* The Raffle episode 2

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Squidink
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* The Raffle episode 2

Post by Squidink » Wed May 18, 2005 9:45 pm

The Raffle





episode 2
Terms and Conditions


BigMog let his eyes follow Wanto's frail form as it receded down the pink sunny corridor, hung with the residents' crayoned depictions of the barrels of Bali. Then from the low bookcase beside his swivel chair, the Director of Nursing removed a tattered blue ring-binder on whose spine in wonky texta was scrawled "Wanto", and the room number, "8". He sighed at having to write by hand -- in this computer age! -- though accepted the requirement as a safeguard, to ensure the residents' records could not be altered. Taking his pen from his breast pocket he opened to a fresh page and marked the date -- 04/11/45 -- paused, then wrote,

Resident watched departure of mortuary van carrying deceased fellow resident, Squid. Appears morbid, resentful and disoriented. Seemed to relax after staff intervention, but continues to question his stay at Green Room, and may be having second thoughts. Said he has no knowledge of tomorrow's raffle, despite repeatedly being informed of this. All reassurance and care given.

Drawing a horizontal line to the edge of the page from his final sentence (which he cringed to recognise as a meaningless platitude), he signed his name and squeezed the folder shut, then unwrapped a shiny caramel-chocolate from the box in front of him and sucked it into his mouth.

* * *

Wanto, on reaching the wood and glass doors to the solarium, stopped to catch his breath beside an antique poker machine, donated by the local RSL. The lofty, curved, art-deco sunroom, almost a hundred-and-fifty years old, let out onto a wooden verandah through a set of double doors out of view to the right. Wanto gripped the machine's lever and pulled it to spin the fruit, and with his other hand scratched his balls as he stared dreamily through the full-length windows that fanned around the front of the nursing home. The view was spectacular. Against the horizon the cobalt blue ocean shimmered like fabric in the pre-noon sun, and below it a mosaic of red-tiled roofs and brick home-units dotted the khaki isthmus like beehives. Under them, the murky green of Melaleuca Lagoon stretched for an area of several football fields to the foot of the nursing home grounds, and the adjacent suburbs north and west.

He watched the ocean, thinking of the dead Squid -- one less in the water -- of the coming raffle -- did BigMog say tomorrow? -- and of how his eyes were still good. Suddenly, he felt an inexplicable joy welling inside of him. He could make out the tiny box-shape of a car transporter, floating in the distance, a primer-grey dot.

By luck or genetics, Wanto's sight was near-perfect -- had won him, by guiding him to perfect peaks and sections, almost every longboard comp since he signed up for the Over-65s some twenty years ago -- though he could also credit his near-vertical pivot turns and high-velocity floaters, which he pulled, at great cost to his lower back, until into his seventies.

But his eyes were key. He wondered if his career as an optometrist had contributed to their excellence. Why not? Who could explain, for example, why his medical-practitioner friends never fell ill? A lifetime exposure to people's germs? Did optometrists gain something from their patients' bad eyes? At the same time, there was the saying about doctors' children -- a GP's child was always sick. And this was true of his kids, too. Two of them, the boys, now in their late forties, had had to wear coke bottle glasses through high school. The third, a girl, Colette, had insisted on laser retina surgery, which had cost a bomb but paid off with a New York modelling contract.

He wondered if any of them would visit today. Not likely. He knew why. It was because he was always around.

He had been around too long. But everyone enjoyed extraordinary health these days. So good. in fact, that lazy retirement, almost as long as the working life, had put serious pressure on the community. When Wanto's parents had died some thirty years previously, it had been an occasion of mourning. Condolences from friends and neighbours poured in, flowers and cards. That was the norm in those days. But the tide of compassion had turned. The cure for cancer, discovered in 2015, had been a double-edged sword, and there was a name for folk who hung like a bad smell, who wore out their welcome, who became a burden, and Wanto didn't like it. They were "Erics" -- a stupid corruption of the name of the ancient rock singer Eric Burdon, from the band called The Animals, which, as stupid nicknames do, had caught on and stuck. Wanto had never been an Eric, was not about to start. That was why he was here at Green Room, where the motto was "Taking the drop." No one at Green Room was allowed to be sad about leaving the earthly coil.

He looked again at the busy pattern of homes and units in what, through his childhood, had been all bush, and wondered how so many people could live there. There had been no population explosion, more of a surging, rising tide. And with the burgeoning hordes of healthy retirees -- cluttering the waterways, blocking the drains, so to speak -- and the government's shutting down of Medicare, society's values had shifted. This was explosive.

It had started in the early 2030s, with a dramatic court case in which ageing offspring had killed their centenarian parents, gassing them in their garaged 4WD. The parents had wanted to die, had put their wish in writing, but this was no mercy killing to end some awful, terminal disease. The old folk were perfectly fit -- they were merely scared of becoming Erics, and their deaths were defended by the children as the ultimate act of free choice -- and held up by the media as the epitome of unselfishness. As was widely expected, the judges threw the case out, but the verdict -- sanctioning the killing of consenting elderly -- seemed to incite almost the entire nation. Suddenly it seemed everyone had been living under a cloud of guilt or resentment. The old folk, sick of life and of being dependent, and the children, tired of caring, and getting-on themselves, clamoured for the right to assisted death. The tabloids and radio began talking up the best ways to kick off; suicide websites mushroomed; people held "Ultimate Choice" parties with undertakers standing by, waiting in their cars to remove the corpses after carefully calibrated overdoses administered at the peak of joyous wakes held in advance. All over the country.

Then the lotteries started. Nursing homes began admitting only those who agreed to take part in a raffle, by which one resident was culled at regular intervals. The Green Room franchise -- the leading aged-care chain for surfers -- was one of the first. Creaky boardriders flocked to it, the motto "Taking the drop," and "One less in the water," inspiring a bravado that corresponded to the risks the surfers lived with in their sport -- not to mention the popular notion, first expressed in the primal beginnings of rock and roll, of hope I die before I get old.

Like his fellow residents on admission to Green Room, Wanto had agreed he had led a good life, and that after five years at the home his name would go into the hat, for a chance to take the drop.

But now with the raffle looming he was not so sure. He wondered if his family would visit today, then remembered he had forgotten that he had already figured they wouldn't.

. . . to be continued


Next episode: http://forum.realsurf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3816
Episode One: http://forum.realsurf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3482

This story is fiction. All events and personal relationships depicted are fictional © Squidink 2005
Last edited by Squidink on Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Johnno
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Post by Johnno » Thu May 19, 2005 7:58 am

Keep up the good work even the web address works on this page...... :wink: :lol: :lol:

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Post by WIDG » Thu May 19, 2005 8:33 am

Good to see you back with a new read Squiddy!! Keep it up!

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Post by Spoon » Thu May 19, 2005 9:51 am

Top stuff Squid. Could easily become reality.
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Post by seahag » Thu May 19, 2005 6:03 pm

Those are some heavy duty concepts, Squid. The whole euthanasia thing. Makes you feel squeamish about putting healthy ppl down, but then how sick is sick. I reckon if someone's health is really fu(ked and they wanna go then they should have help if they ask for it, though
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Post by Johnno » Thu May 19, 2005 6:22 pm

Better to burn out than it is to rust.........Neil Young :wink:

Old age is the pits :!: :evil:

Sould be like the merc ad......... start old and get young.

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Post by baldric » Thu May 19, 2005 8:40 pm

....
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Post by baldric » Thu May 19, 2005 10:01 pm

....
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Post by baldric » Thu May 19, 2005 10:25 pm

....
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Post by BigMog » Mon May 23, 2005 4:52 pm

Nice work squid. I must look into this 'Soylent Green' movie, as we are studying all that kinda stuff at school. Brave New World is a book which deals with sort of the same concepts... anyone else read it?
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Post by baldric » Mon May 30, 2005 5:46 pm

....
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