Carefree

you'd never forget the pelicans because it was their home too and that occasional one who'd try and swallow your baited hook while we cast out into an endless mould of brown and blue skin sometimes catching our line in its enormous and clumsy wingspan floating around the Jetty constantly boasting that huge gullet so close to the pylons covered in poison oyster shells that waited for the bare flesh within our gait, inviting our bare flesh to dance Mum worried that we'd get sick from eating them Dad saying the sewage from the caravan park would sometimes flow near where we fished and that the oysters bathed in it too little buckets of a few bream silver catch of a meal and the persistent cats at our ankles lapping up the smell running up past the shop a front window necropolis of stonefish in vegemitejars suspended in a vault of clear alcoholic brine still deadly in death and us in bare feet all the time three kids in stonefish-infested mud playing russian roulette — one good pair of running shoes between us