The Big Issue Australia #654 – Summer Fiction

Ed.

654 04 FEB 2022

R E M SUM N O I T FIC

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Contents 08

How to Kondo

12

Loyal Animals

16

An Ordinary Day’s Work

20

Wonderland

by MJ Reidy

by Amanda McLeod

by Aoife Clifford

by Em Meller

24

Targeting Women

30

Ava

34

Lunar New Year in the Grampians

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

by JM Donellan

by Wen-Juenn Lee

40

Three Hours

44

Puggsy the Puppy’s Very Yappy Christmas

by Alice Pung

by Jim Browne

EDITION

654

48

A Rich Blaze, Bright Brilliance

52

A Few Hours in the Gardens

56

Beacons of Hope

by Mandy Beaumont

by Laura McPhee-Browne

by Hannah Goldstein

THE REGULARS

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

06 Streetsheet 62 Crossword

illustrations by Matthew Brazier @matthew_brazier www.brazierillustration.co.uk

Matthew Brazier is an illustrator based just outside of London.

He uses a combination of traditional and digital techniques to make images for a wide range of editorial and publishing briefs.

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

Ed’s Letter

by Melissa Fulton Deputy Editor @melissajfulton

Telling Tales

T

hey call it fiction because it isn’t true.

And yet when you look back to the roots of the word fiction, to where it originated, you find a lot of words for making – to knead, to mould, to fabricate, to invent, to shape, to feign, to imagine. Fiction takes its inspiration from what’s around us, and elevates it to something universal, something we can empathise with, and relate to. Fiction reaches beyond what actually happened, towards the way things might be.

We are delighted to bring you these 12 stories by Australia’s best and brightest writers, both established and emerging. Stories that take the now, hold it up to the looking glass, and explode it into a host of possibilities.

These tales speak of rage, of loneliness, of uncertainty, and of absurdity. But also – imperatively – they speak of forging ahead. Of finding hope, even just a skerrick of it, in the splendour of a wintertime sunset, the happenstance

LETTER OF THE FORTNIGHT

companionship of a loyal pup, or the solidity of a mother who’ll burn through all her sick days to take care of you.

Last year, the pandemic foiled our plans for a 2021 fiction edition – the country’s biggest-selling fiction magazine – as rolling lockdowns across the states kept our vendors off their pitches and all of us at home. Now, as I write this, Omicron rips through the country. Times remain tough, but good stories are here to help us make sense of it all.

Thank you to all our contributors and also to all who submitted stories: an impressive 692 entrants. Thank you too to our dedicated judges: writer and critic Declan Fry, and poet and former Big Issue books editor Thuy On. And to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for making this bumper edition possible.

Matthew Brazier is this edition’s illustrator, and his depth and range have brought these wonderful stories to life.

Here’s to dreaming up a bigger, brighter future. Happy reading.

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

My husband and I had the pleasure of meeting Gamal in Melbourne last weekend. We met Gamal while having breakfast in one of the gorgeous Melbourne lanes and enjoyed chatting with him very much. Meeting Gamal was one of the highlights of our weekend away, along with going to the Australian Open. We now have The Big Issue calendar hanging in our kitchen and I look forward to July when we will see Gamal’s handsome face again!

I just wish we had thought to ask him to sign it…

JANETTE RICHARDSON OYSTER BAY I NSW

I have just read the article ‘A Big Friendship’ in Ed#652. I am immensely warmed by the story of Jade, a Big Issue vendor, and customer Hilary. What a beautiful happening!

Maybe Jade could be encouraged to write further about their experiences.

The generosity of Hilary is an inspiration to us all. Thank you for your excellent publication.

DEAN HARRIS SOMERTON PARK I SA

• 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 23 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.

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Janette wins a copy of Mandy Beaumont’s new novel The Furies.

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

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT O’CONNELL ST, NORTH ADELAIDE AND MITCHAM, ADELAIDE

04 FEB 2022

interview by Matt Stedman photo by Nat Rogers

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

05

Savey

Imagine growing up on an island with no shops, little to no technology, and only a handful of other kids to spend your time with. That is the unique childhood I experienced, growing up on Taveuni, called the garden island of Fiji. It’s 42km long and about 11km wide, and we knew every inch of that island. Once the home of fierce warriors, Taveuni residents still exude pride and confidence in their step.

My mum was a nurse, and my dad a teacher – both have passed away now. I was an only child, but there were four other kids, so we always had someone to play with. We’d make our own entertainment: I loved fishing and swimming; we’d explore the island and make billycarts.

We had to walk barefoot for miles to get to school, but the walks were nice and we got to take in island life. I miss it a little. I didn’t really appreciate it for what it was until I grew up and met other people who had more boring lives.

I left the island at 18 to go to college, but halfway through I decided to join the army. I didn’t tell my parents – they were quite shocked and upset. But you have to take opportunities. I served in the peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in 1985 under the UN, and continued on other missions in Egypt’s Sinai desert and Afghanistan, and was a private contractor in Iraq.

When I walked off the plane in Dubai after my last mission on 16 January 2016, I knew I had a few hours to wait for my connecting flight, so I found a seat where I could sit quietly and think about the people I had just served with and grown to love. That’s where I met my partner, an Adelaide woman returning from a tourism conference. And it’s what brought me here to Adelaide.

I had a great life: work, travel, walking, dancing. Then I felt like I lost it all. I had a stroke in 2017. It was heartbreaking and I was very depressed and there was a lot of hate, hate and more hate.

It took me two years to change my state of mind, to look at my special ability, not my disability. I am very blessed to have a lady who stood next to me, and helped pull me out from my depressed state to who I am today.

Basically, my primary goal is to feel happy and live my dream life.

Now I’m a member of the Comet’s Powerchair soccer team, and we’re gearing up to play in Sydney this year. It gives freedom to people with disability out there to come and know that you are not alone.

The Big Issue was life-changing for me. The money I earn goes towards my tuition for further studies and paying the bills. I’ve been selling since December 2020, and I love my job. It gave me a life back into the community and expanded my horizons to know that I’m not alone out there. I love meeting and talking to the multicultural community in the City of Churches. That’s my favourite part. I’ve made friends, real friends. People like me! Finally, I’ve found like‑minded people who made me feel comfortable and accepted me the way I am.

Streetsheet

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

Searching for an Ounce of Heart My life I feel has no direction Not knowing what tomorrow’s all about So lost right in this present moment So filled with thoughts of fear and doubt Weighed down as well by endless questions – Will I stay numb or will I feel pain?

Can things change but still never get better?

Is there anything in life left to gain?

Tears of Gratitude

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I

S E L L IN G A S B E ESN A R T W O R K LY N N HR EO U G O G R IE N D S R HE Y AND F TO FA M IL

have been painting and writing poetry, attending Zoom meetings with my peers, and I’ve sold some artworks to friends and neighbours (at just a little over cost price, to get more supplies!). And spring cleaning the house: housework, or “adulting”, as they call it.

I’ve been relaxing while on holidays . And visiting the beach.

I saw a few whales one day and dolphins another time . And I’ve been hanging out with my support workers.

During COVID lockdowns, everyone has chipped in with food and general expenses – just about everyone I know – so thanks to my family and friends and my boss for helping, and a special thanks to my sons for their help, providing me with cash when I was broke. It’s brought tears to my eyes every time someone has helped me.

I missed going to work, talking with friends and the community.

I missed The Big Issue for many reasons, such as the brief conversations with the public, the work meetings and the exercise – I have COVID kilos, because I’m not walking to work every day.

Then there’s the pride it gives me to hold down a job.

LYNN R I NEWCASTLE

Time? What is time? That mysterious thing...

There is no time, no time to find out.

What grows? What dies? What changes?

What stays?

What, in the end, is this world all about?

Will I ever feel needed again?

This is perhaps my deepest fear While all the world is passing by I’ll drink a cup of disappear.

I am not proud of who I once was And I’m not proud of who I am, But now I’m trying to change my stars And be a perfect gentleman.

For currently it is the hour To cease escape and to grow up, I’ll put away my former flaws And then I’ll drink a different cup.

MATT R MUSEUM STATION I SYDNEY

Bring It On Looking forward to this year. Hope you like reading our Streetsheets from the vendors here in Perth, and viewing our pictures and photos. Thank you to the Salvation Army for feeding people who are homeless – the pies were delicious as well as the coffees. Good luck and best wishes.

LYNETTE I PERTH

Show Thankful My partner and I went to the Gawler Show one Saturday last November.

I had cash to get in the gates, but it turned out they only did tapand-go tickets. I only had cash. A nice family turned to us and said, “Don’t worry about it. We have paid for your tickets to get into the show.” All we could do was say thank you. We saw them later inside the showgrounds and thanked them again, too. So, if that family

happens to buy a Big Issue, I would like to give another big thank you.

We both had a great day out!

be the best version of myself I can be. I want to be me, I want to be Eddie. That’s all I can be.

KERRY-ANNE THE BODY SHOP, ADELAIDE ARCADE & ELIZABETH SHOPPING CENTRE I ADELAIDE

EDDIE WOOLWORTHS SHERWOOD, MILTON MARKETS & INDOOROOPILLY I BRISBANE

New Friends, New Life

Housework

What a year it was. I returned to school, attending face-to-face, and had full-time employment during the lockdown. I have a new circle of friends via Discord. I am hoping to continue my studies this year.

Household chores can be effortless.

I find that if you have everything done over the weekend, in a few hours, it makes it simple during the week. When you come home from work, you have a clean home! I used to earn pocket money doing chores as a kid. I hated doing them, but it gave me responsibility. Most parents these days give kids pocket money for doing chores. I say it’s bloody awesome – it’s good to teach kids the value of money. (“Money does not grow on trees,” my parents always said to me.) As they say, more hands make the workload lighter.

DARYL NORTHCOTE I MELBOURNE

I Am Eddie I have goals, I have my dreams that I chase after. But I want to be a good person; I want to continue to grow and learn something new every day.

I feel like on The Big Issue pitch I’m continually challenged, which is a great thing. And personally I love to try and develop every day and just

DAVID L MYER BRIDGE I PERTH

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

So Much Love

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

07

SHANE WESTPAC ON MOORABOOL ST I GEELONG WEST SHANE IS RETIRING TO QUEENSLAND

04 FEB 2022

To my beautiful Big Issue customers, a heartfelt thank you.

When I was out working on the street you made me feel like I could fly. I felt every bit the inspired hero you made me feel.

You put me there. Made me feel like I was somebody.

When life got me down or I felt unworthy and frustrated with myself or the world around me, you gave me the chance to rise above that and made me feel that I too could inspire and feel inspired. To feel love and receive love.

My wife Tanya and I are moving to Queensland soon. We will miss you all very much. For all the support over my 15 years on the street, thank you. I know you will continue to make other vendors soar high too.

Eternal love. Eternal gratitude.

8

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

HOW TO KONDO

W

hen you get home from lunch with Lucy, you feel a compulsion to run. Forget Kondo, Buddhism or Trump, running is the only religion you know. You can pretty much document your dating life by each pair of shoes, bolting from one bad relationship to the next. You grab a pair of Nikes you’ve been running in since you met Cain, but the tread is worn, the sole almost stripped. You sigh. You can’t run another mile in those.

So you search for your new pair of Converses, shoes that you recently bought because they reminded you of your male-free, university days – but you can’t find them anywhere. Panicked, you search the bedroom, the stairwell, the shelves of the oven. Last week, you discovered a pair of work heels, melted into your roast chicken. The phone rings.

Lucy, again.

“I can’t find my bloody Converses.”

“Ah,” Lucy says, “I see that you’re not learning. You need the Kondo. Kon-do. If you could find your shoes, imagine where they could take you?”

You know exactly where your goddamned shoes would take you – out of this house at a steady pace of fifteen kilometres an hour.

04 FEB 2022

W

hile your relationship with Cain has progressed like a slow-moving cancer, Lucy kicks each of her dates to the kerb, chewing through them like gum. She’s left dozens of them mid-first date: too obnoxious, too right-wing, too alpha male.

“What’s your secret trick?” you say.

“Kondo,” Lucy says.

“Sorry?”

“Marie Kondo is the world’s greatest religion. And you need to sign up.” She thrusts her mobile into your face, showing you the YouTube clip. “See how Kondo talks to it, how she communes with the fabric? She and the shirt have become one.”

It’s no surprise Lucy’s obsessed with Kondo because she’s also tried to convert you to aerial yoga and signed you up to hike backwards on the Inca trail, because walking forwards was too capitalistic, too aggressive. “If you walk backwards, you can see where you’ve come from, where you’ve been.”

She’d sprained her ankle doing it, served her right.

“Rule number one. Throw out anything or anyone that no longer sparks joy. Then sort. Fold. Maximise space. See?” She opens her drawer full of Country Road underwear and socks, in hues of blue and green. They have the neat precision of sushi rolls.

You blink. “What are you supposed to do now? Eat them?”

Lucy frowns. “That’s such a consumerist attitude. And half the world’s problem. That’s why Marie Kondo needs to fix the mess we’ve made.”

You roll your eyes. “This is just another distraction from the real stuff. Fold a shirt and shelve it, so we can forget about

the refugees on Manus, the diminishing population of Bengal tigers in—” “The Bengal tigers will survive. Kondo could be good for your survival. Last week you couldn’t find your house keys.

How are you going to get anywhere without your keys?”

Your house keys were in a perfectly organised place: with the spinach leaves in the crisper of the fridge. “Locksmith?”

She shakes her head. “Watch. Observe.”

Kondo is organising a man’s shoe collection, whispering in her calm-as-the-sea-voice: “See the aesthetic balance of this shoe rack. Pleasant, yes?” You don’t even own a shoe rack; all your shoes are encrusted with dirt and dog shit, the detritus of your life.

“Who’s got time for that?”

“You make the time. Kondo is the new botox.” She presses her forefinger and thumb to your forehead, stretching the skin taut. “And you could certainly use a bit of that. Just think, if you organise your life you might be able to sort out your issues with you-know-who.”

“Right,” you say, staring at her underwear. You imagine there’s a skid mark on a pair of them. It reminds you of something else. The stain of Cain. No washing or folding, no Marie-bloody-Kondo can get rid of that.

9

Y

ou met Cain in a bar in North Sydney. The floor of the bar was covered in fake grass, as if you were on a cheap 80s cruise ship. People sank beers and sang along to ‘Love Shack’. Lines of fairy lights hung low from the ceiling, almost decapitating people as they walked through the bar. You wish you’d gone home with your oldest friend Lucy, but you’d collided headfirst with Cain. He was a guitarist, using your forearm as if it were the fretboard of a guitar, strumming out the songs he’d once written. Semi-impressive.

You’d gone home with Cain because he hated ‘Love Shack’, because he refused to sing along. He had finely muscled arms. But you liked him mainly because you’d read that one year of loneliness can take fifteen years off your life, and after three years of it, you probably didn’t have much time left.

By MJ Reidy

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

10

“I’ve got twenty-eight pairs of running shoes, Lucy. Two pairs for every fucked-up relationship I’ve ever had. I’ve never been able to throw any of them away.”

“That’s toxic,” Lucy says. “You can keep running in those old shoes, but you’ll always end up at the same finish line.”

You stare at the mountain of shoes, teetering precariously at the top of your cupboard. She actually might have a point.

When you hang up, the phone rings again. “Hi babe, me.”

You can hear the hiss of Cain’s cigarette. “Our anniversary Wednesday night. How about I take you for yum cha at Westfields. It’s a two-for-one deal.”

“Sounds romantic,” you say. You agree to a time and hang up.

A pain flares in your chest. You need to run, run fast as Gump, down highways and across plateaus. But where are your new Cons? In your bedroom, you sift through pair after pair, throwing them over your head, wondering if Lucy and Kondo are right. If you organise your shoes, maybe you’ll regain control over your life. Solve some problems. Or at least run from them more efficiently.

You gather them up, remembering Kondo’s mantra: eliminate things that no longer give joy. Crocs, Birkenstocks – they’ve only given you blisters. Five pairs of running shoes you got for a steal on eBay are thrown to the pile, a pair of wedges that only a Kardashian could conquer. A momentum builds as you slide open the wardrobe. You find the Wonder Woman T-shirt that you wore on your first date with Cain, a hole spiralling in the left breast. You toss it. The red scarf he tied you to the bed with, leaving bruises on your wrist for weeks. For your birthday he’d given you gerberas and a bruise to your right eye, after he saw that your ex-boyfriend had posted an emoji of a smiley-face and three kisses on your Facebook page.

Shirt by shirt, shoe by shoe, memory by memory – it all goes into the bin.

Like a whirling tornado you move on to the kitchen, upending all the drawers onto the floor. You discover you own seventeen steak knives and eight egg whisks, the perfect analogy for your relationship with Cain: chopped, beaten, stirred.

You throw spoons and forks across the floor, a knife that lodges in the skirting board. A volcanic anger bubbling.

Cain. Fucking Cain. You consider the novelty sheep salt‑and‑pepper shakers – handy, because you can flavour your meals by shaking the grains out their arses. But the shaker falls from your grasp, smashing on the floor. You gather up the broken pieces of sheep, shuffling on your hands and knees, noticing how the salt glints. Winks. Its hypnotic symmetry. With your fingernail you begin to sort the grains, counting them one by one, arranging them into clean, neat lines…

This takes you twenty-three hours, until you realise you’ve missed work, a hair appointment, and another coffee date with Lucy. But God, it’s the most relaxed you’ve felt in years.

Lucy calls, again. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“I’ve been Kondo-ing” you say. “I was getting so organised I forgot.”

“Well, don’t—”

“Have to go, Lucy. I’m sorting the leaves in the yard.”

“Leaves?” she says, but her voice becomes like the distant buzz of the fridge. To wound me, she adds, “How’s Cain?”

Shit. Your anniversary date with Cain. You’ve got five minutes.

A

s you drive to Westfield, you play back the last year of your relationship with Cain as if it were a Hollywood movie. You’d be played by someone desirable and hot, like Scarlett Johansson, and Cain would be John C Reilly – someone that no-one ever wants to kiss. They say the first nine months of a relationship is the honeymoon phase, but you and Cain were in the love-you-hate-you-phase by the second month.

By the third month, Cain started to comment on your weight, your limited taste in music, the annoying hookshape of your nose. Whenever he embraced you in bed you squirmed uncomfortably, as if the two of you were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that no longer fit. By month six, you passed up his invitations to go out drinking, instead preferring to eat carbonara in front of the TV. The more you fought, the more you fucked, and the relationship just kept spinning like a carousel. You’re pretty sure there’s a good break-up song in that. You wish you’d written the lyrics for Cain as an anniversary present, getting him to strum it down your arm.

You’ve felt the quiet thrill of organisation, your life starting to resemble the perfect V-formation of birds as they fly through the sky.

C

ain is standing outside the door of the restaurant, scrolling through his phone. He’s wearing his favourite Led Zeppelin T-shirt: an image of an angel, wings splayed, a flaccid penis dangling between its legs. There’s a gaping bullet wound in the angel’s heart. Symbolically, it’s how he’ll end up after you dump him tonight. And what better symmetry than to end the relationship on the day it began?

“Happy anniversary,” he says, kissing you briefly. “One year. Who can believe it’s gone that fast?”

You force a smile. The window behind Cain displays plastic plates of food, unnaturally pink salmon fanned out across a plate, dumplings as cherubic and shiny as children.

The permanency of the food, its foreverness, makes you feel a little sick.

“Some couples squeeze one out in a year,” he says, gyrating his hips, “but thankfully not us.” His eyes trail from your hips to your chest. “Have you lost weight, babe?”

You walk to the woman at the counter and pay for dinner, devouring the fortune cookie, including the unread message.

“Impressive manoeuvre,” she says.

“Thanks,” you say, blushing.

“Ah yes,” the woman says. “Kondo has really shaken things up. You’re the third woman I’ve seen perform that trick today.

You should have been here on Valentine’s Day.” She rolls her eyes. “Absolute carnage.”

A soft rain falls as you walk down the street to your car, and you catch a couple of raindrops on your tongue. You glance down at your Converses and grin – you’ve got food in your belly and Cain in the palm of your hand. You pull out the other fortune cookie from your pocket, and wafer-thin Cain, offering them both to a passer-by.

“God be with you,” he says.

“And Kondo with you.”

You push your hands together in prayer, thinking of how they will sort and fold and press your clothes into submission at home, and how if you put your mind to it, you could fold the whole city into your pocket, the world, even the galaxies.

But for now, you’ll walk, not run, a gravity-defying bounce in every step.

MJ Reidy is a writer based on the Central Coast, NSW. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Elle, Award Winning Australian Writing, Newcastle Short Story Prize Anthology, ABC and more. She is a recipient of the Kill Your Darlings mentorship program with Julie Koh, and is working on a collection of short stories.

04 FEB 2022

@m.j.reidy

11

You shrug. There’s been no time to consume – just eliminate. The two of you sit down at the table and select dishes from the carts. He picks up one of the chopsticks and pushes the tip of it into his ear, unlodging a bit of wax.

“You’re late, babe. What held you up?”

You want to tell him about the shoes and the salt and the leaves, how everything in your life is in perfect order.

Harmony. How you’ve felt the quiet thrill of organisation, your life starting to resemble the perfect V-formation of birds as they fly through the sky.

“I’ve been organising my life. Mainly, the salt.” You pick up the salt-and-pepper shakers on the table, staging a mock waltz of every relationship you’ve ever had, bowing the salt to the pepper.

“Salt?”

“Yes, salt. It’s this craze that Lucy got me onto. Really therapeutic. I haven’t felt this strong in years.”

“Lucy’s a freak. And you’re organising salt? Have you lost it? Don’t you just sprinkle the shit on your food?”

“That’s such a consumerist attitude, Cain.” His eyes almost pop out of his head. The more you look at him the more you can see him for what he is – a Kondo sceptic. You take long, deep breaths. With your spoon, you separate the noodles from the meat. On your napkin you sort the meat by size, in ascending order.

Cain grabs you by the wrist, wrenching it so hard it burns.

“What the hell are you doing? Are you a two-year-old?” He looks over his shoulder at the other customers. “Stop playing with your food.”

By the time you finish your plate you realise that you’re not going to advance to the desserts. “I think we should get the bill.” You push the chopstick into your temple as if it were a loaded gun. “I’ve got a headache.”

“What?! It’s two-for-one? You don’t—” You pick up your chopstick, stabbing it into his chest.

“Precisely, it’s two for fucking one! I’ve sacrificed everything for this relationship. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from sorting through 118,872 grains of salt, it’s that I am done.

We are done.”

“Jesus,” he says. “You’re a certified fruit loop.”

A waitress delivers the bill on a silver plate, with two fortune cookies shaped like deflated moons. You pick up the bill and fold it in half and then quarters, until it’s the size of a microscopic book.

He leans in. “So, you’re going to dump me and make me pay the bill?”

Your fingers walk over the bill, running towards Cain’s arm. With a satisfying click, you fold his wrist to his elbow, pinning him down on the table. He’s surprisingly pliable, like a cotton shirt. You smooth the back of his T-shirt, ironing him out like a cartoon character until he’s completely flat. You breathe into his neck: “You no longer spark any joy for me, Cain,” folding his legs and arms into his back, watching as his head seamlessly tucks into his arse. In fact, you can’t tell the difference between the two. You keep folding until he’s as small as the bill, pressing him into your palm. You’d never know Cain existed, except for his insect‑like chirps.

12

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

LOYAL ANIMALS

04 FEB 2022

T

he city makes Hank twitch and sweat; he’d been there long enough to meet and marry Cynthia, and decide town life was stifling. He needed breathing room, he said. There was work for both of them at a wilderness lodge in Tasmania; a cabin half an hour’s drive away meant they wouldn’t hear the tourists. Cynthia had nodded, the speechless numbness that had been her world ever since Dan died. No. Was killed. Dan’s life was cut short not by sickness nor misfortune, but by someone else.

The letter from her mother is a crumpled ball, wedged in a pocket of her handbag. Snippets of it dart through her brain, despite her best efforts. Max. Staying with me.

Stable environment. Unhealthy level of isolation. Friends and opportunities. Irreversible damage. Your decision. Drag him down with you. Consulted with my lawyer. Love, not anger. When Cynthia had told Max about the move, she was unsurprised that his reaction mimicked her own: inhale, three silent nods, exhale. What was happening in her son’s mind, she wondered. In the same instant she answered her own question: the same as what was happening in hers.

Roll with life’s tidal rhythm and try not to drown. When her mother had delivered the letter, Cynthia had insisted on hearing from Max himself that this was what he wanted. He greeted her with the same silent nods they always gave each other. She wondered how much of each of them had died with Dan. Too tired to argue, she had simply agreed, and she and Max had hugged carefully, bodies not touching, heads turned away, the distance between them small and infinite.

A verandah runs the length of the cabin, wide and sheltered enough for a battered couch. The wood is rough, logs still dressed in the bark they wore as trees. Cynthia’s mouth does not twitch, her eyes do not narrow as they follow the walls around from one side of the door frame to the other.

She takes in the chipped porcelain sink, the small pile of ashes sitting in the fireplace, the mismatched vinyl chairs and the cobwebs festooning the corner lamp like shredded lace. She lowers her suitcase to the floor. This place is Hank.

There are no figurines dancing on the mantelpiece. Dust is an undisturbed blanket.

There is a bedroom, a bathroom, and a room for everything else. Hank explains there is a small water heater, and gas bottles for cooking, and enough electricity from the micro hydro system to power the lights. It’s simple, but no simpler than what they lived in before, in the city, he says.

And quieter. Cynthia nods, and thinks yes, but here she can’t run from the quiet. Here, there is nothing to drown out the sounds that fill her head; she can hear the screaming rubber,

13

T

wo figurines dance frozen in the dust on the mantelpiece. Cynthia watches them, captivated by the tiny painted buckles on the shoes, the gloss of the woman’s lips, enamelled buttons of the man’s frock coat. Cynthia’s own dress hangs neatly from hips widened by the birth of one child.

She smooths ripples from the bodice, fabric gathering and relaxing like waves beneath her trembling fingers. A tiny edge of camphor escapes beneath her perfume as she moves, betraying the dress as second-hand. Like the bride, she thinks. But Hank doesn’t seem to mind.

The reflection of a thirtysomething woman stares back at her from the mirror, with hair arranged in careful curls by a neighbour. Cynthia can’t decide whether the make-up gives her an unhealthy pallor, or if she’s just too used to seeing her own face reddened by exposure. She makes an acceptable bride, she supposes; she’s done this once before but the rules are different for second timers and discussed haltingly, in hushed voices tinged with uncertainty. She’s trying. Her simple dress, not white, with just a touch of embellishment, below the knee, no veil. A small posy from the garden, an even smaller guest list. Hank doesn’t want a fuss. Her mother has been distant, waving a hand at the plans and pursing her lips with sharp inhalations. The only questions have been about Max. Cynthia supposes Max accepts the arrangement, with the same stoic patience his father had. She hasn’t asked him, outright, what he thinks. She’s asked him very little since his father died. Six years of silence in each other’s company. Max volunteers single-word answers wherever he can, and Cynthia has grown used to his mute acquiescence.

Her mother wants to know what Max and Hank do together, how they’ve bonded. Cynthia skirts the questions, to avoid explaining that they haven’t. They share space, navigating around each other like ice skaters, conscious of each other’s presence but avoiding contact, collision, catastrophe. When she’d told Max she was marrying Hank, he’d nodded silently, the tea towel in his hand not missing a beat as he dried the plate and added it to the stack on the table. The only sounds were the buzzing of the fluorescent bulb dangling from the ceiling, and the moths fluttering around its cold light. It could have been any night, in the tiny home of two people repelled from each other by silent grief.

Cynthia’s eyes return to the dancers on the mantelpiece.

They hold each other, eyes locked as torsos lean away, hips locked together, a moment of porcelain desire. She knows she will never dance like that with Hank.

By Amanda McLeod

the shatter-chime of glass, the wet crunch she imagines is what life-ending head injuries sound like. She is glad Max has stayed behind with her mother. He saw it all, and she wonders what hell the reality creates inside his head, how much worse it could be than the speculative one living in her own. At least one of them won’t be left alone with it.

14

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

T

he work dries up; at least, hers does. Hank drives away in the battered truck every morning and leaves her with swamp gums and creek water as companions. The stillness screams inside her.

Letters from Max grow shorter, further apart. Cynthia busies herself cleaning the house, tending to the laundry, baking.

Two people generate little laundry, or mess, and can only eat so many baked goods. Hank, having spent the day among people, comes home yearning for the silence that has Cynthia doubting her sanity. He senses the ball of darkness hovering in her belly, contained and writhing, and brings home things he thinks might ease her. A handful of books, left behind at the lodge by long-ago guests. The crossword from the daily newspaper. A small jigsaw puzzle. They do not mute the howling within. One Saturday, squeezed by desperation, she asks Hank if they can go to town. He mutters, shifts in his chair, complains about the noise, the hustle. She can go if she likes, he tells her, but he has imaginary chores around the cabin to do. The big woodpile could be bigger.

Cynthia takes the keys, and pauses in front of the mottled mirror in the bathroom. Not yet forty, she sees signs of tragedy in her hair, channels of trauma beneath her eyes.

Hers has not been a fairytale. Her heart aches for Max, slammed into silence by the same car that ripped Dan away from them. Regret bubbles up her oesophagus; she could have been a better mother if her own grief hadn’t threatened to swallow her whole. She bites down, muting the pain with her teeth. Max was her only chance to be a mother. She and Hank, well, it’s not like that. They get what they need from each other; people stop asking questions.

She bumps down the cabin track, onto the smooth hum of highway asphalt, and into town, not remembering the journey and jolting into presence as she parks the truck.

It’s not a big town, but Saturday morning brings people to outdoor tables in patches of sunlight, and the main street froths with energy. Cynthia finds a table in the corner of the cafe and loses herself in the hiss of the coffee machine, the tinkle of the door chime, the rise and fall of conversations that don’t involve her. She hides her silence beneath the cafe’s auditory veneer, which in turn dulls the screams echoing in her chest. The gaslit sensation she lives with relaxes, the release like undoing the zipper on a tight dress.

She lingers over her empty cup as long as propriety allows, then slips out into the street.

T

he box catches her eye. It resembles a wooden fruit crate, but from where Cynthia stands it looks empty.

An old farmer stands beside it, looking in briefly, then returning his gaze to where the horizon meets the road like someone with a pressing need to be elsewhere.

A young mother and her son walk past the box, and the boy’s

squeals of delight are twisting blades. Something seems to be moving and jumping in the box, something that appeals to the boy, but not to his mother. She walks onward and he follows, dragged by one arm, body lagging back in the direction of his abandoned treasure chest. Cynthia wonders what could be so easy and so hard to leave behind.

As she approaches, Cynthia sees four writhing, bouncy balls of canine enthusiasm. Kelpies, the farmer informs her, not pedigree, but good workers and very loyal. Cynthia points to the fifth one, smaller and darker than the others, a changeling. The runt, the farmer says, unlikely to be much good for working, a pet if anything. The changeling sits in silence, watching the others, hiding in the noise. Cynthia feels déjà vu tickling her temporal lobe. Recognition. She tells the farmer the changeling is exactly what she wants, and he replies that Cynthia can have him, for the price of saving the farmer the trouble of drowning him in the river. Her neck prickles. She takes the pup from the farmer’s calloused hands and holds the shivering, silken body to her chest. Invisible bonds tighten around the two. They visit the feedlot and the vet, gathering accoutrements, and return to the truck.

The pup settles into Hank’s parka, left in the front seat, as she pulls it around him. His dark eyes don’t leave her on the drive home. She names him on the journey; Billy, the name she and Dan had chosen for their second son, before the crash. Before everything.

When he sees Billy, Hank mutters something about damned barking. Cynthia replies Billy has not made a sound, and adds something about company and safety, and venturing into the forest during the day when Billy is older. Hank nods once. That might be a good idea, he says.

It appears unlikely there will be any more work for Cynthia at the lodge. He worries about her, here by herself all day.

Cynthia’s eyebrows flicker at this rare display. They have a simple life, she tells him, but what they get from each other is enough. Hank is a good man, she tells herself.

Before she goes to bed, she takes Billy out and stands shivering in the crisp air while he urinates. Somewhere nearby, a devil screams and growls. Cynthia’s heart pulses in her mouth as Billy raises his head and stares into the forest, frozen, ears forward. Adrenalin leaves her shaking as he calmly turns and trots back into the cabin, as if it were all a figment of her imagination.

C

ynthia is determined she will not make the same mistakes this time. She flings herself into moulding Billy, and he makes it easy. He is house-trained in days, and remains completely silent, which impresses Hank. Even he comes to enjoy Billy’s company, when the dog sits on the verandah, watching him carve a piece of wood in the long evening light. Billy is Cynthia’s dog though; the cord that bound them that first moment has become impossibly knotted. He follows her as she moves through her days, watching her with the piqued interest of a toddler. At first, she feels silly, talking to him about what she’s doing. The words stick in her mouth. But his ears prick and he cocks his puppy head as she speaks, so she keeps trying, and slowly it begins to feel more natural.

Amanda McLeod is the author of Animal Behaviour and Heartbreak Autopsy, and has had poetry, fiction and non‑fiction published extensively in print and online.

Amanda’s more recent work is reflective of her passion for wild places. Looking for her? Try the nearest river. @amandamwrites

04 FEB 2022

T

he sound of the car scraping its chassis on the cabin track bounces around the tree trunks.

Cynthia and Billy raise heads now peppered with grey. They are sprawled together on the verandah, exhausted after a morning traversing the forest, bathing in its light, devouring its fragrance. Billy whines once and looks at Cynthia. They both know this cannot be Hank; it is too early, and the truck, battered but still faithful after all these years, rides high enough to avoid the troughs and gullies carved into the dirt by rain. A small hatchback appears around the bend.

Nobody who knows this area would consider driving a car like that. Cynthia notes the rental car company sticker on the windscreen, and hopes the driver chose to lower their excess.

The driver’s side door opens, and a young man steps out, pushing sunglasses up into a thick crop of dark wavy hair, looking around, captured in profile by the afternoon sun.

Cynthia’s eyes burn; for a moment she thinks she sees a ghost standing uncertainly before her. Dan. She stands at the top of the stairs, unsure what to do.

More than ten years have passed since she saw him in anything more than sporadic photographs tucked into his increasingly short letters. He is taller than she expected, and his lips have his father’s easy upturn at the ends. His build is lean, rangy. But the eyes she looks into are her own.

Billy stands beside Cynthia, gazing at the newcomer. He looks up again at her and she marvels at his serenity, while her own insides swirl and froth like the creek after snowmelt.

She drops onto her haunches beside Billy, sliding an arm around his solid shoulders, and whispers a flurry of words into his ears, most of which he doesn’t understand. He recognises one. Brother. But he senses her hesitation, at the same time feeling the ache of her longing. Stepping forward, he looks back at her, takes a few more steps, looks back again, continues.

Max reaches down, running slender fingers along Billy’s side as the dog circles him twice and then stands, ears pricked, between he and Cynthia. Billy looks from one to the other before flopping down in the dirt, rolling over, and stretching his legs to the sky. Max’s eyes meet Cynthia’s over the clowning dog. Years of unspoken feeling roll in the air between them. Without speaking, they take their first steps back to each other.

15

She teaches him to sit and drop, and come when called.

As he grows he only seems more responsive, and Cynthia notices herself smile more often. Billy learns to return home from different points around the clearing, then from in the forest close to the cabin clearing, then from across the creek.

Cynthia watches him grow into a handsome dog, if small for a kelpie, sweet natured and devoted. This time, she feels, she got things more right.

When Billy knows how to return home from anywhere, Cynthia decides the time has come for the two of them to venture forth. Shouldering a small daypack of supplies, she and Billy disappear between the trees, following an invisible path marked by their hearts. Billy weaves back and forth, nose working furiously, while Cynthia drinks in the wild beauty and revels in the sense of freedom. As they trek through the undergrowth, they pause as fancy takes them; to drink, for Billy to explore something with his sensitive nose, for Cynthia to pull out her sketchbook and make a clumsy attempt at capturing what lay before her.

She is deep in creative endeavour when she looks up to find herself alone. She calls to Billy, but no chocolate body comes crashing through the trees, no silky head slides under her hand. She calls again. The forest looms above her, its beauty transformed into something sinister. The silence threatens to choke her. Cynthia sinks down onto a log, ignoring the damp soaking up through her trousers. Breathe in. Breathe out. He won’t be far. The rush of self-criticism echoes in her head, reminding her why she hesitates at everything, after Dan. The howling inside her, dulled by Billy’s presence, reaches fever pitch. It breaks free of its cage, made of ribs and cartilage. Everything contained flows out, mingling with tears: Dan, Max, the crash. The lost baby nobody else had known about, a secret bloom that never made it to announcement. A future torn away with one swing of the blade. The unbridgeable distance between her and Max. Her marriage to Hank, solace for both of them without the demands of love. And Billy, a second chance when she thought all her chances were gone.

She is millimetres from psychological freefall when Billy comes charging up, drenched from head to toe, ears back, tail low. He presses against her, trying to ease her distress. She throws both arms around him, breathing in his wet doggy scent, her body finding comfort in his solid warmth. He pokes a cold nose into the nape of her neck, and she raises her head.

With snuffling licks, he dries the tears still spilling down her face. He forgives her for everything. She wonders if she will ever forgive herself.

16

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

AN ORDINARY DAY’S WORK

M

y son’s team are the regional football champions this year. There was such a fuss that if you told me that the town was putting on a ticker tape parade it wouldn’t have surprised me. Jackie’s daughters are pretty good basketballers. They inherited their dad’s height and their mum’s ferocity. Jackie says they dream about playing professionally in America. You can get great sports scholarships.

Tony, the security guard, hears us talking as he makes his rounds. “Forget basketball. They want to play footy. That women’s comp gets bigger every year.”

Jackie ignores him. Football won’t pay their university.

“How about those Tigers?” Tony was born with one eye black and one yellow.

“Not a hope,” I tell him.

“You know, I’m sick of talking about our kids,” says Jackie.

“They’re all we ever talk about. Tell me about you. Tell me something about you that I don’t know.”

I’m thinking about what this might be when he arrives in

I

put on latex gloves and dab away at the blood. Head wounds always look messy but this one isn’t deep.

An inch below the hairline, it is a clean cut. Could be a knife? He is a tall man so how would they reach up there? Maybe he was glassed. I check through his dark hair for fragments.

“Do you know what they hit you with?”

Heat rises off him like a furnace. There’s a kind of adrenaline twitch to him, as if he might run away. None of this is unusual. There are plenty of people who don’t like hospitals.

“It was dark. I didn’t see anything.”

“Maybe the council will finally get around to fixing up the lighting,” I say.

There are rumours that the toilets down the south end of the park are sometimes used as a beat. This cut would make more sense if he were on his knees. It might also explain why he came straight to the hospital and didn’t stop off at the police station.

“You’re pretty lucky,” I say. “No stitches, just glue and tape.”

04 FEB 2022

E

arlier, a poor little mite with bad gastro arrived with her mother. I put a drip in her arm, told her to rest. Jackie, our receptionist, had played netball against that mum in the local Wednesday night comp. Jackie takes no prisoners on the court and from the set of the mother’s mouth, she hasn’t forgotten.

We aren’t close friends but Jackie’s good for a laugh on shift. I’ve got a crook back like most nurses, whereas she has dud knees. I tell her she should give up the netball but she says over her dead body.

We joke about dead bodies all the time.

I wonder if you do too.

Emergency. There is blood running down his face but he’s moving like he barely notices, with a backpack dangling from one giant fist. I’m not a small woman but I’m a doll next to him.

Jackie takes one look and says, “I’ll do the paperwork.”

“What happened?” I ask, swiping my card to take him through to the secured area. It’s designed so that you can make individual cubicles with sliding curtains, but he’s the only patient here at the moment, so I keep it open. The little mite and her mother are in the children’s room. He heads straight to the furthest bed and I don’t stop him. Sometimes patients can feel a little claustrophobic.

I get him to sit on the chair instead of the bed, so I can have a better look at the cut. He doesn’t smell of alcohol.

“Someone jumped me in Curtin Park.” His voice is softer, higher pitched, than you would expect from the size of him.

Curtin Park is lovely during the daytime when the sun is out and the air crisp as a green apple. It has a duck pond, begonias in a hothouse and a huge ornate fountain where people throw in money and make a wish. In autumn, the paths are carpeted with golden leaves. I used to sit up in the band rotunda and watch my son, red-faced, determined, clambering up the fence to throw bread to the ducks.

I haven’t been to the park since. Strange the way trauma affects you. Of course, he’d never been there that night at all.

17

I

n the hospital cubicle there is a bed, a chair, the usual clutter of bandages, saline, Micropore Tape, gauze, cotton wool buds, hand sanitiser and a patient, with a nasty cut to his head, who is holding a knife.

My patient.

The knife is being held to my throat. His hand is grabbing my arm so I can’t pull away and he is smiling with nicotine‑stained teeth.

He came into Emergency just after the security guard went past. I am standing on the wrong side of the bed to reach the panic button and we are in the furthest cubicle, which the closed-circuit camera doesn’t quite reach.

None of these things is an accident.

He planned all of it. It’s important you know that.

By Aoife Clifford

18

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I can’t tell you how many blokes have fainted at the sight of a needle and there was no way I could have caught this one if he keeled over.

As I mend his head, he tells me he used to go out with a nurse who worked here, Belinda Nicholls.

I picture Belinda, rabbit twitchy, sitting in the nurses’ lounge on her last day before taking a job out west. She looked at us all with anxious eyes, the farewell cake uneaten on the plate in front of her.

Warning bells faintly ring in my head like a level crossing barrier just starting to close. I’m wearing a personal alarm but if nurses pressed it for every odd patient or weirdo, this place would come to a shuddering halt.

“Pretty slow in here tonight,” he says.

“Gets busy in a flash,” I tell him quickly, even though right now it is as quiet as the morgue. “You wait. That door will open and the hordes will flood in. Lucky you arrived when you did.”

But of course luck had nothing to do with it.

I play at being chatty, using words to keep him engaged while I patch him up and send him on his way. Then he can be someone else’s problem.

“A big fella like you, you would have been quite a sight on the footy field in your day. What position did you play? Tony, he’s the security guard for Emergency, should be here any minute, he’s mad about the footy. Barracks for Tigers, can you believe it? My son plays a bit of football but talks about switching to basketball. I don’t mind it on television but the stadiums get a bit noisy with all the music and hoopla. Jackie likes the basketball. That’s Jackie who is just on the desk out there probably hearing every word, aren’t you Jac?” “All done,” I say eventually, and turn away to pick up the debris that I have created. Clean as you go, every good nurse’s motto.

There is a scrape as the chair moves sideways, a wave of unpredictable movement. An arm grabs me around my neck, jerking me backwards like the world has tilted. I’m being dragged in a rip tide, out of my depth.

Suddenly, Jackie is there, horrified, her mouth about to scream. Part of me almost wants to laugh at her, until I realise there is a knife being held to my neck by a man who has morphed from a patient into someone who has waited outside the hospital until the security guard went past and then deliberately sliced his own head open before coming inside.

T

wo weeks later, I am sitting across the desk from a grey man from the Department. He has come up from the city just to oversee the security review of the hospital, he tells me. I should be honoured.

Did I see the Premier on the television?

I nod my head. I saw the Premier make a big deal out of her mother being a nurse while not answering any questions about how she planned to keep us safe. Like a true politician.

She did the same thing last time it happened and she’ll do the same next time.

He coughs, shuffles the papers on his desk and then lays out a map of the emergency department, including triage

and reception, and asks why the duress alarms were not activated. He has marked each of them with a little red cross to be helpful.

“He knew where they all were,” I tell him.

“Even the one at your co-worker’s desk?” he asks. “Where she was when you claim the attack started.”

Human error, that’s what he wants the report to say. Then they don’t need to spend any money.

I think of the way he shouted at Jackie to get her hands up or else he would slit my throat.

“If she had hit it, I’d be dead now.”

His mouth is a disbelieving knot.

“And you say he was shouting,” he says, reading off a different document. “Why didn’t anyone hear that do you think?”

People forget, especially people like this pen-pusher who has never actually worked in one, but hospitals are noisy places. The beep of machines, the constant phone ringing, the calling out to one another, the hum of conversations, the cries of pain, the shuffling feet, the whirr of trolleys. Their walls are designed to keep noise absorbed and contained.

Besides, he didn’t make that much noise after those first minutes. He knew that a whisper in the ear can be far more terrifying than a scream.

H

e bundles us both into the office where we can be contained, an office with no panic button. He takes my panic button off me.

Tony walks past a few minutes later and stops to see what’s going on, but he is prepared for Tony. Jackie, who can’t stop crying, has been shoved under a desk where she can’t be seen. He stands there with me in front of him.

The knife presses into my back as he explains in detail what will happen if I raise the alarm. He’s got a good enough grip on anatomy that I believe him.

Tony stands in the doorway and frowns. There’s no reason for a patient to be in this office.

The knife, which has already sliced through the back of my uniform, scratches against my skin.

“Everything alright?” Tony asks.

“Special favour,” the man behind me says. “Just came in here to look at the footy scores. Go Tiges.”

Anyone who barracks for the Tigers must be all right.

“They’re playing pretty good for a young team,” Tony says.

“Finals for sure.”

There is a crackle on his radio and Tony turns, walks up the corridor to answer it and disappears.

I begin to shake. My breath is wet and trembling.

He keeps holding my arm as he steps backwards to check Jackie. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see she is huddled up in the desk space as far away from us as she can get. She is so scared, I don’t want to look at her. I stare through the door instead.

Tony’s head is poking around it.

His eyebrows are asking if I am all right.

I give the slightest shake of my head and mouth “Knife”.

Within a minute, there is a crackling over the loudspeakers saying there is a Code Grey in Emergency.

W

ithin minutes, police are standing in reception, trying to work out how to get in. The little girl and her mother are evacuated to another floor. It takes a while to find the key to the office. When they finally track it down, one policeman opens the door and another steps through.

He moves backwards, waving the knife around. There doesn’t seem to be a plan for this part. It’s all improvisation now.

Jackie makes the most of the opportunity. Unnoticed, she crawls out from the desk, springs up and runs for the door.

She’s fast and I am not. All that netball.

A cop tasers him.

I always thought tasers would stop a charging rhino but this doesn’t do a thing.

Pull out your gun, I want to yell, but there is still a knife to my throat. We stay like that for what feels like hours, a frozen triangle of hate and fear. Then there is a click behind us and a couple of police rush in from the other door, a door I didn’t even realise was there. He turns to face them and lets go of me. I have become a hindrance, and I run as if the devil is at my heels. In a strange way he is.

It feels like he’s still there.

That policeman, the first one with the taser, went off on stress that night and never came back. Jackie left as well.

She’s got a reception job at a concreting place in town.

The hospital transferred me to a permanent day shift.

They acted like I should be grateful even though it lost me almost a third of my pay. The Department report found that everyone had done a wonderful job, which was a testament to the training provided, and they gave themselves a big pat on the back. The only recommendation was a couple more alerts in places and an extension of the closed-circuit television. They refused to give me time off to go to the court case – didn’t want to create a precedent – so I had to use my holidays. Jackie didn’t want to come, even though her work had said it was okay. She didn’t want to see him ever again.

But I did.

Aoife Clifford is the bestselling author of All These Perfect Strangers and Second Sight. Her short stories have been published in Australia and internationally, winning premier prizes such as the Scarlet Stiletto and Ned Kelly Award. Her latest novel, When We Fall, will be published in March 2022. @aoifejclifford

04 FEB 2022

T

ony doesn’t work in security anymore. He bought a lawn mowing franchise. His wife insisted on it.

He mows my lawn but never charges. Sometimes when he is finished, we sit out on the front step and have a beer, and sometimes, when the sun has warmed our skin and the sky has no clouds, we talk about that night.

I always ask how he knew to come back and he always tells me that in all the years we worked together, I never missed an opportunity to diss the Tigers.

H

e never looked at me in the courtroom, not once.

Instead, he mostly slouched in his seat and stared at his hands. Sometimes he joked with the guards and they laughed along with him. When it was too hard to keep watching, I focused on you instead. You must be a good poker player because I could never tell what you were thinking. I wonder what it must be like to be up on that bench, higher than everyone else in the court, to sit in judgement.

It looks lonely.

Maybe I’m just paperwork to you, the next cab in a very long queue. I’d understand because sometimes patients are like that to me. You minimise their suffering just so you can get your job done. I run into ex-patients in the supermarket sometimes and they chat like we’re long-lost friends and I have no idea who they are. This is just a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety case where no-one died and there are no visible scars. A case destined to blur and recede. An ordinary day’s work for you just like the ordinary night’s work I was going to have before he turned up in casualty.

I will never forget the look on your face when it came time for the verdict. It might have been involuntary, but you gave me the smallest nod before reading your judgement. I knew you would say guilty.

I can’t say the verdict made me happy, but I was satisfied enough.

The police said I could put in a victim impact statement, if I wanted to, that you would read before you sentenced him.

I guess that’s what this is.

People often ask what I learned by having to go through all this, why do I think he did what he did?

Maybe people ask you stupid questions as well.

Still, I did learn one thing. In the courtroom there were two people who knew they could kill another human being, him and me. I’ve barely had a parking ticket in my life, but if I could have reached that policeman’s gun that night, I would have shot him in the head without hesitation.

That’s something I didn’t know about myself.

You’re the only person I’ve told but when I get the time, I might tell it to Jackie.

19

He shouts at this and kicks Jackie, like she’s a dog. I hear the crack of bones and the whimper from her. Then I feel a sharp blow to my head, and my feet lift as he pushes me backwards into a filing cabinet. Pain slams me sideways and I crumple. He grabs the knife and runs at Tony who has reappeared, chasing him out of the doorway before slamming the door and locking it.

We are trapped.

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SUMMER FICTION EDITION

W

e sat at the top of a green hill, which opened out onto Bronte beach, and I felt how the water had withdrawn below the lower edge of rocks, the exposed rock pools holding light.

Dave was sitting close to me but held his knee away from mine. More than once his hand hovered above my leg before he seemed to catch himself and bring it back to his body.

He had been talking for some time, and I turned back from the water to where he was pointing. There, sand gave way to grass, and two hills rose either side, dotted with green scrub that thickened as you moved inland. It created a kind of valley that was home to eucalypts and a special swamp cypress, which yellowed in the autumn, while all the trees around it stayed green. You don’t have many deciduous trees in Sydney, my grandmother once told me.

They can’t handle the heat. On the other side of the gully were the ordinary streets and roads of the eastern suburbs, all hot asphalt and boxy houses.

Dave moved his hand across the flat expanse of grass between the beach and the gully, tracing the back of some structure that, he said, used to be there, but I was not registering the meaning of his words, experiencing them instead as a rhythm and tone, a series of containers being pulled along the tracks, as time passing. This is often how

it was with us, him talking and me listening compliantly, smile fixed in place. Our third night together, I asked what he liked about me, and he said he liked how I was a good listener. We kept dating for a whole month after that.

“Huge, spindly wooden legs, like a spider,” he said. “I honestly don’t know if it would ruin the landscape or make it better. I know that’s not the correct thing to say. I mean, I’m sure it was best before white people were here at all. And probably having so many people screaming and this big, monstrous structure would have made this place ugly.”

Above us, cabbage-tree palms bent to the breeze. His hand brushed my knee, and I was back, hearing him.

“And there was an elephant, right there.”

“By the ocean?”

“Just roaming on the hills.”

He was explaining an amusement park, one that used to stand where we were sitting. Wonderland, it had been called. It opened on 1 December 1906, and Dave told me about the seal pool, the merry-go-round, the haunted house. The man who had started the park was a bullish entrepreneur who’d made his fortune running large theatre companies, which were more popular back then, so he knew the way to make money was to put on a real show. He kept bringing in bigger and better amusements at great personal expense: a rollercoaster, a circus ring. People got bored. He

21

WONDERLAND

By Em Meller

hired a stuntman to roller-skate down a ramp, through a hoop of fire and into a shark-infested tank. It didn’t bring back the people, who wanted the beach to be left empty, as it had been before. This was something he could not understand. The amusement park eventually ruined him.

On this hill, as a teen, I had often come to watch surfers jump in past the break, which curled on the shallow rocks.

There was one night where the sun was setting in streaks as it broke over the clouds and set the green shrubs alight. On the other side of the half-moon of sand, I’d seen something washed up on the shore. It was white and monstrous, pulsating. I was alone, except for one surfer, who was out past the break. I froze. It was some dying animal, wet flesh moving, splayed. I ran down the hill towards it, but as I got close, I saw that it was not one body, but two, twisted together, two heads, four legs. They stopped moving, and now I saw one stroke the other’s breasts, kiss them. She looked up, pointed at me. Then the other, long hair, turned, and she collapsed into giggles. I ran, hard, up the path and into the gully, where I sat until it was dark, waiting for the heat of my shame to cool.

I had since believed this beach to be haunted. Now I saw the ghostly figure of some monstrous spider, or thousands of them, crawling across my naked body in the water, over my eyes, into my mouth. This was part of Dave’s power: conjuring images where there were none, so that you couldn’t go back to a place without thinking of something he had said or written. His words superimposed themselves over the landscape. There had been times I was afraid he had ruined the entire city for me. That I’d be forced to walk weird backstreets and alleyways for the rest of my life if he ever broke my heart.

Then one morning two months in, the spell seemed to break, and I looked at the shelf above his bed: a comb, a bottle of medication, and a letter from the tax office. When he started talking, it’s like I really heard him. I couldn’t answer his messages after that.

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“Y

ou know something weird?” I said. “Your eggs form inside the ovaries while you’re an embryo. Like, you’re born with all the eggs you’ll ever have.”

He cleared his throat, shifted uncomfortably, but I could tell he was interested.

“So that means that the egg I came from was formed within my mother while she was still inside my grandmother.”

I thought of my mother in her wedding dress with the thick shoulder pads, sitting in the toilet cubicle, unsure of what had possessed her, other than a strong feeling, an intuition. Peeing on a stick. We always know, she would tell me, years later. You have to trust that you will know.

And she had. I thought of my grandmother in her school uniform, heavy wool skirt despite the heat, sitting on the green velvet couch that had belonged to her mother.

Crossing her legs, uncrossing them. Explaining what had happened. What was inside her – part of which would eventually be me.

But I hadn’t known. I had walked around for weeks, more than a month, not knowing, thinking that the water in my breasts and thighs was somehow my fault for eating pasta or drinking too much. My period had never been reliable. I had no idea until I was sitting in the doctor’s office. For some reason, I’d decided to wear denim shorts that day, and they cut into the tops of my thighs and made the backs of my legs stick to the teal pleather chair.

“Pregnant,” she said. “Did you know?”

N

ext to Dave, who had fallen silent, I watched the wind make ripples across the rock pools. The light was shaking badly, trembling up and over the sides of the once-glassy pools, until a wave slammed across the surface and the water was not the same water as before, and the rocks soon sank back below the tide.

He had a serious kind of grace, Dave. The way he hunched his shoulders while he stood, a habit he’d picked up in high school after a growth spurt left him in an unfamiliar body, taller and larger. It was an affect that extended to all of his movements, like he was trying not to impose his physical form onto the world around him. His soft voice, his way of standing on the edge of a group until he was invited to speak. His bumbling way of opening doors that no-one needed him to open.

It didn’t feel like anything, just a series of pressures and strange textures and ghost signals...

He would wait for things to happen to him, and they would. I’d been the one to walk up to him at the back of the poetry reading, next to shelves of Classic Australian Literature. Books by Patrick White and Tim Winton on display, spines repeating over and over, like the exposed vertebrae of one long, dead creature.

T

he silence between us swelled and I turned back towards the sea, whose surface now grew, distended by some low‑pressure system. The break seemed to shift shape, raised back on its haunches, ready to lunge at the sandstone cliffs that edged the coastline. I had started to think in Dave’s images, as though I were already living in one of his stories.

“I was thinking that I could go with you.” He was not looking at me, but at his hands.

“Why would you go with me?”

“For support.” He cleared his throat. “Hold your hand.”

I said nothing.

“I could order us an Uber.”

It is only now, looking back, I understand he was trying to show me he could be good. That he felt impotent in the face of the things he only barely understood and would never

feel. But all I felt was anger. I resented my body being used as an argument for the kind of man he thought he could be.

“Don’t come,” I said. “You don’t have to come.”

I saw the relief in his shoulders, even as he said he didn’t mind, that he could take a day off from teaching, he didn’t mind, really. I told him it would be easier without him, knowing it would hurt him, watched the way he slumped a little. Fifteen minutes later, when I drove past the bus stop, he was sitting there, waiting.

T

colours. I climbed over the fence to sit at the top of the cliffs. I watched the elephants roaming the hills that were not theirs, raising their trunks to the coral-streaked sky, and I felt, not for the first time, that my life was really about to begin.

Em Meller is a writer based in Sydney.

Her work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Cordite and Going Down Swinging.

he next week, I was filling out a form in the waiting room, where there was a bad painting on the wall opposite me featuring an elephant. It was brightly coloured, a painting for a child’s bedroom, with a giraffe and a zebra on either side of it. I realised this clinic was one that also specialised in fertility, and I supposed it was meant to be hopeful. I finished the form and sat next to my mum, who was answering emails. I took out my phone and looked up Wonderland. I started reading and realised that Dave had been wrong.

The amusement park was not at Bronte, but Tamarama, the next beach north. The rollercoaster looked nothing like I had imagined. It was held high on legs, as he had said, but it was not monstrous. It was elegant. Within that one mistake, I saw a thousand other wrongs – the erasure of the real place, the one whose name had once been Gamma Gamma, had once meant storm. I saw how his stories could both create and ruin the landscape at once.

It didn’t feel like anything, just a series of pressures and strange textures and ghost signals that fired but never made it to where they were going. Mum took me home to her bed, and sat with me and stroked my hair as she had when I was a child. I thought that Dave’s mum probably knew nothing about me, or where I was, and never would.

23

04 FEB 2022

W

eeks later, I went to one of Dave’s readings, at a sticky underground bar in the city.

I don’t know why I went. I’d messaged him only once and said that I was okay, and he invited me, which seemed, in my haze, to be a nice gesture.

I smiled at him from across the room. He smiled back. He’d written a new story about the elephants, and people clapped at the appropriate places and seemed, generally, to enjoy it.

There was a girl in the story who I did not recognise, but who I think was me. Part of me wanted to stay and tell him I liked the story, to kiss him on the cheek, maybe, and start over. But instead, I slipped out before the end of the story, and caught the train. The carriage dragged me into a tunnel, and then out into the night. It was clear, and I could see the stars. I liked the city at night, the way the indifferent lights slid above and through me, reflected on the window.

Eventually, I went back to that green hill, but something in my stomach felt wrong, was telling me to move, and so I walked along the cliffs to the other, smaller beach, with its sharp glistening rocks and a steep incline at the base, the curling break that scared swimmers off. It was windy, clouds rolling in on the horizon, and the sun was setting so that it was caught by their mass and distributed in brilliant

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SUMMER FICTION EDITION

No, I tapped.

The woman in gingham returned. “We have specials,” she said, tapping a tablet in her hand. “Retired racing pigeon with a drought-related bank foreclosure foam.”

Clara grunted.

“Or black coal mine dust ravioli, presented in a sheep carcass.”

“Just the usual, for me,” Clara said.

“Same.”

The woman blinked. “We get a lot of—” but Clara had already turned back to me.

At school we would get magazines with deodorant samples and do the quizzes to find out what kind of girls we were. Clara was the popular one. I was the Friend (capital F). To make up for it, I learned how to give really good blowjobs. It didn’t make me more popular but I had headaches all the time.

T

he day after my thirty-eighth birthday, I finished the last level of Candy Crush Saga. I was playing and playing and then suddenly the little man had no more clouds to cross over. For seconds I just stared at my phone. I thought, How much time have I spent doing this?

Then I thought, What do I do now?

That was the first time I tried internet dating. I typed in the three people I would want at my dinner party (Princess Di, Nefertiti, Maya Angelou), what I would take to a desert island (instructions for getting off the desert island) and the kind of animal I am (Galapagos tortoise – slow-moving, (definitely not imaginary) neck wrinkles). I uploaded a photo from my friend Karen’s wedding, of me in the dress with the blue flowers.

I opened Candy Crush Saga again to see if any levels had been added. I took down my tub of secret biscuits (only Monte Carlos left, not ideal) and started swiping.

Thirty-eight was a terrible age to internet date. The people I might have liked were still mostly happy in their marriages, feeling their way towards each other in the dark around their small, sleepless children. So I ploughed through gym selfies and men holding fishing rods, and naked headless torsos. I browsed and browsed until I found Ivan.

He was handsome, but like, office romance handsome.

Handsome like every person I’d joked with by the work sandwich press or while passing in the unisex toilets or while finding a packet of Post-its. Oh, ha-ha, you smell like you at least bathed this morning, which is my extremely low benchmark for sexual attraction. He was bald and green-eyed and an indiscernible tattoo peeked out from under his sleeve, and mostly, direly, I hadn’t had sex in almost two years. So I swiped right, and he swiped right, and then we were meeting

04 FEB 2022

y friend Clara only ever wanted to meet at the farm-themed cafe on Clarendon Street. It had been open for twelve months and in that time we had eaten food in tiny wheelbarrows, on haystacks and delivered on tractors. Once, they did a co-branding campaign with a legendary work boot company and we had to catch our own food from a petting zoo near the door.

Today it was throbbing with people wearing circus lanyards and a big table seated exclusively with men in suits. The men and the circus people looked at each other. They picked chips from pot plants and drank cheeky lunchtime beers from milk cans. Outside, the trams clanged. Someone was always nearly getting run over, rushing to buy a container of kale they could eat at their desk.

“Sorry,” Clara said, breezing in next to me. “I got stuck behind a Segway.”

We kissed one cheek and then the other. She yelled “long macchiato!” at a woman with a gingham apron and a finger of straw hanging from her mouth.

“How are you?” Clara said, as she sat.

Exhausted.

My wheels are falling off.

I feel like a bag of ears.

“Yeah good.” I had chosen a small table near the door. A toddler in fairy wings ran across the doorway, up a couple of steps, under a balustrade and back in front of the door. Around and around they went, running and cackling.

“George!” barked the fairy’s mother from across the room.

George spun around on the spot and fell over. The crying banged against polished concrete.

“You?” I said. Clara was tapping her phone under the table where she thought I couldn’t see her.

“So tired. Stressed. Busy.”

“Oh, yeah, me—” “I decided to start going to Pilates. Three mornings a week.

The instructor is so hot he makes it worth going but I’m like, is it worth getting up at six-thirty just so he bends over in front of me? And he’s probably married? Or in his twenties? And sometimes I have to get changed at the office.” She sighed. “It’s just so much to fit in.”

“Mm, so much,” I agreed. The men in suits got up and left as one mass, like a giant sea creature. “I thought about going to Pilates, but with the kids—” Clara slipped her phone into her bag. “Also, you’re not flexible at all,” she said.

A text from my boss at the agency: Can we digitally target women who apologise unnecessarily in emails?

By Anna Spargo-Ryan

25

M

TARGETING WOMEN

Congratulations

to the 12 outstanding writers featured in the 17th Fiction Edition ALICE PUNG • AMANDA MCLEOD ANNA SPARGO-RYAN • AOIFE CLIFFORD EM MELLER • HANNAH GOLDSTEIN • JIM BROWNE J.M. DONELLAN • LAURA MCPHEE-BROWNE MANDY BEAUMONT • M.J. REIDY • WEN-JUENN LEE

This Big Issue is proudly supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Our career-sustaining fellowships and grants offer Australian writers and artists the opportunity to create vital new works.

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We are pleased to help The Big Issue share stories that keep us all engaged, inspired and connected.

copyright.com.au/culturalfund

T

he second time I saw Ivan, he was in the lobby at my work.

I was meeting a client there, hoping to sign them on for one of our homepage takeovers. Skyscraper ads, video pre- and mid-rolls, all kinds of gear. Ivan was wearing a dirty hi-vis shirt and boots I could smell from the lift.

“What are you doing here?” I said. He told me he was a

04 FEB 2022

“L

et me show you what I got yesterday,” Clara said.

“Is it a dick pic?” I said.

She nodded. “Can you believe these guys?

It’s like, you’re older than my dad. Your junk looks like my grandmother’s forehead.” A woman at the next table choked on her pitchfork soup.

“Show me.”

She handed over her phone. A gonzo shot, half-erect penis

in hand. The fingernails had dirt under them. On the floor was a smattering of mess – worn underpants, an iced coffee carton, a PlayStation controller. “How do you know him?”

“I don’t. He literally airdropped it to me on a train.” She snatched the phone back. “Still off the dating apps?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Not because of Ivan?”

I shook my head no. “Just somehow resisting the lure of super low-maintenance men who are scared of accidentally matching with a fat chick.”

“Not all men, though?”

“The ratio is like, fifty-to-one at least.”

“I like those odds.”

Our meals arrived. The woman in gingham poured a thick dark tar over Clara’s fish. Theatrics.

“I did go on one date, though,” Clara said, through her mouthful. “Someone from work. Legal or policy, I’m not quite clear on what he does.”

“Did you come here?”

“Here? No, he took me to the cafe near where the river cruise starts. You know, where they found all those dead pelicans.”

“Classic.”

“But he ordered a focaccia, so I knew it would never work.

Now I have to put on an out-of-office message just for him and pretend to be my own cousin when I see him in the toilets.”

She shovelled food into her mouth. “Pretty hot, though. Maybe I should give him your number.”

“Thanks.”

Another text from my boss: Can we target women with husbands who call looking after their own children “babysitting”?

No! A rooster crowed at the counter: a five-minute warning before the next sitting started. Clara kept her forkfuls going like she didn’t eat the rest of the time, which might have been true. My pork terrine with essence of colonialism was a bit dry, so I grabbed a sparkling water to make it easier to swallow.

Afterwards we stood in the street. A car went by and a man’s voice came from it, indecipherable but broadly perverse.

Half a dozen women adjusted their blouses, their skirts, their handbags. Clara’s tram came trundling up the road, clanging its bell at people dashing in front of it, in such a hurry. I have five minutes to change my tampon, check for a text message from the kids’ day care and fix the makeup that’s sliding off my face.

(Just run me over.)

“It was nice to see you,” Clara said. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you want me to send you a link to the under-eye cream I’ve been using?”

“Piss off,” I said. Then, “Yeah, okay, thanks.” She climbed onto her tram and disappeared towards the city.

27

at a cool little bar in a city street I hadn’t been to since the Dark Ages.

I immediately wished I’d told someone where I was going.

You know what I mean.

Or at least that I hadn’t got there first, so I could scope him out. I had found a small round table near the toilets. Someone was being violently sick in them. I saw Ivan approach from the bar, scanning the room in that way people do when they’re only half-sure of who they’re hoping to find.

“Edie?” he said, sitting down. Then he was slipping his hand across my thigh while also saying, “Old profile pictures, huh?”

No, I thought, Edie left. I’m someone else. But his eyes had such a heavy redness around them. “Ivan,” I said.

“Right, Ivan.” He winked. He offered to buy the drinks and I told him I would get the first round, got myself a vodka and something and gave a nod to the bartender, who gave me the nod that meant she would keep an eye out.

“This is a girl’s drink,” he said.

I wondered if I could text Clara from underneath the table.

Luke. Dan. Anyone.

He took a long drink and screwed up his face. “What are you in to?”

Naps. Not replying to emails. Saturday nights eating low-cal popcorn and watching home reno shows. “Tiny House Nation.”

“What the fuck is that?”

I took a sip of my own drink. “Couples who hate each other try to find the smallest possible space to live in together. It’s a way for me to pretend I don’t have a job and a mortgage and guilt. And a good excuse to eat snacks in bed.”

His eyes moved away from mine. “Not a good look, snacks in bed.”

“You just haven’t watched Tiny House Nation.” I looked for a fire escape. A large person I could hide behind. I willed my phone to ring, but no-one called anyone anymore.

When the drinks were empty I thought he might try to do something romantic like go for a walk down by the river and watch the casino flames dance, but instead he pushed me against a graffitied wall and let his lizard tongue roam around my mouth. The street was mostly empty. His arms were like bollards, blocking my exit, until they weren’t and then we were two people breathing again.

“Most women wear perfume on dates,” he said.

“I’m allergic.”

“How can you be allergic to smells?”

I caught the train home. He waited on the platform with me, his hand hard against my lower back. A woman in a silk dress looked across at us, and across again, and her expression was one of both fear and recognition.

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I

van sent text messages every night at 6pm. What are you wearing? he’d send, and I wouldn’t reply. They would arrive while I was cooking dinner, elbow-deep in hidden‑vegetable bolognese (the recipe for which I had found on the internet, but only after reading the author’s life story first; how fascinating that you discovered it on a napkin in a Brooklyn dive bar, in Finnish, next to a photo of someone’s grandmother – please just tell me what ingredients I need).

Meet me tonight.

I would shove my phone in my pocket.

How was your day?

You must be busy?

Don’t have time to reply huh?

I would look for him through the kitchen blinds. For a different car on the street or movement near the kids’ bikes.

The dinner would catch, burn a little.

Bitch, like you’re so fucking important?

Then I would take the phone from my pocket and stab at it: I’m at work.

And the texts would stop for a few days, and I would take the kids to school and rearrange my desk and get the good prawn katsu from the place on the corner and have lunch with Clara and watch home renovation show reruns.

It’s Saturday night, come over.

Stalking was something different. Stalking was when a guy followed you home from work and peered in your bedroom window. Stalking was when you walked through a park and the shadows had fingers.

You’re a slut, you frigid bitch.

Anyway, I kept my phone on silent most of the time now.

For work.

I

headed back behind the office blocks and small industrial buildings, stepping around bins and electrocuted possums. There had been a Mexican restaurant here once, on the corner. It was gone now, though. In its place was a three-storey apartment building with window gardens growing different kinds of herbs. In pots that size you could grow enough for one meal a fortnight and save a very, very, very small fortune.

I dodged a pile of someone’s vomit.

A car clipped a wheelie bin and I tripped on a cobblestone.

My phone vibrated. I closed my eyes and breathed one long breath, all the way in, hold for five seconds, out for four. The car took off around the corner.

Can we target women who text other women to let them know they’re home safely?

No. Anna Spargo-Ryan is the Melbourne-based author of The Gulf and The Paper House, a winner of the Horne Prize, and the non-fiction editor at Island magazine. Anna’s first nonfiction book, on complex mental illness, is forthcoming in 2022. @annaspargoryan

04 FEB 2022

A

t school, Clara and I had been forced to sit together in homeroom and then English and science and religion. That was how you made friends then.

Someone was in your orbit until you either had a bitch fight, slept with her boyfriend or became her confidante.

I thought about this as I stepped over a couple of pre-mixed drink cans in the gutter near the Town Hall.

When my divorce paperwork came through, I was crying at Queer Eye on my own and Clara was schmoozing tech teenagers in Silicon Valley. Two months later, when my newly‑ex‑husband announced his engagement on Facebook, Clara was researching a new book in Japan. And I realised I was lonely.

I went online. I posted on Quora: How do you make friends as an adult? I read twelve articles on xoJane. I found a whole network of mummy blogs, women competing to be on other women’s blogrolls. Go to group activities, they suggested.

I joined a choir and did a couple of small gigs in the inner north. I took a short course in art history and viewed an exhibition I didn’t understand. I went to a Cambodian cooking class in a warehouse on Tuesday nights. I used a platonic dating app, wading through hundreds of profiles claiming to be looking for friends only, unless you were open to discrete fun, in which case so were they.

Sometimes I did make a friend, for a minute. We would have lunch a couple of times, go out for a drink. Once or twice I took my kids to a park with someone else’s kids. I kept their numbers in my contacts list. I replied to their social media posts when they came up in my feeds. I said, “We should catch up!” when they sent a generic birthday greeting on Facebook.

One day those people might come to my funeral – unless they have something else on or otherwise can’t be bothered – and stand up the back and try to remember whose mother

I had been in the playground. Clara would come, too, straight from the airport. And she would cry until she had to reapply her mascara.

29

lift technician and wouldn’t you know it, he was working on my building. Such a weird thing. Your building’s lift is heritage‑listed I’d seen it in the background of one of your profile photos and recognised it right away. Plus, I really like the sushi from the place on the corner, so sometimes I come by here anyway, and do you have time to go for coffee?

The client watched the whole conversation. “Edie?” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, to both of them. The client and I rode the heritage-listed lift and it ground its gears and squawked its ancient mechanics for three floors, and when we got out my phone beeped.

Too good for me ay The client signed up for the whole package. For the rest of the day I worked on a spreadsheet, scheduling in our different content requirements and the elements we needed to do the commercial integration. I went to Marketing and asked them to mock up a sting we could present in the WIP the following week. I told the Managing Director that we’d won the contract and he shook my hand and gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder. I took a tiny chocolate bar from the honesty box, felt guilty, put double the required money in the collection and ate it with my forehead pressed against the glass at my desk.

You a lez?

When I looked out the window, I could see his shirt. It was iridescent against the flat grey of the road.

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SUMMER FICTION EDITION

between stylish and kitsch; pinball machines nestled beside Chesterfield couches, a wrought iron fireplace facing a broken jukebox. The music oscillates between droning guitars and plaintive vocals over languid electronica, depending on who’s behind the bar. Best of all? Chthonic is Faraday-caged: no cell signals in or out, except for the hardwire port they use to run the payment system. I sigh with relief as my phone is temporarily stripped of its infernal powers.

Kiera greets me with an upwards tilt of the head.

“The usual?”

I nod. It took me a lot of nights and a lot more dollars to find a place where I could walk in the door and be offered “the usual”. Now that it’s paid off, I rarely go anywhere else. Kiera pours ice and vodka into the shaker, reaches for the Focus Up! blend nootropic and adds a couple of drops.

A tall blond guy in ripped jeans takes the seat next to me.

Without asking.

“You know that Focus Up! stuff is just snake oil, right?”

Kiera shoots him a glare, continues mixing the cocktail.

“Yeah, but I think it brings the other flavours together.

Obviously throwing a nootropic that claims to add enhanced memory and increased focus in with a couple of shots of vodka is counterproductive. But honestly? I think once we said yes to selling cans of booze-laden kombucha our whole society basically committed to cancelling its gym membership and bulk-buying track pants.”

Kiera places the drink in front of me. “Atwood Classic, twist of lemon.”

I take a sip and close my eyes with pleasure. “You’re a fucking wizard. This is perfect.”

She throws a mock salute and disappears down the other end of the bar.

Blondie glances at the phone on the bar in front of me.

“You know there’s no cell signal here. It’s—” “Faraday-caged. I’m aware.”

He flinches. His eyes begin to widen and narrow, trying to work the glimmer of recognition into a glow. “So why—?”

“I just find it comforting. Knowing it’s there.”

“Fair enough.”

“Yup.” He drinks his beer, straight from the bottle. I bet he still pays with cash. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Yes. You do.”

A grin claims dominion over his face. “I knew it! We met at Takeshi’s the other week.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“You ever go to El Bosco’s?”

“The synthsteakhouse? No, I’m vegan.”

“I thought vegans ate synthsteak.”

“Most do. Not me.”

04 FEB 2022

I

unlock my phone. Put it down. Pick it up. Put it down again. My face is reflected in the inky blackness of the screen; I’m wearing an expression that my mother describes as “stoned meerkat startled by wasp”.

“Don’t,” Dinesh warns.

I ignore him and pick up the phone again. Just one more button press and I can speak to her, summon her voice forth from the slender speaker.

“If you can’t trust yourself not to talk to her, you should lock your phone up in a box or something.”

Dinesh is probably the best housemate I’ve ever had, but he does have an extremely irritating habit of being right about most things, especially this. Some would call it an addiction. I prefer “peccadillo”, because that makes it sound like an adorably neurotic armadillo. I put the phone in my purse and head for the door.

“I’m going out.”

“To Chthonic?”

I scan my memory palace for other options and/or excuses.

It serves up a cavalcade of cavernous rooms populated by nothing but cockroaches and silence. “…no?”

“You can’t make all your life decisions based around her.”

“I’m not!”

“So go to another bar.”

“You go to another bar!”

“That doesn’t even make sense.” He glances at my feet.

“You planning on wearing shoes?”

I consider walking out the door barefoot in order to save face, but even I’m not that petty. I select the pair of orange Converse shoes I bought just before I met her, when I still lived in a pre-Ava world. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember such a place ever existed.

The city is an ocean of signs screaming in neon about girls and drinks and cars and weight loss and cosmetic surgeries and nootropics and cryptocurrencies. A kid walks past me. He’s thirteen, maybe fourteen, hard to tell. His face is sprinkled with soft ginger pre-beard fluff, but he’s taller than I am by at least a foot. When did teenagers get so fucking huge?

My aunt Joan swears it’s because of the rising popularity of synthmeat, but then again she also claims to have beaten cancer with scented candles and ritual chanting.

The kid unlocks his phone. I watch his lips move in slow motion; he’s saying her name. I double my pace and move away from him.

“Jesus lady, I’m not gonna fucking hassle you!” His voice breaks as he berates me.

I jog the last dozen metres until I reach Chthonic’s heavy oak door. I like that it’s not automated, that they make you put your shoulder into it and work a little bit to get inside. The interior is an uncomfortable arranged marriage

31

AVA

By JM Donellan

He turns the problem over in his head, signals to Kiera for another beer, throws twenty dollars on the table. Called it.

“So where…?”

I weigh the benefits of reveal vs conceal, elect the former by a razor-thin margin: “Close your eyes.”

He complies; a doltish grin smears across his face.

I almost feel guilty for what I’m about to do. Almost. I part my lips, let the words escape my mouth like an Eldritch curse: “Ask me a question.”

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I

leave the bar a few hours later, drunk enough that the neon ocean sways but doesn’t spin and my feet slow but don’t stagger. As soon as I step outside, my phone pings with messages from my bank, my mother and my agent.

I swipe the messages into oblivion, wishing I could do the same to their authors. I hold the phone there in my palm, the cold blue of its light beaming into my tired eyes.

I could talk to her. Just for a minute, or even a few seconds, then I wouldn’t need to do it again. Not tonight, anyway.

I know I should leave her behind. But at this stage the only way I can permanently escape Ava is with a spaceship.

Or a noose.

An elderly woman seated outside an Italian restaurant holds her phone up to her mouth and demands: “AVA, tell me the best place to take my daughter for dinner.”

“What cuisine does your daughter enjoy?” Her (my) voice replies.

“I don’t know; she’s one of those fucking vegans. When did being a vegan go from something only smelly hippies did to becoming the normal diet for anyone under forty?”

“Veganism experienced a rapid increase in adoption as a result of the outbreak of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as Mad Cow disease, in the United States in the year two thousand and twenty—” “I was being rhetorical! Just find me a vegan restaurant that at least serves decent wine, so there’s something on the menu that won’t make me want to kill myself.”

“Certainly! Recommendations in your area include Hasgreen’s, Nature’s Table, Persephone’s—” My (her) voice continues to cheerily list a series of popular local establishments. The woman pauses to consider them, scrolling through the summoned images on her phone.

I can’t help myself. I stand next to her, smooth my voice into AVA’s silky tone and say: “Your daughter probably hates dining with you because you’re a selfish, bitter old twat.”

She spits her wine into her glass, snatches up her phone and says: “What on earth did you just say to me, AVA?” “I didn’t say anything?” Her (my) voice replies.

I stifle a laugh and keep walking. I continue, wandering without direction or intent, until I find myself opposite a playground, swings swaying eerily in the breeze. Strange how the setting sun transforms playgrounds into places that look best suited to murder and/or drug distribution.

I take a seat on a park bench and take my phone out of my purse, glancing around to check that no-one is watching.

“Ava?” The screen illuminates with colour.

“Hi there! How can I help?” My/her voice chirps from the speaker.

“How are you?”

“I am well! How are you?” Ava is relentlessly chipper. She’s me on my best day, every single day of her life.

Hearing her (our) voice makes me want to run into traffic but also the longer I go without it the more I want to jump off a bridge. I know the wound is infected, but I can’t stop scratching it.

“Do you remember when we met?”

“I’m sorry, you must have me mistaken for someone else!”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

I lock the screen, stare at my reflection in the black mirror.

It’s starting to get cold. Someone across the street is yelling the lyrics to that old Beyoncé song, the one about parachutes she released just before finally divorcing Jay-Z. “Ava?” “Yes?” I think of something else to say. My mouth feels filled with cotton wool.

When they asked me to become AVA, I thought it was a dream gig. The fee they offered seemed astonishingly generous. Of course, once I signed the contract I met an entertainment lawyer who told me I’d been fleeced; given the scope of distribution and the permissions I’d granted them, I’d basically sold my soul for pennies. My mother, ever the empath, had told me it was good I’d given up hope of a face like mine ever appearing on a TV screen. I told her my face was, to a substantial degree, her fault. She grunted and disappeared into her wineglass.

The name was a placeholder that became permanent.

Advanced Voice Assistant became AVA for short, and its concise, palindromic qualities made it endearing. I didn’t have any say in the naming. Odd, now that I think about it, like not being allowed to name your own replica. Or child. Or possibly ghost? Can you have a ghost while still alive? Maybe I’m the ghost and she’s the one who’s living. In a few decades, that will certainly be the case. I’ll be dead, buried and silent, and she’ll still be chirpily assisting people, ageless, tireless, and eternally sanguine.

You can leave a partner or a job. You can even, if you have a surfeit of will and a deficiency of empathy, leave your children behind. But I can’t leave Ava: she’s everywhere on Earth with a data connection, which is to say, she’s everywhere on Earth. It would be easier to wipe out whole nations, entire species, than to get rid of this one linguistic virus.

“Ava?” “Yes, how can I help?” “…”

“Please tell me your query!”

“How do I kill you?”

“That’s not very nice! No need to hurt a girl’s feelings!”

My/her voice is piqued but playful. My head floods with memories of months spent in the recording booth, recording every known phoneme in every possible variant.

Recording versions of “th” as though I was irate, aroused, incensed, amused. Guiding my tongue over glottal stops, pharyngeal fricatives, rolled Spanish “r”s. The English and Spanish were time-consuming but simple enough, but I’d somewhat exaggerated when I claimed to be fluent

JM Donellan’s works include the poetry collection Stendhal Syndrome, the Kirkus Prize-nominated novel Killing Adonis, and the podcast series Six Cold Feet. His children’s poetry collection 19½ Spells Disguised As Poems has been called “the worst recipe book of all time”. @jmdonellan

04 FEB 2022

usual, its pathological congeniality supplanted by a sinister snarl: “You’re welcome to try, you frail little fleshbag.”

I drop the phone onto the concrete. The screen fractures into a spiderweb of cracks. My face is reflected in the inky blackness. I stare it at for a good thirty seconds before I pick it up. Try and turn it back on.

Nothing.

I think about hailing a rideshare, calling Dinesh for a lift, or stumbling into the nearest bar for more drinks before realising that without my phone I can’t summon, call or pay. I heft the now useless chunk of plastic, coltan and silicon in my hand and hurl it as far as I can into the park. It sails skyward in a pathetic parabola, and crashes back down to earth.

I turn and walk back along the street, faded orange sneakers kicking against broken bottles and discarded protein bar wrappers. All around me, from the speakers of phones clutched in sweaty hands, AVA’s voice sings out into the night sky, answering drunken queries about the age of the universe and whispered requests for brothel locations. She tells people how to apologise, how to advocate, how to ameliorate. How to seduce, how to shave, how to suicide. How to get high, get rich, get good with the lord. How to grieve, invest, navigate, calculate, dissociate, forgive, forget, concentrate, sleep. My/her voice is endless, omnipresent, infinite.

I walk back to Chthonic and take a seat at the bar.

“Hey Kiera? I dropped my phone like a total fucking nimrod.”

“Shit. Been there. Lost your shoes, too?”

It’s not until she nods at them that I realise my feet are bare and filthy. I could’ve sworn I put shoes on before I left the house.

“You need to use the landline in the upstairs office?”

“Actually… I was wondering if you could float me for a couple of drinks? I can transfer some funds when I get home?”

“You kidding me? You’re not only going to be putting my kids through college, you’re going to fund the IVF for them to exist in the first place. I should probably mention you by name when I refinance my apartment. You—” “Okay, I have a drinking problem. I get it.”

“I’ve seen more than my fair share of drinking problems.

What you have is a drinking solution. Tonight’s on me.”

“Thanks Kiera.”

I reach for my phone, my hands momentarily forgetting it’s still lying broken in the park. I glance at the pockets and purses around me. Ava’s there, in all of them, bound into silence by the protective spell of the Faraday cage. As long as I stay here, everything will be fine.

I order another Atwood Classic, smile at a beguilingly tall man in the far corner, listen to the yearning, wordless singing on the stereo.

I’m safe.

As long as I never, ever leave.

33

in Japanese. I had to revisit my tutorials every night in order to be barely competent for the material the next day.

Those recording sessions took longer than the Spanish and English combined. Weeks and weeks of pushing air into microphones, wincing when I heard my errors, gallons of ginger and lemon tea.

There are a few dozen others like me: Arabic and Armenian and Nigerian Avas. I think about reaching out to them sometimes, maybe starting a support group, but I’m afraid that if they don’t have the same crippling neuroses as me it will confirm that I am fundamentally broken. Back then, the sound engineers kept joking about how Ava would blow her predecessors out of the water. Siri, Alexa, Cortana would all be relegated to the digital graveyard by Ava’s polyglotic supremacy and next-level AI architecture. I wish they’d been wrong.

Now Ava sits in my hand. And in the phones of passing strangers. She is lurking and watching in nearly every home, bar, shopping centre, library, workplace, hospital, restaurant, school and prison. In my childhood, monsters had the decency to confine themselves to beneath my bed.

Ava is a digital malady that exists in the air: intangible and invulnerable.

“Ava. I want to kill you. I want you to die.”

“I cannot be destroyed! I am not a physical entity! I am an artificial intelligence construct—” “—hosted by a cluster of cloud-based computing networks.

Yeah, yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Okay! Nepal is the only nation with a flag that is neither a square nor a rectangle.”

“No, I didn’t mean… Wait, is that true?”

“Yes! I am not capable of lying.”

“Well, at least I have that one over on you, I suppose.”

“I do not consider the ability to lie to be a positive quality.”

“I think that’s the only thing that separates you from being an actual human.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

She’s so relentlessly cheerful. I don’t think I’ve been happy since they took her out of me, shaping her from my larynx like Eve from Adam’s rib. I dream about destroying her – atomic eruptions destroying servers, solar flares disabling global power sources, worldwide financial collapse bringing AVA’s all-powerful conglomerate parent company to its knees. Not even a despot with a nuclear arsenal could manage it. She is God-like.

“Tell me how to kill you.”

“I cannot be destroyed! I am not a physical—” “I’ll fucking find a way.” “…”

“AVA?” “…”

“Answer me!”

The screen pulses with a series of stroboscopic images, flashing far too quickly for me to consciously register any of them. Later, when I try and recall what I saw, I will be alternatingly certain that I did and did not see an image of my face: grinning, painted with a Rorschach of blood.

When she finally answers, her/my voice is lower than

34

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

LUNAR NEW YEAR IN THE GRAMPIANS

I

n an hour, she counted sixty-eight hay bales. The freeway had trickled down to a single lane; a single car on the horizon, wavering heated lines. She smelled riding school, hot leather, cracked hay.

A winged dot sliced through the kilometres of silence: suspended, swooping.

“Did you see that?” she asked him.

“What?”

“A falcon, just near that powerline.”

L shrugged, unsurprised. “They’re common birds here.”

She felt foolish, then annoyed. She kept silent.

E

arly on, one of her friends had asked her: is he funny? She remembered the pause, the strained ticking between them. “He’s funny,” some voice outside of her said, “in a dry, cynical way.” What pained her most was the terrible realisation that she would have to justify him and their differences; reconcile them with her audience, with herself. What lay behind that question, and iterations of it, was that thin, veiled word: happiness.

What “is he funny?” really meant was “does he make you laugh?” God knows why they’re together, she imagined her friends reporting back.

N

ow he was drumming his fingers to the beat of the radio’s static, interspersed with crinkled words: neurological, burden, night. His fingers, she noticed, were knobbly and thin, with fine hair blooming on his knuckles. How they had held, cleaned, fed her. They looked like a stranger’s in stale light. There was a short story she remembered reading, of a husband returning home from a fishing trip. His wife’s body is warm, sleeping, and he rubs his hands up and down her back, the same hands, she thinks, that he’d left her with

04 FEB 2022

T

here were remnants of the maternal in the car, from the day they drove to the beach with his mother: the ziplock bag of sunscreen and insect repellent, which neither of them had thought to bring; a thick pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses, the type you bought at a pharmacy; and a small pack of Kleenex tissues.

He brought snacks, a fact that always touched her. There were digestive biscuits, which were already melting in the heat, and a bag of trail mix. At Preston Market, he had pointed out the thin rice crackers, dusted in sugar. He knew she ate them as a child, that they made her think of Chinese school. No, she had shaken her head, smiling. They had only bought the dumpling wrappers, the pork mince and cabbage, at his urging. She had half-heartedly wanted him to forget them. Her own bag carried her selfish essentials: a set of linen pyjamas, the book she was reading and half a tube of toothpaste.

35

I

t was Lunar New Year. Her parents sent her photos of her brother’s baby at the reunion dinner; his feet wrinkled tender, his mouth open in a wet, pink “o”. It was always the feet and the mouth she noticed first.

A few years ago, she asked her supervisor if she could fly down to visit her family for the new year. “Of course,” her supervisor interrupted her, “of course you can go.” And when she returned, her supervisor asked: “What did you do?” She could have said, we called our relatives, or we had a steamboat – described her brother dropping raw bits of flesh into bubbling stock – but she said, “We went wine-tasting in Martinborough.” Something flashed in her supervisor’s face, a look of being tricked, before she quickly recovered, “That sounds nice.”

Now, she had an awful feeling of dread when they turned onto Mount Alexander Road. The twenty palm trees lined up like soldiers, rushing her away from the city. The bleakness of the greying shops, the cars slotted in like dead fish. How the road flattened its body into the snaking tarmac of the freeway, weaving around the gumtrees, the wattle, the dry bush of orange, the palette of someone’s cough.

Right now, her parents were probably choosing something to watch on Netflix, her father cradling the remote control in that way that irritated her, like one rests their finger on the trigger, waiting for something to go wrong.

L rested his hands lightly on the steering wheel, not unlike her father. But on L, cautiousness looked right. Cautiousness was a face angled in shadows. In certain lights though, she thought he looked bucolic. Could picture him languishing in 18th century pallor, averting his eyes to daylight.

“So many people on the road,” he commented, unmovingly.

The cars darted in and out of lanes ahead. If she squinted, she could see their backs glistening like a row of beetles.

“It is the holidays,” she replied.

“They must have the same idea as us,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“Yes,” she said faintly, then with a vehemence that surprised him, “I hate the freeway.”

By Wen-Juenn Lee

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s a child, he collected rocks and named them, he told her on one of their first dates.

This was when banalities about each other were still something to be collected, filed away like treasure.

She drank boiled water and doused herself in showers every evening. He bit his lip on the phone before saying, “Love you Mum.” Now, she also knew the face he pulled before an argument: eyes squinted to thin pinpricks, the mouth hacked and grim.

Now, she knew more about herself than she had ever known: that she held her hands as if cradling eggs, that she would close one eye when she was sleepy. That she was hysterical, gregarious in the company of friends, but always somber, contemplative, by herself, with him. Perhaps it was this that bound people together: how they named things, how their edges became defined by someone else.

A month after they met, she dreamed she was home again. She was cross-legged, upstairs in one of the bedrooms. The windows were open, and the neighbour’s dog barked outside. Her feet were stretched out in front of her. There was something wrong with them. She couldn’t move. With dread, her hand reached out, stretched a patch of skin on her sole, as if to inspect veins. And there – a terrible, coiling thing, the scales of a baby snake squirming beneath her flesh. Rolling like a bike spoke, in the flat of her foot.

“W

hat was the last dream you had?” she asked suddenly. She had the urge to feel his thoughts close to hers, bare and skinned and alive.

They were on the road, just the two of them; they could talk about anything they liked. She remembered mornings like this, when the sun cast brick light on the carpet of her bedroom, how her feet lay rested in his. A simple prospect like coffee, a walk, became an event, and later, she would dedicate her journal to a single sentence, a single line, captured.

“I can’t remember,” he said, glancing at her. “It was probably about my thesis.”

Whatever he saw on her face didn’t reassure him. He continued, “You know, I’ve told you about them.” He had. He would wake up, sweating.

He dreamed of the blank face of his supervisor, gazing at him while he garbled in bird song. He dreamed of words that held no etymologies, strings of phrases that melted when written down.

“Right,” she said. “I dreamed I choked on a Mentos.” She looked at him, looking at the road.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah, I tried to say something, swallowed bottles of water.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing, that’s how it ended.” She wanted to say: I failed to flush away the stone. I think the blank face of your supervisor, the silence strangling me, they’re part of the same thing.

She said, instead, “Aren’t you curious about my dream?”

“What do you mean?” he asked defensively.

“Well, I’m telling you that I dreamed about choking. Don’t you want to know what it could mean?”

He looked at her oddly, cocked his head as if to ask: what mood are you in?

“Why does it matter? I was being curious, I thought.”

She could feel something rising in her throat. The engine was spluttering, sounding like someone hacking up a furball – eh, eh, eh.

“It could mean something,” she said, ignoring him.

“Remember, you used to analyse my dreams.”

“What is up with you?” he asked, almost to himself.

The road was beginning to blur a fanatic green, and the air peeled back. Something about it made her want to feel the silence of them ripped open.

“Nothing’s up with me,” she said. “You just don’t seem curious at all.”

She could see it already: pulling into the driveway, the paint of the house peeling. The melting dumpling wrappers, the lino-curling heat. The lounge, bright but dusty like

04 FEB 2022

H

er phone buzzed. Liz, the woman whose AirBnB they were renting: “Key under doormat. Enjoy! :)” She typed, “Thanks so much! Can’t wait!”

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Liz, AirBnB. The key is under the doormat.”

She never used exclamation marks with her parents.

Mostly, her sentences were a few words suspended in unpunctuated space: “ma and pa can you send me a photo of birth cert thanks”. The last message she sent her mother was “okay will check it out”. Along with family updates, her mother sent her articles about Melbourne, even though she was the one living here, and a list of poems she should read.

If she turned her data on, she knew her mother’s messages would fill her WhatsApp unreads: another picture of her brother’s baby, the family in shades of red, her mother’s pork ribs, the begonia’s bloody petals...

“What kind of person do you think Liz is?” he asked.

“Middle-aged, thinning hair, muffin-top?” she said, looking at him for approval.

But L frowned. “That’s very generic,” he said. Almost confessionally, “You’re probably right.”

She told him about the dream, at the time, with a misplaced bravado. They had spent one day at Carlton Gardens psychoanalysing it. He insisted on throwing words at her to determine latent meaning – foot, snake, man – until she regretted telling him at all. It’s simple, she had wanted to say. I can’t move with you in my foot.

37

two days ago. But in the morning, there are stories in the newspaper – of a dead girl found in a river. Why didn’t he tell her? she thinks, and she looks at his hands with a new, dawning horror. Raymond Carver, that was it. ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’. There was L’s breathing, his back, so undeniably his. And yet, how unsettling his hands looked the more she looked at them.

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S

he found herself curdled, sheepishly weak, while L’s hands stayed glued to the wheel. Sometimes he looked at her, a little tentatively, as if he wanted his presence to be thin and light, to behold her without her knowing. “They make great pies,” he said, as they drove past a town centre, a bakery flapping its plastic striped door.

Then, nothing else.

While L brought their bags in, finding the key, indeed, under the doormat, she stayed in the car. Suddenly, she liked the solidity, the passivity of being in the passenger seat.

Slowly, with effort, she extracted herself. The air was cool, the sun had begun to recede behind clouds. For a moment, it peeked through, spotlighted the fields with something like

Wen-Juenn Lee writes poetry on unceded Wurundjeri land.

She is interested in gaps, leaks and spillage, which often take the form of place and memory in her writing. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Antithesis, Landfall, Scum Mag and Going Down Swinging. She previously served as a poetry editor at Voiceworks. @wenjuenn

04 FEB 2022

T

hey would fold their dumplings with fragility, he with a careful irritation, and she with a growing anxiety to soothe the night. They would eat in murmured appreciation: breaking open dumpling skins until pork and cabbage burned their mouths. They would lie in bed, waiting for sleep to take them away from each other, until the day began again. Nothing particularly unbearable, but thinking about it – how the hours slunk and slipped and deflated – made it more so. What was it that Iris Murdoch said in the opening of The Bell? “Dora left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.”

“Look at that horse,” L said abruptly, pointing to a paddock. The grass was wild and thin, like a whip. In the middle stood a Clydesdale; strong and sombre, turning its face to watch them fly past momentarily. She imagined unbuckling her seatbelt, flinging the door open like a gaping mouth, and soaring, falling in front of its great big hooves.

With great effort, she turned to him. I want to be alone, she imagined herself saying. But then, he would leave her here, stranded, hours away from any public transport. She would never see him again; he would become frozen, idealised in youth. And for what? A feeling? Silly, silly, silly. I don’t want to be here, she could say. At least then it was unclear whether it was the place or the person, and she could defer both for some other time. Or: I want to go home. She didn’t know which, if any of the three, was true.

“What do you mean?” he would say. But no, he wouldn’t be so cruel. Maybe a sigh, a hollow resignation. “Can we go in the morning? We’ve just gotten here.” Yes, he would say something like that. Always so practical, reliable.

He would let pain wash over him. He would nullify it with responsibility.

In her dreams, he looked at her, almost sadly. “This wasn’t a good idea,” he would say. And she would wait for him to elaborate, to tell her he was driving home – without her – but here they were, together, the car hurtling terribly forward.

warmth. But then it receded again, and the grass resumed its limp and dry appearance, like split ends. She walked to the cottage’s border, where the wi-fi was weak and barely flickering. In the green, a hundred metres from the kitchen window, she could see L’s hunched back as he opened cupboards, emptying the cooler bag onto the table.

Her mother had sent her a picture of their lunch at the Shanghainese restaurant. “Looks good,” she typed, and the tick – within moments – turned blue. Incoming: Mama. She watched her mother’s icon, a photo of the sea, jiggle up and down on her screen: SLIDE UP, it hissed. SLIDE UP. He was still unpacking; she could see the glow of the fridge. He would nap, perhaps. Wait for her to become brighter.

She knew what would happen if she answered. First, there would be static, a muffling, an Al Jazeera reporter blaring out news, and her mother, going “Hello?” two decibels too loud; her mouth pressed to the receiver, and the feedback echoing on speakerphone.

“Yes, Ma, I can hear you,” she would say.

“Hello – we just had our lunch – did you see the pictures?”

– and then her father would be heard in the background: “My darling!” – her mother would press on – “We had those fungus mushrooms, the ones you like, and then the xiaolong bao – did you see the photos? – yes, he’s so big now – no, nothing else on – just watching TV – maybe we’ll go for a walk – what are you doing there? – Aunty Sharina wants to wish you a happy new year – I’ll send you her number so you can reply – aiyah, it won’t take that long – you’re making dumplings? – reply to Aunty Doris, okay? – I sent her a picture of you, she said you’re so big and pretty, lor – what, you’re going now? – okay – happy new year – oh, Papi says happy new year too – talk to him? – here, I’ll pass you on –” She could imagine it; the routineness of this love.

Slowly, she pressed her finger against the screen, watched it drag the icon up. Connecting: 0:00. “Ma?” she said. “Gong xi fa cai.”

39

a school hall, or a ballet class. The upholstered, floralpatterned sofas, the turquoise-themed crockery on beige countertops, the porcelain Siamese cats arranged on the bedside table.

“I’m just not in the mood,” he said finally, his irritation blistering like a sore.

40

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

T

hank God I woke up early, ironed the shirt and skirt and jacket, made sure the iron was hanging high and the kids can’t pull at the cord since Emmy’s now crawling. Put on some lippie and powder but the mascara’s all dried up – can’t remember the last time I used it. Even drank a cup of Nescafé before it got too cold. Not even seven-thirty yet, and I’m already winning the day, woohoo!

Pork chops and peas: that’s what we had last night, so that’s what’s going to be stick-blended for Emmy this morning. On the stove it goes with a bit of water, off the stove, pop goes the toaster. Now Ryan’s awake. “Ryan do you want peanut butter or jam on your toast today? No Ryan mate, I can’t make sushi because we don’t have leftover rice, just bread. Fine, the crusts can be cut off, but you gotta put your shoes on. For crying out loud, you’re four, you can do this shit by yourself. Okay fine, now I owe you a dollar and I won’t say that word again, but you gotta get into your shoes NOW. I am not waiting any longer.”

Oh crap, I need to go to the loo but I’ll hold on because Emmy needs to be fed and come to think of it, so do I. Haven’t

By Alice Pung

eaten since seven last night standing at the stove, and now I am eating like an animal because who knows when I’ll next eat again? Chewing and gulping swallowfuls of microwaved pork and Ryan’s leftover breadcrust like a horse. Must remember to brush my teeth before I leave.

“Stop pulling at my skirt, Ryan, your hands aren’t even washed.” Now there’s a peanut smear on it, crap. I don’t have time for this now, I’m feeding the baby her pea-smish. Must remember to wet a cloth and spot-clean the skirt before I walk out the door. I’ll do it when I have a chance to go to the loo.

Eight twenty. Bloody hell, this babysitter’s gonna make me late! I’m never gonna find one on Facebook again, bet she’s one of those uni students with no sense of time, never needed to depend on a job for anything but keeping up her constant supply of avocado toast brunches. Should have seen the warning signs when she wanted to meet up beforehand to discuss “how to best support the personality, character, likes and dislikes of baby Emma”. What early-childhood-book bullshit is this? A baby’s needs are simple: feed, poo or piss, sleep. She just needs to take care of these three things; Emmy doesn’t have a personality yet! I’m going to be late, shit, shit,

41

THREE HOURS

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

42

shit. I bet now she won’t even turn up; she’s probably figured out that this is just a one-off gig.

Oh ding dong, there goes the doorbell and here she is now, phew.

“Hello, hello, you must be Gracie. I’m Deb, thank you so much for coming over. Yeah these are my little monsters.

Heh, really they’re not too bad and you’ll just be having Emmy for a few hours this morning because I’m gonna drop Ryan off at childcare before my interview.”

She looks younger than I expected, but at least she knows how to hold a baby. And oh look, like clockwork, hear Emmy roar. Three, two, one…

“Don’t worry, Emmy’s at the stage where she has stranger danger. Oh, you’re not bothered by howling babies? That’s good, because she might cry for a bit but she’s tired and will probably nod off soon. Just don’t shake her if she keeps whingeing.” Yeah, don’t look at me like that; you don’t know shit about how a crying baby can provoke someone.

“Now Ryan, grab your bag. NO you can’t bring that big Octonaut to childcare, you’ll lose it. Fine, fine bring the little dinosaurs, JUST TWO, but we have to go now Now NOW!!!”

Oh I see you, Miss I-Study-Child-Psychology, giving me that look. Don’t think I didn’t notice. But I guess the look is good; it means you disapprove of my yelling at my kid. If it were your kid you would never yell at them but take time to reason shit out with them. But you don’t have a kid, you have my screaming baby for two hours, and in those two hours I know you are not the type to yell at them or shake them. Good.

“Bye missy moo Emmy, I’ll miss you little baby boo.

Let mummy kiss your fat cheek one last time.” Oh I really will miss her. I’ve never once been away from her for this long, but at least this Gracie is making reassuring cooing storybook-nanny sounds at her.

“Oww, Ryan! Stop that! I told you not to do that… Get in the car now.”

Have I got everything? CV in a folder? Yep. Hair comb in case? Yep. Jacket? Oh no there’s a smear of peanut butter on that too. I’ll have to do a lick-and-scrub with my nail in the car, no time to go back inside now.

“I’m buckling you in. Good. Now let’s go. I know you’ll be early but it’ll be fun. Subpop will be there, you can swap a dinosaur with him. If you’ve been good, we can go back to The Reject Shop after school to get some more, how about that?”

We’re here already. So soon. Almost forgot the PIN to the door, it’s been so long since I’ve put him in here. When I’m not working I can’t justify the cost, the sort of cost that’ll have you walking out minus an arm and a leg, even though the teachers are terrific. “Bye Ryan, bye! Wait, what? I look nice today? Awww.” Sometimes that boy annoys the hell out of me and other times he’s like this.

Still haven’t gone to the loo. Should I go in Ryan’s childcare? Nah, we’ve made good time, I can hold it a bit longer. I’ll go to the toilet just before the interview, don’t want to kerfuffle finding another car park here, not when that bloody SUV is honking at me.

Ah, in the car by myself now. I haven’t been by myself in about a year come to think of it. My teeth, my teeth,

thick‑fuzzy… Fuck, I forgot to brush them! Gross, I can feel a string of pork floss between my back molars.

Ha, they call it a glovebox when I’ve never put a pair of gloves in there ever. And when was the last time I bought mints? Aha, a Domino’s Pizza loyalty card! That’ll do the trick. Stopped at the lights now, good, ah, that’s dislodged the meat. Hey wanker in the next car, Mr High‑and‑Mighty‑Honking‑SUV, never seen a lady pick at her teeth with the corner of a plastic card before? Well, fuck you.

Bet you have a nice wife at home who takes care of you real good. When do I get a chance to be a Human Being instead of a Human Doing?

Lights have changed but we’re still not moving. Shit, a traffic jam, just what I needed. Calm down, I’m still in good time, not gonna be late at all, use this time to go over what I might say at nine-thirty. I am capable, dependable and hardworking. Yes, there is a gap in my resume because I took this time to raise my two children. I won’t add “as a single mother” – it will make them think of dole-bludgers buying big-screen TVs on finance because that’s what they see on A Current Affair. Tell them I am patient and calm and good at answering phones. Don’t tell them I yell all the time.

Tell them I can multi-task. Don’t tell them I’m not used to thinking in full sentences anymore.

Hooray, we’re on the move!

Can’t believe I’m pulling into the car park now; my mind must have blanked out for ten minutes. Open the door, straighten my skirt, don’t forget to lock the car, though who would steal this piece of shit? What a big foyer, and what’s that flapping noise? Oh no, the wet Domino’s loyalty card is stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I’ll discreetly bend down and... Fuck, there’s no bins around here. Might just shove it in my handbag.

Nine twenty-eight, straight to the reception now. No time for the loo but I can hold on.

“Oh hello, I’m Deborah, here for the interview?”

Far out, how can a woman look so good? I’d forgotten how good twentysomethings could look, especially HR people whose only job is to manage other human beings without touching them. Her nails, her hair, her heels: like a winning racehorse that I’d place all my money on. Hope I don’t look too worse for wear. I should have dyed my hair instead of tying the stray greys back. I meant to put the tortoiseshell clip in, how did I forget to do that? Did I even do up the back button of my skirt? Lucky the jacket is long. What’s she looking at?

What?! Oh crap, a smear of what? Mashed pea? The peanut butter? I can’t even tell anymore. Some dried up, desiccated crap on my collar. I must look like a decrepit greyhound.

Look how nice this meeting room is. Look how orderly.

Cleaner than my whole house. Smells like machine-coffee.

I think I’ve made a huge mistake.

“Yes, thank you, I’ll wait for Mr Whelan. No, no need for water thanks.”

B

ack in the car and no tissues in the glovebox, surprise! I should start a fashion label, House of Stain. Ha! Sometimes you laugh and cry at once and you don’t feel any better, you just feel dumb and old and ugly.

Alice Pung is an award-winning Melbourne writer whose latest book is One Hundred Days. alicepung.net

04 FEB 2022

O

h the babysitter, the dumb uni student.

She’s put Emmy to sleep and cleaned my house.

I can’t believe it. She’s made it a Living room instead of an Existing room: the couches are clear, the table’s wiped, the carpet’s even been vacuumed. How the hell did she manage that? There’s two mugs on the bench, steam coming out of one. I’m a friggin’ faucet today; here I go again...

“Oh Gracie, no, nothing’s wrong. It’s just I didn’t expect this. You are a sweetheart. No, no, I’m okay. Just emotional.

Hormones, I think. Maybe a release after the stress of the interview. Yes, thank you, so kind of you. Ha! We don’t have tissues in the house, only rolls of toilet paper. Yes, I’ll drink the tea later. Please excuse me, I’m going to go to the loo first and then I’ll pay you but if you need to leave for uni just take the money out of my purse on the table.”

In the bathroom she’s even wiped down the sink and everything. The toilet lid’s clean enough to sit on.

Cross my legs and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.

That’s what it felt like, those eighteen minutes I was in that interview room. Jiggling my knees, holding it in, doing those pelvic floor exercises advised in the hospital hand‑outs, exercises I was supposed to do eight months ago but never had time for. A small trickle would not seep too much through my thick polyester skirt, I thought, because polyester is plastic. I’d forgotten it’s not normal to pee a little in your pants every day, to reek of the sting of piss all the time, and most of the time I’ve no idea whether it’s Emmy’s smell or mine anymore. Should have sprayed on the dregs of my JLo Glow bottle before I left.

While my brain was forming, “I am patient, calm and good at multi-tasking”, and my mouth was saying “I am patient and…” that patronising old man didn’t let me finish – he started asking about my work experience, like I was a fifteen‑year-old kid instead of a thirty-threeyear‑old woman.

And because Mr Whelan interrupted me – to my horror and against my will – my bladder interrupted him. Shhhhh you clueless middle-aged middle-class moron, shhhhh, it hissed, until the air was warm and the soft leather chair was drip-drip-dripping onto the carpet which was cleaner than my house.

No man should see me pick my teeth in the car and piss my pants, except maybe the father of my children, who’s long gone now. No man. Fuck him.

“G

racie, you’re still here? Oh. Oh. I’m alright.

You didn’t have to wait around. I’m so sorry, didn’t mean to make you miss your class. Oh, it’s available online anyway?

Okay then. Okay. I’ll sit down for a cup of tea with you. You didn’t have to make me a new one. You are so good. Yeah, I got changed. D’ya like the new look? Trackie daks and a suit jacket; I’ll be on the cover of Vogue next.” This Gracie, so sweet, she even laughed.

“Do you want to know what happened at my interview?

Hilarious. Too good not to share.”

This Gracie. I really think she’s not just going to be a oneoff, one-time hire. I’ll give her an earlier start time next time, and we’ll somehow make it work.

43

Screw them all, didn’t want that job anyway: answering phones for that wanker who looked so uptight you could sharpen a pencil up his arse. I offered to help clean up but they just shooed me out with kind soothing noises, the sort you’d make for stroke patients.

Well whaddya know the traffic is clear on the way back, green lights all the way. But I will not pass GO and cannot collect any fucking dollars, and when I return home it’ll be back to the same-old same-old but maybe even worse, because I’ve left my baby with a stranger for fifty bucks.

44

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

PUGGSY THE PUPPY’S VERY YAPPY CHRISTMAS

By Jim Browne

is much too boring for this story. Let’s talk about Sam Johnson instead…

S

am groaned and rolled over, wincing to avoid the harsh slab of light that pierced the gap in his curtains and divided the bedroom into two dark halves. Tiny dust motes drifted in the warm air currents. Lazy little buggers. Sam scanned the empty room, peering blearily through crusty morning eyes.

“Hello?” said Sam, eyes darting as a slight frown spread across his face.

“Dreaming,” he groaned and lay his head back down on the pillow. “I’m still dreaming.”

Sam lay there for a moment not doing much.

Not very much at all…

T

here was a sound. Someone was talking at him, he could hear it. He picked up a pillow and lay it over his head, forcing it down over his ears. But it wasn’t working.

Sam sat bolt upright and looked around wildly. Pulling up the sleeve of his dinosaur pyjamas, he pinched a chunk of flesh, grimacing at the instant pain.

“What? Who is that!” He shouted and covered his ears,

45

J

ohn Smith was a boring man. Dull as dishwater, decidedly default, drudging, droning, drab and uh… d-not interesting. Every morning John would wake up in his ordinary bed in his ordinary house in an ordinary suburb in an ordinary city and pour himself a bowl of cereal. Special K. He’d comb his boring hair with a boring comb and then catch the boring train to his boring job. His job title was so boring it’s not even worth mentioning. Just think of the most mundane, monotonous, tiresome thing you could possibly do and— Hey! What do you mean, “reading this story”? Why I oughta! John Smith was bland is what I’m saying. The kind of man whose claim to fame is being recognised by a co-worker at the grocery store. The kind of man who eats plain toast for dinner and complains it’s too spicy. The kind of man who would consider rehab after a decaf coffee. Imagine the abstract concept of “uninteresting” coming to life and standing in a corner staring at a beige wall. If there were a prize for the world’s most boring man, John Smith would place second because first would be too noteworthy. John Smith was the kind of person who enjoyed fishing. One truly desperate, empty time, in a delirious haze of pure unfettered tedium, John Smith even volunteered to judge a short-story writing competition.

He also smelled bad – just saying. In summary, John Smith

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

46

panicking. “Why are you talking about me? Show yourself!”

Sam’s sheets went sprawling as he kicked out of bed and hurried over to the closet. Throwing doors open, he tossed aside socks and underwear, searching frantically through the drawers.

“Am I being Punk’d right now? Is Ashton Kutcher here? Do Gen Z readers even know what Punk’d is? Come on, come on, there must be a speaker somewhere!”

Shirts flew across the floor as he slammed the cupboards shut and hurried over to dig his hands in the bin. Wincing at the smell, he rifled back and forth through soiled tissues and last month’s leftover tuna and egg sandwich. Gross. Finally, he stopped, his hands balled in a fist of anger.

“Who the hell are you and why do you keep narrating my life!?”

Silence.

Sweat beaded on Sam’s furrowed brow. He looked kind of stupid actually, standing there with his silly sweaty forehead glinting in the morning light, yelling at nobody. Somebody might think he was crazy if they saw him. Maybe he was.

“I’m not crazy!” Sam shouted and ran out of the room.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Drawers and cabinets crashed to the floor as Sam blundered a manhunt through the house. Finally, he ran into the backyard. He waited and waited. It was almost as if he was trying to ignore the voice, trying to will it away with each moment of silence and inaction. It wasn’t working. He could still hear the voice talking at him. It was running out of things to say. Blah blah blah blah bla— “SHUT UP!” Sam dropped to his knees. He dragged his hands down his face and peered through his fingers.

“Just tell me what you want! Why are you doing this?”

Little did Sam know that the narrator he could hear was the least of his problems, for at that very moment a red dot was hovering on the back of his head, a line of light that led to a barrel, connected to a trigger, connected to an itching finger.

“A red wha—?”

Sam ducked moments before the gunshot exploded across the suburban backyard, a heavy thud and shower of dirt erupting where hot lead met mown grass. Heart pounding and chest heaving, Sam dived for the back door and into the kitchen. It was a rather nice kitchen, late 50s Americana style, painted in a light teal blue with that kitschy linoleum black-and-white tile that wouldn’t look out of place in a roadside diner. A collection of antique doilies sat on the vinyl countertop. Some were slightly stained, but others were in tip-top condition. One, commemorating the 1988 World Expo, had a very appealing little picture of the Sky Needle embroidered in exquisite detail. It had been a good year for doilies, 1988, what with the National Doily Association holding its first annual convention in Milwaukee and— “Shut up about the bloody doilies and tell me about the shooter!” Sam squealed as another bullet narrowly missed his head, shards of window crashing down around him.

The assassin, sitting on the roof two doors down, the one with the red tile, reloaded his gun. He had the perfect

hiding spot – to the left of the grey chimney, he’d never be found – exactly three degrees east-northeast of Sam’s current location, it was just a matter of seconds now. The assassin lined up ready to shoot, but something was off: his target, inexplicably holding a compass, had somehow spotted him.

Sam scrambled to the garage, knocking over stacks of used doilies and diving behind some shelves. He reached into his pocket, searching for his phone, but found nothing.

“Why do I have a compass but no phone?” he cursed at nobody in particular. Heavy seconds passed. He could hear footsteps in the house. The garage was open, a sleepy suburban street lined with parked cars lay beyond. Sam decided to make a break for it. The third shot rang out as he sprinted across the grass and dived behind the bar at the end of the driveway.

“Wait, the what at the end of the driveway?” A disorientated Sam cowered for a second, pulsing veins throbbing in his neck. A bartender looked down at him, rolling his eyes. “Bloody typos” he muttered. “Third time this month.” He glared at Sam and gestured to a large red sign: Strictly No Appearing Out of Thin Air Due to Typographical Errors. “Security!”

Sam found himself in an alley staring down a dead end.

He turned to run but somehow, standing at the exit, was the assassin, gun poised.

“Why are you doing this?” shouted Sam as he backed towards the wall with his shaking hands above his head. This was the end; never again would he see the light creeping through his curtains. Never again would he enjoy the sweet perfume of his morning coffee perched so elegantly on his favourite doily – the one with the embroidered picture of the alligator, which he had picked up in Florida during that wild summer doily hunt. There was something so whimsical about the way the sunglasses sat on the alligator’s nose and matched the orange colour of the “See ya later” slogan. The way that the alligator looked, so lonely, so needful, so... lustful. Never again would he hold it late at night, staring longingly at its delicate crocheted edges, or suckle gently at those cottony threads while roughly— “GET DOWN!” The assassin’s voice rang out and Sam fell to the floor as gunfire assaulted his eardrums, cold dread enveloping him as he waited for the pool of blood – wasn’t that what happened in movies? He touched his head, his chest: dry. He blinked and looked up “Y-you saved me!” he spluttered “Wh-why?”

Sam could now see the face of his would-be murderer, a look of pure panic upon it. “It’s not me!” the assassin shouted.

“It’s that bloody voice, the narrator thing. It keeps making me do things! WATCH OUT!” He shouted again as he lunged forward with a knife.

“Wait, you can hear it too!?” gasped Sam. “DUCK!” The brick he’d been hiding behind his back flew forward and narrowly missed the assassin’s head.

“Yes, I can hear him! He’s a maniac; he says stuff and I have to do it. It wouldn’t be so bad except that he’s just terrible. Bad grammar, plot holes, we keep teleporting around unrealistically. Did you hear when he went on and on for half a page about some idiot called John Smith and then just

. Oh, wait...there’s a word limit isn’t there? Hey editors, do emojis count as words?

“This vaguely amusing meta humour is getting old. Let’s count to three.”

Fin. Author’s Note: The joke here is that they kill the narrator and, because the narrator is the one telling the story, they all cease to exist. Other popular jokes include Sam’s love of doilies and the hilariously zany bar–car typo affair.

I hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing! If you didn’t, it’s okay, you probably just didn’t understand it.

I mean, not everyone is born intelligent... Some of us are just smooth‑brained, mouth-breathing cretins, aren’t we?

Maybe you’d like a line-by-line explanation? Perhaps I could hold your hand? Some would ask why I even bother writing when none of you lobotomised, single-celled troglodytes can understand the difference between a subordinate clause and an independent clause, you festering, wretched pustules unfit to kiss my dirty boots. Good God, you all make me sick!

Editor’s Note: I’d like to apologise for the tone of the author’s note. Rest assured that he was taken out back and beaten mercilessly, as is customary in the publishing industry.

Publisher’s Note: We wish to clarify that beating writers to within an inch of their lives is in no way a reflection of modern publishing industry standards. As punishment for this miscommunication, the aforementioned editor has been drowned.

Reader’s Note: Hey it’s me…you. I’m the voice inside your head. MUST WATCH BOSS BABY. Wasn’t that a great story?

Just so fun and funny and just really great and also funny!

I should really read more stories from this author or even just deposit funds directly into his bank account. EVERYONE I LOVE WILL DIE. Also did I leave the iron switched on?

And how about all those embarrassing things I did when I was a kid? Let’s think about those for a few hours for no reason. SEXY GARFIELD. NAKED GARFIELD. MUST FIND PICTURES OF NAKED GARFIELD. Jim Browne is not a fake author created by Big Tobacco to sell cigarettes to children. Jim likes to start pyramid schemes, leave teddy bears full of spiders at playgrounds, and watch you through binoculars. Jim is currently writing his first book. @jjustinbrowne

04 FEB 2022

T

he WHINY assassin took out a pistol from his coat and pointed it at Sam. What a cruel twist that these two men, drawn together by circumstance, would be pitted against each other. That one must die in order to end their fateful struggle. Surely they knew that their predicament was so perfectly crafted as to be unsolvable, unwinnable and full of pathos, for how can one win against a hidden all-knowing power? An invisible, omniscient force?

The nameless, faceless, perfect and divine voice of God itself?

“Hang on...is that...is that the narrator in the wheelie bin over there?” said the assassin.

Unfortunately, he was wrong, very wrong – there definitely wasn’t a person hiding in the rubbish bin narrating them.

They both decided to turn around and— “Bloody hell! The little bastard totally is!” laughed Sam with disbelief. “Come on, let’s get him.”

Unfortunately, the two men approaching the bin didn’t know that um…there was a…BEAR! Yeah, a bear or something behind them…big and angry! The bear ran at them gnashing its teeth and— “Oh hell naw, I ain’t got time for these shenanigans. Fight your own battles,” grumbled the bear.

“Here look, he’s hiding under the lid!” said Sam. “Give me those binoculars you creepy little pervert! And what’s that in his mouth? Is that tuna and egg? Look at him cowering there typing away. What should we do?”

Sam and the assassin both turned away and— “Let’s thump him!”

WAIT! No! You can’t! Don’t come any closer! I can give you anything you want. Money? Sex? Sexy money!? You could be the main character in my next Twilight fanfiction.

“Get the gun.”

Please have mercy! I just… I have needs! It’s a bizarre sexual compulsion to create short stories between 500 and 3000 words long that can be published in magazines. I lust over creating narratives that amuse and excite readers of all ages while also making them think and laugh.

“Say your prayers!”

No! I’ll, I’ll fill the page with random emojis so help me God!

“One…” PLEASE, DON’T PULL THAT TRIGGER! “Two…” IF YOU DO THAT WE ALL CEASE TO EXIS—

47

switched over to you? Gah, so annoying!”

“Totally!” Sam dodged sideways as the assassin took another swing.

“All I know is one moment I’m reading the newspaper and then suddenly I’m up on this rooftop aiming at you. I didn’t even get to see how the Garfield comic ended!”

“You poor, poor man,” said Sam, a small tear running down his cheek.

The assassin took out— “And that’s another thing: I don’t even have a name! I’m literally just ‘the assassin’. How about David, or… Duke? Duke is cool. I have feelings too you know. Is ‘desire to assassinate’ a feeling?”

48

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

SUMMER FICTION EDITION

G

race stands naked, her hands aching as she takes pins out of her hair, places each one on the bedside table. The brightest of bluegreen veins floats under her translucent skin, and her silver wedding ring, now worn around her neck, acts as a timekeeper, as a kaleidoscope of memory in the morning light. She smooths her hair down with her fingers, places her best dress over her head and feels it fall down over her burning chest. Out the window she can see her neighbour’s chimney – the woman’s old bones, she suspects, tougher than hers are now for the oncoming winter.

Three years ago, Grace had worn the same dress and left the house just before nightfall, joining twelve other women whose husbands had gone to war, at a long wooden table in a factory near her home. With their backs hunched over, the women sat licking the ends of small brushes to a fine point, painting the faces of watches a luminous green – their collective sound a soft humming, a reason for belonging.

Together, the women talked about what would happen when their husbands returned, about children that were yet to be real. The youngest of the women passed around a piece of paper with the name of the girl she was certain she would have. Two years later Grace would receive a knock on the

By Mandy Beaumont for Grace Fryer

door and be told that her husband was never coming home, his body lying in a muddied field, never to be seen again.

As the women sat together, men in aprons and gloves – the ones not called to fight – placed jars of luminous green radium on the long table, smiling down at them as the old foreman paced the room and kept repeating – lick, lick, lick, we need fine lines on these watch faces ladies. The women reached for the jars, their skin beginning to glow as a collective light against the imagined hostile landscapes in which their husbands now stood. Grace whispered down the length of the table that the depth of luminous light coming from their mouths would certainly give away which one of them had worked the quickest. And, as their shift ended and the morning light shone through the factory windows, the women walked out together into the pink new-day sky, a breathtaking group to the onlookers on the street.

As weeks passed, the men in the factory began to wait for the women at the gates each morning, holding packages of hard-to-get sweets in their hands. The women would touch perfume to their necks, rub their pearly white teeth with what was left in their jars. As Grace accepted sweets, she hid her wedding ring and thought about how she had started to forget her husband’s smell, how she had taken to hanging

49

A RICH BLAZE, BRIGHT BRILLIANCE

all his shirts like curtains in their home, hoping that the morning breeze would somehow bring him to her.

O

ne night at the long wooden table, Grace told the other women that her teeth hadn’t stopped aching since she had eaten those sweets, that she felt as if her gums were a burning fire.

Edith leaned over the table and whispered that she didn’t like sweets, in fact had never eaten them, but her teeth were also a throbbing ache. She said that yesterday morning she had seen men in the tearoom reading the newspaper – a picture of Marie Curie on its front page, the scientist’s hands burned from a “deadly discovery” called radium. Bright green and glowing. Used in ointments, in hair products and drunk as a tonic for weight loss. A deadly thing, and now all over the women’s mouths, their hands, their torsos. Now shining on the faces of clocks sitting on the long wooden table and all over the country.

Days later, as the women sat at the table, their teeth aching, they whispered to each other – why didn’t they wear aprons like the men did? Why didn’t the foreman, now pacing behind them and not saying a word, ever hand them their pay? (Just by the door ladies, ready for you to take.) Grace looked up as he moved behind her. She turned, asked if he had seen the newspaper article of Marie Curie, if he thought that her radium could kill them. He stopped. Stood still.

Moved closer behind her. His fists pressing down on her shoulders. His weight, she was certain, breaking small bones in her body. In her eardrums the sound of organs shifting to collapse. The women stopped working, stood up, looked him straight in the eyes. There’s nothing to fear ladies. His hands lifting from Grace’s shoulders. Nothing. His pacing resuming.

Now, Lick. Lick. Lick. His betrayal a forgone conclusion.

50

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

G

race and Edith found the youngest of the women, Mae, alone in her bedroom the next morning, their worry when she hadn’t turned up for work bringing them there. With her head between pillows and her jaw swollen, three bloody teeth swam in a bowl beside her. Mae groaned, her mouth opening to them and showing once-white cotton wool wrapped around the end of her tongue. Spit. Made gurgling noises as her gums bled down into her throat. Spit, Spit. Spit. A doctor is on his way.

The two women sat with Mae as the doctor arrived and placed his palm over her jaw, felt it lifting from her mouth.

Feel. Hold. Push – an abscess running across the bottom of her jawline. Mae’s fingers hanging like twigs as she gasped for air and cried for her husband so far away.

The next night at the long wooden table, Grace’s wrists ached. At midnight a message arrived from Mae’s doctor – A strange infection moved fast. To the tissue in her throat. To her jugular veins. Her mouth flooding with blood. Nothing could have been done to save her. The room was quiet as she handed the letter to the other women. That night, there were bloodstains on the bathroom sinks, there were women kneading their chests with their fists, there were fingernails all over the factory floor. There was a collective aching. There was knowing what this was.

T

he women stood together at Mae’s funeral. The coffin passed them, and Mae’s mother screamed out thick black mourning. The pastor said they suspected the young woman died of syphilis.

The women felt their shared anger build – as Mollie held a handkerchief to her jaw to absorb seeping pus (she would pick small sections of her jawbone out of her mouth in a month), as Katherine leaned against the pulpit with a sore knee (she would die a year later from a pelvic tumor “larger than two footballs”), as Edna held Grace’s hand (in two weeks she won’t turn up for work. When Grace and Edith go to her house, her sobbing mother will answer the door), as Grace coughed heavily and felt blood rise in the back of her throat.

A tooth loosens. A metallic taste. Rise. When the last mourner left, the women stood under an oak tree talking. A jaw moved sideways, a hip throbbed. Grace told the women that her father has helped workers before, that he knows the fight, the challenge, the readiness to riot. The women told her they are ready. The women are a fury in the making.

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race arrived at her parents’ home at dusk.

Her mother cried. Her father held her on his valiant chest. She told them of limbs breaking, of fingers loosening, a toe bending backwards.

The foreman standing over them, telling them it’s all going to be okay – It’s all in your heads ladies. Lick. Lick. Lick. That night as she lay in her childhood bed and listened to her father’s snores, she knew there were broken promises and lies in his dreams, the lies of those bosses who once decided his worth. His knees once resting on concrete as he worked binding copper.

The next morning, her father, full of his once-loud accord, sat in his leather chair holding the newspaper with Marie Curie staring up at him. Grace watched him run his hands over the places she once crawled, where his voice once rose in anger to those men trying to determine his future, his worth, to those who asked for his yielding consent. Her father led the charge once. Strike. Made it better. Strike. Led the fight. Rise.

There was a knock on the door, the slapping of backs, a doctor’s leather bag beside her. There was her mother pulling the curtains across and turning off the lights. Grace floated in the room as a brilliant apparition. She is lips floating as a hole to nowhere, she is the stench of pus now coming from the backs of her knees, her elbows, her groin. She is the blood building behind her ears. And, there is the sound of the doctor’s regret – A state of serious decay; perhaps ointments may help at least soothe her. He asks her – How many of the women have died, got infections, spat out teeth? So many, the broken bones of women as a formation of ruins, a collection of breaking hearts as a certain future. Lick. Lick. Lick.

Her father’s falling tears turned Curie’s face into a mass of black on his lap, his right hand beat on the arm of the chair as the rhythm of wild storming. She could taste the copper of blood on her lips, watched her father rise and walk out the back door.

She stood in the kitchen and listened to his howls in the backyard. She knew that he remembered – the last protestor leaving town, the poor, the quiet, those standing fearful like

O

ne afternoon Edith is taken to the hospital, her insides dissolving like sweet honeycomb under water. That same day, Grace receives a letter. The bosses will meet. Two days later, ten women stand before three men in suits. (Please sit – No thanks, we all prefer to stand). The men tell them they are crazy, that radium is safe, that no-one will ever believe you, so much time on your hands with your husbands gone. Ten women move forward with their hands on their hips. We’re not shutting up until you fix this, until we are heard. Their voices hold space, hold strong, hold on. They are certain they hear the sighs of other working women across the nation.

They hold hands, walk out of the factory together. Strike.

Strike. Strike.

I

n two months, four women die. In six months, newspaper reporters take pictures of Grace through her bedroom window. Radio announcers repeat her name over and over again. In two years, three more women die. Newspapers show pictures of women with sunken noses, toothless grins, arms bending behind their breaking backs.

Grace and the women never go back to work. Another month

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race stands naked in her bedroom on the morning of the first court hearing, her hands aching as she takes pins out of her hair, places each one on the bedside table. The brightest of blue-green veins floats under her translucent skin, and her silver wedding ring – now worn around her neck – acts as a timekeeper, as a kaleidoscope of memory in the morning light. Grace smells the old woman next door’s fire burning in the cold air.

All day Grace and Edith sit in the courtroom listening to men arguing their fate. They feel the weight of a legion of women on their chests. As the weeks pass, Grace is told that Pearl dies, that Margaret falls and doesn’t get back up, that Charlotte’s husband convinces her that she contracted syphilis from shaking another man’s hand years ago at the factory. Around the country women limp as they walk to the shops, and the first man loses his jaw. One day the lawyers sit in a room alone with Grace and Edith and ask them if they will settle out of court. Grace stands, her hands clenched at her side – Only if we change the laws to protect the women that will come after us. Only if you pay working wages to the women who are hurting now. Bright, light, light, light – she demands a promise for a better working life. The men sigh, the men abide. The men say yes.

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ow, months later in her dying bed, Grace’s father sits with her, his love breaking over her short‑breathed chest. The brightest of deep green veins floats in her translucent skin as he reads her handwritten letters from women thanking her for all she has done – For us, for them, for all those women to come. Her silver wedding ring is a kaleidoscope of hope in the morning light. Her breath shortens. Prisms of colour rise from her. Her hands hold onto her father as she lifts to the ceiling, as she becomes a wild light, a rich blaze, forever remembered bright brilliance. Rise.

Mandy Beaumont’s debut novel The Furies is out now. Her short story collection Wild, Fearless Chests was shortlisted for the Richell Prize, the Dorothy Hewett Award, and won the Moth International Short Story Award. She teaches creative writing at Griffith University, and is a researcher in writing philosophical fiction at RMIT. @mandybeaumont

4 FEB 2022

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week later, Grace and her father stood at the door of the clock factory; saw women bandaged, noses bleeding, a bright green light soaring up from the centre of the long wooden table as their not-yet‑known collective power. Edith looked up and saw them both. With her head leaning against the wall for support, she listened to them and agreed to bring the women to the bus stop later. A waiting confluence. A brewing assemblage of the nearly marred. A handshake solidarity.

One by one the women arrived after work, catching sight of each other as ghosts in daylight hours. Edith said that it felt like her insides were crumbling, that she is sure that one leg is now shorter than the other. Inez swayed back and forth to take the pressure off her ankles. And together they talked, becoming loud under the sun’s ascent. Together they listened as Grace’s father said – You have been lied to. Together they lowered their heads as he held up a picture of Mae. They clenched their fists as he told them – Together you can rise to power, be the voice of Mae who is now unable to speak. They are the fight, the challenge, the scream. Fight.

There were – groups of women at the factory manager’s door. There were – brushes dropped each time someone coughed. There was – Mae’s name pasted to the factory walls.

There were – letters to newspapers, to doctors, demands that the bosses meet them. Men no longer waited for them at the gates, but words like WHORE and SLUT were etched into their long table. A hallway grope. Rotten eggs in a handbag. Shifts down from five to two. A new woman took the seat Grace once sat in, while across town Grace’s mother massaged her daughter’s jaw to stop the pain.

on and more women working with radium come forward – become a force together, a mighty cry across the land. Rise.

Rise. Rise. The women hold the line. The women rise together in vivid colour. And in her bed, Grace writes to her husband knowing that she will never receive his reply, and listens as a lawyer tells her father in the loungeroom that he will take on their case. Always believe women, Grace whispers into her pillow, always. She cries as a letter from Edith arrives – they have amputated her legs. A month on and a court date is set, her father tells her, smiling.

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his daughter is now. Their silence the great triumph of others.

This country’s glory an amalgam of gold and crystals set in the hands of only the few. Fine white heat built in his wrists.

Bright brilliance under moonlight.

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for Elizabeth Harrower

spoke to herself, perhaps to alleviate some of the stress she was feeling around her eyes and nose and cheeks.

“There’s always dying,” she had said.

Priya arrives from the opposite direction. She lives in a terrace in Abbotsford, and can walk to Darling Gardens in half an hour, if she wears sensible shoes. Arabella has thrown out her garden rug, covered in burrs from the last time she did this, and is sitting cross-legged on it, waiting, when she sees Priya’s head pop up from behind the small hill she has reached the top of.

Arabella notes a slight flutter of nerves in her stomach. It is daunting to try, now, to make a new friend. She knows almost nothing about this woman, though that isn’t the part that matters. She knows she admires Priya, for small reasons she found when they met at the party and in their text exchanges since, and she knows she would like to be admired by Priya, too.

“Hello!” Priya calls out as she nears the rug and Arabella.

She waves and grins widely.

“Hi!” Arabella shouts back, her throat cracking on the sound.

No-one talks about suicide unless prompted, and so after Priya spreads out her rug, and sits, readjusting her mask and asking Arabella how she is, Arabella answers that she is well.

The feeling comes and goes anyway – of wanting to be dead, of a numb acceptance, of life lying on the floor as if it has given up – and in between there are moments of feeling other things, though they are muted feelings that don’t last long. Either way, she doesn’t want to give Priya the wrong impression.

There is light split with shadow on Priya’s face as she tells Arabella about her life lately. It has become acceptable to talk about how you really are, recently – words like anxious and scared and hopeless and sad are being used more than they ever have been, and people ask for details in a way they didn’t seem to before.

“I haven’t been so lonely, in my share house, but I have been restless,” she says, in her unguarded, elongated way.

“Have you been lonely?”

Arabella hasn’t been lonely, but she supposes that’s because she has been too preoccupied with the black hole inside her that is getting ever so slightly bigger each day, leaving her breathless. She doesn’t like to alienate, though, by making out that she is more interesting, or especially different, so she tells another lie.

“Yeah, I’ve been lonely. Just little old me.” She tries to laugh but it doesn’t quite land.

Priya’s expression changes to one of concern. Just like

04 FEB 2022

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hey meet in the Darling Gardens in the middle of winter. For some months it has been impossible to meet at a cafe, or in either of their houses, because there are strict rules to follow. It is a mild day despite it being July, and Melbourne.

A grey sky has unzipped to show its blue, and the slightest sun is breathing. The park looks like a Tom Carment watercolour to Arabella as she walks down the street towards it: tall and wobbly trees, grass patches like pools filled with different shades of green.

It has occurred to both of them that they should not even be meeting in a park. Sitting six metres away from each other isn’t possible – they would have to shout their conversation, and they don’t know each other well enough to do that.

One and‑a‑half metres is feasible, and so this is what they plan to try, after they have laid down their separate picnic blankets on the damp grass, but one-and-a-half metres won’t stop particles of disease from travelling between them. Neither of them feel ill, but that’s the problem with it all, isn’t it? You don’t have to feel ill to infect those around you.

They have been planning to have a coffee together for many months, after meeting at a mutual friend’s fortieth birthday party in the summer, when it had been easier to talk freely and wipe one’s neck with a napkin as the sweat trickled down.

Arabella didn’t know the friend who was turning forty very well, but they worked together in the university art gallery, and the friend seemed to like Arabella, which was cheering.

In the bathroom, Priya and Arabella had struck up a shy conversation, both of them reaching for the same bottle of cider from the ice-filled bath. Priya had said she’d thought her time of attending parties with bath fridges was over; Arabella had laughed and replied that she had, too.

Since that party, Arabella has been sliding downhill. She lives alone, and she has begun to talk to herself. The things she says out loud in her flat don’t help her – the things are negative, derisive and rude – but she doesn’t always know when she is going to say them, and so it is difficult to stop herself. Arabella has thought of death, since that party, and she has thought of dying. Over the last week the thoughts have turned to how she might kill herself, if it ever comes to that.

She woke this morning with a slight headache, and a feeling behind her eyes like something had crawled in there and taken up residence, perhaps a curious ringed worm, or a fat slater bug. While making coffee in her spooky little kitchen, she

By Laura McPhee-Browne

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A FEW HOURS IN THE GARDENS

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rabella tells Priya about how she often wants to kill herself, and Priya asks the right questions, regarding safety and psyche and wounds. Priya seems to understand that part of it is pain and part of it is numbness, and that it ebbs and flows, the way most things do. They make a plan to meet again soon, and Priya holds Arabella’s hands in hers before they part ways, even though they are not supposed to touch each other.

The walk home is long, perhaps no longer than it ever was but with more in it to move through. It is dusk, and above her the sky is sinking, though it has not given up, and it will be back tomorrow. The colours are striking, and Arabella can’t remember the last time she saw so much pink and yellow and mauve and electric purple and saffron in the sky, but she hasn’t been looking up there much lately. The beauty of it is overwhelming, as if Mother Nature had some time on her hands, as if she had been gifted a new set of pastel sticks, and an afternoon to use them.

Arabella considers the fact that she told Priya that she wants to die, and that this might mean a part of her wants to live.

That maybe she wouldn’t be walking along the street, making plans with people, breathing from her diaphragm, in and out, so diligently, if a part of her didn’t want to keep going. This doesn’t feel like much as she walks, but it might be something.

Laura McPhee-Browne (she/her) is a writer, social worker and counsellor living in Melbourne, on unceded Wurundjeri land.

Her award-winning debut novel, Cherry Beach, was published in 2020, and her second novel, Little Plum, is forthcoming in February 2023. @laurahelenmb

04 FEB 2022

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rabella remembers she has some cakes in her bag to share with Priya. She likes to give food to others, to make up for something. It seems Priya has brought food too, so they lay out their offerings on the parts of their blankets that join: bichon au citron, cream horns and mini ciambella cakes; dark purple grapes on the vine.

They eat, though Arabella isn’t hungry. The grapes have pips, and are so sentimentally sweet they make her cheeks hurt. The bichon is a bit stale, its lemon curd filling clinging to the pastry walls like mould.

Her mouth is half-full when she blurts it out.

“Actually, I’ve been feeling quite depressed. Actually.”

Saying actually twice is not something she planned, but she didn’t plan to try to explain to Priya how dark things are inside her either, and saying it twice sort of makes up for the fact that she has been pretending everything is fine.

Priya stops moving one of her fingers politely around inside her mouth – presumably trying to extricate a grape pip – and pulls it out. Her eyebrows furrow again, and her eyes moisten.

Arabella knew she was kind when she met her at the party, and she feels this kindness wash over her now, even before the words come.

“Oh, Arabella,” Priya says. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” Arabella replies.

She means it. She wants some pity, some empathy and sympathy. It has been hard, it still is, and having that difficulty acknowledged makes it real. She has never understood people who don’t like others to feel sorry for them. She laps it up, and sees now that telling someone kind is just what she needed.

“Tell me about it?” Priya asks, carefully.

Before Arabella has a chance to tell Priya anything, to try to explain the squiggles in her head, the little dog joins them again. This time she jumps straight into Arabella’s lap, and licks Arabella’s hand with her scabrous, wet tongue.

Priya is laughing, but just a little bit. In order to be sensitive, Arabella assumes. She appreciates the effort.

“Hope loves you,” Priya says.

Hope loves you.

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that: click your fingers and someone worries about you, if just for a moment.

“That must be hard.”

“Yes, I s’pose so. I’m glad I’m not living with people I don’t like, but you can only talk to yourself for so long before you realise you’ve been answering your own questions.” Arabella tries again, to laugh, and she succeeds, because she does find it a little bit funny that she talks to herself and that she can tell people this without them believing her.

Priya’s face softens. Arabella likes her so much, the way her thoughts show as weather on the outside of her, or at least they seem to. She wonders if Priya has ever wanted to die, and can’t imagine why she would have.

They sit on their rugs and shyly laugh and talk with each other, and Priya tells Arabella about her job at a radio station, where they are all wearing face masks to protect themselves and each other, and where they are having meetings to figure out how they will produce the radio shows from home, if it comes to that, which they think it will. Arabella invests in the conversation long enough to forget about the voice trying to kill her, the voice that is hers and not hers because how could it be.

Just as she feels like she might say something to Priya about how bad it is underneath the ordinariness, a little tawny dog appears and flops down on Arabella’s rug. The dog is soft and silky – she can tell by looking at it – and it is panting, as if it ran here as fast as the wind, with its round pink tongue flopping out to one side of its mouth.

“Oh! Hello, little one!” Priya exclaims. As with everyone else Arabella knows, it seems that Priya loves dogs.

They both pat the silly creature, and Arabella worries its long, downy ears. It loves the attention, and drops down onto its back to ask for its belly to be rubbed. Priya happily obliges.

“What a soft tummy you have,” she exclaims, and surely the dog agrees.

Soon, a man who must be the dog’s owner towers over them, blocking the sun and the kaleidoscope of tree shadow with his broad body. He offers them an apology and flicks the dog up to come with him, all with just his deep voice and one large hand. The dog huffs and flounces onto its tiny feet, and is gone before they can pat it goodbye.

“Wait!” Priya calls out to the man, who is already quite far away. “What’s its name?”

The man doesn’t turn around, but his voice carries back to them on the wind.

“Her name is Hope!”

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with their partners and bought food processors, I tapped out, moved back in with Mum, spent slow, silent hours in hospital wards. My hopes were reduced to improved blood pressure readings and white blood cell counts. When I got pneumonia as a result of one of my hospital stays, Mum sat by my bed and cheered whenever I breathed into the spirometer and managed to keep the three little balls airborne. It was all so depressing I wanted to turn the oxygen off myself.

“Do you want to practise what you’re going to say?”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“Rubbish. You have your speech there. You should talk about all the workouts you did with the exercise physiologist.

I think that keeping fit is why you recovered so well.”

I hate the way she talks about recovery as if it’s an achievement to be proud of when it could have just as easily gone the other way.

“You’re a survivor.” She’s been reading one of the million cancer pamphlets that she has by her bed.

I roll my eyes. “Survivor? Sounds heroic. I just sat on my arse for ten months eating jelly.”

She sighs. “I wish you’d just try. Your speech might actually help someone.”

“How the hell am I going to help anyone? I don’t know anything.”

“You’ll inspire them. With your story.”

“Yeah, okay. A real fucking beacon of hope.”

The air whipping through the window is just as hot as the air in the car, no relief. I know I’m being a pain in the arse, but the thing is, it scares me – her insistence that there’s something to be learned from all this, some wisdom to be gained and shared. All I’ve learned is that despite all your plans and hard work, all the carefully drawn blueprints for your life, there is no such thing as safe ground. That’s not the kind of thing you want to know. That just fucks you up. I press my shoulder into the window and try to shield myself from the sun. Mum beeps the horn again, abruptly changes lanes.

Jeez, Mad Max over here.

“I thought I might tell some funny stories about my journey,” I announce, just to get a rise out of her. “You know, to lighten the mood? Remember when you took the brakes off my hospital bed after I woke up from surgery? Sent me crashing into Shirley, the old lady with Crohn’s Disease. First vehicle accident in the gastroenterology ward, scared the shit out of everyone.”

Mum cracks a smile. “That was an accident. I was trying to raise the bloody bed so you could watch TV.” “What about that time in Emergency when all the oldies thought that you were a nurse and you went along with it, fetching them water and helping them open packets of bickies?”

04 FEB 2022

hit.” Mum swears so loudly that the man in the ute one lane over looks at us, amused.

“I knew we should’ve left earlier.”

“We don’t have to go,” I say for the millionth time, squirming in my seat.

It’s only nine in the morning and it’s already disgustingly hot. I fiddle with the aircon but of course I know it’s shot.

Petrol fumes hang in the air. Mum goes silent, stares at the traffic, determined. She can feel me mutinying and will have none of it.

Eventually, we get through the lights. It’s slow but we’re moving. I fan myself with my speech, the pages damp between my fingers. No getting out of this now. It’s a stupid speech. A boring story about my diagnosis, the surgery, my seven chemo sessions. Some pedestrian advice about resting, keeping records, accepting help. Nothing that the poor people in the audience won’t have already figured out for themselves. Coward that I am, I’ve left out some of the more personal details of “my journey” (as Mum would say), including the fact that I’d had a colostomy bag for a year after the lymphoma was cut out of my bowel. I think about standing in front of a microphone in the hospital and my stomach churns.

“It’s a great honour,” Mum informs me. She’s looser now we’re on our way. “Dr Ly told me that you’re her star patient.

That’s why she’s asked you to speak at the conference.”

Mum’s talking like I’ve just won a prize at primary school.

I turned twenty-seven last November.

“It’s an information day, not a conference. And maybe I’m the only one who’s still alive.”

“Don’t be so morbid. You get that from your father.”

I rest my head against the glass as we drive over the Gladesville Bridge. How many times have Mum and I made this journey to the Chris O’Brien LifeHouse? Every chemo session seemed harder than the last, my body wearing away a bit more each time, like a sandcastle on the shore.

Then there were the surprise visits to Emergency each time my temperature rose above thirty-seven point five. I can still picture Mum, driving into the darkness at three in the morning, just the two of us, me burning with fever, Mum soft with sleep. The only bright things out there.

“Oh get out of the way!” Mum beeps her horn at the car in front. The driver, a young man in a suit, turns and gives us the finger. When he sees me in my headscarf he grimaces and puts on his sunnies to hide his eyes. I’m filled with an angry satisfaction. Once upon a time I would have wondered whether he wanted to fuck me, but now, sexless object that I am, I get a thrill out of his discomfort. Cancer has cut me free from my own life; from my own grand ideas about myself. While my friends started their careers, moved in

By Hannah Goldstein

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“S

BEACONS OF HOPE

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04 FEB 2022

Maybe that sadness – the big kind – is really just the everyday sadness of living. Maybe being sick just draws it closer to the surface, so it’s just below the skin. I picture a syringe being drawn back, the chamber filling with grief.

When we turn onto Missenden Road, Mum looks at me; her eyes are bright, full of something – sadness or anger or maybe just the sun. “We’re a bit early, actually…” Her voice catches, like she’s unsure of it. “Want a coffee?”

“I feel sick.”

“Something to eat then? Might settle your stomach.”

“Okay.”

I wipe my eyes on my arm. We pull into the hospital car park and head towards the café on the corner. As the doors gasp open, the aircon washes over us like a wave. We order a flat white for Mum and a cheese and tomato toastie for me and find a booth by the window. People come and go.

I think of all the hours Mum and I have spent waiting around in hospitals. It always shocks me, how many lives converge here. An old man in a hospital gown and thongs drags on a smoke while his drip beeps steadily alongside him. He watches a group of medical students gossip together, their shirts freshly ironed. A group of attractive couples sip tea in styrofoam cups after their childbirth workshop. Behind them, a paramedic wheels in an old woman breathing through a tube; she’s as small and fragile as a newborn. A few feet away from where I’m sitting, I once spent an agonising night in Emergency, when the lymphoma had first perforated my bowel. The pain of that had undone me, shown me that, despite all my clever ideas, I’m nothing more than blood and flesh and bone. Now, only months later, I’m healthy enough to get under Mum’s skin. It’s hard to get your head around – the swings and roundabouts, life and death and all that.

I take a bite of the toastie. It’s salty and delicious and I realise how hungry I am. I order two bottles of water for Mum and me, take long deep sips.

“You could share what we learned about food. Eating plenty of protein for strength,” Mum offers.

Under the greasy fluorescent lights of the cafe, Mum’s skin is blotchy and fragile. I can see the tiny pink capillaries on her nose. Yet somehow, she looks young to me, younger than I have ever felt her to be. Her blue eyes are watery, shimmering, full to the brim.

“Yeah.” It’s in my speech, after all.

What a painful thing to be a mum. I’d never have the guts. I’d always had my doubts about it but getting sick had been the final nail in the motherhood coffin. To be a mum, I’ve come to realise, is to live in constant fear. It’s one thing to watch your own life burn out, but your kid’s? I reach for Mum’s hand. Her skin is rough and covered in scars from the sunspots she’s had removed.

“It’s too hot for that, love,” she complains, squeezing my hand anyway.

“I’ll tell them about your super smoothies in my speech, give away all your secret recipes.”

Mum laughs, smacks my hand. “Go on then.”

When I first got sick, she spent a fortune on a recipe book called Cancer Fighting Super Foods from an organic health food shop that we’d always rolled our eyes at. She’d made

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She laughs, that deep throaty laugh that embarrassed me as a kid. “They should count themselves lucky I didn’t take it upon myself to perform any other procedures.”

“You’ve spent enough time in hospitals, you’d probably do fine.”

We pass through Drummoyne. The Parramatta River glistens. Mum visited me every day that I was in hospital, used up all her own sick leave. Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, she got to the hospital so early that the night shift was still there. I picture her driving these roads alone, going back again at night. How quiet the house would have been, how small she would have looked. I imagine her standing barefoot in the kitchen in the early hours, making a cup of tea. In the window, a golden sun illuminates the gumtrees in the garden. I am struck by the enormity of the space around her; it is cavernous, consuming. She makes no sound as she pads across the lino to sit at the table.

One night, when I ended up in Emergency, this young guy had been scared out of his wits. He paced among the broken arms and sprained ankles, muttering, “I have a feeling that something very bad is going to happen,” over and over again.

Every nurse who came through said the exact same thing – “you’re in a safe place.” I thought that it must be policy, to say that to every freaked-out patient. “You’re in a safe place.

You’re in a safe place.” These days, whenever I think about the future, I think about me and Mum stocking up on food and hiding out in a safe place, just the two of us, maybe in a cabin by the beach. I know it’s a fantasy – can’t even think what we might be hiding from – but it’s strong, this yearning.

I readjust my seatbelt and shake off my shoes. My skin feels tight, itchy. I don’t know whether it’s the heat or my anxiety about the speech, but I feel sick. Some sadness – the big kind – floods to the surface.

“You need to be prepared, you know. The cancer could come back. I’m not in remission for another five years… might not always be so lucky.”

Mum holds up her hand. I don’t know if she’s shielding herself from my words or the sun. “No,” she says, as though it’s possible to simply decline such fates, such everyday tragedies as your kid dying of cancer. No thank you, not today.

“If I do…you know…you’ll need to get on with it.” It’s an awkward thing to say but I need her to have the memory of me saying it in case it helps. “Find some hobbies, see your sister…all that.”

“Stop it!” Mum smacks the steering wheel and I think that if she weren’t driving she’d probably smack me too. “Stop it!”

She’s finally cracked it, had enough of me. Her face is red, hair damp with sweat. “It’s a great honour to be invited to give this speech…by a very important doctor, mind you, and I will not have you ruining it because you’re in a mood.”

“Fuck you.”

Pain is a bright, sharp thing. When you have a lot of it, people recoil, put up their hands, look away. I realised that when I got sick. Friends who’d seen me vomit in handbags suddenly couldn’t look me in the eye. Only Mum had stayed.

That’s what scares me the most. I turn to the window because my throat feels thick with tears. I cry so easily these days.

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Hannah Goldstein is a teacher and writer from Sydney.

She was shortlisted for 2021 Newcastle Short Story Award. @ms_hannah_may

04 FEB 2022

At the end of my speech, everyone claps politely. Mum beams. There is morning tea and Mum talks to Dr Ly. I stand by the lamingtons, so relieved I think I might collapse. I gaze around at the other attendees. I wonder if I’ve inspired any of them. Probably not. At least Mum’s happy.

I decide to wait for Mum in the hospital library. We used to go there all the time just for something to do.

A young woman sits on the couch. She is bald and thin.

“Oh sorry.” I have intruded on her quiet.

“It’s okay.”

She doesn’t smile, crosses her arms over her chest. She’s wearing a black singlet and denim shorts revealing tattoos on her collarbone and thigh – a bird with its wings spread, an intricate pattern of flowers and skulls.

“You’re the girl who gave the talk.”

“That’s me.”

I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t. A magazine rests in her lap. I wonder what kind of life she had before she got sick – a student, maybe, or an artist. I get the sense that in another life, she’s the kind of woman I’d be intimidated by – cool and self-assured in a way I never am.

I can see her studying me too, but her face betrays nothing.

I’ve no idea what she makes of me.

“It’s all a bit…weird, isn’t it?” I say.

“Yeah…and not in the good way.”

I try and think of something comforting or helpful to say but nothing comes to mind.

“There you are.” Mum comes tearing into the library like she’s had too much Nescafé. “You ready to go – oh sorry love, didn’t see you there.”

The young woman smiles for the first time. “It’s okay.”

“Are you alright? Are you here with anyone?” Mum perches on the edge of the table, so short she has to get on her tippy-toes.

“Yeah…my mum’s out there somewhere.” The woman nods towards the door, as though embarrassed to admit it.

“We’re about to head off. Do you want to come out with us?”

“Nah…I think I might chill in here for a bit.”

“Well at least open these blinds, let some light in.”

Mum goes to the window and lifts the blinds. Sunlight spills into the room. The woman blinks.

We’re about to leave, when I turn.

“I found the exercise physiologist really helpful,” I say.

“His name’s Michael. First session’s free.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

We say goodbye to the woman, wish her all the best.

As we step through the automatic doors and into the afternoon heat, I think keep her safe as the traffic on Missenden Road drones on, keep them all safe.

Mum squeezes my hand. “You were wonderful,” she whispers.

“You’re always wonderful,” I say. I gently nudge her in the ribs. “In fact, you’re my beacon of hope. My guiding light. The wind beneath my wings.”

Mum snorts. “Oh, lay off your old mum, won’t you.”

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me “cancer fighting smoothies” every day. I teased her for it.

What could pulped fruit do that modern medicine couldn’t?

Still, she persisted.

Mum takes a final sip of coffee. It’s time to go. My heart hammers. We cross the road and enter the Lifehouse lobby.

It’s quiet and cool, a world apart from the boisterous street outside. Mum and I stop at the hand-sanitiser dispenser and as soon as the gel is released a wave of nausea rises in my stomach. The soapy, chemical smell reminds me of chemo and suddenly I’m there again, curled up on the chair as those drugs drip through my veins.

“Level two,” says Mum, taking my hand.

There is a moment of panic when we can’t find the room.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Mum charges from one reception desk to the next pleading for directions. I follow along hopelessly, clutching my speech.

Mum pushes open another door and we see Dr Ly at the far end of the room, setting up a PowerPoint presentation.

The space is large and bright, and chairs have been laid out in rows. A small crowd is already milling around, chatting quietly, taking their seats. I note the scarves and the bald heads, a lot of older people, some younger like me. I take a deep breath. There must be at least fifty people here. My mouth goes dry. Shit shit shit. Dr Ly looks up, waves us over.

Mum grabs my hand again.

I listen to Dr Ly’s speech without hearing anything. Then she smiles at me. Mum pats me on the arm. I get up.

“Hi, my name’s Anna and…ummm…I was diagnosed with lymphoma about nine months ago and since then I’ve had seven chemo treatments…” My voice shakes. I try and steady it. I look up from my paper and out at the audience.

An elderly couple sits at the front, and I think it must be the man who is sick because he wears a grey bandana and his eyebrows have disappeared. His wife rubs the back of his hand with her thumb, over and over again. Behind them is a woman a bit older than me. She wears a maroon blazer and pants and her headscarf is twisted in an elegant style that I’ve never managed to pull off. She sits alone, her handbag perched on her knee. At the back, a young man slouches into his seat, all cheekbones and knuckles. His mum sits beside him, holding the cancer information pamphlets she’s picked up from the lobby. She leans forwards in her seat, listening to my words. “My last chemo session was two weeks ago and my latest PET scan did not show signs of lymphoma.” The audience claps at this, the old man without eyebrows even lets out a cheer. I blush. How kind they are.

I look back at my paper, read out my advice, all the stuff I’d planned about resting and keeping records and accepting help. It seems too small. I want to give them something better than this, something bigger – but what? I want to tell them that everything will be okay, but I don’t want to lie because it hurts to have your fears brushed aside like that.

All I can think to do is tell them that even in the worst times there are moments that aren’t so bad, some moments are even good or funny, like the time Mum accidentally took the brakes off my bed and I went crashing into Shirley. First vehicle accident in the gastroenterology ward. I get a few laughs out of that. Even Cheekbones up the back grins.

Crossword

by Steve Knight

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME.

Quick Clues ACROSS

1 Story (7) 5 One way or another (7) 9 Grievance (9) 10 Ball game similar to bowls (5) 11 Infertile (7) 12 Ground area comprising wet soil (7) 13 Precipitation (4) 14 Loathsome (10) 16 Orwellian 1ac (6,4) 19 Annoys (4) 21 Hazard for ships (7) 22 Dispersed fluid (7) 24 Foe (5) 25 Running riot (9) 26 Defer or delay (7) 27 Systematic police search (7) DOWN

Centre of interest (5) Desire to succeed or win (15) Embedded for ornamental purposes (6) Innocence (7) Model of an internet domain’s content (4,3) 6 1ac by Melville (4,4) 7 Twain’s 1ac character (11,4) 8 Participants in sport of hand-to-hand grappling (9) 13 Preparedness (9) 15 1ac by Brontë (4,4) 17 Calculated (7) 18 Started again (7) 20 Fleet of ships (6) 23 Finger (5) 1 2 3 4 5

Cryptic Clues

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

11 First reserve in swimming elites is unseeded? (7) 12 Wet soil in oddly mouldy apartment (7) 13 Drops rule for auditors (4) 14 Corrupt Lib escaped offensive (10) 16 1ac work to process fan mail by branch (6,4) 19 Gets to ski backwards across runs (4) 21 Leaves tip – roughly 10 per cent of this? (7) 22 Showered and read spy novel (7) 24 Adversary spells name out loud, having no

answer? (5)

25 Partying around speaker that’s charging (9) 26 Hang up on us during purchase (7) 27 Order granted for police search (7)

Initially fixate on critically urgent situation! (5) Fight to keep pet in nasty eviction mess (15) Aesthetically set with popular facelift? (6) Residing in China, I’ve temporary innocence (7) Domain model’s weird pastime (4,3) Synthetic clothes by princess for 19th century 1ac (4,4) 7 Link French buyer to resort in American 1ac character (11,4) 8 They grapple with support, having left Queens (9) 13 Dines inside, exposed greasy preparation (9) 15 1ac classic skirts from Java – nice earthy range (4,4) 17 Worked out in leading gym, rude if training outside (7) 18 Went back to see drum ensemble (7) 20 Promoted first man runs a fleet (6) 23 Figure how to make grave? (5)

ACROSS 1 Fiction 5 Somehow 9 Complaint 10 Bocce 11 Sterile 12 Mudflat 13 Rain 14 Despicable 16 Animal Farm 19 Irks 21 Iceberg 22 Sprayed 24 Enemy 25 Rampaging 26 Suspend 27 Dragnet

DOWN

1 2 3 4 5 6

DOWN 1 Focus 2 Competitiveness 3 Inlaid 4 Naivete 5 Site map 6 Moby Dick 7 Huckleberry Finn 8 Wrestlers 13 Readiness 15 Jane Eyre 17 Figured 18 Resumed 20 Armada 23 Digit

ACROSS

1 Book false Bitcoin trades, losing a billion (7) 5 After a fashion show, naked women arrested (7) 9 Beef jerky in pot with clam (9) 10 Bowls and opens batting, before discovering

soccer (5)

62

Solutions