edith dansky and her medicine
Eighty-five year old woman attacked and robbed in city mall.
Ninety-five year old woman raped in nursing home.
Seventy-eight year old woman knocked down and dragged down street by bag snatchers.
Police at a loss to understand the current violence directed at the aged in society.
Four brothers turn fugitive in order to escape arrest for the cultivation of illicit substances in central NSW.
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The Danskys: Derek, David, Dexter and Dudley. Mother Edith, aged eighty- nine. Spinster. Husband Ed gone twenty years. Blindsided by a tree on a road. They had been married for fifty years, there was no body, everything burnt to grease and ash.
The last thing the boys did before they fled to Bukit was to buy her an apartment in Sydney with a bag of mouldy cash that had escaped the raid, nothing exceptional, just a third floor two bed in an old block in the Haymarket. Edith thought that the Chinese had a special way about families, and while her boys were ducking and diving in places to the north she took her company amongst the chinatown mahjong players.
She was a small woman, spindled tight from her years of farm labour, old and hard. Miss Edith. The women at the mahjong table were forever trying to patch her onto their widowed grandfathers. Edith though kept it tight, kept it right, and waited for her boys to either come home or call for her.
They sent her $1,500 every month, 1st Tuesday, and Edith took her cash from the same ATM everytime. So they came for her.
Grabbing a little old lady by the arm and moving her to where you want her to be is easy, they freeze solid at first, then they ask what you want. So you give them a little strong-arm toggle, just enough so they bruise, just a little hurt, and then you have them alone in the toilet stall, or a hidden corner in the mall, or on the street if your need of shit won’t wait.
Edith’s moment came on a Tuesday when a woman with black dyed hair and tattooed arms followed her into the hallway of her apartment block, right up close so the old lady could smell her sour panic when she turned around to shut the door, and there in her shadow was this little wild-eyed troll.
Eyes like jangling marbles, breath like a methane well, and the creases in her forehead were grimed out with lines of old city grit. You fucken old slut she said, and she tugged at Edith’s hand bag, yanked at it, give it to me you fucken old hag, and the old woman looked into the eyes of want and decay and hunger and said waitaminit, you can have it, but first can I take out my medicine.
The dark-haired woman flicked her eyes up and down and all over, she was shivering, and now there was a little blood on Edith’s arm from her nails they were dug in so hard.
Just let me find my medicine Edith asked, and she opened her handbag and fiddled about in there, her fingers feeling their way through the interior pockets, there.
Found it.
– and she raised out a Browning Buckmark Contour semi-auto machine pistol and shot the troll through her right eye.
Without blinking.
you lookin at me?
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