Alex Smith

It is because I have not even the scantest interest sheep shears that I have decided to dedicate this memo to that tool, and since I cannot muster sufficient passion to create a story about sheep shears I fall back on that old favourite: the anthology.
At least I can say it was impossible to find tales about shears.

From Confessions of Appropriation
By Morton Nicoll, 1944

Virtually every Australian is familiar with Tom Roberts’ 1890 masterpiece Shearing the Rams, an impressionistic depiction of the act of shearing, but few know the story of man wielding the shears. Most would be alarmed to learn the hero of the beloved oil painting was not merely an ace at skirting the fleece and a convict shipped from Britain, as were many of the great rousties at the time, but a killer, as brisk and dextrous with knives as he was with shears.

From The Legend of Aridita who had Sheep Shears for Bones
By Antigo Enredo Viciado, 1962

To understand how the woman Aridita came to have sheep shears instead of bones, it is essential to spiral back in Ouspensky’s three dimensional time to an apartment in suburbia. There the chairs were all white and the floor was covered in butterflies, and these creatures with dark red wings and blue wings and some with yellow wings caused a perpetual maddening breeze which made everything go wrong. So it is no surprise Aridita fell pregnant, married the father she did not know, and then on the day they moved into a glass house, with glass stairs and glass beds with glass sheets, she miscarried the child, this before she and the new husband of rich sheep-farming relatives and poor manners could fall in love. Their marriage became an awkward, purposeless thing: he liked beer and golf, and she liked tea and piano playing. He couldn’t abide the scent of woolly piano felt about her, and she loathed the stench of golf ball straw that hung about him. When Aridita fell pregnant again the prospective grand-parents on both sides were relieved and a whole sheep was skirted and roasted to celebrate, and when Aridita miscarried again there was despair all round. After a third attempt to carry a child also failed, and doctors blamed Aridita’s wonky uterus, she was ready to drive a pair of shears through her heart, but she did not because the God of Sheep intervened, and if you could see Aridita you would understand why the God of Sheep was so smitten. He made a deal with Aridita and his side of the deal was to place Aridita’s fertilized egg into the womb of a blind ewe. This he did and the blind ewe carried Aridita’s twins to full term. Now these children, J and L, were perfect, the grandparents on all sides were delighted, and for all the world it seemed Aritida’s life was perfect too, but since it had been a blind ewe who had born the children, and since Aridita’s side of the deal with the God of Sheep was unspeakably evil, Aridita became irrationally consumed with proving herself a good mother. Guilt and worry lodged in her bones. Within two years guilt and worry turned to cancer. Doctors could do nought but point to multiplying dark spots in Aridita’s X-rays. Again she was ready to drive a pair of shears through her heart, but again, the God of Sheep intervened. This time his side of the deal was to give Aridita a new skeleton, and this he did in two winks of an eye.

From Gorgidas the Moustache Twirling Mountebank
By Bella Angelopolous, 1980

“He’d have to swim the Hellespont,” Crista said. Sometimes she wished she was a carnival stripper again, at least up there she knew the men thought of her as an object and likewise she thought of them as objects. Gorgidas had confounded her, first with attention she did not feel she deserved, and then with abandonment she did not feel she deserved. In fact, it was not a swim across a Turkish strait that reunited Crista and Gorgidas, but a pair of Burgon & Ball Red Shank Drummer Boy Sheep Shears, the best-selling shears in the world.

MEMO 3 of 999