Peripheral Vision by Paddy O'Reilly

Those Canadians were probably only two or three years younger than me, but they’d obviously never worked a day. Straight from school to university, conference trips across the globe, exciting adventures in cars with the locals who earned a living doing photocopying and filing. I turned to the Taiwanese girl in the seat beside me.
    â€˜What do you study?’ I asked.
    â€˜I am professor,’ she said, and turned to look out through the window.
    I wished I’d taken the touristy tour.
    Josie was lying on her bunk when I got back. I pulled off my clothes and lay down on the lower bunk in my underwear.
    â€˜We need better jobs,’ I said to the slats and bulging mattress wads above me. ‘And the cassowaries were in an enclosure and bored and they were as tall as men and looked angry. They’re dinosaurs, living in the wrong time and the wrong place. We dinosaurs from the lost world all need better jobs.’
    â€˜Better jobs? I guess I got chosen by the wrong parents and went home to the wrong house. Then I went to the wrong school and I met you there and we both got the wrong jobs.’
    â€˜Wrong school all right. Wrong suburb, wrong country, wrong time. I never thought I’d say this, Jose, but I want to have a good job and a nice car and a house and … are we talking about the same thing?’
    Above me Josie shifted position and the shape of the mattress through the slats rolled like the underside of a raft. A hand reached over the edge of the bunk. I took the notebook and read.
    J & M’s Travel Diary, Day Three. I am having trouble telling Merryn that I found out I was adopted. And freaked. And left Melbourne. And everything is shit.
    â€˜Fuck,’ I said. ‘Fuck.’
    So here we are, standing up to our hips in the dawn sea, dressed in bikinis and pantyhose. We’re holding our arms high and she’s gripping my right hand like she’s the referee and I’m the winner of the bout. She’s gripping my hand so hard it hurts, and I think of those years at school when all I wanted was to be her, the glorious, take-no-prisoners, bulletproof Josie. I can see the transparent blue of a box jellyfish drifting toward us on the lip of the swell, its tentacles performing a slow shimmy in the seawater. There are probably millions of broken-off tentacles here too, random strands riding the currents, wrapping themselves around the driftwood and the seaweed, the tiny silver fish and the human beings.
    â€˜I feel better now,’ Josie says. ‘The water is refreshing.’
    My arms are getting tired. It’s tempting to let them drop into the cool sea.
    â€˜Thanks for coming,’ she says.
    â€˜Of course I came. I’d always come.’
    Our raised arms start to tremble with the strain.
    â€˜I think I’ll go back to shore now,’ she says.
    She lets go of my hand and leans over to kiss me on the cheek. The movement causes water to lap over the waistband of my pantyhose. I wait for the excruciating sting, but nothing happens. The jellyfish washes past me on the swell, its gelatinous body bumping harmlessly against my nylon-wrapped thigh.
    â€˜I’ll stay in a minute longer.’ I wrap my arms around my chest and stare out to the horizon, white-blue against the dark line of the sea.

Restraints
    The labs should have been locked, but because of a massive power surge – followed by an outage – every room was gaping as if some angry foot had kicked open all the doors. Normally, the inside of the buildings was lit to banish any idea of a shadow. White walls and white linoleum. Windowless hallways and labs. Security points at every entry. Now the only light visible was the glowing green of the exit signs.
    The other weekend skeleton staff were racing around the dark building like disturbed ants, panicking about damage to the instruments. I was hurrying too, not because anything urgent was going to happen in my lab, but it seemed wrong