The elsewheres of Charlie Bolt

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  • Published 20200505
  • ISBN: 9781922268761
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

NO ONE KNEW what happened to Charlie Bolt. He had a wife, somewhere. She left to find ‘happiness’, believing it was elsewhere. Instead of looking for her, fifty-two-year-old Charlie Bolt went the other way. He’d never experienced an epiphany on his lonely road. Charlie Bolt lost his job and stroked out on the floor in the bedsit of a rooming house. While the ambulance officers scurried around and humped Charlie Bolt onto a stretcher, he found a world of cockroaches and lost coins under the fridge in his room.

Charlie Bolt met strangers in the hospital who had sudden opinions about him. Cold sterility. He was Aboriginal and no longer had a next of kin. Charlie Bolt’s left arm hung, a flailing limb. Charlie Bolt had hours to ponder where everything went finally. Where was the feeling in his arm? The doctors brought his blood pressure down to 120 over eighty-five. Phantom limb syndrome would still haunt. Half of his body had been assigned to the elsewhere of elsewhere. Maybe it would reconcile with his wife?

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