Australian Rules, by Ian C. Smith

As they circle, they grope to soil her.  Sinuous, she dodges deftly, eluding oafish attempts to tackle her.  Pushing off the trio’s ringleader with the heel of her hand hard to his chest, she wrong-foots him.  Another, overweight, falls, tries to trip her, but she executes a neat step over before baulking the third, sprinting from beer and curses, her goal the penumbra of light, and advertising’s screech.  Reaching where twos and threes become an optimistic crowd, scanning back, she sees, beyond moths bewitched by the floodlights’ effulgence, her mouth-breathing hunter-morons still fixated on their quarry.  Breath spent, mingling with the throng after rushing headlong, sweat aglow, she notes animal symbolism, red against white like blood on snow.  Camouflaged amidst cliched taunts between opposing fans, she slips through their maul towards black gates beneath towering walls.  Nearing turnstiles, passing statues of former stars, she bisects moving queues to circumambulate the chiaroscuro below the grandstand’s eaves.  Turning her jacket inside out, phone and purse safe in zipped pockets, she slips through the tide’s thinning ranks.

Imitating vulpine U-turns to avoid being followed down small streets, she jogtrots, a nimble wraith, stealth her chevalier.  Where the streetlights’ glow is softer, swallowed by the night, she then walks, arms akimbo, musing about pack mentality, virtuoso’s anathema, and what an ugly waste of time reporting this would be.  She conjectures what Hepworth, Moore, or Rodin might make of that statuary, and if her predators fantasised she was a disguised zombie.  Mind-laughing, bouncy with relief, she lines up a can, kicks straight and hard, sending it clattering into the gutter.  Her follow through, arched foot level with her bright eyes, is manual perfect for skill.  Far behind her now, a great roar rises like the sound of caged beasts in the Colosseum smelling their kill.

A wedding invitee, scathing about the ubiquitous TikTok look, she dislikes the ambience.  And being bored.  Who doesn’t?  The men cluster to talk football.  She wonders about marriage.  Is it as lonely as Chekhov said?  Did he understand what women want?  Freud apparently didn’t.  When the bride, ready to leave, holds her bouquet high, the other unmarried women gather in a twittering anticipatory pack.  Our gal sheds her heels, move swiftly in behind them on the balls of her feet, timing her approach, her take-off.  Her right knee finds a rounded hip, ideal for climbing.  Her left knee, even higher, nudges a hopeful shoulder out of the aerial no-contest.  She soars, bodice filled to burst, neck cords straining, hair streaming, fingers an eagle’s talons.  The bouquet seeming to float in slo-mo, she grasps it, rolls on the floor, finishing on her feet, crushed flowers raised in triumph.  Shoes collected in sudden silence, she handpasses gaping men her bedraggled prize on her way out.