If for some reason you were transported back in time to 1979 and you had the inkling to hide in a faraway tree with a set of binoculars, with the sole purpose of google-eyeing me, you would have found me perched atop my ‘Yellow Huffy Sting Ray’.
My bike, brand spankin’ new with and elongated glitter gold seat, multicoloured streamers windswept to horizontal (when I was at top speed) and a bell that only worked when it wanted. The handlebars were high like a Harley Davidson and back then there was no requirement for helmets.
I lived with my family of five. Big sister, little brother, mum, dad, you know, normal scenario. Our house had stilts and sometimes I imagined it just upping and walking out of town, when it, like me, got sick of the neighbours.
We lived in Mackay. Across the road from us was a disused shed which had engines and rusty cars all over the place. I never once saw anyone in there.
Down the road were sugarcane fields. Big business back then, sugarcane fields. If I stood on our house on stilts balcony and looked in the direction of the sugarcane fields, sugar cane was all I saw. My little brother and I made jumps in the fields. Not my sister, she always liked her dolls better than riding bikes over already squashed cane toads for fun.
My brother had a BMX. I loved his BMX, he could get air on his BMX. Facts are fact, Yellow Huffy Sting Ray’s are not meant for flying through the air after coming off a jump at speed. For that matter, I don’t think the Yellow Huffy was built for speed either.
There were kids up that played cricket with the cane toads while they were still alive. That never felt like the right thing to do for me. I always felt these kids were a soft in the head like lime green jelly on a stinkin’ hot tropical day.
‘Don’t matter,’ they’d say of the toads, ‘they’re pests, my dad even tells me so.’
I still never saw no reason play cricket with them, the cane toads that is.
At night I would go to sleep with the thought of riding my Yellow Huffy right over the jelly heads. I would ride over them so many times, they to would be splatter cake like the cane toads that never got out of the way of the oncoming trucks. I’d also imagine the squish noises when I rode over their brains. I’d wait ’til they dried out on the bitumen in the hot tropical sun then take them to the local market to sell as new and fashionable floor mats. I figured if people put skinned cow hide on their floor, jelly head floor mats could quite possibly be the next best thing.
Lucky for the jelly heads we moved away from the tropics, otherwise, my floor mat business would be booming right now.
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
