SKATEBOARDING
What we figured was that the quarantine was the perfect time to try new things and what we figured was a perfectly good new thing was skateboarding. What we figured was that if we stacked it hard down at the park while everyone was sick or scared of becoming sick none of the usual angry teens would bully us or our bruised arses seeing as their parents had grounded them so as to save their grans’ lives from the apocalypse. We didn’t have grandmas by then. None of us did. And since we had no one in particular to give it to we took our extra Centrelink money and got boards off Gumtree or from our neighbours’ yards while they weren’t looking and we went down to the park by the stadium and dared each other to go down the edge of the bowl real fast and to try to make our boards do a jump and as we did we yelled stuff like Board Parkour! or Tony Hawke’s My Dad! when we did anything cool. And this was all well and good till Blake called us over and said Watch This and tried going down the concrete bowl backwards and instead just fell right crack down to the concrete so his arm snapped in two and the bone was sticking out and we all started freaking out till Tony said we ought to lay him out across all our boards in a line and then just like that we wheeled him all the way to the hospital while he yelled all sorts of swears like S and F and the other F and when we got to the hospital the nurses said swears also but quiet-like and then they told us we had to wait because a procession of elderlies had just shown up with the same dry cough and worried looks in their eyes and they were a priority because of the apocalypse. Probably some of them were the angry teens’ grans. We waited with Blake for a full hour and he cried and we said it was okay if he cried and his tears washed over the pink-bloodied bone like a small sheen of glitter paint and eventually the doctors did get to him and now his arm does this thing where his hand can twist too far either way and he looks you in the eyes and asks you to punch it and he yells at the top of his lungs I Can’t Feel Anything! I Can’t Feel Anything! Oh God, I Can’t Feel Anything!