearlessly, towards his pets – screeching in unison with them. As he reaches the circle, he comes face to face with insects big and ferocious enough to eat him in two bites. Three of the bugs stare him right in the eyes, and others from around the circle start to gather closer.

  I cover my face, peeking out from between my fingers, preparing for the worst. But, rather than devouring Lewis right there and then, the wall of lice opens. It’s like a door to a secret passageway, and only Lewis holds the key. As he passes through, his nits begin to follow him. Lewis strides across the lawn towards his house, followed by his swarm of oversized friends. He is the Pied Piper of the nit world.

  We all watch in awe as he stops at the tap, picks up the hose and turns it on. He scrubs the sauce out of his hair, then shakes like a dog after a bath. He continues to communicate in Louse as hundreds of nits line up and he hoses them clean of Nan’s secret sauce one at a time. The nits shrink before our eyes, just like they did in the bath.

  Before they get too small to see, Lewis leans down and the nits climb into his hair, disappearing into the foliage. He repeats this until the street is clear of lice and the near-deafening screech of the nit symphony is replaced by the sound of approaching sirens.

  Epilogue

  The following day, Sergeant Hategarden and another police officer have a few questions for Nan about the ingredients in her sauce. I have a few myself. Questions like, ‘What the heck was in it?’ and ‘Are you out of your mind?’ and ‘Could you try to make a sauce that works on humans because it would be really cool to be a giant for a day?’

  I am there in her living room when the police interview her. She serves them Anzac biscuits and a cup of tea, but I notice that they don’t eat or drink.

  ‘So, what exactly was in the sauce, Mrs Weekly?’ Hategarden asks.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, love – a few things.’

  ‘What kinds of things?’

  ‘Well, tomatoes, vinegar, spices.’

  ‘Right,’ he says, jotting notes in his little black notebook. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘A little bit of bleach.’

  ‘Bleach? But bleach could kill you!’

  ‘To keep the bugs out. My mother always put a dash of bleach in her cup of tea and a dash in her spaghetti sauce. Keeps your dishes clean and your insides spick ’n’ span. And a tablespoon of bicarb soda to keep your teeth nice and white. There was a little bit of pine-lime shaving cream for flavour, a clove of garlic and a pinch of VapoRub for the sinuses and …’

  Hategarden writes down everything in Nan’s secret spaghetti sauce recipe. There are 136 ingredients in all. Most of them are more likely to be found in the chemist or the hardware store than the supermarket.

  Hategarden sends the recipe on to the CSIRO, the national science agency. They grow two cockroaches the size of meerkats and several mice the size of Chihuahuas. But that’s off the record. For some reason, Nan’s toxic spaghetti sauce does not work on humans.

  Lewis, Jack and I get an ‘F’ on our filmmaking assignment. Miss Norrish thinks we’ve used a special effects package to create the ‘unnecessarily gory and entirely unbelievable’ action sequence, which was against the rules of the assignment. I try to tell her that it all happened, just as I filmed it, and she threatens to send me to the principal for telling lies.

  But we do get pinned with medals of bravery by the Kings Bay Police Department in a private ceremony. I suggest
that, since Jack screamed, ‘I don’t wanna diiiie!’ and ‘I want my mummyyyy!’, he might not qualify for a bravery medal, but Hategarden gives him one anyway.

  Oh, and Lewis still has nits.

  25 Reasons Why I Can’t Wait to Be in a Nursing Home

  My pop, Cliff Weekly, used to try to escape from Kings Bay Nursing Home every second week. I never understood why. He was living my dream life. Here are 25 reasons why I can’t wait to be in a nursing home:

  1. Room service 24/7, and I won’t have to waste energy trimming my toenails and nose-hairs and wiping my bottom. Someone will do it for me!

  2. No homework. (My teachers will have died years ago.)

  3. Nude bingo.

  4. Wheelchair races in the hallway.

  5. Wheelchair jousting in the tearoom.

  6. Wheelchair scuba diving in the pool.

  7. Dinner tray sled races down the grassy hill near the bin shed.

  8. Borrowing a fellow inmate’s motor scooter and laying some doughnuts in the car park out front.

  9. Bed sores make awesome scabs, and scab collecting is one of my favourite pastimes.

  10. Catch ’n’ kiss. Old ladies can’t run as fast as the girls in my class.

  11. Dinner at 3 pm.

  12. Nap time at 9 am, 11:15 am, 1:05 pm, 3:22 pm, 4:05 pm and lights out by 5 pm.

  13. Replacing the oxygen tanks with helium so that everyone speaks in high-pitched voices.

  14. Nice soft food so the food fights won’t hurt as much.

  15. Not having to brush my teeth. (No teeth to brush.)

  16. Wearing those cool old-guy nappies so I won’t have to walk all the way to the toilet during the ad breaks.

  17. Speaking about myself in the third person. As in, ‘You wouldn’t mind trimming that festering wart off Poppa’s knee, would you?’

  18. Tricking my grandkids into smuggling Chupa Chups in for me.

  19. Pinching their cheeks really hard when they come to visit.