She Has a Problem with Bill Murray

To justify the chips in her nailpolish,

the mouldy cups of coffee in her room,

the dusty easel and her inability to even look at a photo of Bill Murray let alone one of his movies,

she told me

our heads are nothing but TV sets and our dreams are old sitcoms that never learnt to fly.

Like that explained everything.

But after she said it,

I saw tins of canned laughter trapped behind the glass screens of her eyes.

I asked her out for breakfast but she told me she wanted to go to the gallery again to watch a video installation of two hands slowly reassembling the shattered pieces of a broken china plate.

The next day I drove to the dump,

reverse parked into the hard rubbish section

and loaded in the first old television I could find.

At her place I took her by the hand and led her out to the front lawn,

the TV sat on its side exactly as it had fallen from the trunk,

in the glass I could see our feet reflected side by side.

I placed the hammer into her questioning palm and with a large black texta I drew a squeaky X on the dusty screen.

Before she took a swing I told her to cover her eyes for protection (sometimes dreams hurt) and I also told her to think of Bill Murray.

She swung long and hard.

When the TV face cracked I thought I saw some kind of gas released that curled skyward between us before dissipating into the atmosphere.

This could have been a symbol of her repressed feelings being released or it could have been a toxic cloud of radioactive material.

Or maybe even a combination of the two, since I spent the next morning throwing up, while she dusted off the easel and started painting again.

I think she’s painting broken china plates, but fuck, hey, it’s a start isn’t it?

When things are broken, try smashing something.