The Big Issue Australia #669 - The Fiction Edition

AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST-SELLING FICTION MAGAZINE xx.

02 SEP 2022

669 Ed.

12 SHORT STORIES Claire Aman • Gwen Andrews • Vrinda Baliga • Emma Darragh Clare Fletcher • Benjamin Hickey • Bec Kavanagh • Jenni Mazaraki • Kerry Munnery Linds Sanders • Katherine Smyrk • Sean Wilson • Illustrations by Guy Shield

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Contributing Editor Michael Epis Editorial Coordinator Lorraine Pink Freelance Editors Jo Case Oliver Driscoll Art Direction & Design GOZER (gozer.com.au) CONTRIBUTORS Fiction Judges Melissa Fulton Claire Cao

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Contents 08 Morticia and Me

by Emma Darragh

12 Gethsemane

by Benjamin Hickey

18 Where I Lived Before

EDITION

36 Buttercream

by Bec Kavanagh

40 The Body of Taylor Keats

by Linds Sanders

44 Nearly Nirvana

by Katherine Smyrk

by Gwen Andrews

22 Balladonia

48 The Ferry

by Claire Aman

26 The Gun

by Jenni Mazaraki

30 Daughters Come Home

by Vrinda Baliga

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

669

by Sean Wilson

52 Eight Seconds

by Clare Fletcher

56 The Last Child

by Kerry Munnery

THE REGULARS 04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor

06 Streetsheet 62 Crossword

Illustrations by Guy Shield

Guy Shield is an Adelaide-based illustrator with an obsession for colour, light and storytelling. He spent his formative years selling newspapers opposite Big Issue vendor Carol, outside the Prahran Market in Melbourne, and is thrilled to be on board for this edition. He primarily works digitally, for a variety of clients around the world. @guyshield guyshield.com

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

A New Page

A

few years ago, in those halcyon days between Christmas and New Year, I witnessed my nephew fall in love with reading.

We were on holiday together, down the coast, my brother and his family. Axel had turned seven a month before, and loved books – but it was in this moment that the world of fiction truly lit his soul.

He’d received a copy of Dog Man, from Aunty Karen – a graphic novel for kids

by Dav Pilkey – and he spent most of the time lying in strangely contorted positions on the couch, on the chair, on the floor, with his nose in the book.

It’s that amazing feeling, when the rest of the world disappears, when all that matters is what happens on the next page. That is the power of fiction: it expands our worlds, helps us make sense of this one, and allows us to experience life from other perspectives – even life as a dog man. And it was magic to see Axel discover that gift.

LETTER OF THE FORTNIGHT

This edition – our 18th annual Fiction Edition – is dedicated to discovering some of that gold. Made possible thanks to the generous support of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, we bring you writing from new and emerging talent across the country, and beyond. This year, we received a record number of submissions: a whopping 905 stories.

They were read blind by writer, editor and critic Claire Cao, and Melissa Fulton, our outgoing deputy editor and books editor, to whom we bid a fond farewell with this special issue. Their longlist of 30 was whittled down by the editorial team to the 12 here. A special thanks to Jo Case and Oliver Driscoll who helped edit these tales. And a welcome to our new deputy editor, Sinéad Stubbins, who arrived just in time to proofread these stories, brought to life by the outstanding artwork of Guy Shield. There’s an extra 16 pages to showcase even more writing, and give you even more time to kick back and enjoy that simple pleasure of a good read.

04

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 25 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.

Your Say

Congratulations on an awesome issue #662! There was such a range of articles, and every one had aspects that resonated with me. Molly Meldrum’s interview was so candid and beautifully expressed. I loved the Streetsheet ‘This Is Me’ contribution; I am full of admiration for Cameron and his story. And congratulations to Daryl who has completed his psych and counselling degree – best of luck Daryl for your remaining studies.

As a child who spent every Sunday in church, Denise Picton’s experiences of keeping herself and her sister entertained struck a chord; while the Blondie interview brought back memories of growing up, and of my dad being very taken with Debbie Harry’s care of Chris Stein during his illness. And so it went on with every page – another heart-string was pinged and another set of memories were awakened. When words on a page can create emotions that are so real, that is writing at its best. And all for $9. Thank you for providing the opportunity for us to write, to sell, to earn, to read and to be moved.

JOANNE LYNCH BEECROFT I NSW

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work.

• The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 24 locations around the country.

• The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales.

• The Big Issue Education workshops provide school, tertiary and corporate groups with insights into homelessness and disadvantage, and provide work opportunities for people experiencing marginalisation.

CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Joanne wins a copy of Sean Wilson’s debut novel Gemini Falls, out 27 September. But first, you can read his short story ‘The Ferry’ on page 48.

We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.

Meet Your Vendor

interview by Lilian Bernhardt photo by Michael Quelch

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

02 SEP 2022

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE IN BALMAIN AND DRUITT STREET, SYDNEY

05

MITCHELL

I had somewhat of a unique upbringing – I was a show kid. My dad ran the go-karts. I was very young, so I had a ball. I was one of the rare show kids placed into school in early primary.

Sideshow alleys travelled every couple of weeks, and I was in and out of a new school every fortnight. I was a little bit blasé about it all. I could have applied myself and done very well but being uprooted constantly for a couple of years – and again later in high school – affected my attitude towards it.

My dad passed away when I was very young, and my mum raised me solo. Losing him had an impact on my discipline, I think, as I never received harsh words parentally.

My favourite part of my childhood was my adolescence. I was a surfer in Ulladulla, on the south coast of New South Wales, and formed the town’s Junior Boardriders Club in the mid 70s.

My claim to fame came after my education, when I got my rigger ticket and became a class-one rigger. I worked on and around the waterfront of Sydney Harbour for 17 years.

I found myself broke and homeless in the early noughties. My mum had a house in Sydney, and I preferred to pay her over a real estate company, which made it hard for me to get a rental when she passed away in 2000. After three years on the streets, I was granted permanent housing at a bedsit in Millers Point.

Push came to shove economically, and I had no prospects of a job. I tried to upgrade my rigger ticket but discovered I wasn’t in the system, despite passing all my tests. I sort of got shunted out of my industry – I was in my late fifties and I wasn’t in a position to go back to tech.

I was still connected to the city’s homeless and knew many people selling The Big Issue. I thought, I might give this a go, and it proved to be a good choice. I’ve always remembered my first day. I was a bit nervous as you would be, but it took me just three minutes to make my first sale.

I’ve been a vendor for 15 years now. What I love most about selling The Big Issue is not only does it let you know who you are, it also lets you be who you are. It never ceases to amaze me how it always puts a spring in my step. You can wake up a little down in the mouth, but after you’ve made a few sales, it changes your spirit. I love the interaction with people, and I love thinking on my feet – it’s a big trait of mine It’s all come good now. I’ve got a job for life, I’ve got a house for life, and I’m not in debt. I’ve been transferred to a one‑bedroom flat in Lilyfield, right next to where I grew up.

And I’ve fully embraced The Big Issue – it helps me eat every day, with enough to buy major items sometimes too.

You may be wondering who my favourite customer is, that’s easy – the next one. Perhaps that’s you!

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

VENDOR SPOTLIGHT

CHERYL L

Tiny Bit of Time

I’m Back, Baby!

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

U

pdate on my health: I’m back, baby! So after seven months of surgery and chemo treatment I have been placed in remission – I was ecstatic on hearing this. My doctors have allowed me to return to a few hours of work doing Big Issue Classroom talks and Women’s Subscription Enterprise shifts. And hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m back selling mags on the streets. Oh, and for those interested, the cats are just fine!

CHERYL IGA NORTH MELBOURNE, WSE & CLASSROOM I MELBOURNE

I spoke and my voice was like a mouse Untrustworthy No-one listened Just talked the day away About what’s best for me Now, for a tiny little bit of time I get paid to speak of those times People listen, hear and understand Confusing as can be No-one listens to share and care To kindness and trust Only the dramatics of gossip and war And the fakery of money That makes us hear and not listen.

RACHEL T PYRMONT I SYDNEY

Mag on the Go I was selling the magazine outside Queens Plaza on a quiet Monday morning when an ambulance pulled up. The paramedics grabbed the mobile bed and went inside the shopping centre. A while later they came past me again, with a man on the mobile bed. The man on the mobile bed asked the paramedics to stop, saying he needed something to read and bought a magazine off me. I hope the man is okay and the hospital staff get him back to good health soon.

DAVID K QUEENS PLAZA I BRISBANE

Tickled Pink Floyd I am soon going to be celebrating 10 years of selling The Big Issue in Geelong! I am a very serious person when it comes to The Big Issue. It’s not about the sales for me, I just love to talk to people! I love that The Big Issue gets me up and out of the house. My favourite customers are those who show care and kindness and love to chat. My advice to new vendors is to be polite, honest, don’t be shy – talk to people.

I start singing lessons in a couple of weeks, my dream is to be a rockstar. Hopefully I will get discovered while busking, singing tunes from my favourite band, Pink Floyd. I do hope that I become the lead singer for a Pink Floyd tribute band.

STEVE B MARKET SQUARE SHOPPING CENTRE I GEELONG

Hopelessly Devoted

Let’s Face It

I see some famous people from sport while I’m working – ex-footballers and stuff. I go to the gym three or four times a week to do weights and get stronger. I like to go to my pitch at the beach after doing my meditation class. Yesterday I ate breakfast at Hungry Jack’s because I got a good deal on the app and I ate it with Jan, the lady who buys me breakfast.

While helping at our regular barbecue for people who are homeless, I was approached by a gentleman who recognised my face.

He explained he recently purchased The Big Issue and recognised me from the Meet Your Vendor profile I wrote. He followed on by saying he was inspired by my story and really wants to turn his life around after reading that I turned mine around.

It made me feel really good and excited that someone in his position would purchase the magazine and that my story could influence him to feel this way.

RHYS V HUNGRY JACK’S, RUNDLE STREET & ZUMA CAFFE I ADELAIDE

KAIA ROCKINGHAM FORESHORE I PERTH

TED J QUEENS PLAZA I BRISBANE

On My Pitch

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

RONALD’S SPACE SUIT WAS OUTTA THIS WORLD!

It’s Space, Man! I was so happy when I saw a magazine about space. I love the idea of travelling up there for a day. I did float around in my space suit, walk on air and see what astronauts see. I went back to my pitch at the Mary Street Bakery in Highgate on Sunday after a bit of a break. A big thank you to my lovely customers for welcoming me back.

RONALD MARY STREET BAKERY, HIGHGATE I PERTH

SPONSORED BY LORD MAYOR’S CHARITABLE FOUNDATION. COMMUNITY PHILANTHROPY MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN GREATER MELBOURNE AND BEYOND.

07

02 SEP 2022

I can remember Olivia NewtonJohn being on Bandstand, and Grease was a good story where she played Sandy with John Travolta.

She was a very caring person, and

she set up her cancer clinic and raised millions of dollars and she has travelled quite a lot. It’s sad that she passed away at 73.

8

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION 2022

Morticia and Me Riverdale is lame, but I’ve watched a few episodes. The character’s name comes to me: Cheryl Blossom. This Cheryl Blossom looks like a popular girl, too.

Morticia joins me by the fire with a full plate of food: sausages, potato salad, barbecued chicken. She hands me a bamboo knife and fork.

“I got us some food,” she says, spearing a sausage and putting it on my plate. She divvies up the potato salad and is about to give me the chicken leg but I hold up my fork.

How she eats without smudging her lipstick is a mystery to me. I’ve probably got tomato sauce on my chin and potato salad in my hair.

“Columbo over there?” she says pointing to a floppy‑haired guy in a long grey coat, smoking a cigar across the fire. “That’s Greg. It’s his birthday. He’s a writer and teaches at the uni.”

“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing to Cheryl Blossom.

“I can’t remember her name. I can find out—” “No, no. Don’t do that.”

She sits back down. “She’s Sarah and Tom’s kid. Actually, I think Tom’s her stepdad. I don’t know them very well.

They’re in theatre.”

“Cool.”

“Please, have some of this chicken,” she says, putting it on my plate.

She picks up a can of Canadian Club and takes a drink.

“How am I?” she asks, waving a hand in front of her face.

I check her face for crumbs and smudged lipstick. She’s immaculate. “Good,” I say.

She bares her teeth. White. Clean.

“Yep, good. Me?” She looks me over. She seems both relaxed and energetic.

Her face is soft and pretty in the firelight.

“Absolutely perfect,” she says. “I’m going to be social. Do you want me to grab a drink for you?”

I hold up my Coke.

“You’re okay?”

“Fine.”

She bends down and picks up our plates, then wiggles away to toss them in a bin.

I’m trying to get some chicken out of my teeth with my tongue when Cheryl Blossom, of all people, sits beside me.

I stop with the chicken and try to smile a hello.

“So what are you meant to be?” she asks, stretching her legs toward the fire. Her white Converse sneakers are muddy around the soles. I look up at her face, trying not to stare. No, I’ve never seen this girl before. I’d remember.

“I’m a Ghostbuster. From the remake,” I say.

“Oh. Right.”

09

W

e’re at a backyard birthday party in Keiraville. Fairy lights are strung up along the gutters. Adults in fancy dress laugh and talk in small groups. A fire lights up a section of the dark backyard and I’d like to throw myself into it. Everyone was half drunk by the time we arrived and soon my mother wasn’t far behind. She put her drinks in a mini fridge then flitted off, up into the house, without looking back.

I didn’t choose the Ghostbuster costume. My mother chose it for me because apparently it was the only thing we could throw together with such short notice. She’s dressed as Morticia Addams. She showed me a clip of The Addams Family.

It suits her, the long black hair, the flowing black dress. “I was always teased for being so pale,” she said. “A boy at Year Seven camp called me Wednesday Addams once and I cried.”

She doesn’t cry at the party but I almost do. I don’t know anyone here. There are kids – little kids, little fairies and a little Spider-Man and a Baby Yoda – shining a torch around the corners of the back garden. Nobody my age.

A Star Wars guy in a long robe, barbecuing by the back steps, watches Morticia’s ascent. He notices me noticing him noticing her and lifts his tongs in the air to say hi.

The Tiger King and Carole Baskin and a character I don’t recognise sit around the fire. Carole Baskin breastfeeds a tiny tiger, right there in front of everyone. I look away.

There’s a few gazebo tents with tables and folding chairs and I can hear Morticia laughing inside. I turn around and notice that Star Wars guy isn’t at the barbecue anymore. Huh. I wish someone my age would show up so I’d have someone to talk to, but the thought of it also terrifies me.

There is a cob loaf, though. And a tub of hummus ringed by sticks of celery and carrot. Beetroot dip and fancy crackers. And a wooden cheese board with uneven hunks of hard cheese crumbled all over, the brie or camembert hacked and smeared, a dead white body part. I grab a plate, dip some carrot sticks into the hummus, and head to the cob loaf.

“There are more snacks for you kids over there,” says an adult Harry Potter. He points to the adjoining table – like I couldn’t possibly have noticed it on my own.

“Thanks, Harry,” I say. I step around him and take a handful of chips from the so-called Kids’ Table.

“Soft drinks are in the esky,” he says.

I manage to grab a Coke without spilling food from my plate and go sit on a crate near the fire.

More people arrive: a Mulder in a suit and a Scully in a lab coat, their Riverdale daughter in red jeans and baseball shirt.

It’s obvious that Riverdale girl is Scully’s daughter – they both have the same red hair as their characters.

02 SEP 2022

by Emma Darragh

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

10

“It was my mum’s idea. It was last minute. I wasn’t meant to be staying at her place this weekend so we just picked something easy.”

Why am I explaining myself to this girl? You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone, Evie. Don’t go through life apologising for who you are. Mum is always saying shit like that to me and she’s right, but it’s easier said than done. I spot her – Morticia – bending down to get another drink from the fridge.

“I haven’t even seen it,” I say, turning back to Cheryl. “The new Ghostbusters.”

“Why aren’t you dressed as Wednesday Addams?”

“Why should I be?”

“Well look, Obi-Wan brought Baby Yoda,” she says, pointing to Star Wars guy. “And Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin brought tiger cubs.”

She’s right, of course. Why aren’t I dressed as Wednesday Addams?

The crack of my mother’s can opening, a man laughing.

“Why aren’t you dressed as, I don’t know, something from The X-Files?”

“I just think you’d make a great Wednesday and the costume would be super easy. You look so much like your mum.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

I follow her gaze to where Morticia is standing by the dips talking animatedly to the Star Wars guy. He leans toward her, doesn’t look away until he throws his head back laughing.

Morticia tilts her head in a cute half-shrug and it occurs to me that she’s flirting with this guy and he’s really into her.

I turn back to Cheryl Blossom.

“She’s very...vivacious,” she says.

“She’s very drunk.”

She gives a half laugh and twists on her crate. “You want a drink?” she asks.

“Sure.”

Cheryl goes over to the mini fridge and brings back a beer and a Canadian Club. “Which one?” she asks, holding out the drinks to me, her back to the house.

“Huh?” “Take one. Quick.”

I take the Canadian Club and Cheryl sits back down, opens the beer.

“Serious?”

“They won’t notice.” She tilts her head back and drinks.

She’s clearly done this before.

I slip my thumbnail under the ring pull.

“They’re not supervising us, so it’s a moral failing on their part, not ours,” she says.

I crack it open and take a sip.

“Do you always drink at parties?” I ask.

“When I can.”

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

This feels like a trick question. I shrug. “I dunno.”

“Sixteen. Basically. You?” “Fifteen. Basically,” I tell her. My birthday is in five months and nineteen days.

“Cool,” she says.

“So, you like Riverdale?” I ask.

“Yep. But I’m wearing this, you know, ironically.”

“What do you mean?”

She looks at me sideways, but not in a way that feels mean.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says.

I curve both hands around the can so that nobody can see what I’m drinking. We sip our drinks. Some adults come over and sit beside us and I wait for them to notice how sus I’m acting, but they don’t. They don’t even notice us.

“Do you like Ghostbusters?” Cheryl asks.

“Like I said, I haven’t seen it.” My drink is half gone. How? Cheryl finishes the rest of her beer. “You want another one?”

“Um, okay.”

Cheryl leaves the beer bottle on the grass and heads toward the house. But instead of stopping at the mini fridge she goes inside.

Please come back.

I feel exposed without her, sure to be busted. I finish my drink in three mouthfuls and set the can down on the grass behind my crate. The plastic is digging into my bum but I don’t want to move in case someone takes our seats.

I stand, stretch my legs. So this is what it feels like.

This party isn’t so bad. The air is cool but the fire is warm.

Every now and then a breeze comes and blows smoke into my face. I close my stinging eyes.

I wonder how my mother knows all these people. She is not the mother I remember from playgroup, or the mother who packed muffins and mandarins into my lunchbox. Morticia.

I open my eyes and look up at the sky. Where’s Cheryl?

I look around and there’s Morticia, sitting across the fire from me now, listening to Star Wars guy. How long has she been there? Did she notice me drinking her drinks?

She meets my eye and waves. A few moments later she comes and sits in Cheryl’s seat.

“Are you okay? Do you want anything else to eat or drink?” she asks, her breath sweet, her eyes intense.

“Yeah,” I laugh. “We just ate, remember.” But maybe that was hours ago. I look up toward the house.

“Did you make a friend? Sarah’s daughter?”

“I dunno, kind of. Did you?” I nod toward Star Wars guy.

She laughs. “Kind of. We went to high school together.” She leans in and whispers, “I had a massive crush on him.”

She turns and looks across the fire towards him and he waves over at us both.

“You can go,” I say. “I’m good.”

“You sure? We can leave whenever you like.”

“I’m sure.”

“I love you, Evie,” she whispers and kisses my cheek. When she stands, she almost falls back into the fire. I grab her hand and pull her toward me.

“I love you too, Morticia,” I say. “You can go sit with your crush.”

She laughs and wobbles slightly on her way back to him.

I imagine her as a teenager. Pale and dark-haired, crushing on that guy. I try to picture him young, too. He’s tanned and very tall. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would’ve been bullied. But you never know. I can’t imagine her having a crush on someone. Did she write in her diary about him?

Emma Darragh lives and works in Wollongong, on Dharawal Country. Her writing has appeared in Cordite, Westerly, Meniscus and TEXT. Emma is soon to complete her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong, where she is also a sessional academic. @em_darragh

www.emmadarragh.com

02 SEP 2022

I’m hot all over now, need to go take my clothes off and wash my face and drink more tap water. Get cold again.

I sip my drink. It tastes better, much more like lemonade.

Much more like the drink I should be drinking.

“Do you feel it?” she asks.

I breathe out. “I feel drunk.”

She laughs, touches my arm again. “Me too. But no, I mean, it. Do you feel it?”

My heartbeat is everywhere in my body. Like I’m about to get my period. Like the kitchen is on fire. Like I’ve hiked all the way up to the top of Mount Keira.

I nod. Cheryl leans in and kisses me.

The moment is way too good to be true. And it doesn’t last.

The back door smacks open and I hear my mother’s voice, my mother’s laugh, tinkling like dropped cutlery. She steps into the kitchen.

“Oh. Hello. I’m interrupting. I’m just going to grab a drink and I’ll get out of your way.”

Her voice, her face – she sees it. She knows what’s happening.

She opens the freezer and takes out an ice tray. Cracks ice into a glass. Drops an ice cube, bends to pick it up, and tosses it into the sink. I want to smack her. Cheryl watches, has an amused look on her face. An annoyed look. She rolls her eyes. I look back at my mother in her long black dress. I wonder how many kitchen kisses she’s had. I picture her crushing on that guy.

“Mum,” I say.

“Yeah, baby girl?”

She puts the empty ice cube tray back in the freezer.

“Give me your phone, Mum.” “What for?” she asks, but gets it out of her bag for me.

“I’m getting our Uber,” I say.

My voice is different. I’m the boss now. Was it the kiss or the Canadian Club? I’ve never booked an Uber, but I find the app on her phone. Our lift is on its way.

I lead her out the door, I don’t look back at Cheryl in her red jeans. Don’t even know her real name.

“I guess it’s getting late, huh?” Mum says.

“It’s almost two-thirty,” I tell her.

“Oh my God. Feels like eleven-forty-five.”

I laugh. It’s a game we play. Guess the time. “You just lost two hours and forty-five minutes of your life,” I say. “Sorry.”

“It was worth it,” she says.

The Uber arrives and we get in. Mum starts out chatty, asking the guy how his night was. Her face flits in and out of shadow as the car takes us back into town. She is smudged, but beautiful. Cheryl Blossom said I look like her. The driver doesn’t really want to talk to my mother. She looks across the backseat at me and pulls a grimacing face that makes me laugh. She reaches across the backseat and takes my hand, rubs her thumb across my knuckles a couple of times. We sit like that the whole way home.

11

There would have been no internet, no Instagram to stalk him on. Did she look across the classroom in maths and imagine touching his arm, the way she’s touching it now? Did she imagine him looking at her in that way?

Cheryl comes back with two glasses and what appears to be lemonade.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she says. “I had to be sneaky.”

It tastes a bit like lemonade but more like...

“Vodka,” she whispers.

I screw my face up at the taste and she laughs.

“I think I made them a bit strong. Don’t do that with your face though or we’re done for.”

I laugh and take another sip. It warms my throat and what feels like my heart.

“What took you so long?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

I figure she must have been gone for at least half an hour.

“Got stuck talking to my mum. Then I had to wait for people to leave the kitchen.”

I take a tiny sip of my drink and try to think of something interesting to say.

“Your mum’s gonna hook up with that guy,” Cheryl says, nodding toward the fire.

God, she might be right. They’re sitting close. The neckline of her dress plunges low.

Cheryl takes a drink and shivers.

“Don’t do that with your face,” I joke.

She nudges me with her knee and I feel like I might float away, like a balloon.

Morticia’s loud laughter brings me back down to my hard plastic crate. Star Wars guy has his arm around her and is laughing into her shoulder.

“Where’s his kid gone?” I ask.

“I dunno,” Cheryl says, standing. “But I can’t drink this. We need more lemonade.”

She holds out her free hand and I take it. Her hand is soft and warm and stronger than I imagined it would be.

I let go and follow her into the house.

She goes to the fridge and takes out a bottle of lemonade.

“Drink a bit more and I’ll top you up,” she says.

I take a big swallow and can’t help shuddering.

“Take it easy,” she laughs. She pours lemonade into our glasses and stirs each drink with a spoon from the dish rack, like she lives here.

I wonder what it’s like to be so confident. And beautiful.

Those things are connected, I realise. They must be.

“Do you know where the toilet is?” I ask.

“Down that hall,” she says, pointing.

I go. I have to unbutton the whole jumpsuit and it’s cold but the cold is good. It wakes me up a bit. The toilet seat against my thighs is cold too. When I stand up, I notice that my legs are imprinted with crate lines. My face is hot, so I splash water on it, and drink straight from the tap. I look up into the mirror and see my plain pale face, my Ghostbuster costume.

Cheryl is waiting for me in the empty kitchen, leaning against the counter in her red jeans, drinking her vodka.

“You okay?” Cheryl hands me my drink.

My face is hot again. “Yeah.”

“Are you sure?” She touches my elbow, looks into my eyes.

FICTION EDITION 2022

Gethsemane

by Benjamin Hickey

02 SEP 2022

“Who are these tall people at my house? I barely recognise you!”

“Hey Mum.” Claire had greying regrowth and never wore make-up these days. She kissed Florence’s cheek. Had she felt a person’s warmth since Claire’s visit the week before?

The handshakes at church as they said “peace be with you” to one another – that was probably it. She wanted to hold her daughter tight, but said, “Where were you? I thought you’d had an accident.”

Claire pulled away. “Do we have to do this?”

“Well I’m sorry for being concerned.”

“Kids, hug your grandmother,” Claire sighed, before they’d even have had a chance to do it unprompted. Dylan awkwardly patted her back. Talia rolled her eyes but at least gave Florence a squeeze. The middle child didn’t seem to have heard.

“Chris,” Claire said, “can you put that thing down for five seconds?”

“I’m in the middle of a battle.”

Who wasn’t? The kids tramped dirt into the hallway but she didn’t let it bother her. When Talia whispered “it smells weird” and Claire hissed “don’t be rude,” she pretended not to hear.

They crowded around the kitchen table. The last time they came Chris made a crack about her Arrowroots, so she’d bought a pack of Tim Tams, which she laid out on a leaf‑shaped plate. The boys ate half the biscuits each without saying thank you, but at least they liked them.

“Hasn’t the weather been lovely?” Florence said.

Talia muttered something about climate change.

“I called the heater guy,” Claire said, “he’s coming on the twelfth.”

“My heater works perfectly well.”

“I know you love the carbon monoxide, but you’re getting a new one anyway.”

13

F

lorence hovered in her front yard and scrutinised the garden: roses wilting, camellias dry, azaleas desperate to be pruned. It was a quarter past the hour. There was no sign of them. She stooped to pick a daisy from the lawn and something clacked in her spine. Her bones were turning to chalk and her joints were turning to bone but nobody had told the weeds, which were flourishing. She’d pull them out now – blast the pain – if she wasn’t wearing decent clothes: her purple coat from the Myer sale, a floral blouse from Dimmeys and ironed slacks over her stockings.

Even perfume. Pathetic. They obviously weren’t coming.

She hadn’t laid eyes on the grandkids since Christmas, and at this rate wouldn’t till the next one, if she didn’t pop her clogs before then. That would serve Claire right. Her youngest knew full well how she felt about lateness, how much she worried. Right now, they could be mangled in some burning freeway pile-up. Claire either did it to spite her or simply didn’t care about her mother’s time. And after all, why should she? It wasn’t like Florence did anything except rattle around the house. Claire had told her plainly that the kids hated coming. What were her words? “They’re teenagers. They’ve got better things to do.” When they were little they came most weeks, to play Boggle and Jenga and bake iced biscuits shaped like wombats and magpies. But that was over, and it was better that they hadn’t come than come under duress. The last thing that she wanted was to be an imposition.

With two toots of a horn the silver Falcon swung into her driveway. Florence patted down her hair and gave a magnanimous wave. They spilled out onto the lawn: Dylan, wan and slouching with his blue hair in his eyes; Chris, kicking over one of her gnomes because he was glued to his phone; and Talia, barely thirteen, in a hot pink tube top with “Foxy” written across the front.

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“Well I’m not letting you pay for it.”

“Too late.”

Florence tried to give her an envelope with money, then relented. She hated being a charity case, but had been squirrelling away that cash for their holiday in a week’s time.

Every Labour Day weekend the family stayed at Claire’s friend’s beach house on Phillip Island. Florence had already packed.

“We’ll pick you up Friday, after school.”

“No, no, I’ll come down Saturday morning. Save you the hassle.” The kids would be fighting the whole way down and Claire’s country music gave Florence a headache.

Claire frowned. “It’s a fair hike, Mum.” “I can still drive. If I lose my independence I might as well be dead.”

“God you’re a drama queen. Just be careful.”

“I’ll meet you at the house at midday sharp.”

“You can only come,” Claire added, “if you wear sunscreen and a hat this time.”

“I don’t get sunburnt. Your grandfather had some Greek in him—” “You got fucking sunstroke last year.”

The kids all looked up from their phones.

“I’m sorry for swearing, but I was worried, Mum.” Florence’s face went hot. “It was embarrassing,” Claire had said. She focused on smiling placidly. The kids babbled on about this and that. Talia wanted her septum pierced.

“Well Ma, we better love you and leave you.”

“You just got here.”

“We’re heading to Brandsmart. School shoe sale.”

So that was it. Florence was a stop on the way.

F

lorence lived on a highway, which had been a dirt track when they’d moved there fifty years ago. Now, fine dust and headlights seeped through the windows and under the door. She was used to the traffic and rattling glass, but on some nights – on that night – a truck smashed through the weatherboard and pinned her, bed and all, up against the wall. Her mattress was the wood, the bumper bar the wire, and she was a mouse, bleeding in a trap.

She woke from that dream with a dry mouth and fumbled for the mug on her bedside table, beside the glass with her dentures and the print of Christ. She hoisted herself out of bed, pulled on her mauve flannel dressing gown and felt her way to the toilet. The step before the bathroom was three inches high, and easy to miss in the dark. Each time her foot found level floor she felt relief, and fear, because it was closer.

But if she turned on the lights she’d never get back to sleep, and she knew the house like her skin. She’d paid it off herself, long after Frank had died.

The step was no problem – it never was – and Florence was tucked up in bed again, almost asleep when she thought of her mother, who’d been killed by a two-step stepladder. She’d been getting a tin of baking soda out of the top cupboard at

S

he counted down the days until Phillip Island. On Monday she had a go at the weeds. On Tuesday she took the train to the market for her groceries, including strawberries for a sponge, Chris’ favourite.

She won twelve dollars on the tatts that week and bought offcuts from the butcher for the maggies. “Aren’t you beautiful?” she said to one, as it downed a scrap of meat.

It looked at her and warbled. On Wednesday she went to Dr Ling’s. Her blood was going well but he wanted to keep an eye on her heart. On Thursday she went out on the church’s food van, and ladled out minestrone. And on Friday, as she whipped cream for the sponge, her middle child Rosalyn called. One of her Grade Twos had put up his hand, smirked, looked her in the eye and asked, “Miss Brooke, what’s a virgin?” Florence tried to feel sympathy but the blubbering made it hard.

“I’m not sure what you want me to say. Did you discipline him?”

“Of course not, Mum,” Rosalyn sniffed. “He’s got ADHD and his parents are getting divorced.”

Rosalyn had been to teachers’ college for free and was forever jetting off to that ludicrous ashram. At her age, Florence was raising three children, alone, on nothing.

Industrial compo was pathetic back then, and the company had legions of lawyers. Six months’ wages: that was what Frank’s life was worth. She’d had to sell the car. When the hospital wouldn’t give her more shifts, Florence had cleaned houses as well.

“If he was being a brat he was being a brat. Six cuts to the hand, in my day.”

“You’re missing the point. I’m scared I’ll always be alone, and when you die no-one will care about me.”

She’d hate to inconvenience Roz by dying. “Oh come on, you’ve got plenty of friends. Then there’s Claire and Gordon, Aunty May—” “You know that’s not the same.”

“Well why don’t you try dating again?”

“What do you mean, try?” There was that note in Rosalyn’s voice, the mean streak.

“Have you had a go at those Weight Watchers recipes I sent you?”

The line went dead. Florence’s hands shook. Rosalyn always wanted something. Gordon, her eldest, was even worse. He only called for money – as if she’d ever had any

02 SEP 2022

“A

nd in the Garden of Gethsemane,” said Father Isaac, whistling his esses, “the Apostles were supposed to look out for Him, but they fell asleep and the Romans came.”

Florence shifted in her seat. Ernie Cuthbert was snoozing in the pew in front. She wondered if she should prod him awake, like his wife Eileen used to, but of course it wasn’t her place.

“They weren’t Judas, but they betrayed Christ all the same. That’s why sloth is the deadliest sin: more harm comes from the absence of love than the presence of anything else.

Desolation is the space that’s left when we abstain from good.

They weren’t there, so He was alone. And in the Garden of Gethsemane…” He shuffled the pages, white head bobbing under the tabernacle. “Sorry…In the Garden…” He always lost his place these days. He never made jokes, or got fired up about the kids in refugee camps. And he paused before he prayed for the bishop, like he was pulling out a splinter.

Florence still came to see the others – the few that were left – and look at the stained glass. She joined the hymns and swallowed the host, but the light through the glass was the only part of mass that was holy. The red was pure blood, alive, like when it dripped from His sides. The orange was fire. The yellow was lemon cheesecake. The blue was her kids’ eyes, when they were only just born. White was ice, and purple was the night, and green were the Otways, where she used to go bushwalking. God was all that light at once. God was solid. God was see-through. God was a mosaic, mortar, the alignment of little pieces.

She couldn’t find her friend Angela after mass. Sipping tea, she read the noticeboard: dancing lessons, missing cat.

Should she teach guitar again? Her arthritis had stopped her playing at mass, but perhaps she could instruct?

“Florence!” said Mary Gibbons. “I like your coat.”

It was the one she wore every week, as Mary knew full well.

“Have you seen Angela?”

“You haven’t heard? She had a fall – broken wrist.”

“God. Is she—” “Hospital, yes. I’ve already sent lilies.” She lent in closer.

“Did you hear about Father?”

Of course she hadn’t.

“They’re retiring him.”

Her stomach turned. “Why?”

“Health reasons, apparently – who knows what that means. They’re bringing in a Franciscan. Vietnamese, of course.”

“Sorry,” said Florence, “I have to go.”

She drove Ernie Cuthbert home, who snored like a dog the whole way. She’d considered remarrying after Frank, but was glad she never had.

She called Angela’s mobile. No answer. She dug out her kids’ confirmation photos. Father Isaac, hair black, smiling, had his hands on their shoulders: Gordon, Rosalyn, Claire.

Even cathedrals don’t last forever. When her little church was demolished or fell down – as, one day, it must – she wondered what would happen to the glass.

15

her house. Shattered hip, couldn’t reach the phone. Stupid.

Mum had been old, but younger than Florence was now.

How much had she yelled, before she gave up? By the time they visited three days had past. Frank broke in through the window. Too late: dehydration. All three of Florence’s children had seen the body. Claire was still in pigtails.

Then, not long later, Frank went too. Faulty scaffolding – fell headfirst. Florence was orphaned and widowed in consecutive years. Absurd.

She breathed deeply, counted sheep, recited the books in the Bible: Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith… But she knew, now, that there was no point. Every time she closed her eyes baking soda was spilt across the floor and her mother’s green bakelite phone was ringing on its hook. Her bed was a tower and her grandkids, still babies, were crawling off the edge.

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changed into her nightie with the bluebells. The heat closed in. As she lay pinned to the towering bed she’d heard them talk through the walls: Didn’t say a word all night. Dementia?

Sunstroke? The hungry mice had scraped and gnawed. Claire had definitely laughed.

She put the shells back under her bed.

O

n Saturday, Florence planned her route to the island in the Melway over marmalade toast. She dragged her tartan overnight bag into the boot of her Mazda and put the strawberry sponge on the passenger seat.

She turned the key. ABC Classic was playing one of Chopin’s Nocturnes. She looked at her roses in the garden: dead. She turned the engine off, went into the garage for the secateurs, and chopped the heads off one by one.

Was she a joke?

She took her luggage out of the car, locked it, went back to the kitchen and did a crossword, then another. The clock passed ten, then eleven. At noon, the time she’d said she’d meet Claire, she took her clothes out of her bag and folded them all away. The phone rang – she ignored it and made and ate a tomato and corned beef sandwich. It rang again at quarter past two, and then at ten to three. The phone was white, with square grey buttons and a little flashing light.

Twenty past three, a quarter to four. The intervals shrunk.

The sun fell. She turned on Family Feud.

At 6.01 she answered on the fifth ring. “Hello, Florence speaking.”

“Mum,” Claire said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“But where are you? I was about to call the…” Claire’s voice broke. She started to cry. Florence looked at the sponge cake in the bin. A vivid rage reared up in her and she said it like she’d practised: “Well, I didn’t want to be an embarrassment.”

Benjamin Hickey writes short stories and essays in Naarm/ Melbourne. His pieces have won the 2022 Newcastle Short Story Award and the 2019 Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Fiction Award. Benjamin teaches professional writing at RMIT and is working on a collection of interconnected stories about people struggling to connect under capitalism.

02 SEP 2022

@solomonfaust

17

– and hadn’t spoken to her since Christmas. He had four grown-up kids by three different women, scattered all over Queensland. She sent them cards but got nothing back.

Apparently the eldest was in prison.

Where had she gone wrong? God knew she’d tried her best, though she supposed it was God who killed Frank. The only person who was kind to her was Claire. She came every week, fixed things, organised a boy to mow the lawn. But even Claire was short with her, and mimicked Florence to the kids in the voice of a shrill and imperious duchess – Florence had overheard. Claire helped her out of obligation, the kind you have to a bank. Maybe she was after a bigger slice of the will.

Florence went to her bedroom and dug out the seashells from the previous trip: a tiger-striped spiral of ochre and peach; a spearhead of mother of pearl. She turned them in her rheumatoid hands. Embarrassing.

Last year’s weekend had been fun, hadn’t it? Florence had a good memory, probably because not much happened in her life. They’d played Pictionary and visited the penguins.

Sleeping had been hell, of course: the too-soft bed, the mouse in the wall. A “little friend”, Claire had said. Every time the blanket had brushed against Florence’s skin, she’d flinched. Ever since then she would sometimes find herself thinking that the mouse was creeping around her feet.

Where had she read about an old person who was eaten alive by rats, too weak or demented to yell out for help?

Claire’s friend must have known the place was infested, but did nothing. You could have all the money in the world and still live in filth. She remembered that on the Sunday, Claire had made bacon and eggs, which wasn’t the sort of thing Florence did for herself. When Claire had told her to put on sunscreen, Florence had said “I’m hardly going to down there in a bikini.”

They’d laughed at that, or pretended to. Then Dylan had said “Yeah, but the sun’s worse now, because your generation screwed the ozone layer.”

Claire had told him not to speak to his grandmother that way, and Dylan had said, “What? I could have said fucked,” and Claire had yelled at him.

She remembered picking up seashells from the hard, damp sand just up from the water’s edge. Leaning down had hurt her back, but Talia had helped. She hadn’t started high school back then and still liked spending time with her Nan. Or had Claire told her to, as a chore?

On a beach chair, wrists facing the sky, Florence had soaked in the sun for hours, and when she’d stood up the beach had spun. She’d wobbled as they walked back up through the scrub. Rosalyn had driven down for dinner and whinged about her principal. The grandkids had eaten with their mouths open, like cows, the sticky mush rolling between their teeth. Florence hadn’t been hungry. Claire had given Florence a glass of prosecco, which she’d sipped while the sisters drank the rest of the bottle.

“Do you want some water, Mum?” one of them had asked.

Florence had shaken her head. The dinner passed like a show on telly with the sound turned down. She excused herself and went to bed. Each step felt like the bathroom step. Balancing herself against the dresser, she slowly

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FICTION EDITION 2022

Where I Lived Before

by Katherine Smyrk

I

can’t sleep, and I blame The Screecher and her friends and their party, but really it’s the rushing of blood in my ears and the fist squeezing tight in my chest.

My head spins with the flowery chemical smell of carpet cleaner, which I don’t think I vacuumed up properly before moving in my bed. The traffic on the road outside never seems to stop coming. My window rattles wildly in its frame as big trucks roar past, heading for the freeway. The music from next door pulses underneath it all and, every once in a while, there are the screeches. Whenever I think I might finally be about to drift off, the sound yanks me back from the edge of sleep like a hand tugging on my shoulder. I think The Screecher’s dancing. I think she’s having a good night.

02 SEP 2022

I

draft messages to Ria in my head while eating twominute noodles in my room, trying not to splash the chilli liquid onto my new white doona cover. She never would have bought anything so impractical. I imagine telling her about the feud with the neighbours.

I heard her, The Screecher, while I was in the back

courtyard having an anxiety cigarette, blowing smoke over the fence, hoping my housemates wouldn’t notice. I’d told them I was a non-smoker in the interview. As I tried to regulate my breathing around the rhythm of inhales and exhales, her voice carried back over to me in sharp, painful bursts. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, couldn’t tell if she was angry. Or happy. Or scared. Just loud.

“It’s the young party people versus the old folks who have to get up in the morning,” I imagine writing to Ria. “I never thought I would be on the old folks’ side!” I wonder if that’s the right place to put the apostrophe. She would know.

19

“T

he Screecher is having a party tonight,” declares Andy as he strides into the lounge room. “I just saw her pulling a goddam keg out of her car.” Meg groans from the adjoining kitchen, where she’s chopping a capsicum for dinner, the red juice bleeding into the wooden chopping board.

“The Screecher?” I ask from my perch on the armchair in the corner.

“Oh, you’ll know her soon enough,” Andy says, dumping his backpack on the table and pulling out single cans of beer, wet with condensation.

“She lives with the other youths next door,” adds Meg, tilting her head to the left. I’m not sure if she’s being ironic.

I don’t laugh. “You’ve never heard anybody reach such decibels. It’s quite impressive, really.”

I don’t know whether the meal is for all of us or not, so I wait to see if Meg will offer. The smell of garlic and onion in the pan fills the room like memory.

As I lie perfectly still in my bed, trying to trick my body into letting go, I think about just going to the party. I would get up and slip on a dress, spray perfume on my wrists. The front door would be open and I would go right in, walking confidently to the kitchen where I would find a drink. I would go to wherever the dancing had started, and I would stand right in the middle and dance with my eyes closed, the taste of gin on my tongue. And when I opened my eyes again there would be a beautiful woman with dark hair and a mouth like a bow standing in front of me, and we would go to the corner and kiss for hours. I would take her home eventually, and we would sink slowly together onto the white expanse of my big bed. Right in the very centre.

I do sleep, eventually, uneasily, the noises of the night throbbing through my dreams. Garbage trucks wake me in the first pearly hours of the morning, so loud it seems impossible.

S

20

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trands of Meg’s long brown hair are all over the house, but she doesn’t seem to notice. They’re curled on the edge of the bath, caught among the clean laundry, snagged around my toothbrush handle, hiding between the pages of the newspaper. I think with sudden sympathy of my dad when my sister and I were teenagers, swearing under his breath as he pulled matted clumps out of the drain.

I put on rubber gloves to clean the bathroom, wanting to be useful, practical, a good housemate. I scrub under the toilet seat and wipe pinkish mould from the rim of the drain.

With thick rubbery fingers I pick up the strands of hair and try to put them in the bin, but they won’t come off the ends of the gloves when I want them to, instead wafting infuriatingly to the floor. I find myself on my knees plucking at them, eyes hot with almost-tears.

I can hear music from next door again, the bass throbbing like a worried heart. I stand up and stare out the bathroom window. If I were to balance my belly on the sill and lean right across, I would almost be able to touch the side of their house.

Through the gaps in the fence I can see upturned milk crates and the trunk of a stunted little tree and an inexplicable pile of small white pebbles.

The front door slams and Meg clatters into the hallway, humming to herself. I lock the bathroom door, and stand there dumbly on the tiles, still wearing the rubber gloves. I let myself imagine, just for a second, that it’s Ria coming back after a day at work. Her hair is short and straight and never seemed to moult.

T

he Screecher has left her emptied bin on the street for the whole week and it has toppled onto its side on the footpath, its lid flung back indecently. I peer in as I step around it, unsure of what I’m expecting to see. There’s an old catalogue stuck to the bottom, its colours running like tear tracks down the page.

I hadn’t expected Andy to accept an airport pickup. I only offered because I wanted his girlfriend to think I was nice and then he was telling me his flight number and saying he would buy me a pint. I don’t know the best route to the airport.

There’s surely some back way of getting onto the freeway, but I didn’t ask.

The bitumen is still wet from a storm the night before, and there’s a mush of leaf litter and rubbish clogging the gutters.

There are brown leaves and white bird poo on the roof of my car. The weather is still unsettled and I have this windy feeling, like I don’t have a firm footing and could be blown somewhere completely unrecognisable before I’d even realised it.

D

riving back from the airport, I can see Ria’s hand stretched out under my nose as she badly mimes a plane coming in to land like the ones that roar over the car. She’s smiling up at them and I’m gazing at the half-moons of her fingernails. I don’t realise that Cherie is talking to me. “Sorry, what did you say?” I swivel my head over my shoulder slightly. I’m surprised to see she’s sitting in the middle seat.

“I just asked if you’ve ever been to Tasmania,” she says airily, palms on the front seat shoulders. Andy is twisted around so he can see her. He has new freckles on his nose.

“Um, yeah,” I respond, turning back to face the road.

There’s a long red truck ahead and I wonder what it’s carrying. “When I was a kid. But not for a long while.”

“Oh, Julia, you would love it now!” I start a little when she says my name, realising I haven’t heard anyone say it aloud for a while.

“Mmm, I’m sure I would.”

“Really, Jules,” says Andy and I jolt again, thinking of Ria calling me Crown Jules or Family Jules or Run the Jules and laughing too hard at her own jokes. The road waves in front of me like it’s also suddenly feeling dizzy. “There’s so much amazing food and booze and art,” he says. “Hobart is actually kind of cool.”

I keep going with the conversation all the way along the freeway and up the Bell Street exit, but really I’m observing it from high up, watching us through the car roof. I see myself nod in the right places and even laugh a little, hands diligently at ten and two.

I see myself point to it, the skinny semi-detached with the dark brown door and, like I’m watching a movie, hear myself say to Andy, “That’s where I lived before I moved in with you. That one there, with the olive tree out front.” I’m not sure how I keep control of the car as I’m driving and pointing and talking and watching through the roof and at the same time sitting on the front verandah next to Ria while she rolls a cigarette with smooth twists and tells me that if you just loosen your focus a little bit you can convince yourself the roar of passing cars is actually the sound of the ocean.

“Home sweet home,” says Andy, and I’m pulled back into my body with a sick lurch, realising we’re now out the front of the house. Our house. A tram thunders past so close that I’m surprised my wing mirror doesn’t go flying right off. As they get out of the car and start pulling bags from the boot I stay in my seat, palms on thighs, gritting my teeth against the wild urge to slam my foot on the accelerator and roar away, scattering their bags onto the road, careening through intersections until I’m back at the airport, until I’m buying a ticket, until I’m in the air on my way to her.

I

wake up lying diagonally across my bed, my head fuzzy, my eyes gluey. When I pull back my curtains I see that the garbage trucks have come and gone, that the bins have been emptied. I’d slept right through the whole thing.

Katherine Smyrk is a writer and broadcaster, currently working as a reporter in north-east Victoria on Waveroo and Dhudhuroa land. Her novella was shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Literary Prize 2017. She is the former deputy editor of The Big Issue (and has always wanted to be published in the Fiction Edition). @ksmyrk

02 SEP 2022

W

e keep the back door open while we play cards. The air wafts through the room in wet, sweet-smelling bursts. There’s the muffled thump of music from next door, building up and then dropping down hard, and I find my shoulders moving in time with the beat, despite myself. It’s not late, but the sky is low and dark, so Meg turns on the lamp in the corner. The light is liquid and golden and the cards slap softly on the shining wood of the kitchen table. My fingers smell like smoke as they sift through my options. I have a terrible hand, but I don’t care all that much. Meg opens a bottle of wine that smells like passionfruit. Whenever it’s her turn, she lays her cards onto the pile with a triumphant flourish for all to see, even when it’s a pair of threes. The game is slow, punctuated by the long pauses of people forgetting it’s their turn. “Julia, you’re up,” comes Cherie’s voice, slipping gently into my head.

“Oh shit, sorry guys.” I can’t go, so I have to pick up a stack of cards, unwieldy and slippery in my slow-moving fingers. I think of the two-dollar shop in Port Fairy where I found a green plastic card-holder, the kind made for kids so they can hold their cards more easily. I bought it for Ria and she laughingly called me an arsehole but then brought it out at the campsite later, clutching it with one small hand, wordlessly fanning her cards.

A new song comes on next door and there’s a particularly loud screech, cracking through our foggy calm. We all reach for our wine glasses at the same time. “Every time she screeches, we drink,” says Meg and we groan.

Andy gathers the stack to shuffle, and looks up at me mischievously. “You weren’t here for my magic phase, were you?”

Meg laughs with her mouth wide open. “Oh my god, Julia, you really missed out.”

“Were you any good?”

Andy starts shuffling the pack, making the cards whirr between his palms. “Wanna see?”

“Absolutely!”

He spends some time shuffling, whispering to himself. His cheeks are a little pink. After I’ve picked a card, looked at it, and returned it to the pack, he starts shuffling again, staring straight at me, blue eyes small and round. It goes on for quite a while and I start to feel bad for him, and wonder if I should pretend he got it right just to make him feel better. Then, hands still. Cards together. Eyes level. A sneak of a smile. He spreads the cards out smooth as butter on the table and mine appears: a four of hearts, right there, like magic. We open more wine to celebrate.

21

I

hadn’t planned to come out of my room for the rest of the day, but Andy had insisted, wanting to thank me for picking them up, and soon we’re sitting in the back courtyard smoking two joints, passing them around the circle in a fluid clockwise motion so no-one has to wait for long, the smoke settling down around our shoulders like a misty shawl. There’s a few fat splotches on the concrete, an angry cold spray of wind, and then within seconds the rain is drumming down hard. We scramble for the cover of the verandah. There’s the smell of cold water hitting the warm concrete, and sudden, high-pitched shrieks from the backyard next door. “My hair!” a woman bellows, her voice surging over the fence. Then more of the shrieks. Meg rolls her eyes.

“The Screecher gets wet,” I say quietly and am shocked when they all laugh, big and loud.

Under the verandah, we continue passing the joints, listening to the rush of water through the battered gutters.

I wonder at what point in my life I will start thinking about cleaning the leaves out of gutters.

It’s quiet for a while and I think The Screecher has gone in to dry off. But just as we’re standing up to go inside, her voice sails clear right over the fence. “Tomorrow you’re going to meet my slutty friend,” she says to someone, and we all freeze like it’s musical chairs, smiles ready to go. “Claudia,” she adds. “She’s fucked more than one hundred guys.”

FICTION EDITION 2022

Balladonia

by Claire Aman Dot sliced her thumb on the ham machine. She asked Dot, “When did you cut your finger?”

“My birthday, remember?”

“What date?”

“Fifth of October.”

My mother flipped the pages back and forth: November, October, November.

Dot and Kerry gave each other a look. Dot put her hands on her hips: “What are you working out, bub?”

N

ow, Con comes in and takes a choc milk from the fridge. He can have anything he wants. T-bone every night. It’s hard to keep a mechanic here.

“Who was that, babe?” he asks.

“When?” She reaches for the tomato sauce.

“On the phone.”

He could reach all the way over the counter if he wanted

“Nan.” She twists the nozzle open and shut, leaving sauce on her fingers.

The guy waiting for the salad roll is standing behind the postcard carousel, watching my mother and father. Only my mother can see him. The humming from the drinks fridge is the only sound. My mother takes a step back. Then Dot’s at the hatch with a paper bag. Con heads for the door, chest out, legs thrusting forward. The guy pays for his salad roll along with insulation tape and a coil of copper-wire.

“Couldn’t possibly borrow any pliers could I? For my stereo?”

My mother points out the window towards the workshop.

Ask the mechanic, she’s about to say, but he turns back to the pegboard where the accessories hang. She goes to the kitchen. Brian keeps tools under the sink. She grabs a pair of longnose pliers before Dot can turn around.

“Thanks a lot,” says the guy. “Hope you don’t need them for a while. I have no idea what I’m doing.” He turns the copper-wire in his hands. There are already a couple of stray loops.

My mother stands wiping the counter. The guy says he’s been working up north in the mines. “You can only do it for so long,” he says, unwrapping the salad roll. He takes a delicate bite. He’s skinny, with a plait and a Pink Floyd T-shirt.

“I know,” says my mother. She asks where he’s heading.

“Melbourne,” he says. “I’ve got friends there, we used to work on a fruit farm.”

Then he asks, “Was that your boyfriend?”

She looks at the dishrag in her hand, looks out the window.

02 SEP 2022

to.

23

I

n the phone box, my mother presses the telephone receiver to her ear. She lifts one foot and tucks it against the other leg. She steadies herself. Across the other side of the petrol bowsers, Con Constantinou – my father – stands outside the workshop with his legs planted wide, his eyes on her. He folds his arms. She fingers the telephone cord. It’s braided steel. She is not my mother, not yet.

The light on the telephone flashes red. Her foot slips to the ground. Working fast she fits her last two coins into the slot. It’s quiet, then a voice: “Yes?” Her heart thrums high.

“Yes?” “I need to make an appointment,” she says. The red light flashes again, followed by beep, beep beep, and then the perforating dial tone.

Her hand slaps the metal. She shoves her order pad back in her pocket and swings the phone-box door open. Con tries to call her over with a jerk of his head, but she keeps her eyes on the dirt as she crosses between the bowsers and back in through the shop. She skirts around Kerry and Dot at the kitchen bench and out through the back door.

Brian, the boss, is outside stacking bottle crates. She shuts the toilet door and checks her pants. Nothing. She flushes the toilet so Brian thinks she’s been.

Tea-break is over. She goes to the kitchen and lifts a boiled chicken from the pot. The skin is grey. With a sharp knife she shreds the meat. Later, she’ll make a stack of chicken and lettuce sandwiches for the Greyhound. The carcass lies with its legs splayed.

The bus passengers always buy ready-made sandwiches because they’re scared of being left behind in Balladonia.

There’s nothing here but the roadhouse, the Nullarbor Plain stretching out in every direction, and the night sky that’s speckled with millions of stars.

Balladonia, like the poison belladonna, a beautiful, sad ballad, a ballerina. My mother isn’t staying long – she’s saving for Paris. She’s already saved nine hundred dollars since she herself stepped off the Greyhound. In 1978, that’s a lot.

The shop bell tings. At the counter, my mother writes down a guy’s order. A salad roll with cheese. She tears off the page and spikes it on the nail. Most of the time it’s the same thing – steak sandwich, hamburger with the lot, large chips or Chiko roll. On the last page of the order pad, Dot has written King Edward Memorial Hospital, Perth.

Underneath, in my mother’s hand, is the number from Directory Assistance.

The night before, she stood at the calendar, remembering the box of tampons she pocketed from the shelves the day

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

24

The salad roll guy, it’s Quinn. This is how he came into our life. I used to think he was my uncle.

Con has long black eyelashes. He looks like an action figure in his bulging overalls, all fists and biceps. Most days, my mother and Con take a lunch break in my mother’s room behind the roadhouse. She brings pies and choc milk.

They lie on the narrow bed and eat, they have sex, doze.

Then my father buttons his overalls and walks around to the workshop. He gets an hour for lunch but my mother has three hours because she works a split shift. So every day after Con’s break, she gets two hours to herself. She showers, washing the meaty smell out of her hair. She opens her bottle of cucumber and avocado skin cream and smooths it into her face. She brushes her hair in the tiny mirror.

Then she spreads a blanket on the floor beside the bed and opens Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha. The book is a faded orange, left in the room by an earlier cook. Inside are pictures of yoga poses with step-by-step directions. Outside is stony ground and blue sky. There are trucks, wind, flies.

There’s Con. But my mother is a half-moon, a triangle, a boat. Balancing on one leg she is a tree.

At night while my mother works in the kitchen, Con and Brian sit on old car seats outside the workshop, drinking.

Con has brown eyes, which is where I get mine. My mother has green-blue eyes and wears green-blue bangles and rings. Her hair is like a cape. Lately she doesn’t look into Con’s eyes. This is a long way from anywhere and she is only passing through. She keeps to herself.

My mother is in the cool-room looking for bacon. The smell is old blood, milk and cabbage. She comes out with her hand clamped over her mouth.

“You ever heard of the pill?” says Kerry. My mother doesn’t answer.

After lunch, Con fills her doorway. “Babe,” he says.

“What’s the matter babe?”

“Nothing.” She pulls her sarong around herself.

Suddenly his arms have made a cage. His hands splay on the wall, one on each side of her head. He smiles, glittering, muscular.

“We got no secrets, do we babe?”

She shakes her head.

Today she doesn’t do the yoga. She comes to the kitchen, squeezing past Brian as he lugs the slops bucket out. There’s a telephone on the bench but no-one’s allowed to use it. Dot catches Kerry’s eye and they watch my mother at the shop counter, pressing a five dollar note into the till and scooping out coins. They fold their arms as the door swings shut behind her.

Con reverses a spluttering Kombi van out of the workshop.

His head tracks my mother as she passes. He gets out and holds the driver’s door for a bald guy in a singlet, who climbs in and revs the engine. Con goes behind the van and opens the engine hatch.

My mother reaches the phone box. She pushes the door shut, stacks the coins and lays out her order pad and pen. Standing firm on her left leg, she rests her right foot against her left thigh, breathing evenly through her nose.

She stretches upwards through her spine. She is a tree. She

waits for the dial tone. But someone’s outside the phone box.

It’s the guy who ordered the salad roll. He’s come from the other direction and mustn’t have seen my mother in there.

When he sees her, he smiles, shrugs and turns his back.

There’s a picnic table further along. He sits, resting his chin on his hand.

She dials the number. The coins drop, followed by a click: “King Edward Memorial Hospital.” It sounds like a question.

She rises on her toes, balancing.

“I need to speak to someone.”

“Yes?” Con leans out from behind the Kombi. The red light flashes once and a coin falls.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

Sweat trickles from her armpits. She’s like a solitary doll balancing in a glass cabinet. She knows what she’s going to say. But now Con’s climbed back into the driver’s seat of the Kombi and is revving it over and over, his eyes on the phone box. It sounds as if the Kombi’s going to take off. His head looks like a bullet.

“Can I help you?”

She grips the receiver in both hands. “I need to see someone.”

The words echo off the glass and spill under the door. Her ankle trembles; her foot drops to the ground. The Kombi gives a roar, then there’s a bang like a shot. A cloud of black smoke rises.

The voice on the phone says, “Sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you.”

Her heart is thudding like a wooden thing.

“Sorry, are you still there?”

My mother pushes the receiver into the cradle and the coins jingle down. The workshop looks as though it’s far away. Con and the bald guy march back and forth in the smoke, shouting, their arms jerking like marionettes. Brian’s outside now, shielding his eyes with his hands. A stink blows over to the phone box where my mother stands behind the glass, her arms dangling. The sky is too close to the earth.

It’s impossible to think. She stares at the silver button in the centre of the telephone. Important. Do not press button unless instructed by operator.

She looks up. Con and Brian are pushing the Kombi into the workshop. Con, ridiculous in his tight overalls, flicks a last look over his shoulder before they disappear through the doors.

The salad roll guy stands up. Now he’s at the phone box again, running his coins from hand to hand. My mother holds the door open for him as she steps out.

“Thanks,” he says. “Could you hear anything on the phone?”

She shakes her head.

“I’m glad he’s not working on my car,” he says. “Hey are you a dancer?”

“No.” She swallows.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I just have to get out of here.”

“I can understand that,” he says.

A semi roars past stacked with cars at odd angles,

followed by a couple of cars and another semi. The traffic always bunches up – nothing else will come for ages now.

He asks her if she wouldn’t do him a quick favour, could she? A small thing.

“Maybe. What?” Not because he thought she was a dancer, but because in the shop, earlier, his face had been something steady, a light.

“Dial a number, see if my little sister answers.”

“Your sister?”

“Yep. If she picks it up, hand it to me.”

“How would I know it’s your sister?”

“She’s a kid. If it’s an adult, hang up.”

“Just hang up?”

“It’ll only take a minute. I’ll stand over there so your boyfriend doesn’t wig out.”

They look at each other.

“He’s busy,” she says. Con blowing up that van. It’s almost funny. “How old is she?”

“Twelve today,” he says with a little flourish, as if his sister’s standing right here.

“So I just dial the number?”

“Yep. I wouldn’t ask, but just, I don’t feel like talking to my old man, that’s all.” He looks away with this rigid sort of grin, tugging his shirt around himself.

She pulls out her order pad. “What’s the number?”

He writes it down. It’s New South Wales. The coins are warm from his hand.

“So if it’s a man’s voice, I hang up?”

“Yep, or his wife. Just hang up.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks, thank you. I hope your boyfriend doesn’t mind.”

The guy looks at her.

It’s just a small thing. She listens for the dial tone, fits the coins in the slot and dials the number, looking back at him.

There’s a click on the seventh ring. The coins drop and the light flashes. The voice is adult, male: “Hello? Hello?”

She listens to the breathing.

“Is that you Quinn?” says the voice. “Is that you?” She holds still. “Piss off. You’re not wanted, Quinn. You were never wanted.”

The salad roll guy’s eyes are on her. When she hangs up he nods, all his useless hope leaking out. She turns away for a moment to arrange her face, and then gently gives him back his handful of coins.

“R I

in my bunny rug, Melbourne, July 1979, written below in her handwriting. I can remember Quinn, just. She still writes to him at his monastery in Thailand.

The sonographer points to a bright shape on the screen.

It’s my baby, like a new star forming in space.

Claire Aman lives in Grafton, NSW. She has worked as a forklift driver, roadhouse cook and environmental planner.

Her short story collection Bird Country was published in 2017. Her stories have appeared in Southerly, Island, Heat, Griffith Review and Best Australian Stories, and short‑listed twice in the Elizabeth Jolley Prize. @claire.aman.9

25

think of my mother now as my uterus appears on the ultrasound screen. I twist my head further to watch the clusters and skeins, swirling, webbed, pulsing, infinite.

Later, when I ring her, I will tell her it reminded me of nebulae. Like the night sky on the Nullarbor, she’ll say.

I think of her photo album with the yellowed instamatic photo with my mother’s old friend Quinn holding me close

02 SEP 2022

an off with a bloke, just like that,” she imagines Dot saying as she and Quinn drive through the desert. “Up the duff too.”

On the Monday, Brian will put an ad in The West Australian for a waitress/cook.

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FICTION EDITION 2022

The Gun

by Jenni Mazaraki as a macabre, putrid warning. They looked like her bathrobe: its red velveteen placed tenderly over the back of the chair in the corner of her bedroom at home. Its pockets were deep enough for a pencil, its rounded collar a comfort to smooth between her fingers at bedtime while her parents argued about the dishes, the garbage bins, the electricity bill.

02 SEP 2022

D

ean stood by and watched the men shoot at the tin cans lined up on the fence. He handled the guns expertly. Knew how to flick this bit and that bit up and down, making snapping metal sounds with the weapon. Rosie knew she had to look after the younger kids, but put her sister down on the trampoline and walked to the front of the house to see what was happening. She saw Dean take his shot before he handed the gun to Rob. “Good boy,” said Rob without looking at his son. Dean said nothing and began biting his fingernails.

No-one noticed Rosie. They were too distracted by Meg, who was bringing out a plate of sandwiches. Rosie watched as the men made a big show of thanking Meg as she placed the sandwiches on the fold-out card table, against the house.

“Dig in boys,” said Meg. Dave leaned towards her and reached his hand up her skirt. Rosie watched Meg laugh and push his hand away, as though it were no more aggravating than a fly buzzing around her body.

“Settle down, you.” Meg turned towards her husband and gave him a quick kiss before she walked back to the house.

The men watched her disappear through the doorway into the kitchen. With Meg gone, Uncle Rob turned to get another beer from the esky. Caught a glimpse of Rosie.

“Oh, here we go. Little Miss Smartypants wants to see how it’s done, ay?”

Rosie bit the side of her cheek, pressed her lips together.

She tried not to roll her eyes at her uncle, knew it would only encourage his mocking.

Her uncle was careless with his words and hands. His glances were always too lingering, his comments always teasing – wanting Rosie to respond in some way that she refused to. Each time the families came together, he made a joke of offering Rosie fifty bucks for a kiss. A hundred if she sat on his lap.

“No,” said Rosie, her arms across her body and a scowl on her face, which she hoped made her disapproval felt. She watched the men and her young cousin shoot bullet after bullet towards the fence. They looked like children with new toys. Under the makeshift tin verandah, their energy could barely be contained. Rosie didn’t want to step closer, for

27

T

he kids were told to go and play on the other side of the house away from the men. In the wasteland that they called the backyard, there was the trampoline, the totem-tennis pole, one plastic bat with a cracked handle. Last holiday, Rosie had started making a cubby. Large sticks leaned up against each other, tent-like. Bark covered part of the structure, placed half-heartedly. Someone else had been here since then. Dried leaves piled up around the base.

Inside, there were empty chip packets and crushed soft-drink cans. A single, forgotten sandal lay at the back, half buried.

Rosie resented being told to go with the younger kids. She was the default babysitter whenever the adults were playing cards, or drinking or shooting guns.

At twelve, she was the one who helped the younger kids when they went to the toilet. She brought them drinks, broke up squabbles. Not that she could imagine her future-self as someone’s mother. The role of babysitter was thrust upon her. She had no choice in the matter, not really. Holding her baby sister on her hip, she regretted wearing her new white sneakers to this place. Tried to step carefully to keep them clean. As she watched the other kids bounce on the trampoline, she listened to the men shoot at their targets, laughing as they swigged their beer. She heard Uncle Rob and his friend Dave talking to her dad. Each sharp crack of the gun made her ears ring, loud enough that she feared it would be hard to sleep.

The mothers were inside preparing lunch. So much food for three families. Dave and Meg had arrived in the morning, after driving up from Melbourne with their three kids. Rosie couldn’t see her mother through the window, but knew she was inside the house making sandwiches with Meg. Aunt Cath had popped down to the local shops to pick up some extra supplies.

This holiday house was nothing more than a simple fibro shack, a couple of hours from Melbourne. It belonged to Rosie’s aunt and uncle, and was a gathering place of sorts to waste time at. The land held no redeeming features.

Scrubby bush covered the ten hectares and there were no close neighbours. Clay earth made the ground hard. Nothing beautiful ever grew here.

Yesterday, Rosie had gone along in the ute while the men hunted rabbits. She had insisted that if her younger cousin Dean was going, she should go too, instead of staying at the house preparing food and cleaning dishes. She was a witness to the end of a small animal’s life. Watched silently as the rabbit was shot and skinned. Did not cheer with the others, refused a sip of beer from one of the bottles being passed around. Saw the entrails draped over the wire property fence

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“N

o way. I’m not shooting that thing.”

As soon as the words came out of Rosie’s mouth, she realised that the challenge had been set.

“Oh, big words.”

“Rosie’s too good to shoot.”

“Nah, she’s just chicken.”

“Nah, she’s a kid.”

“She doesn’t know nothin’, ha, ha, ha—” Everyone had joined in; her cousin, her uncle, even Aunt Cath had come back from the shops just in time to see what was happening.

“Go on Rosie, at least give it a go.”

Only one person hadn’t participated in the teasing. Rosie’s dad stood by and said nothing. She tried to catch his eye to gain some kind of signal, or a sign of support. Maybe he could make them shut up? When he finally looked, it was with an expression she couldn’t interpret. He pulled his gaze away while the others continued their teasing. She watched his eyes dart around the space, landing on the house, the dirt at his feet, the beer in his hand.

Rosie had often seen her father and her uncle with their chests puffed out, circling each other, voices raised. Seemed like they were always playing a game her dad could never win. And when her dad came home from work one day

Jenni Mazaraki is a writer living on Wurundjeri land (Melbourne). Her short story collection I’ll Hold You was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript 2020. Her work has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal, The Suburban Review and Overland. @thatsgreatjen

02 SEP 2022

R

ob didn’t like his niece standing there, behind him, watching him with that look on her face.

He remembered the time she corrected him at dinner: “It’s hors d’oeuvres not horse doovers.” Who did she think she was anyway? He’d worked like a dog in construction. He’d won Tattslotto, big amounts too. He’d skinned rabbits. He took good care of his things: his house, his boat, his women.

A calming silence washed over him when he cleaned his guns. They were always immaculate. He’d take his time: emptying the ammunition, disassembling the pieces, removing the barrel. With his soft, grey cloth, he’d wipe down the guns, caressing them as if they were the hand of a woman he wanted to get into bed. When the task was completed, he would piece all the parts back together again. Feeling the cold, heavy weight of the metal in his palm, he’d reluctantly pack them away in their cases, placing them up high where kids couldn’t reach them. So, who was he to be rattled by this little upstart, his niece, who didn’t even share his blood?

bringing the word bankrupt into their living room, Rosie felt something shift. Her father borrowed money from Uncle Rob. A lot of money. It took years for him to pay it back, and it had changed everything. Her father was beholden to his brotherin-law. Rob used every opportunity to remind him.

“A real piece of work your daughter, ay?” Rob patted Rosie’s father on the back.

Rosie looked away and in a move that surprised even herself, demanded the gun.

As she listened to the instructions on how to operate and hold it, all she could think of was how heavy the gun felt.

The shot sounded different up close. Like the snap of a leather whip, rather than a metallic crack. The recoil forced the gun’s power back through her body. The burnt stench of smoke invaded her nostrils. Reminded her of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Her breath quickened, oxygen rushing to the ends of her fingers and toes. She heard nothing except for the pumping of blood through her arteries. Rosie reloaded the gun for a second shot, like she’d been shown.

Her uncle went to replace the cans on the fence. He was unstable on his feet after drinking all day. Tripped over himself, dropped the cans in the dirt.

“Hang on,” he told Rosie, without looking back at her. He placed his half-smoked cigarette between his lips to free his hands, bent down and scooped up the cans. He lined them up neatly, careful to give each one some space from the next in line. As he placed the last one, logo facing out towards him, a whip of air snapped the ground next to him. Rosie watched as he spun around, frightened. Fell onto his side. She placed the gun, still smoking, down on a chair. Knew now how easy it would be.

A scream from the other side of the house. Rosie ran to where she had left her sister, saw that she’d fallen off the trampoline and lay squirming in the dirt, trying to right her small body without success. A swollen lump bloomed on her forehead: a small red hill and a thin trail of blood.

The mothers had reached her sister before Rosie could get near. She stopped running, stood still: between the men and women. She watched the women fuss over her sister as they called to Rosie, blame deep in their voices. Behind her, the men were yelling after her about firearms and responsibility.

They paced and shook their heads, fuelled by adrenaline.

The feel of the gun still on her fingers, Rosie was fixed to the spot. Her new white sneakers had kicked up a cloud of dust, turning them a muddy brown. She rubbed her palms together, trying to remove the sensation that prickled under her skin.

29

fear of being caught up in something she wouldn’t be able to control. Standing at a distance, she could watch them carefully. Didn’t need to fear spittle landing on her face as the men laughed. She felt no need to get any closer to those bodies in T-shirts and shorts, reeking of rancid perspiration and booze. Rosie saw them goad each other, challenging another shot, another beer, another bet.

“You get that one, you can have my bottle of Beam.”

“You miss it – you have to cook the barbie.” The laughter was rough and loud and ugly.

“Go on, little Miss – you think you know better than us?

You show us how to do it, then.”

FICTION EDITION 2022

Daughters Come Home

by Vrinda Baliga of turtles nestled in the sand, with more still arriving: their olive‑green carapaces glittering as they rode the incoming waves.

02 SEP 2022

A

mrita had decided, even before she arrived, that she was going to hate this “holiday”, her first visit to her grandmother’s home in this distant village by the sea. Every other time her mother was sick, her grandmother had come to stay with her in the city while her parents were at the hospital. But this time, her father had brought Amrita here instead. She didn’t know then that she had been sent here, to her grandmother, because her mother was dying. She didn’t know those extra-tight hugs, and the kisses her mother had showered upon her before she left, would have to last her a lifetime. She didn’t know – but perhaps she sensed, in the manner of children, that something was amiss; something in the world of adults that she was barred from.

That was why she’d sulked all the way from the airport, even as the car her father had rented wound its way between green fields and swaying palms, the sea announcing its presence in the salty air long before it came into view. The roads became narrower as they approached the shore, until at last the car stopped before a whitewashed house with a tiled roof, and a verandah with concrete seats. The house sat in the middle of a small, green plot, with a bougainvillea-filled garden in front and a vegetable patch at the back, shaded by mango, jackfruit and coconut trees.

And there was her grandmother, hurrying down the verandah steps to welcome them. Her grandmother – a spirited woman with boundless energy, had always seemed a younger version of Amrita’s mother, when it should have been the other way around. Her mother was careworn and fatigued by her illness, but that was the only way Amrita had ever known her. It was her normal. But this time, Amrita was in no mood for energetic affection, and determinedly shied away from her grandmother’s hugs and caresses.

That evening, her grandmother set out a lavish spread, which she must have toiled over all day. Fish curry with rice, pakodas, kheer and buttermilk. The tunnel-shaped “golden finger” pappads Amrita usually loved to slip on her fingers like fat, crunchy rings. But Amrita flatly refused to touch any of it.

“Pizza...I want pizza,” she demanded, her tone high and insistent. She would not relent, no matter what her grandmother tried. Her father, who usually would not stand

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“T

he gods and their archenemies, the asuras, had been at war for eons. But to obtain the nectar of immortality – the amrit – the ocean had to be churned. And such a colossal task could only be undertaken if they put their differences aside and combined forces.”

Her grandmother paused to catch her breath, and Amrita looked out at the sea. In the moonlight, it seemed to stretch to infinity. She had seen her grandmother churn cream to make butter in her kitchen, rotating a wooden churner between her palms. But how did one churn an entire ocean?

The cool sand crunched softly underfoot as she walked along the edge of the water, her soft, young hand clasped in her grandmother’s leathery, wrinkled one.

Amrita had never thought much about her name. She was “Ammu” to her parents back home, and even to her friends and teachers at school. She only ever used “Amrita” when she had to write it on the cover of a schoolbook or at the top of a worksheet. But tonight, on their nightly patrol of the beach, her grandmother had asked if she knew what her name meant. And seeing Amrita had no clue, she had clucked her tongue and launched into this story: the story of amrit, the nectar of immortality.

“But what could they use to churn an immense ocean?” her grandmother continued. “Nothing less than a mountain would do. So, they fetched Mount Mandara to serve as the churner, and the king of snakes, the enormous serpent Vasuki, volunteered to act as the rope to tie around it. And they began to turn the mountain, the gods pulling from one side, the asuras from the other.”

They reached the end of the beach and, as was their routine, settled down on the sand for a short rest before they strolled back. Amrita leaned comfortably against her grandmother’s warmth. The white crescent of the beach twinned the moon in the sky above, and both seemed to cup their palms around her.

“But, of course, the mountain was heavy,” her grandmother continued, “and it started to sink into the ocean instead of churning it. That is when Lord Vishnu came to the rescue. He took the form of a turtle and supported the bottom of the mountain on the back of his shell—” “A turtle?” Amrita asked, incredulously. “Like these ones?”

Her grandmother laughed. “I daresay it was much, much bigger than these! But yes, we hold these turtles sacred because of this story.”

All around them, covering the length and breadth of the beach, were turtles. Hundreds upon hundreds

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parallel tracks of turtle fins. And still, they kept coming, as if drawn by some mysterious, invisible force. Every incoming wave carried more turtles on its back, depositing them on the sand to join their friends.

“They travel thousands of miles across the oceans to come to this very beach to lay their eggs,” her grandmother said. She spoke in a whisper, as though the slightest disturbance might break the spell and cause the turtles to vanish into the thin air they seemed to have come from.

“Why only this beach?” Amrita found herself whispering too.

“It is the beach on which they themselves were born many years ago.”

“But how do they find their way here?”

“This is home. Every living being knows its way back home.”

02 SEP 2022

“T

here are so many of them, Papa! Thousands!

And we are in charge of keeping them all safe!”

Amrita’s grandmother had joined the local volunteer group in charge of safeguarding the nesting site. Every night, Amrita accompanied her on a patrol to keep the beach free of feral dogs and other animals that might dig up the new nests. They walked by the light of the moon – any artificial light was prohibited on the beach, lest it disorient the turtles – but Amrita’s grandmother knew every inch of the beach like the back of her hand. And Amrita clutched this hand and walked with her.

“They’re called olive-ridleys, but I’ve kept names for them,” Amrita went on, excitedly. “There’s Star and Captain and Spot and Dot—” Her father laughed. “They sound marvellous, sweetie.

And I’m so glad you’re having so much fun.”

Her father called every day, and now at last she had something to tell him, something that was not a complaint.

“Mama loves you very much. She misses you a lot,” he always said at the end of the call.

But Mama never came on the phone.

After he had finished talking to her, her father always asked to speak to her grandmother. They would share a short, hushed conversation, her grandmother’s voice soft and comforting.

That was the other strange thing. Amrita knew her grandmother didn’t like her father. She had never been told so explicitly, but she knew and sensed more than the adults suspected. Her mother had married against her grandmother’s will, to a man from a different region, a different caste. For a time, things had been so bad that mother and daughter had broken ties altogether. Relations had improved after Amrita’s birth, and after her mother’s illness was diagnosed, her grandmother had been generous with help and support. But, even on the occasions she had visited them to help out, her grandmother had always been distant with her father: polite, but not warm. Something had changed now.

On that first night, Amrita, through her tears of rage, had heard from her bed, with an odd mixture of shame and satisfaction, her father apologising for her behaviour.

33

for such nonsense, remained surprisingly quiet – and this failure to elicit a reaction disconcerted Amrita all the more.

Soon, she was wailing.

She went to bed on an empty stomach. And next morning, when she woke up, her father had already left.

The next few days were no better. Amrita fussed and fretted.

“This tastes different from home,” she complained of the rice, the chappatis, even the water.

“Yuck!” she said, turning her nose up at the thick skin of cream covering her glass of milk.

“There’s a lizard over my bed!” she shrieked.

“I’m bored,” she insisted, no matter what her grandmother produced for her amusement.

She had spent her entire life, all six years and three months of it, in a gated community in a sprawling metropolis. Glass and steel and concrete were what she knew. High-rises and malls. Cars and school buses and pizza-delivery boys. Nature, if it was allowed to intrude, was fenced in and trimmed to perfection. “Outdoors” meant manicured lawns and play areas with sanitised sand, and colourful jungle gyms and slides and swings.

But here, the “outdoors” were literally at the doorstep.

The insects – ants, crickets, ladybugs, moths and beetles – seemed to recognise no boundaries and roamed freely indoors and outdoors. The days, devoid of manufactured or pre-arranged entertainment, seemed to stretch as wide as the vast, open fields on one side of the village, and the hours rolled endlessly, like the waves of the boundless sea on the other side. And the dark! Unlike the glitter of the city, here the night unfurled a thick blanket of unbroken black, the likes of which she had never known.

She knew she was wearing her grandmother’s patience thin. And she felt guilty, for she loved her grandmother dearly. But all she wanted was to go home, back to the familiar.

And then, the turtles began to arrive.

Amrita had woken to the sound of her grandmother’s voice.

“Wake up, wake up, Ammu!” She was shaking Amrita’s shoulder gently, though the urgency in her voice was palpable. “They are here!”

“Who’s here?” she’d asked, groggily. It was barely dawn, and the sky was still dark.

But her grandmother’s excitement began to rub off on her as they hurried to the beach: Amrita in her nightie, her teeth yet to be brushed. Who had come? And why were they going to meet them on the beach? She could get no answers.

“You have to see for yourself,” was all her grandmother would say.

And then, rounding the turn to the beach, she saw.

The sand, usually pristine and white, was now pockmarked with flecks of green. Closer in, she saw that the green was shells – and they were moving, fanning out across the beach. Turtles, turtles, everywhere. Amrita stared in astonishment. It seemed unreal, like some kind of magic spell had been cast on this place – the sand thick with carapaces, the beach patterned with the intricate

“I’ll take her back home if you find it difficult,” he had said.

Her grandmother’s voice had been warm and reassuring.

“Don’t worry about anything. Ammu will be fine. You take care of my daughter, and I’ll take care of yours.”

A

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rribada. That was what this mass nesting was called. Arribada. A word of strong, rolling consonants. It suggested drumrolls, fanfare. But the arrival of the turtles was anything but loud.

It was silent, mysterious, wondrous. On wave upon wave, the expectant mothers came ashore, their progress across the beach slow, almost tentative, yet as inexorable as any force of nature. They took their time finding a suitable spot to dig their nests, moving as though every single shuffle must be thought through before energy was spent on it. The digging of the nests was equally unhurried and methodical.

Time itself seemed to bow before their patient, laborious toil. The susurration of scraping claws on the sand, the quiet lapping of waves at the shoreline. The night deep in meditation, its breath long, slow and measured.

And in the peace of such a night, Amrita made her peace too, with her grandmother’s home. For if these turtles came all the way across the world, facing down innumerable obstacles, to this place, there must surely be something wonderful about it.

T

uning into the rhythms of village life, she woke to dawn birdsong instead of the beeping of an alarm.

She helped her grandmother pick the ingredients of their meals from her vegetable patch, instead of a supermarket shelf; played gilli-danda with the neighbourhood kids, instead of video games; embraced the porous personal boundaries of the village, so different from the rigid ones of the city. It was a life of hard work, yes, but also of camaraderie and afternoon siestas and hours unshackled to the clock. A slow life, not unlike that of the turtles.

One evening, Amrita came home from playing with her new friends to find the house dark and silent. The only light came from her grandmother’s room. Amrita had rushed home, flush with her latest success, but she felt her spirits drowning in the churning beginning in her stomach.

She went into her grandmother’s room and found the elderly woman sitting on her bed, leafing through an old album.

“Ajji, you forgot to turn on the lights,” Amrita said, her tone unusually high. Accusatory.

Her grandmother looked up at her, for a moment uncomprehending. Then, she gave a small smile. “Yes, child, I must have forgotten. But never mind. Come, sit by me here for a while.”

Amrita approached the bed hesitantly. “I made my pebble skip seven times across the lake,” she tried. But

the words came out subdued, nothing like the triumphant announcement she had practised in her mind. “Even Harish could not match me, and he’s the village champion.”

Her grandmother smiled. “Your mother was a champion at that, too.”

Amrita looked at the album. The girl in the photos was chubby and bright-eyed, her face alive with laughter.

She looked nothing like the Mama Amrita knew. “Why did she leave?” Amrita said, quietly. “I would have stayed forever.”

Her grandmother cupped Amrita’s face and smiled down at her, her words a warm comforter. “Well, you are here now, aren’t you?” she said. “If there’s one thing the arribada teaches you, it is this: daughters always come home. One way or the other, they return home.”

E

ventually, the arrivals dwindled, and the departing waves bore a tide of olive shells out to sea.

The turtles, having travelled such distances to lay their eggs, slipped silently back into the ocean, without fuss and without a backward glance. As suddenly and quietly as they had arrived, the turtles were gone.

Amrita watched the last females retreating into the ocean with a profound sense of loss. Star and Captain and Spot and Dot: the turtles had become like friends. “Why do the mothers leave? Who will take care of their babies now?”

Her grandmother smiled, putting her arm around Amrita. “Their grandmother will.”

Amrita looked up at her, puzzled.

“The beach, of course. She birthed their mothers many years ago, and now they have left their own babies in her charge. She will keep the babies safe till they hatch out and can venture out into the sea themselves.”

She bent to pick one up and help it to the water, to save it the long, fumbling journey across the sand, but her grandmother stopped her.

“No,” she said, gently. “It is important they find their own way.”

They stood at the water’s edge, grandmother and granddaughter, watching the baby turtles leave. And they whispered their farewells into the sea breeze, warmed by the knowledge that these younglings, too, would cross the oceans someday, and come home.

Vrinda Baliga is the author of three short story collections – Mixtape; Arrivals and Departures; and Name, Place, Animal, Thing. Her work has appeared in The Best Asian Short Stories 2019, Asia Literary Review, Himal Southasian, The Indian Quarterly, The Bombay Review, and New Asian Writing, among others. She lives in Hyderabad, India. @vrinda.baliga.author

35

02 SEP 2022

T

he night patrols continued, keeping the beach safe from poachers and animals. Deep in the sands, a new generation stirred. It felt strange, walking the empty sands where just a few weeks ago, they had been in the company of thousands. Amrita and her grandmother continued to speak in hushed tones, in deference to the unborn life in the beach’s womb.

“Ajji, in that story you were telling, is the amrit found in the end?”

“Yes. The churning of the sea throws up a whole lot of things – some good, some bad, even a deadly poison capable of destroying all creation – but the gods and asuras persist against all odds, and in the end, the waters yield the amrit.” Her grandmother gave her a hug. “And that’s why it is so precious.”

Eight weeks after the arribada, the sands of the beach started to shift once more.

Cracks appeared in eggshells and tiny, bald heads began to emerge from the nests. Soon, the beach was covered with tiny turtles, tumbling and tripping and toddling, all headed inevitably towards the sea.

Aren’t they scared, Amrita wondered, to venture out on their own without their mothers beside them? They seemed so small and vulnerable, and the sea vast and terrifying.

FICTION EDITION 2022

Buttercream

by Bec Kavanagh

B

ernie puts a packet of Mint Slice into the trolley. She’ll go home and eat most of them and hate herself later, but right now she’s thinking of a glass of wine and nibbling the chocolate around the edges so she can lift it off the top with her teeth. She’ll lick the mint cream slowly while she watches reruns of Silent Witness. At the end of the aisle is a half-finished display for the new Betty Crocker readymade icing. The new face of Betty Crocker (younger, perkier than the old model) beams out from the life-size cardboard stand. Bernie reaches into one of the boxes and pulls out a packet, kneading it against her thigh. It’s true.

Stephanie – Stephy – does love buttercream.

“That’s true. You do love it. I remember when you ate a whole—” “It’s always been my favourite, you know. Josh made me buttercream cupcakes with little fondant bees on top the first Valentine’s Day we had together. Get it? Bee mine?”

“Oh. He’s clever.”

“He’s clever! We’re going to ask the cake-maker to put some bees around the flowers as a little in-joke.”

“Bees? Real bees?”

02 SEP 2022

“I

don’t doubt you, Mum. It’s just that we’ve decided to get something more modern.”

“More modern? What does that even mean? Cake is cake is cake, isn’t it?”

“I just want to keep it simple, you know? One of those natural buttercream ones with wildflowers or something on top.”

Wildflowers? Edible ones? Bernie had to swallow a mouthful of hysterical laughter at an image of the bride and groom sucking buttercream from spiky banksia fronds at the wedding. And buttercream? Buttercream isn’t a finishing icing. Marzipan is for wedding cakes. Buttercream is for birthday cakes, like the Women’s Weekly cakes Bernie used to make for parties. She’d been good enough then.

The purple witch with the licorice hair for Stephy’s sixth birthday, when all her friends had sat in a fairy circle making potion bottles in the backyard. At nine it was a jelly swimming pool. They’d sung ‘Happy Birthday’ clustered around the concrete mushroom at the water park. Eleven was the real triumph though – the Dolly Varden cake. Now that had been a cake. Bernie had to buy a special tin for it and everything. That had been the year Stephy was obsessed with princesses and everything was about jelly sandals and press-on earrings. Bernie had surprised Stephy with a trip to the chemist the day before the party, holding her hand as he lined up the stud gun to her innocent pink lobes.

Stephy had loved her for it. And when Bernie brought out the Dolly Varden cake, her skirt covered in peaks of pale blue buttercream (better – and more modern – than the traditional marshmallow) Stephy’s face had radiated pure joy.

“Oh Mum!” she’d said.

“It’s just a cake,” Stephanie (not Stephy anymore) had told her. “There’ll be plenty more. You can do the Christmas cake.

Josh loves those, you know that.”

“With buttercream?”

“No, Mum. Just the way you always do them is fine. We just want buttercream for the wedding. You know how much I love it.”

37

T

hings with a holy glow: the entrance to the movies in the rain; the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home from a big night out; the supermarket carpark at dusk.

Bernie pulls in next to a metallic blue ute – guys who drive metallic utes are invariably tossers – and yanks on the handbrake of her Corolla. She’s still smarting from her fight with Stephanie.

“No Mum! Fondant ones. Like the ones Josh made for the cupcakes?”

Of course. Bernie tries to hold onto all the little details of her daughter’s life, but they slip away so fast, like all those other sneaky little details. Where she’s put her phone. What she needs from the fridge. Whether she’s given Linus his pills.

It’s hard to keep track.

The packet of icing is red, with familiar white cursive across it and a twist cap. Nothing requires effort anymore.

There’s even a coffee in a can that heats itself when you crack the ring-pull. Stephanie doesn’t drink coffee now.

She drinks dandelion lattes because “they’re better for your digestion” and makes them with oat mylk, which Bernie has tried to enjoy. But she can’t get past the sensation that she’s drinking porridge.

W

hat do they add to the icing to keep it soft? Not butter, that’s for sure. Even butter isn’t just butter anyway – it’s got stuff in it to keep it spreadable and fresh. Chemicals probably. She read somewhere that margarine is grey before they add the chemicals that make it a more appetising yellow. She pictures the icing pouring out a sort of cement sludge, some worker in full protective gear adding bleach to turn it a romantic white.

Bernie knows icing sugar is a tricky little fucker on its own. Knows from years of motherhood; of mixing bowls of coloured icing that she’d line up on the bench to decorate gingerbread men. People. Stephanie calls them people now.

Add too much lemon to the sugar in the bowl and it all becomes a sloppy, runny mess, making everything tacky once those small, sticky fingers have dipped into it.

The bag Bernie has been kneading against her leg has yielded to the warmth of her hand. It’s soft and pliable – comforting. She’d never been a natural baker, never picked it up as a kid, despite her nan’s efforts, but practice had forced her hands to learn the movements. Motherhood had forced her body to submit to a number of lessons. Her fingers sink into the soft plastic, the icing squeaking slightly inside, like chalk on a board. She looks around briefly to see if anyone is watching, but it’s almost closing time – just Bernie and the other late-night loners. Bernie twists the cap and squeezes a blob of icing out between her fingertips.

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A

bored-looking guy with greasy hair pushes a trolley full of restocks past her. He looks at the bag in her hand and acknowledges her with a slight tip of his head. She realises with a thrill that he thinks she’s responsible for setting up the display. She nods back and he turns the trolley into the dairy aisle. Emboldened by their exchange, Bernie opens the box nearest to her and takes out a handful of sachets. She licks the dollop from her fingertip, savouring the taste. It’s not butter, but it’s butter‑like: creamy and sweet. It’s the feeling of birthdays and school fetes. Jam doughnuts and sugar lips. Holding hands. Possibilities.

Bernie squeezes the bag and a healthy dollop plops out, landing on the top of her foot. Stephanie is right. Even this supermarket buttercream is tastier than the fondant Bernie

uses for the Christmas cakes, or the royal icing she uses for gingerbread. It’s better than the sickly-sweet buttercream she remembers from her own childhood – or was that cream cheese icing? – lathered on top of the carrot cake at the school picnic. Bernie had forgotten to eat lunch, so she ate too much (and most of a bag of spearmint leaves) until both made her feel queasy and overwhelmed.

No. That had been cream cheese icing. Horrible stuff. The buttercream isn’t quite white – it’s a pale lemony yellow. Is that modern? Bernie doesn’t know anymore.

A

ll Bernie wants is to hear Stephy say oh Mum! in that way again. Not that way. Not the way she says it so often now. Oh Mum, of course they won’t be actual bees. Oh Mum, why do you leave milk out for Linus, don’t you know dairy is bad for cats? Oh Mum, why don’t you just stop trying so hard? Is it too much to ask for a single, Oh! Mum! It’s beautiful.

She takes a breath. Getting angry won’t get her anywhere.

She has managed to squeeze the entirety of the bag onto her foot, where it sits like a lemony cowpat. Cardboard Betty has tilted slightly and looks sideways at her. What now? she asks. Bernie opens another sachet and squeezes the entirety of it onto her foot. That’s what. She feels a violent jab of satisfaction as the contents of a third packet land, plap, on the lino around her feet. She hikes her skirt up around her knees, ignoring the old man nearby who is staring into the milk fridge, and stomps her feet into the mess. One of the ceiling lights buzzes and flickers. Her feet luxuriate in the buttery splatter.

Bernie loves having her feet massaged. Loved having her feet massaged. Even now it hurts to remember Del; it’s like having him snatched away again. If he were here now, she would put a dollop of icing right on the side of his face, just below his right ear where the scar was. She might draw a buttercream moustache below his nose, make his face twitch in anticipation. She misses his smile, and the way they used to play. If Del were alive, Stephy wouldn’t treat her like such an incompetent.

If Del were here.

Bursting with impotent fury, Bernie opens another pouch, slapping it between her hands and causing another burst of icing to land at her feet. Another – ha! And another. The mound of icing builds to her ankles. She squelches her toes, buried inside the buttery slop, feeling it slip between them, around the toenails. She is sick to death of being told what to do. Spinning to open a new box, Bernie knocks Cardboard Betty, making her list drunkenly to one side. I bet she is a closet alco, thinks Bernie. She’s never liked the Stepford mums – the women who would arrive early enough at the school gate to have a chat with the crossing guard and press their lips together smugly watching Bernie and Stephy race towards the gate as the second bell rang. They’re the mums who sent homemade cupcakes to school every birthday and made lamingtons or fairy cakes for the school fete. Who has the time? It always gave Bernie some satisfaction when all the kids at the fete gravitated first to her plate of honey joys and toffee in patty pans.

“L

ook Mummy, look at the princess cake!”

“She’s lovely, sweetheart.”

“She’s beautiful. I want to be a princess for my birthday.”

“You can do that sweetheart. Did we get anything for your lunchbox next week?”

Bernie opens her eyes. The brunette mother wears leggings and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt. She’s pushing a trolley with one hand and holding onto a little girl with the other.

The mother isn’t looking at Bernie, but her daughter is, and when Bernie smiles at her, the child widens her eyes in delight. She tugs her mother’s hand as they walk away.

“Oh Mum! That princess was real.”

B

ernie leaves her dress where she’d thrown it, in the pile of cardboard boxes. She steps out of the icing skirt and it collapses into itself without her body to hold it up. She leaves it, a sad heap melting over cardboard Betty, retrieves her handbag, and follows the gleaming lights of the empty bread aisle to the front of the supermarket. She nods at the last remaining checkout girl, who stares in horror at the trail of buttery footprints Bernie has left in her wake. At the checkout she buys a bottle of wine and a packet of cigarettes and walks barefoot to her car, stopping to hand her remaining coins to the woman sitting at the front entrance, a sleeping bag tucked tight around her legs.

“Good night for it love?”

“Good night for it.”

Bec Kavanagh is a writer, literary critic and academic whose research focuses on the representation of female bodies in literature. She has been published in a variety of publications including Overland, The Big Issue and The Guardian. Bec is the youth programming manager at the Wheeler Centre, and a sessional tutor at La Trobe University. @beckavanagh

02 SEP 2022

B

ernie lifts her sack dress over her head and tosses it into the pile of boxes behind her. The icing is almost knee-deep now, her legs buried in its satisfying softness. The boxes behind her are filling up with discarded pouches as she empties sachet after sachet onto her legs. The overhead light flickers wildly, and the sugared scent of the icing dominates the sour-milk smell emanating from the fridges nearby.

When the icing is thigh-high, Bernie thinks of the night she and Del fucked backstage at a Descendents gig. She’d squeezed her thighs tight enough around his face that she could feel him smiling. She comes to life with the memory, and the feeling of the icing folding around and into her body.

Five more packets and she’s back lying on the couch, Stephy’s sleeping baby head nuzzling into her stomach. They spent hours like that in those first twelve months, milk drunk and enmeshed in each other’s skin. A trolley wheel clicks and stops as someone pauses nearby to take a box of crackers from one of the other endcaps.

Bernie’s stomach is concealed by the icing skirt, which tapers up to the middle of her silk slip. She looks down at the way it drapes in layers around her legs. She opens the last packet, carefully squeezing out the last buds of confection into white peaks around her waist and then throws it into the stack of boxes behind her. The weight of it is grounding, comforting. Cardboard Betty is on the ground now, looking up at Bernie in awe and envy. She closes her eyes. She breathes in the smell of birthday parties and wedding cakes, dancing, laughter. Something deep in her stomach stills.

39

T

hings she would do if Del were still alive: go to the weekly swing dancing nights in the back room of the Railway Hotel; ask him to take her skinny-dipping at St Kilda, something they’d always joked about but never done; get him to unscrew the kitchen doors so she could paint them teal. She’d always meant to paint them, anything other than the existing colour, which made her think of teeth stained yellow with tobacco. She and Del had been good together. Fun. And then he’d gone and died, and all of their plans had come grinding to a halt. And she’s still here, going on living and feeling and carrying the weight of all of those years inside this sagging skin.

Ballet is good for disciplining the body! Bernie’s mother had forced her to do lessons as a child. The teacher – Tiffany – had been tall and elegant. She always walked towards Bernie and her mother as if wading through water. “Is she improving?” Bernie’s mother would ask, and each week Tiffany would scramble to come up with a polite new way of saying “no”. Eventually she gently suggested that perhaps ballet wasn’t the dance form for Bernie, which Bernie was a mixture of relieved and disappointed to hear. After that, her mother had hounded her into team sports and shapewear beneath her school uniform, doubly determined to control Bernie’s defiant body.

Later, Bernie had managed to solve the problem by cultivating an eating disorder. Her mother would nod her approval every time Bernie politely said “no thank you” to breakfast or dessert. At university she’d added Dexys to the mix, which had the added bonus of giving her the energy to dance all night. That’s how she met Del, who’d had a mullet back then and danced with all of the mad, strangled enthusiasm of a fish flapping on the jetty, gasping for air.

All the going without had amounted to not much in the end, when Stephy came along and stretched Bernie’s belly into an ill-formed paunch that drooped out from the bottom of her T-shirt like the bellies of the sweaty old men at the TAB, who seemed unaware of their hairy, sagging flesh.

It took a long time, after Stephy was born, to shrink the empty pouch to a size that didn’t make Bernie ashamed to be naked. Time, and a pack-a-day smoking habit for a while. Del never judged, just held her close every morning in the shower, tracing the outline of her body.

Beautiful, he’d say.

Fuck you for buggering off and dying, you old sod.

FICTION EDITION 2022

The Body of Taylor Keats

by Linds Sanders

Before the seal investigates the limp foot, bumping his forehead into the toes and playfully pulling off a shoe by its floating lace, the body of Taylor Keats begins to loosen the doors separating each vital system from the next, allowing salt water to fill the space where once something living resided.

Before the men release her to limply fly over the shore break, the body of Taylor Keats swings by the ankles and wrists in an arc in the air.

Before each police officer takes a turn to glance voyeuristically at the pasty cheeks and bulging eyes, the body of Taylor Keats rests in a tangle of netting on the floor of an aluminium fishing boat.

Before one of the men thrusts his elbow into the chin that she’d once been teased for, the body of Taylor Keats considers the safety guidelines about not approaching poachers, then stands up from behind the rock anyway.

Before the boatman reaches the foot that’s missing its shoe with a telescoping pike pole, the body of Taylor

Before the three men turn towards the headlamp she’s wearing and her glowing phone screen, the body of Taylor

02 SEP 2022

Before the ambulance drives through the easy morning traffic without the emergency lights twirling, both paramedics sharing their own riptide stories, the zippered bag fastened to the gurney behind them, the body of Taylor Keats shines in momentary camera flashes that accentuate the puckering of her fingertips, the broken skin on her chin, the clothing she’s wearing and the shoe she’s missing.

Keats drifts in the morning crests and troughs as though snorkelling in jeans and a waterlogged vest.

41

B

efore the mortician moves the delicate velvet lungs with sterilised forceps, the body of Taylor Keats enters through the swinging doors, on squeaky wheels in an opaque polyethylene bag.

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Keats crouches behind the rock outcropping, willing her phone to find the single bar of service and whispering a mantra, you got this, you got this, you got this.

Before her roommate warns her that she’ll die single if she spends every night studying tide pools, the body of Taylor Keats puts on jeans, a warm jumper and a vest filled with down, and laces up her shoes.

Before her professor suggests she postpone her research until the Department of Fish and Wildlife investigates, the body of Taylor Keats imagines how she could confront her fears, ashamed of the times she’s faltered under stress.

Before the officer says they’re swamped right now but will send someone to the beach when they’re able, the body of Taylor Keats runs back to her car to dial the number listed at the bottom of an abalone poaching pamphlet kept in the glove box.

Before dozens of abalone shells spill out, showing their empty iridescent underbellies, the body of Taylor Keats pulls at the corner of a plastic bag buried in the sand.

Before her mother calls for their weekly phone date to discuss Grey’s Anatomy, the body of Taylor Keats watches for the green flash as the sun tucks into the ocean’s edge.

Before the boy says her chin shakes like a chihuahua, the body of Taylor Keats hides in the corner stall wishing her father was alive to pick her up from school like he did when she threw up during lunch in the Grade One. Before her father dies from a tumour in his colon, the body of Taylor Keats skips and dances towards the breaking tide. “Careful, Slug,” he calls after her, her stringy hair clumped together with mist and salt. And she is careful, tip-toeing on patches of rock barren of snails to crouch at the rim of another miniature seascape. With a pencil on waterproof paper, she tallies the number of purple urchins in a column adjacent to one for crabs. She counts how many neon green anemones yawn open, their tendrils drifting in the faint current. Before she can move closer to the armour-plated chiton, the body of Taylor Keats accidentally crunches a collection of tiny shells, cringes and whispers a mantra, sorry snails, sorry snails, sorry snails.

Linds Sanders (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist in Montana, USA. Her poetry enjoys burrowing in small literary magazines and occasionally fetches a prize. Her artwork darts in and out of art galleries and national/ international publications. At the end of the day all her work comes home to rest at lindssanders.com. @resounding_bell/

Before the flight attendant passes her a cup of ice and a miniature Sprite can, the body of Taylor Keats packs a sunhat, her summer clothing and sunscreen for sensitive skin into a small suitcase precisely the dimensions of the airline’s carry-on allowance.

Before the back of her hair is smoothed down by her mother, who says her father would be proud, the body of Taylor Keats considers staying home to continue to watch Grey’s Anatomy with takeaway Thai, popcorn and her mother within arm’s reach.

Before her advisor shares her acceptance into the coastal research practicum, the body of Taylor Keats blushes as her male study partner whistles a crescendo down the hall in response to her top grade in bio-chem.

43

Before the boy in class teases her for not only having the largest chin in their graduating class but the largest crush on their science teacher, the body of Taylor Keats delicately touches the acceptance letter as if it were printed on gold leaf and liable to break apart.

02 SEP 2022

Before her roommate envies her semantic memory of bivalves, the body of Taylor Keats traces her jawline in the bathroom mirror, recalling her dad reciting facts about surviving pupfish of the ice age, wondering if he, too, had a strong memory.

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION 2022

Nearly Nirvana The bird scuttled a little closer to her. “Hello luv.”

Narelle snorted. “I wish you’d never taught that friggin’ bird to speak!”

Ann joined her on the couch. “Talking’s good for him – keeps his mind occupied. You never do anything but feed him. Why don’t you let him go? He shouldn’t be chained up like that.”

“The cats would get him.” The bird let out a loud screech, as if to agree.

Ann picked a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket in her shirt. “Have you got your lottery tickets? The jackpot’s thirty‑six mill this week. Can you imagine?” Her eyes narrowed in the smoke floating up from her cigarette.

“What would you do with thirty-six million dollars?”

“Dunno.” Narelle folded her arms across her chest. “Get out of here, I suppose.” This was the only desire she had formulated in twenty years of buying lottery tickets.

“You could buy one of those big houses on the front – get a view of the beach.”

Narelle watched as Ann took another long drag on her cigarette. The smokes were probably why she was so skinny.

And had so many wrinkles on her face.

“Or you could go to Sydney on holiday,” Ann said.

“I been there.”

It was true – Narelle had been to Sydney, once. The traffic and the people, the unimaginably tall buildings, had unsettled her. She had walked halfway across the Harbour Bridge, looking through the wire of the cage that surrounded pedestrians, down at the ferries, sailboats and motor yachts plying the water far below. It had made her dizzy. A little way from her, a young man had hooked the fingers of both hands through the squares of wire, and was staring downwards.

She’d pictured him climbing the cage like a fly, crawling over the bending barbed wire and taking off into thin air.

She’d put her own fingers through the wire, closed her eyes and prayed to God (whom she imagined sitting a hundred metres above) to let her get safely home. She was in Sydney to consult a specialist about something that had gone wrong in her stomach, and she was scared. But in the end, it turned out to be easily fixed. She was soon back in her bungalow, feet up on the old couch.

“Anyway,” said Ann, “you’d have to be careful if you won.

Everyone would want a piece of you.”

Narelle reckoned that was right. Everyone who knew her would be round begging for money. She’d even get letters from people she had never met. Just thinking about it made her sweat. “How’s Bill?” she asked, to change the subject.

45

N

arelle punched the buttons on the ATM, head down, squinting, face close to the panel. Her skin was freckled and blotched from the sun, and she wore a pink sun dress, with red trainers on her feet.

She finished – to the relief of the queue behind her – stuffed her cash for the week into a wallet, and headed out of the mall into the unforgiving sun of an Australian summer.

She started to trudge the four blocks home. Sweat ran like melted wax down her back and between her thighs. The dress stuck to her stomach and breasts. Her feet hurt and she gritted her teeth against the unrelenting heat.

Her cottage was one street back from the beach, built of fibro panels that had once been yellow. Narelle mounted the step to the porch and said “Fuck off” to the screaming white cockatoo chained by its leg to a perch. It spread its yellow comb in a show of anger. She entered her front room, furnished with a scratched wooden table, a couple of armchairs – she had moved the couch to the porch – and an old highchair in the corner beside the television. Pulling a sheaf of lottery tickets from her bag, she arranged them on the tray of the highchair, which carried a vague memory of happiness for her.

Apart from the front room and kitchen, the house had two bedrooms. One had been her parents’ and a second, little bigger than a broom closet, was where she had grown up.

That bedroom was now empty of everything except the single bed that her mother had died in.

The toilet seat shifted when she sat down, and again when she stood and flushed. She was thinking that she might as well sit outside for a while; she had her lottery tickets and there was nothing else that needed doing. She settled herself on the sofa beside the bird. A subtle, sweet scent came from the frangipani trees that grew up over the roof of the cottage and blocked the view of the street. Her parents had kept the trees cut back, but Narelle liked the way they made the verandah feel like a cave. Her neighbours liked the fact that the trees hid the tattered old cottage from the street.

She sat for nearly an hour, trading an occasional word with the bird. He had been her companion since childhood, a gift from her parents. She saw a pair of legs turn off the footpath onto her lot. She could tell it was Ann – black leggings cut off below her knees and what she called ballet flats on her feet. Ann mounted the verandah and ducked under the frangipanis, trilling “There you are!”, as if she had discovered Buddha under the Bodhi tree. She paused beside the bird and said in a singsong voice “Hello luv!”

“Hello luv!” the bird cracked back.

“Hello luv.”

02 SEP 2022

by Gwen Andrews

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

46

Ann took the cigarette from her mouth and tapped the ash on the bottom of her ballet flat. “Gone,” she said. “We had another row and he left. Said he wouldn’t be back.”

“He will be, most likely.”

Ann shook her head. “No. He’s gone.”

Narelle let the silence draw out for a few moments, then said, “Good. He wasn’t exactly George fucking Clooney, was he?”

“He was a man,” said Ann indignantly, turning away.

Narelle understood what Ann had not said – that’s more than you’ve got. She wondered why Ann couldn’t give up on men. Years ago, when Narelle had come home crying about being let down by another selfish bastard, her father had curled his lip and asked, “Why can’t you give all that up?” And so she had, little by little. As she gave up her longings, her father turned his criticism to the way she ate.

By the time he died, she was entirely virtuous and weighed fourteen‑and-a-half stone.

“A cup of tea would be nice,” Ann suggested. Narelle breathed in through her nose. She knew what would happen if she complied. Ann would follow her into the cottage and stand in her lounge room while she made tea. Her eyes would sweep the room, fixing on things that she thought could be improved, and Narelle would hear about it.

“Well,” said Ann sourly, “if that’s too much to ask, I’ll be on my way.” She got up and stuffed her packet of cigarettes into the pocket over her heart. Back on the concrete path, she turned and said, “You really ought to get more exercise. It’s a wonder you’re not diabetic, with your weight.” Then she was gone.

She sat out with the bird until the setting sun lit the houses on the other side of the street. She got up and spread fresh newspaper under the perch, brought the cockatoo water and a cup of birdseed. It settled down with a squawk to feed.

Narelle fixed herself a plate of ham with slices of tomato and bread with cream cheese. She kept her eyes fixed on the television news while she ate tea. The lotto logo came on the screen. She picked up the remote and increased the volume, levered herself up and shuffled over to the highchair to collect her tickets. She grabbed a pencil and wrote down the numbers of the balls that fell into the basket. When the blonde hostess had said good luck and good night, Narelle went through her tickets. The first few she discarded with a grunt for each. She looked at one for a long time, then went through the rest. Finally, she came back to the one she had kept and checked the numbers again. She had won. Not the jackpot – she didn’t have all the numbers – but she had enough for a divisional prize. If she had counted right, it would be second division.

Narelle sat back in the chair, her mind a slow whirl. A second division prize could be a lot of money. How would she find out? She had no truck with computers. The local paper didn’t print the lottery results. If she went back to the store where she had bought the ticket, they would know she had won, and she didn’t want that. She barely slept that night for worrying about it.

The morning found Narelle standing at a bus stop. She was staring off into space as the bus arrived, bright red and

chugging diesel fumes. The driver tooted the horn. She paid the fare and put her canvas bag on the seat next to her to discourage company. The cane fields went by, the river meandered in and out of view and fat cattle munched on green grass by the roadside. She was headed to the next town, down the coast.

At a newsagent in the main street, Narelle handed in her ticket. The girl behind the counter – black uniform, black hair, rings through her nose – registered excitement as she scanned the ticket. “Ohhh,” she said, “you’ve been lucky!

There weren’t many second division prize winners.”

“How much?” asked Narelle, croaking like the bird.

“Three hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and fifty-two dollars, and forty-eight cents.” The girl passed the ticket back to her as if she were conferring that amount on Narelle personally. “What are you going to do with that?

You didn’t buy the ticket here, did you?”

“No.” Narelle stuffed the precious piece of paper into her wallet. She wanted to get away, but she made the girl repeat the amount so that it stuck in her brain.

On the way home she stared unseeing out the window of the bus. Three hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-eight cents was more money than she could imagine. She lived on a disability pension since she’d given up her checkout job at the grocery store. Standing all day had wrecked her back. The pension wasn’t much, but she had the house and she could walk to the local shops. She had what she needed.

Narelle was hot by the time she got back home. She brushed past the bird without acknowledging it and unlocked the door, sat in the front room with a fan going and a glass of lemonade in her hand. She had her chance – what was she going to do with it?

Narelle knew that the cost of property was no longer what it had been when her parents were alive. Three hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars wouldn’t get you much these days. It wouldn’t come close to getting her one of the houses that fronted the sea. But she also knew the value of her own block, just back from the beach, because the real estate agents kept contacting her about it. Lots of people wanted to tear down the old cottage and build something new. Selling the block would double her lottery winnings. She could buy one of those new villas behind the shops and still have money left. The villas were attached and didn’t have any land around them, but that hardly mattered. Narelle never had any interest in gardening anyway. She could get a villa with two bedrooms, just like she had now, but with air-conditioning and a new kitchen. She’d need somewhere to sit out where there was some shade. Maybe she could plant a frangipani on the nature strip.

A shadow crossed the window as the bird crab-walked to the end of its perch. She watched his silhouette, wondering if they would let her keep the bird at the villa. She knew they had rules about pets. Maybe she’d have to leave him behind.

Give him to Ann, who liked him.

Her brow creased. What about her pension? Would Centrelink stop paying if she had money of her own? She relied on that cheque arriving fortnightly in her bank

“Just to the bottle shop for some beer. Bill’s back.”

Narelle smiled in the darkness. “Told you!” Ann tooted the horn and moved off.

The rising moon picked out the clusters of white and yellow blossoms on the frangipani trees. Narelle sat watching the show, feeling the coolness of the evening air on her skin, listening to the bird making tiny noises in the night. She thought, Maybe I should teach the bird to say something else.

She turned on the couch and looked at him.

He noticed her attention and spread his wings and his crest. “Fuck off!” he cried, beating his wings like feather dusters. “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!” he screamed to the empty street.

Narelle chuckled and turned back to stare at her view.

“My thoughts exactly,” she said.

02 SEP 2022

Gwen Andrews has had several short stories published in magazines and anthologies. One of her stories was a prize winner in the Roly Sussex Short Story Award. Her debut novel is currently under consideration by an Australian publisher. She lives and writes in Yamba, NSW.

47

account. She had no idea how to handle money of her own.

And there was the difficulty that Ann had identified – people would ask her for handouts. Ann first among them, she imagined. Narelle did her best to avoid people, but she did not want them to think badly of her. She imagined endless demands, the possibility that she might be threatened.

Exhausted, she started to cry. It was all too hard – you couldn’t ever change anything without people noticing. It would have been a lot easier if she had won the thirty-sixmillion-dollar jackpot. Then she could call a taxi and drive out of here to wherever she wanted. But three hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-eight cents – how much change could that buy?

She got up and wiped her nose on a dishcloth in the kitchen. She opened the door to the porch and stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. The rubbish bin below the verandah smelled faintly of rotting food. Off to her right, the bird squawked and raised its sulphur crest. She gazed at him for a long moment, and he squawked again.

Narelle walked over to the perch and grabbed the bird by the back of its neck. She held him down while she struggled with the catch of the chain on his leg. When he was free, she gave him a shove to unbalance him. The bird half fell, half flew, to the boards at her feet. He took a few stumbling steps before realising that the chain no longer bound him.

He raised himself up on his claws, spread his wings and squawked loudly, then started patrolling up and down the porch with determined steps.

Narelle watched him. “Go on,” she ordered. “Bugger off!”

He stopped in front of her and cocked his head, looking up. “Hello, luv!” he said. She aimed her foot at him and he hopped to one side to avoid it.

“Fly!” she screamed. He started his patrolling again, saying “Hello luv!” every time he passed her. Tired of his display, she turned to go back inside. The bird flew up to his perch, settled his wings and smoothed the crest into a yellow ducktail on the back of his head. “Hello, luv,” he said sleepily.

That was that, then, thought Narelle. She picked up her wallet and dug out the winning lottery ticket, crumpled it in one hand and went to sit on the porch with the bird. She sat for hours, until the sun went down, until the streetlights came up and the moon started to shine through the tortured branches of the frangipani trees. She held freedom in her hand, the bird sat unconstrained on his perch, and neither of them moved. Maybe freedom wasn’t worth the bother.

“Forty-eight fucking cents!” she muttered to herself. She would not have known how to put it into words, but she felt there was a principle behind her decision. If happiness was the absence of earthly desires, she was at least content.

The headlights of a car came up the street, casting light through the frangipani jungle. The vehicle stopped in front of her cottage, and a window rolled down. “Hello!” called Ann. “Are you there? I can’t see you!”

“I’m here!” Narelle called back, strangely pleased.

“Did you win anything on the lottery?”

“No,” Narelle called.

“Oh well, better luck next week!”

“Where are you off to?”

FICTION EDITION 2022

The Ferry and hopeful, to the glossy flyer they’d brought with them on their visit. On the cover of the flyer: a senior man and woman dressed in white, wide-brim hats under a pale blue sky.

Beneath them, a smooth lawn like green carpet stretched out in all directions.

He knew the real reason they’d suggested the bowls club.

Since his wife’s death, Roland had been spending a lot of time in his house, the house he once shared with her. It was a hard death, with needles and pills and visits to clinics. He’d been busy the whole time, making appointments, preparing meals, setting timers for medication. He’d given up his work as a general practitioner without hesitation when the diagnosis came in. One day he was a doctor with a steady flow of regular patients and the next day he had only one patient to care for.

And then, after all the trying and hoping, she was gone.

After the funeral, the tasks abruptly stopped. Roland had the sense that he should be moving, that he should be doing something, only there was nothing to do. He found himself pacing around the house. He flipped through photo albums, looked through boxes of old keepsakes. He sat, for hours at a time, staring at a wall in the living room. During those times, his mind was an old movie reel, spinning over and over, playing the old features he would never tire of: a constant screening of the life he shared with her. He could sit for the best part of a day, playing those films inside himself.

49

T

hey left for the island early in the morning. Dawn was less than an hour away as they gathered at the harbour with the other travellers. The people rubbed their eyes and scratched their chins. They offered yawns to each other like handshakes. Light reached from below the horizon, coating the harbour with a soft glow, turning water into glass.

It was the middle of March. Mia, Roland’s wife, had died almost two years earlier.

Roland was at the harbour with his new friend Grant. They had tickets for the ferry. He had met Grant at the bowls club that January. Standing at the bar, opposite the plaques that listed names of champions and club presidents, Grant had offered to buy Roland a lager. He shook Roland’s hand and looked him in the eye. Grant gave Roland the impression of a salesman, with the smile and steady eye contact, but in this case it was an offer, not a request.

The club was a new part of Roland’s life. His daughters had suggested he become a member as a way to make sure he got more sunshine. You’ll get a good dose of vitamin D and that’s good for your bones, they said. You should know that better than anyone. You can’t stay home all the time, they said. You’ve got to get out more. A lot of good it’ll do me to worry about my bones, he thought. His bones could rot away for all he cared. He didn’t say that to his daughters.

He smiled and nodded. He looked from their faces, anxious

02 SEP 2022

by Sean Wilson

Roland didn’t return to his practice. He didn’t have the heart for it, felt old and out of touch. Most of his colleagues were retired and had moved out to small beach towns. He’d lost contact with friends. As he passed the days inside his house, he thought about his two daughters. They were grown, with their own families and careers. He felt unsure about calling them. He felt like a burden. Would they have time for him? Would they sigh on the other end of the line? Would they only half listen to him, smiling at whoever they were with, waiting for the old man to finish speaking?

And then, one day, his daughters turned up at his house and handed him the flyer that would start the next part of his life.

50

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

G

rant had them at the front of the line for the ferry. He was a tall man with wavy grey hair and a beard that was long but not unkempt. Grant was a smart dresser and, on that day, he wore a white shirt above grey chinos. He’d rolled the cuffs on the chinos, exposing two pale, thin ankles above a pair of tennis shoes. He carried a small, neat backpack over one shoulder. Roland considered his own clothes. He was dressed in faded jeans and old runners, a loose golf polo. He thought about his own ankles, wide like the trunks of trees.

“Inside or outside? What do you say?”

Grant placed a hand on Roland’s shoulder as they walked on the gangway and boarded the ferry. Roland looked at the outdoor seats and counted four seagulls hovering and squawking nearby. Ferry staff tossed what looked like chips to the birds and the gulls caught them mid-air or else dived down to the water to gather the food, and then rise again.

“Inside, I think,” Roland said.

They picked seats near a window on the lower deck.

Families dressed in shorts, skirts, thongs and baseball caps filed in around them. There were mesh bags filled with towels. There were sunscreen bottles, flippers, snorkel masks, tennis balls and cricket bats. The ferry swelled with people talking and laughing. A few of them took what Roland understood to be selfies near the front of the boat.

“I’m glad you decided to come along,” Grant said. “It’s a long way from bowls, I know.”

Grant had twisted his body so that his face was directed at Roland. His eyes glistened under the fluorescent lights.

“I’m glad you asked me,” Roland said. “I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I’ve been out to the island.”

Grant clapped his hands together.

“How about a cup of coffee? It’s far too early to be doing this without caffeine in our veins.”

They left their seats and walked to the bar. Grant ordered two cappuccinos and they leaned against the bar, blowing on the surface of the coffee. The ferry moved out of the harbour and into open water, picking up speed. The swell was high and the ferry rocked on the waves. Tennis balls rolled to the rear of the cabin and then back to the front. Roland reached for the bar. His legs shook. Grant laid a hand under Roland’s armpit and took some of his weight.

“Bit rocky today,” Grant said, smiling and blinking quickly.

“I guess you don’t have your sea legs then?”

Roland widened his stance and leaned back on the bar.

“It’s been a while for me,” Roland said. “I’m not much of a swimmer either, to be honest. Whenever we went to the beach, I was always the one on the shore calling out to my daughters.”

“Not me. I can’t get enough of the ocean. I’m out here every chance I get,” Grant said. He looked out of a window at the grey-blue ocean, deep and wild. “It’s like a different world out here. I feel like I could be anyone I want to be, like the normal rules of life don’t apply.”

A boy in the cabin began being sick into a plastic bag, bent over in one of the seats. His mother rubbed his back. Roland had the impulse to walk over and offer his help. He imagined examining the boy, looking into his eyes, his throat. He imagined taking his temperature and listening to his lungs.

He reached for his cappuccino instead.

T

hey disembarked on the wide concrete pier. Children ran past, the sound of their rubber thongs like metronomes. Parents pushed mountain bikes. Grant and Roland walked slowly and, before long, they were the last people in the stream of bodies making their way to the shore.

“What do you say we start with another coffee at the hotel?” Grant asked.

The hotel looked different, not the way Roland remembered it. There were sleek glass windows. Broad white umbrellas covered the outdoor seating. String lights dangled overhead.

They ordered coffees and sat facing the ocean. Ragged tea‑trees bent to the wind and, beyond that, boats bobbed gently in the bay.

The last time Roland was here, he’d visited with Mia and the girls, back when they really were girls. They’d sat on benches near the kiosk eating ice creams. They’d hired bikes and followed the winding paths around the island. The girls had stopped countless times to follow the little creatures that roam the island, the ones that look like tiny kangaroos, only with large, adorable faces. He couldn’t remember the name of the animals. They’d taken the last ferry home that day, skin covered in greasy sunscreen and grains of sand. He can remember watching over his wife and two daughters as they napped in their seats. His daughters leaned into his wife. His wife leaned into him.

“I thought we could swim over at The Basin,” Grant said.

“It’s not far to walk. Are you up for a swim?”

Roland looked down at his jeans and runners.

“I didn’t bring any swimmers,” he said.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Grant said, tapping his backpack. “I brought two pairs.”

They walked along the shore until they found a change room. Grant opened his backpack and pulled out the swim shorts, one navy and one red. He handed the navy pair to Roland.

“You look like a navy man,” Grant said. “They’ve got jocks built-in so you’ll be comfortable.”

Grant took off his shoes and unbuttoned his chinos. He dropped his pants and his underwear to the concrete floor.

Roland looked at Grant’s short, wrinkled penis. It was ringed

leaned over slowly and kissed Roland on the lips. Roland stared for a moment at the blur of Grant’s face. His pale cheek, his dark eyelashes. Roland closed his eyes. He felt his heart beating harder in his chest. He sensed something shift inside, felt a change in his lungs, his muscles, his tendons.

There was a thinness to his body, a feeling of air, as if his organs had processed a weight and released the heavy parts of him. It felt good to be close to someone, to be locked in a moment with someone. Grant opened his mouth a little and Roland did the same. It felt like arriving somewhere new, opening a door to a new place. He was pulling a handle and light was rushing up to Roland, filling everything around him. He was covered in light and the light would show him everything that lay on the other side of the door.

Roland remembered the first time he kissed Mia, back before she was his wife. As their faces moved closer together, it felt like two planets merging. It was as if the gravity of their bodies pulled them together. The kiss felt right, the physics of it. He wanted to be with her, and she wanted to be with him.

On the beach with Grant, Roland had the same feeling. It felt true and good.

Grant leaned back. He smiled at Roland and then looked out over the ocean. They sat there, holding hands and watching the storm build. Gulls swooped low over the water in the cove. Crabs darted around the shoreline. Roland thought about his life. He thought about the past couple of years and about his grief. He imagined his grief as objects placed in every room in his house, every shop he visited, every park he walked through. Grief had been with him always, taking up space. It had been following him and filling up a part of his life. Grief had been a constant presence. Every day was another day to endure. From the moment he woke in the morning until his head rested on the pillow at night, grief had been with him.

Roland watched the lightning. He watched the birds and the crabs. He saw the grass in the dunes swaying in the breeze. He felt, for the first time in a long time, that the space around him was clear.

S ean Wilson is a writer from Perth, now based in Melbourne. His short stories have been published in Australia and internationally, including in Island and Narrative, and he was shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights Award by Sydney Theatre Company. His debut novel, Gemini Falls, is released in September.

02 SEP 2022

@seanrichardwilson

51

by soft grey hairs. Grant didn’t seem to mind facing Roland as he changed, and Roland wondered if it was because he knew that Roland was a doctor. Grant pulled the red swimmers up his legs and dug his feet into his tennis shoes.

“Come on,” he said. “Get cracking. This is the best time of the day for a swim.”

Grant walked out of the change rooms. Roland took off his jeans and underwear and replaced them with the navy swimmers.

The Basin was a small beach beside a reef with a jagged horseshoe opening filled with light blue water. There were a few other swimmers. Families on the shore applied sunscreen to faces, built sandcastles or dipped toes in the water. Grant pulled two thin towels out of his backpack.

“I see you forgot a towel too,” he said.

Roland nodded. He squinted at the bright white sand.

It would be scalding hot in an hour. Roland thought of second‑degree burns and gauze and ointments. He thought of triage nurses and paperwork.

“Lucky one of us is prepared.”

Grant winked at Roland. He lifted his shirt over his shoulders and Roland watched his pale, smooth skin appear. It was almost the shade of the soft-serve ice cream he used to buy his daughters when they were little. He felt guilty knowing what the fat and preservatives would do to their young bodies, but he craved the look on their faces as they devoured the ice cream, excited and content at the same time.

After their swim, Grant suggested they buy some sandwiches and find a more secluded beach. Roland insisted on buying. They walked to a store and Roland picked out an egg and salad sandwich from the fridge display. Grant selected a pulled pork sandwich. He raised his eyebrows as he handed it over to Roland.

“You only live once,” Grant said. “YOLO. Isn’t that what the kids are saying these days?”

They walked away from the main settlement, choosing a footpath with the fewest people. They walked for a long time, the path getting more and more deserted as people stopped to tie shoelaces or take photographs with the little kangaroo creatures. Roland and Grant branched off again, this time onto a sandy track that cut between tea-trees. They climbed a dune and emerged on the other side to find a small, empty cove. Clouds were gathering overhead, darkening the beach from a brilliant white to a dull shade.

Grant led them down into the cove. He spread their towels on the sand and Roland handed Grant his sandwich. They sat and chewed their lunch. There was a storm gathering over the ocean to the west. They could see the blue flashes of lightning but there was no thunder. The lightning came and went like a camera flash, bright and silent. It was over in an instant but the memory of it remained on Roland’s retina, burned into place.

Roland finished his lunch and drank from his water bottle.

He handed the bottle to Grant. They sat on their towels, watching the lightning spark over the ocean.

“I’m glad you came today,” Grant said.

He reached out and took hold of Roland’s hand. Grant

52

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

FICTION EDITION 2022

Eight Seconds

by Clare Fletcher

T

wo…

Deathwish kicks up his hind legs until he’s almost vertical, but Corey rolls with him. If he can hold his seat here, he’s off to a solid start. One of the three “protection athletes” jigs into the bull’s eyeline, trying to draw him away from the gates. Christ, I remember when they were called rodeo clowns – and a lot more fun to watch than these blokes in their branded uniforms. Everyone takes themselves so seriously now.

Corey was seven when he had his first ride. He’d been begging me for years, training on poddy calves and a fortyfour gallon drum my dad rigged up for him. I held out as long as I could, but he wore me down, just like he wore out that VHS of 8 Seconds. You think you know what’s best for your kid, but who’s really the best judge? Corey knew exactly what he wanted, and, for my sins, I let him take the reins.

His first ride, Corey got thrown. Didn’t even last a second.

Looked up, shocked, like he couldn’t believe it didn’t go down like the Luke Perry fantasy in his head. His arm was dislocated, his pride was shot. I couldn’t believe I was getting off so easy. I wasn’t.

By the main event, he was strutting around with his little mates in their big hats. A sling over his clean shirt, bragging about how he would do it differently next time.

Have you ever wondered how the cowboys keep their hats on their heads through a bull ride? Bobby pins. Took months of my hairpins disappearing before I realised where they were going.

His second ride, he lasted four seconds. His third, he made it six. And once he got through those eight seconds for the first time, I knew I was stuck watching him trying to kill himself in this godforsaken sport.

T

hree…

Corey keeps his seat as the bull canters on a diagonal, twisting and arching. His free hand is flapping about wildly. He won’t be happy with that. One accidental brush of contact against Deathwish, or even his own body, and he can be disqualified.

They talk about faces only a mother could love, but there’s something in Corey’s face that makes every woman feel like his mother. They want to take care of him, nurse his wounds, hoping the shine of that prize belt buckle will rub off on them. White-knuckling through his every eight seconds in

02 SEP 2022

O

ne…

The gate flies open and the bull, Deathwish, springs out of the chute. It’s not his first rodeo either, and he unleashes explosive kicks from his hindquarters as he thrashes against the barricades.

Corey came into the world in a rush of blood. Growing up in the sticks, I’d seen my share of animals born, so I didn’t think I could be shocked. But the bellow that came from my throat on that final push seemed nothing to do with me – almost more tectonic than animal. The midwife held him up in front of me: eyes closed, skinny, greasy with vernix like a slick pup. He was silent – seconds that soon felt like hours.

Breathe! Come on, baby.

The midwife gave him a swift slap across the arse and I heard his bleating wail for the first time. She put him in my arms, and his little mouth hoovered across my chest until he found what he needed.

I was stitched up, smarting, and finally enjoying a cup of tea when in sauntered Corey’s dad. Blister, they used to call him around the work sites in town, because he’d only emerge after the hard yakka was finished. It was no different on the labour ward. He’d run a wet comb through his hair as a concession to the occasion, and doused Old Spice over the stale beer wafting from his pores.

“Gimme a holduv ’im.”

I was so tired I could hardly see straight, but the sight of those hairy arms juggling my baby one-handed as he

clumsily reached for his cigarettes, woke me up damn fast.

Corey and I did not have room in our lives for a man who could be so casual with my most precious possession.

Unfortunately Blister shot through before I could explain this properly – so in addition to child support, he robbed me of the satisfaction of calling him out on it.

53

C

orey Walgett, you bloody idiot.

There he is, grinning up like a goose from under that wide brim as he takes in the packed stands. Like he’s not about to wrap his legs around a tonne of beast that wants nothing more than to eviscerate him. And the crowd wants it, too. That’s entertainment!

The support crew help lower him onto the bull, already lashing at the gates, as the announcer’s voice rolls around the arena.

“Our next rider is a local boy. Least, he started out as one.

He’s back in the game after four years out – we thought he’d retired! I know he’s hoping for one last big ride in front of his home crowd. Let’s hear it for Corey Walgett!”

Up here in the bleachers, the bursts of country rock are deafening. But down there, I know Corey’s senses are narrowing by the second, because mine are, too. My pulse rushes in my ears, muting the speakers, then the crowd.

I imagine Corey in the same tunnel of focus, attuned to every tiny shift of the beast below him.

Hang on, baby, I think.

Eight seconds doesn’t sound like much, but here? It’s a lifetime.

slow motion, I never understood rodeo’s blithe devotees, much less the parade of buckle-bunnies Corey brought home.

By the time he was fifteen, I had long given up the pretence of being the one in charge. I’d wake at dawn’s crack on a Sunday, with a few blessed hours to myself before work, and inspect the crime scene of the kitchen while the kettle boiled for my first cuppa. Toast crumbs on the lino, stalactites of cheese in the still-open oven. The lounge room a kaleidoscope of neon in the gloom, Rage still blaring on the telly. Still, it took me by surprise the first time a girl shuffled through the kitchen while I was still dunking my morning tea bag.

Some would race past, head down, shoes in hand, pretending they didn’t see me. Others would brazenly sit at the table for breakfast. Corey would have a smug, sheepish look as he leaned against his bedroom doorframe watching them leave. That’s if he bothered to get up out of his sheets.

Sometimes they’d introduce themselves, offer a hand I’d leave hanging.

“Hi, Mrs Walgett,” they’d giggle. “Thanks for having me, I’m a big fan of Corey.”

I’d think briefly of their mothers, teaching them these nice manners.

“I don’t need to worry about remembering your name, sweetheart. Cup of tea, before you go?”

I’d watch their faces fall, their uncertain glances back towards his room, the dawning realisations. Their ride might’ve lasted more than eight seconds, but they ended up in the dirt all the same.

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F

our…

Corey’s still on. In fact, he’s looking almost comfortable. It’s always a good sign, when he just lets his body rag-doll through the bull’s convulsions. Face an impassive blank, eyes pure focus. I know he’s listening to Deathwish pant, his heartbeat pounding in time.

The girls never worried me. But there was something different about Hester. Corey was nineteen by this point. I watched through the steam from my chipped mug as she took pains to close his door silently behind her.

I always loved that moment when they first saw me, realised they were busted. But she looked up from under a heavy fringe, met my eye. A slight brunette, she wasn’t his usual type.

She gave me a cute little wave as she saw herself out.

A few minutes later, he shot out in his boxers.

“She’s gone?” he asked thickly, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

I nodded.

“Shit.” He sat looking for patterns in the laminate tabletop, just like he did as a kid. Still soft with sleep, he had a vulnerability I saw rarely anymore, bony shoulders and bruised ribs. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

His use of present tense rang a distant alarm.

“What’d you think?” he asked. I thought of her raised eyebrow, holding my eye without an ounce of shame. He looked at me with boyish expectation. We’re in trouble here, I thought.

She was suddenly a fixture at our table – breakfasts, dinners. He was always waiting for her, never the other way around. And she didn’t care about rodeo. Used to have these big arguments about how it was cruel to the animals. He had

to beg her for weeks to get her to watch him at Warwick Rodeo.

What a night that was. Corey had gone early, so I offered her a lift in the Kingswood. I saw her take in the ashtrays in the door handles, hold herself up off the upholstery, trying to hover like it was a bloody public toilet seat.

I took my usual spot in the stands and made space for her next to me. I explained all the rules, even though surely she’d had it all from Corey already. He didn’t have much else in his conversational repertoire.

I breathed through Corey’s ride, waiting for her to flinch and cry out, but she held herself straight and still, taking it all in. It was a good ride – he went the distance, placed second on points – but I could sense a tension in his body. He held himself differently knowing she was watching.

After he’d jumped off, he looked up at the stands and waved his hat goofily. All three of us knew it was for Hester’s benefit. As he bolted for the fence when the bull went for him again, Hester gave a little nod.

“He’s good,” she said.

“Yep,” I said.

“He’s not going to give it up, is he?”

“Nope.”

“It doesn’t bother you, seeing him do that?” she asked.

“Can’t stop him,” I shrugged.

She had the same nod, the same calm resolve when they got married eighteen months later. By that point she’d been to enough rodeos not to fight the bolo tie and dress hat he wore for the wedding, though she refused to wear boots with her tulle and lace.

No parents there to give her away. Of course my loyalty was always to Corey, but I did have a soft spot for old Hester. Even if I always suspected she’d break his heart.

It was a lovely day. Registry office and a buffet at the RSL. Corey promised Hester he’d take her to Bali one day, but for now their honeymoon was a swag in the back of his ute between rodeos. She took it with good grace. For a few years.

F

ive…

Deathwish tries a different tactic to shake Corey off.

He spins in circles. The washing machine, Corey calls it. Now he knows how to ride it out, but I remember the sick chill of Corey’s first rodeo concussion.

He was a wild kid. I’d seen him fall out of trees and jump off roofs and get axed on the rugby league field. But this was different. Time slows when it’s your kid lifeless in the dirt, fifty metres out of your reach.

Like anything, though, you get used to it. Corey accepted the concussions as part of the game. He’d seen dozens of cowboys get knocked out one weekend and be back for more the next. Doctors’ advice to wear protective gear or give up the sport was always just that: advice, which he could take or leave. When you have to ride to get paid, most riders chose to leave that advice.

“Why don’t you try a helmet?” I tried to argue with him for a while.

He’d just laugh.

There’s something funny about a kid walking like a drunk. It became an ongoing joke: the forgetfulness, the

S

even…

Deathwish tries a last-ditch bash up against the railing, and Corey slips. The crowd gasps.

Hang on, baby.

Without rodeo, without Hester, Corey was a shaky outline of himself. Like those drawings he used to do, tracing the comic-book heroes through a layer of baking paper: the shapes all there, but something not quite right. The plumbing

E

ight…

Earlier tonight, I fought the urge to wipe a smudge of tomato sauce from my son’s cheek with my thumb.

Old habits.

“Hester wouldn’t want you getting on another bull,” I said.

“Hester’s not here, is she?”

I could tell he wanted to sound careless, but he threw down the rest of his dagwood dog with a sigh.

“It’s not worth it, Cors.”

“It’s all I’m worth, Mum. Youse are better off without me.”

He raced off to the yards. I didn’t let him see my tears.

I never did. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. I can’t keep letting this happen.

Like mine, Corey’s senses will be flooding back now. Dust under his sweating hands, the smell of deep-fryer fat and spilled beer, the swell of the crowd screaming. And the best sound of all – the buzzer. Eight seconds. He’s done it.

He rolls away in the dust, Deathwish charging at a protection athlete in the opposite direction.

“And the scores are in,” the announcer booms. “Corey Walgett, 84.5 points.”

“Well, how about that, love?” I say. The warm hand squeezing mine finally lets go to punch the air.

We’ll have to see how the other riders go, but he’ll be hard to beat. Will it be enough for Corey? He feels like he can never achieve enough. Like his clock is seconds away from running out. And it is. He should be soaking it all up while he can still make sense of the world.

He climbs up onto the gate and looks up at us. Mouth cracked wide, waving that bloody hat. His daughter looks back at him with the same grin.

Clare Fletcher was born and raised in St George, in regional Queensland. Her debut novel Five Bush Weddings was published in August. In 2021, her story ‘Death’s Waiting Room’ won a prize at the Scarlet Stiletto Awards. Clare lives in Sydney with her husband and daughter. @clare_fletcher

02 SEP 2022

S

ix…

Corey digs in his heels and for a split second, Deathwish responds. The judges will like that, a bit of control. The bull’s rage is back soon enough. But Corey’s almost there. It’s the danger zone – so close to the finish line, bull riders often lose focus. Like all the cricketers who get out on 99.

Is it really for the best if he does last the eight, though? If he makes it through, there’s no way this prize money will be enough for him to quit. Just like in a heist movie, “one last job” is never the last – until it’s the last of you.

Maybe getting thrown here is the best thing that could happen to us. A respectable seven-second ride to end his career. I bet the announcer has a retirement speech ready.

He’ll focus on the good years, the championship. The days when we all thought Corey would make it onto the US tour.

They were good days. Before Hester left. Before Corey’s big fall.

I hope I never have to see another face that broken. Weeks in intensive care, of cold coffee in styrofoam. Hester and I taking shifts in those threadbare chairs. He finally woke up, cracked a joke. He finally got the tests Hester had been asking for.

The diagnosis was a punch in the gut for Corey and me, but Hester seemed unsurprised.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Syllables I’ve committed to memory, an uninvited mantra. His brain shaken loose one too many times; an old man’s mind in a young man’s battered body.

“You have to quit, now,” she said.

“Blokes have ridden through worse.”

“This will literally kill you, you bastard. Don’t you care about us?”

It was the most emotional I’d ever seen her.

He shrugged. She left. Without a doctor’s clearance the officials wouldn’t let him ride anyway, but Hester stayed gone, an A4 envelope of divorce papers the only sign of life.

apprenticeship he’d once half-arsed his way part through wasn’t enough for him to land work with a licensed plumber.

It was enough for him to bluff his way into some odd jobs.

I’d get home from work to find something smouldering in the kitchen where he’d left the burner going on the stove.

He’d walk into rooms with no idea why he was there. He’d call to check what I wanted from the grocery store and then realise he’d driven to the shop in the next town.

When he wasn’t confused, he was angry. A rage I’d never seen in him before. He kept losing jobs. For four long years, the house hummed with Centrelink hold-music.

And then Hester’s final gift showed up on the Greyhound bus.

We both saw the local paper crowing about the ten grand prize money for this year’s rodeo.

When Corey started talking about one last ride, I told him to pull his bloody head in. He’d drop it.

But my bobby pins started going missing again.

55

weird moments when he’d stagger off-balance or walk into something he should have seen coming. His spaciness got to be an urban legend, like the time Corey found himself in Tamworth straddling the neck of the Golden Guitar, his memory a blank where the ninety-minute drive from Scone Rodeo should have been.

Hester never got used to it. They both wanted kids, but she knew it was her only leverage. Used to beg Corey to see a specialist, get some scans.

“It’s not normal for a twenty-three-year-old to forget things like this. It’s not right.”

Corey would laugh it off.

56

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FICTION EDITION 2022

The Last Child Tess has known him since university, twenty years now.

She suspects from certain hesitations over the last few weeks, certain quirks of his mouth when she said something about Louis being an only child, that his new partner is already pregnant.

“Lovely,” Tess smiles at Louis. “Aren’t you lucky to get two birthdays and two cakes?”

Andre glances at her, checking for sarcasm.

Tess ducks out of his eyeline, squats and hugs her son.

“Okay, bye-bye lovely bunny. I’ll see you on Tuesday. You remember how many sleeps that is?”

But he is stuffing a T-Rex into his backpack and starts to wriggle. “Just let me do this!” Tess tries not to notice this expression of his father’s. These echoes are more complicated, now.

She wonders, again, whether their second child might have been different, more like herself. But she is well practised at derailing this train of thought.

Be grateful, she thinks, knees aching as she squats in the hallway, playing second fiddle to a plastic dinosaur. She is over forty, and now single. Louis will be her only child.

Finally, he grants her a hug. Tess buries her face in his hair, breathes him in, covers him with kisses.

Andre glances discreetly at his watch. “Okay. Say bye now,” he says. Technically it’s “his” weekend, and he has been reasonable enough in these negotiations. Tess still flinches a little at this language – your week, my weekend. As if the separation agreement has assigned them each ownership of the turns of the earth.

Louis pulls away, T-Rex’s legs still sticking precariously between the teeth of the bag’s zipper as he slings it over his shoulder. “Bye bye!” he says.

Andre opens the door, they go through, and a gust of air nudges a loose blue balloon down the hall. Tess waves, but no-one is looking. Her hand drops.

It’s just the way of kids, she says to herself. To move on to the next thing. Louis didn’t ask for any of this.

She wonders when Andre will inform her about the baby.

They are no doubt waiting a bit longer, until they are sure.

Tess told everyone when she was pregnant for the second time – why wouldn’t she? But it will not be her, after all, who provides a little sibling for Louis, who waves a wand and reinvents him as a big brother.

The house is quiet when she closes the door. Empty, she thinks. She had offers of company for tonight but refused them all. She needs time and space to clear away the chaos, drag out the photos from Louis’ birth. Wallow a little – she’s entitled to. Cry.

57

T

ess has blindfolded children, spun them until dizzy, provided them with pointed pins. She has circulated layers of newsprint catastrophes, to be shredded by small, questing hands. She has lit five tiny flames and helped extinguish them.

All the birthday party rituals have been performed, as per Louis’ non-negotiable list. Her child is sweetly imperious.

Perhaps, she thinks, because of the name she chose for him, unintentionally evoking a miniature French king. Let them eat birthday cake.

She is taking a moment of quiet between seeing off guests, and leans back against the front doorway, bisecting herself. To her left: warmth, a brightly lit hall, the shrieks of over-sugared children echoing from the party room.

To her right: a deserted streetscape and the early evening midwinter sky, already indigo-grey. The party has gone on for three hours, and now Louis is about to be swept off to Andre’s family dinner for more presents. Tess knows they are overcompensating, but they can’t seem to help it. It is the first, but not the last, birthday their child will be spending in two different households.

Andre is already here, somewhere at the other end of the house, chatting with the last of the mothers who have arrived to claim their children. He’s a born extrovert, sociable, unlike Tess.

More parents and children bustle down the hallway, a parade of chocolate-smeared faces and distorted fairy wings.

“Bye darling! Got your party bag?” Tess says. “You’re welcome, no problem, a pleasure. See you at school!”

Her cheeks ache from smiling and her voice is too high, too chirpy. She calls many of the children darling or sweetheart because she isn’t yet sure of all their names. A recent arrival to this new suburb, she had thought it polite to invite the whole class from Louis’ school. But they formed quite a crowd and this house has been filled all afternoon with tiny strangers.

“See you at soccer! Thanks for the ball, Louis loved it!”

Slamming doors, departing car tail-lights, and the guests are gone.

Andre now strides down the hall towards her, calling back over his shoulder. “Come on Lou. Where’s your bag?”

Louis’ voice calls something inaudible.

Andre arrives next to Tess, nods. “Alright then?” he says.

She shrugs. “Five years ago I would have been in labour.”

“I know. I was there too, remember?” Andre says. But gently.

Before she can reply, Louis scampers up in his Spider-Man suit, his party crown askew. “Did Ellie make my Bluey cake?” he asks his father.

“Sure did.” Andre beams.

02 SEP 2022

by Kerry Munnery

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02 SEP 2022

I should have been more careful, thinks Tess. But they were in the middle of moving. Saying goodbye to the old house, the old neighbourhood. There was so much going on.

Tess remembers Louis’ recent school photo, with the names in neat black print at the bottom. A surname would be a start. “Alright, just sit there, sweetheart. I’ll be one minute,” she says.

Down the hall, Louis’ room is completely trashed.

Wrapping paper and new toys mingle with his old ones on every surface, among and on top of the half-unpacked boxes.

Tess’ foot connects with a plastic container. Thin sticks – yellow and red and blue – spray across the wooden floor.

Detached from whatever game they belong to, they create a tangle of lines and angles: an arcane script she studies briefly, but can’t translate.

The class photo is on Louis’ desk. She scans Prep/One Wattle, once, then again more carefully, pausing at each face.

Rows of kids smiling or not smiling, with baby teeth or big teeth or gaps, or all three. None of them is remotely like the girl downstairs.

Tess rubs her arms, suddenly cold. She had only invited his new school class, plus Louis’ two best friends, who he’s known since playgroup.

I’m overwrought, she thinks. There’s been a lot going on.

The girl was just away on photo day. Or forgot her permission slip. That’s all.

But the chocolates shift uneasily and she swallows down nausea.

She had been violently ill with morning sickness when carrying Louis. So when she sailed through the early stages of her second pregnancy with no discomfort, she was surprised and relieved. Overconfident, after Louis’ uneventful birth.

The night before the miscarriage she had danced around the kitchen to 80s hits, congratulating herself on achieving the dream – lovely house, delightful partner, one healthy child, another soon to come. Then, overnight: pain, blood, rising panic. The doctor in Emergency telling them there was nothing to be done. “If the baby wants to come out, it will come out,” he said.

Only fourteen weeks, people said. Just try again, people said. Probably there was something wrong with it, people said. Count your blessings, people said. They were trying to be kind, Tess kept telling herself.

As the weeks and then months passed, even Andre – also mourning, and gentle at first – struggled with her inability to get past it. But Tess had been raised Catholic, and the concepts of guilt, and sin, and punishment bubbled up from some buried place. She had failed on some level. Smugness, overconfidence, tempting the wrath of the Fates? She must have done something, or failed to.

“You need to stop beating yourself up,” Andre said.

“It wasn’t your fault. These things happen.” He quoted statistics, tried to normalise it. Reached for patience, but did not always get there. He was puzzled that the normally rational Tess seemed to have disappeared and some other strange, superstitious person had been set in her place, pawing over portents.

59

A glass of red wine, she thinks. Two. But when she re-enters the living area at the back of the house, a child is standing on top of the party table: bare feet grubby among the crumbed and smeared plates, the greasy cupcake papers, the crackling lolly wrappers. A small girl, with wild brown curls and a red party dress.

“Christ!” Tess startles. “I mean. Goodness. Hello. Well.

What are you doing up there?”

Bugger, is what she is thinking. One left. She must have lost track in the flurry of goodbyes.

A pause. “You’re supposed to take care of me,” says the child.

Tess glances at the kitchen clock. It is thirty-five minutes after the designated pick-up. Not too late, she supposes. The others have only just left.

“Of course, I’ll look after you until Mummy or Daddy comes. They’ll be here soon. But you need to come down off there. Tables aren’t for standing on.” Tess approaches and holds out a hand. The child ignores the gesture, but scrambles her own way down onto a chair.

“You’re supposed to take care of me,” she says again, standing on the chair now. She regards Tess evenly over the back of it.

“Yes, I will. I am. What’s your name, again?”

“May.” Tess’ hand instinctively flies to her throat. If she is unprepared, small things can bring back a jab of pain, even now. That name had been high on her list of possibilities for the second child.

“Oh really? I like that name.” She glances at her watch.

Where are the bloody parents? “So. May. Looks like Mum and Dad are a bit late. I’ll give them a ring. I’m not sure I have your number handy. Do you know it, maybe?”

A shake of the head.

“No worries. What about your surname? You know, your last name?”

The girl’s eyes fill with tears as she answers. “Don’t you know?”

Fair enough, Tess thinks wearily. The grown-ups are meant to be in charge. The child is a bit hyped up, no doubt.

Tess remembers standing tearfully around at birthday parties when she was little. Thrust into the noise, the chatter, the forced fun, told it would bring you out of your shell. What’s wrong with a shell, she still wonders.

Tess extracts a chocolate freckle from the remains of the birthday cake. The lolly is sickly sweet, but she takes another, and crunches it while she scrolls through her phone messages. Her friend Jen asking her how it went, her mother wishing her luck from Queensland. A query from Andre about Louis’ soccer boots, which she apparently forgot to pack. Nothing from any parents, no unknown callers.

She doesn’t have a list of guests and numbers, like she should. Louis hand-drew the invitations, which they copied and handed out at school. The RSVPs were sometimes by phone, sometimes in the school carpark, sometimes a cheerful email that didn’t specify which child they were responding for.

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something sticky. An impish grin.

Tess licks her thumb, and gently wipes the mess off the child’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you,” she says.

May gives her a familiar impatient look, that of a child whose forward motion is being stalled by the tedious and inexplicable priorities of an adult. She shrugs.

“Don’t be silly!” she says. “Come on. Let’s do dancing now.”

May spins away, studies the music player and pushes a button. The radio comes on, loud. “Happy, happy, happy,” someone is singing. May jumps and pirouettes. She turns to Tess and beckons with both arms, curling them towards her chest. “Come on!”

This one turned out bossy too, Tess thinks. Obediently she slips off her sandshoes and begins to move – tentative, awkward. She hasn’t danced for a long time. Not since that night.

“Come on!” says May. The child takes Tess’ hands and leads her to the open space, where they lean back and spin.

And Tess turns and turns until there is nothing but the music, and the ball of her bare right foot meeting the flat hardwood floor, and the warm hands of this child.

The music is loud enough to shake the room, and beneath it there might be the sound of a car horn, or perhaps only a trumpet joining the chorus. And there might be the sound of knocking, or perhaps it is the beat of the drums.

The song finishes, and a strange voice echoes in the sudden silence: “I’m so, so sorry.” The words seem to rise out of the empty spaces of the house, above and below and around them.

Tess releases May’s hands. Their grubby fingers stick together for a moment, then separate. A door creaks, and an orange balloon floats into the room on a gust of air.

02 SEP 2022

Kerry Munnery is a Melbourne writer who likes to explore the overlap between the everyday and the unfamiliar or uncanny. She has won or been placed in several major short story awards, and has also published creative non-fiction and children’s stories. She lives and works on Wurundjeri land.

61

Now, in Louis’ room, Tess picks up his pillow and breathes him in. At least I have him, she thinks. My lovely Lou-Lou. Though now he disappears too, every second weekend and half the school holidays, returning a tiny bit older and further away from her each time.

She sets the pillow back and checks her phone again as she leaves his room. Nothing. She will have to steel herself for awkward conversations with people she hardly knows.

“May…” she begins.

But the party room is empty, and silent, and dark. The lights have been turned off and a single, white-striped candle has been relit on a corner of the cake. Two flames give the only light – one real, one a reflection in the glass doors that lead to the backyard. A will-o-the-wisp hovering in the dark.

Beyond it, her own thin, translucent image stares in at her, hollow-eyed, from outside.

I want to go home, Tess thinks. But she is the adult now and this is where she lives and there is nowhere else to go and no-one is coming to collect her. She slides the door open and steps over the threshold into the crisp cold.

Louis’ errant soccer boots lie discarded in the middle of the yard and she gathers them up, muddy and wet, and holds them to her. Cold seeps into her chest.

“May!” she calls. “Where did you go?”

I couldn’t help it, she thinks. It’s impossible not to project a future for the child you’re carrying. When the actual baby is born, they drive away all those alternatives. Once they are flesh and blood, quite literally. But what about those who never reach that stage of insistent corporeality?

A faint giggle comes from behind her, inside the house.

Tess turns, sets the boots on the outside table, returns to the party room. She pinches out the candle – a tiny, fleeting pain, a brief darkness. After a moment, she flicks the lights back on, blinking tears.

“May. May! Where are you? This isn’t funny, missy!”

Another giggle. The sound hangs in the air like an echo, but she can’t locate the source. She checks the cupboards in the kitchen, under the table, behind the TV unit. There’s a rustling at her back, but wherever she turns, the laughter is behind her again.

Finally, she slumps onto one of the party chairs. She is trapped in a room full of games but empty of children; in a house she has to call home that holds no history; in a life that’s nothing like it was meant to be.

I should call someone, she thinks, staring at her phone.

But she can’t imagine who.

There is a small movement out of the corner of her eye, a rustle. The sofa seems to be moving, the beige nap twitching like a restless animal. Tess stands and stares, then creeps over and bends to rest her hand on the soft fur. It moves again: up, pause, and down. She digs her fingers into the big cushions and hauls them away. And there is the child, wedged between the back and the base of the couch.

“Found me!” May says.

Tess drops the cushions onto the floor. She reaches down, takes the child by the hands, and pulls her gently out. May’s hair stands out around her face like a brown, frizzy halo, and she has a piece of greyish fluff glued to her cheek by

Crossword

by Steve Knight

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Quick Clues ACROSS

9

1 1897 epistolary novel (7) 5 Districts (7) 9 Shows up again (9) 10 Crazy (colloq) (5) 11 Set aside (7) 12 Come into (7) 13 Enclosure (4) 14 Going Places With… TV host (5,5) 16 Approved (10) 19 Criticism (4) 21 First (7) 22 Stone fruit (7) 24 Asian river (5) 25 Metallic hardware item used to

10

11

12

14

fasten (6,3)

15 17

18

19

DOWN

20 21

22

24

25

26

27

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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Cryptic Clues

Solutions

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Book car with dual steering (7) 5 Escorts perform for quarters (7) 9 Comes back to harvest fruit (9) 10 Mad king visits Texan city (5) 11 Book store (7) 12 Come into main heritage block (7) 13 Carbon paper for pen (4) 14 Comedic actor: very pithy, Indigenous,

1 More serious rift starts between Diana

blowing us away? (5,5)

16 Licensed bookmaker trained side (10) 19 Occasionally folk ask for criticism (4) 21 First sign (7) 22 Pulp left from tropical fruit (7) 24 Asian flower in drugs, oddly (5) 25 Bolt’s partner to turn local representation (6,3) 26 Most smart salesmen backing estate

management (7)

27 Warms up to hear set played (7)

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More grim (5) 1924 Forster novel (1,7,2,5) Referee (6) Layperson (7) Japanese dish (7) Farm buildings (8) 1989 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel (5,3,7) 8 Novella (5,4) 13 Alliance (9) 15 Trivial matter (3-5) 17 Unlawful (7) 18 Facilitator (7) 20 2008 Tim Winton novel (6) 23 Bible book (5) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

and the Queen (5) Novel idea – sago in pasta salad (1,7,2,5) Moderate EU switch for kingdom (6) Green energy in trauma treatment (7) Japanese dish of leaves, a fish, miso soup (7) Showed off in empty castles and farm buildings (8) 7 Corrupt narc did no casual work (5,3,7) 8 Efficient dispatch of novella? (5,4) 13 Union’s fossil fuel opposition drops 50% (9) 15 One sinus problem is a trifling matter (3-5) 17 Crooked crook in charge of computers (7) 18 She facilitates apparel ban, excluding backpacks? (7) 20 Bully started agitating at her work (6) 23 Book tickets in theatre’s upper section for opening (5) 2 3 4 5 6

ACROSS 1 Dracula 5 Sectors 9 Reappears 10 Wacko 11 Reserve 12 Inherit 13 Cage 14 Ernie Dingo 16 Authorised 19 Flak 21 Initial 22 Apricot 24 Indus 25 Collar nut 26 Neatest 27 Reheats

16

26 Most tidy (7) 27 Warms again (7)

DOWN 1 Direr 2 A Passage to India 3 Umpire 4 Amateur 5 Sashimi 6 Cowsheds 7 Oscar and Lucinda 8 Short work 13 Coalition 15 Non-issue 17 Illicit 18 Enabler 20 Breath 23 Titus

13