[Here is section 6 of 17. Yet again I must warn readers that it contains extreme violence flippantly depicted and some strong language.]

“Better get out there and see about that,” She shouts

out at Hen pottering around the greenhouse,

hearing the battering on the front door. “Mum,

answer that!” Deb shouts down from her TV-filled room.

Hen pretends to be deaf. That old trick. Smoke streams up

from a house across the road. She sits up on the sunbed

and shouts louder. “Better do something about that.”

Hen grumpily unfurls his gardening gloves and marches

to the telephone without uttering a word.

*

The bullets hit him through the glass paned front door

before he can get his fingers into 999. “Fuck

that blinking glass door She wanted,” is the last thing he thinks.

She comes running angrily squawking.

A stray shot takes her larynx out

and she sinks to the floor over dead hubby,

speechless, gurgling, choking,

the purring telephone receiver bleeding out

faint increasingly irritated unanswered questions.

The couple lie together in rigor,

grimaces etched on their lips,

like a macabre Romeo

& Juliet, Anthony & Cleopatra,

like effigies of king & queen slumped artlessly

atop an Arundel tomb by an unsympathetic court sculptor.

*

The kids are curled up watching the soap on TV.

Roz has run off into the outback

and heart-throb Lando is off after her on his motorbike.

Dark aboriginal prophecies are inscribed in trees.

The boring bit. And the redneck couple get hitched on a sheep farm

and Roz hustles a bus-full of cross-dressers and clowns to help her win her man,

to a back drop of Ayer’s Rock. Girls go missing in the crevices. Next week’s plot.

*

A tap on the frosted glass front door. Shots. Deb rushes downstairs.

A bullet thrashes through glass and skull. Mike

muscles his way through the empty door frame

over mum&dad’s intertwined dead bodies into the home,

and puts a final flurry of grapeshot into the images of virtual neighbors still on TV.

The curtains tangled up in the cathode ray tube flare up in flame.