Woroni: Creative Edition, 2013 by Woroni

Foreword

Until this year, UniPub at the ANU hosted an annual Short Story competition. Students from all disciplines would participate, sharing their dreams and visions with all of the ANU, enriching the imaginative landscape of the university. Sadly, in 2013, this beautiful canvas of student expression was torn to shreds by issues with (wait for it) funding. At Woroni, we believe that the creative voice is one of the most powerful in the human condition: as such, for us, the news that UniPub’s competition would end was nothing short of tragic. But there was still hope. There is hope. Never one to give in, Woroni has taken up where UniPub left off, and has decided to create its own Creative Arts competition. We didn’t just stop with short stories: we also had categories for poetry and visual art content, with the understanding that a multitude of forms are the key to enjoying creative expression. This Creative Edition is the culmination of this competition; it is our gift to the ANU campus. In it, we have published every entry that we received, in the hopes that you can enjoy the multitudes of perspectives offered in the competition as much as we did. You will find the sweetest happiness and the most devastating tragedy; you will see the conventional and the abstract, art of all sorts, reflecting the diversity of voices we have at the ANU. We hope you enjoy it, The Woroni Editors

Table of Contents

Poetry p2. Enticement by Ella Relf p3. the ex-‐occupant by Nancy Jin p4. Let Me Tell You by Emily Hitchman p5. Autopsy of the Body by Tara Shenoy p7. Kaapstad by Louis Fourie p8. [27] by Samuel Guthrie p10. Riddle by Rosalind Moran p11. Saint Ambrose by Andrew Eddey p13. When I tell people I’ve never been in love by Jill Masters p14. Untitled by William Martyr p15. Four Walls by Brooke Hogan Short Story p18. How to Make Friends by Rachel Kirk p24. Celia & Mr D by Bostan Nurlanov p29. Cocoon by Liz Abbott p32. Going Nowhere by Natasha Seymour p36. A Letter by Emily Ham p39. My Brother by Duncan Koenig p46. Observations of a First-‐Year Psychology Student by Adam Ridwan p53. Puppet by Maddison Williams p55. Untitled by Elise Horspool p61. The Catholics by Emily Hitchman p67. The Wisdom of Goldfish by Aziah Williamson p73. Chronic by Danae Williams Visual Art p82. Rin Rin Ly p83. Samuel Guthrie p84. 6 Years and Counting by Erin Walsh p85. Elise Horspool p86. Spring A Web by Adam Spence

POETRY

Prize Winner: Ella Relf Enticement It smelled like ink. Muted but not soft, Liquorice but not black; Underneath, it glowed gossamer suggestion Where will it be next What will be decided? Because, despite the rain Of a million clapping fingertips, Something is missing. Unsatisfactory. Smell your pen but it will not help.

Nancy Jin the ex-‐occupant you sit where the stone towers reach their epiphanies: in the windows, the curtains hang like the mingled hairs of sweet lovers who had grown white and old together; in the distance, the bronze of tree branches. leaving, some suitors leave their leaves of poetry behind, down the nautilus shell, in the very centre there is a heart folded from half-‐inked pages, it is tarred and feathered, you don’t touch it, you don’t know how. in your celestial room, it’s awful quiet, visitors are too few, the people pass: you can hear their shuffling shoes, sighing; it’s a terrible clamour—how was it that the previous drunk could have lived in such tuneless desultory. you saw him once, he staggered when he shook your hand, and winked with one porcelain eye to your back; you knew, he was older than the mountains and the deep-‐purple sea, he held the moonlight by a crooked hand. he told you, come visit my wife and I when we are settled you’ll know to find us; but you did not know the paths in the milky way, was it a left turn or was it a right: it was a dead end every time you tried. a wrinkle in time then, and the dancers kept on turning, stepping in squares and then in circles, they were all foreign steps to you, a mockery of your misfiring neurons that spluttered to-‐and-‐fro.

Emily Hitchman Let Me Tell You Immodest sky Blown back to the bridges of the morning as scanty clouds climb toward the city bent, dome-‐like, lit from below spatially unaware Immodest sky and a singular wind blowing through from the edge of the evening of some other place; and the mushroom city cowers Bursting out of itself in a race to the start Canvass sky drops its fragments city-‐pieces immodest city growing out of its own reflection wouldn’t that be a grand thing? Let me tell you– It would be

Tara Shenoy Autopsy of the Body The corpse is a yellow flower on the operating table, arms spread, petal skin peeled back and inviting, mouth gaping wide, in its last grin, clown-‐like, to swallow the light. Her mouth is a canyon, wide open to swallow her own booming bellow, tumbling beneath his feet. The last gasp of the privileged. To feel not, but have. To know not, but want. To feel it in your grasp, turn soft and crumble, for fear of losing it. So, swallow the tongue, the scathing tongue and its transgressions. Perforate the heart, located behind sternum and lungs. The surgeon lifts his surgical mask for a strong puff of cigarette. Thick fingers fumbling with toys and heavy machinery. He can smell women hanging by hooves from ceilings in meatpacking districts. Greed is not a glass ceiling. It is the shit-‐tonne of bricks, an avalanche that beat her senseless. A woman that roars till it reverberates and boomerangs in cyclic motion. In transit, she has died a thousand deaths at their hands. He lends a sympathetic ear to the first few moans before growing weary. He is the perpetual weight, lumbering alongside.

These veins are split, love-‐red paints the cavity. Skin is fragile. Skin is translucent in its weakened form. It breaks. Crack the outer membrane. There is a woman inside. Blood hieroglyphics on the floor. The family trembles, eyes tracing a geography of blue-‐black bruises, the bed of intestines. The insurance will not cover this. The surgeon wipes his brow. That incision was too close to the bone.

Louis Fourie Kaapstad The sidewalk is black and hot and the searing African sun melts it, there are black people walking past and behind and I love looking at their colourful clothes and feeling their bodies as they brush past me, so full of life and making me feel full. The big smells of the city punch my face and sweat builds up on my back, prickling my shirt to my skin. I’m an envoy of my father’s pointing finger, pointing down at the ground, hand wrapped around it as we step up concrete blocks and occasionally wait for things to happen and for people to smile and say things to us. Hot leather burns my calves as we zoom along the beach road, the journey is framed by tinny guitar coming from the radio and thick, blocky accents which I barely understand tell us things about where we are now and what’s going to happen. Eventually, we’re at a cafe, a central but picturesque courtyard with green fronds, flaking metal chairs and friendly, long-‐known waitresses. The smell of newspaper and watching an old white man talk down to the young black cleaner fill my head. Later, after talk of God and micro-‐organisms and more calf burning, we’re at home, the old sun lowering itself to cast gold on everything I can see and hear and drench the big, watching mountain behind us with afternoon bloom. After thinking of chess and hating Bach’s violins, I’m under the palm tree out back, on the thick, cool grass, my father directing water into plants, hand on hip, faded blue jeans and large nose are all that I can see. The pond in the corner is heartbreakingly dark, cool and dank and I love the feel of its rocks and perfect, black folds of water. A pause and the old, grey cat slinks up on top of the neighbour’s wall, ignorant and baleful, golden eyes making me smile. Everything is so full but I’m too young to hold it all, I can’t even begin to know it. I’m zoomed right into an earthworm up close and now, everything I know and feel is still and basic. My father is massaging a dark, wet, rich patch of mud near the steps with his big, practical hands, a sprout of green coming up from the patch, his sleeves rolled up and hands black and wet with life and even at that time, on my back, looking all upside down at the deep, dark, blue African sky, I know the feel of where I am right then and I know that I come from somewhere.

Samuel Guthrie [27] [I] arthur boyd: she cried 'transubstantiation' -‐ why don't you eat dirt and feel closer to Earth !(?) i slipped ,jointlessly, seamless quicksilver ,going downdown until I wrapped my serpentine form around the core , a cold static stone (our thighs) [II] (gently) /mornings are not sunrises, and arenot accompanied by angels/donot underestimate them they are violent the darkform ,plunging into his crucifixion (before the mirror(trailing you the fissured fortune which transcribes

the anatomy of a moment ;the lines on your face [III] trembling mirror ;her eyes a thousand sunsets tumbling merge into incandescence her spine soft like wax candle light passes through ,her fragile embryonic glow trailing y(our) curves) citysmogstars revert to endless haste (but at least that's bright & the sunset has found her way ,demure tucked into the ethereal longmists upon floodplains (the magistrate) [IV] (before the mirror ,defeated society constructed only silent structures) she mumbled ... 'light decays into heat ;heat is the simplest form of energy ;cold is the absence of energy.'

Rosalind Moran Riddle I flee from the light, for the dark’s my domain I can drive you to greatness or drive you insane I wear a mask often though faceless am I While I can’t break an egg I can make a man cry To laugh in my face I consider a crime But betray me and I’ll return time after time I reach out to the lost though no peace do I bring I can rule; command; govern; but I am no king. ANSWER: Fear

Andrew Eddey Saint Ambrose To me you are a face, Each crevasse speaking truth Like your one lip. Your dry ashen face, Itself a body perched, wrapped in dust, Incongruous beside that verdant cloth, That mummified script preserved in gold leaf, That pure white marble headstone encircled With precious rocks your unneeded crown. Your face, all lids and wrinkles, is nobility. I wish those fake regalia were off you So I could see you truly bent like a king. Beneath your cardboard robes playing pretend You are all ashes, bones, and dust. I saw you folded like that, your whole body Twisted and grey in your face. Your beard Your bed, your nose your knee. To me you spoke of true suffering Like that which the gods would drink. I didn’t want to end your burden, I wanted to carry it the same as you.

I long to carry that torch, the same as you did. Whatever torch it was that gently, insistent, Wrapped its white arms, like your own fingers, To drag downward your eyes, Caressed your face until it folded. That flame not iridescent – dull, Which made your visage and whiskers The same wasteland.

Jill Masters When I tell people I've never been in love they always seem to lead with sorry, their voices softer than girl-‐mouth and wet like sauce others festoon themselves like the sidelines of sporting pitches give me drink pitchers warm with beer, sticky like couples in the warm-‐down on television white-‐teethed strangers buoy me with their lantern eyes ready to sink like a fat man bobbed in a bath so when you come in armful after armful of warm light with your t-‐shirts just that little bit too small they hug they strangle and all turn me into white yours is a good book but the snug lip of every page is an end and I catch myself dreaming in comic book gutters white-‐teethed strangers kiss like the borders of brother countries I swallow the kisses with my own mouth

William Martyr Untitled The white door springs with familiar sound, The poor miser searches; nothing found. A loaf of grey, a cheese of blue – Cruel mocking from groceries past. Pining; no roommates, no allies The scholar is left to dote, On the sweet caress of 3 week old Chinese. Alone, he lays coiled in the mattress; Twisted in the sheets. Left to watch what passes for TV. Anxious he turns; A quest for survival, searching for relief – There it lies; its tender folds revealing, Its familiarity brings comfort. “Woroni: And so my sweet companions, Draw on talents past. Construct a simple poem-‐ Salvation at last!” So my merciful masters, I am now left to beg: Please no more Chinese.

Brooke Hogan Four Walls The murmuring silence of the white light is broken by the same breath of the four walls that pulls at our fingers, that pulls at the steady thumping of our hearts. The words hang in my hair and slam in my chest. The bass guitar starts through the light, carving around us all. Waves of flesh and limbs in the air with no names reach up to a dirty ceiling, to something only we see. Our stamping feet drum up to the bodies above me. Bones, splinters, frost from the concrete, cut into our sides. It makes my teeth ache at the taste of it. The dark bright room sways again, as bloodshot eyes stare at the figure in a yellow dress, unsteadily grasping at a microphone, her painted fingers curl into it. The skin of the metal clings to the crevices in between her ribs to join the roof white with cobwebs vibrating. Pupils dilate and the autumn leaves are crackling against the bruise on my thigh, a dark splotch of purple, white palms press into the top of my shoulders. One seam of glittering moonlight slides to hug the beam of the spotlight, making the edges of the spotlight fall to the humming floor. The light stretches, wavers, and falls to its feet. It straightens its crooked form, and raises its head to the glowing thump of the bands heartbeat.

We inhale the music, And it scratches our throats. I pound against our ground and plummet through our breath. Violets furl with the darkness to drown the storm outside, Holding its struggling body under the floor for me to tread upon. Trying to hold onto the twisting furling violets but they blaze and throw me down further, inside the four walls of the people around me.

SHORT STORY

Prize Winner: Rachel Kirk How to Make Friends Do you have trouble making friends? Come on, now, don’t be shy. I know exactly how you feel. I used to have exactly the same problem. I never knew what to say when meeting new people. Never knew what to do. It always felt like everyone else was linked into this great social rhythm of small talk and planned encounters while I was left desperately trying to force my way into the system. The problem, as I saw it, was that it is extremely difficult to befriend someone about whom you know absolutely nothing. You might waste hours, days, even weeks with someone, or pass over a perfectly viable subject. This was the stumbling block I hit whenever I tried, once more, to fit into the norm, and way I reassured myself when I was inevitably cast off again and again. Perhaps the trick, then, was to do your research before you said so much as a word to your new friend. This is precisely what I decided to do. I would investigate, I would learn, and then, finally, I would know exactly what to say. I wouldn’t pick a specific candidate – rather I would wander – shop around, as it were – until they presented themselves to me. It took me a little while to find her, but when I did, I knew at once that she was the one I’d been looking for. I was coming home one day from a class, picking my way carefully along the dirty street that ran behind a row of houses. Chipped bits of concrete jutted up from the pavement like peeling paper, and the brick walls were covered with scribbles of mindless graffiti, but I liked it – most of the houses had windows that opened up on to this back alley, and I could look into them as I walked past. Most of them presented an unprepossessing view of bare boards and, sometimes, items of mutilated furniture. This window – this house – was different. A suitcase was sitting on the floor, and all around it were piles and piles of books. Just books. I won’t bore you with the titles, but they absorbed my entire attention for one or two long moments. I noticed the girl almost as an afterthought. She was pretty in a washed-‐out sort of way, harmless and colourless, drowning in an enormous woollen jumper. She had a book in her hand; a play, I think, by Pinter. It was an edition that had the author’s name enlarged and embossed next to the pitifully small scrawl of the title, and I could just about make the name out through the greying, spider webbed glass in the window. It must have been a play, because she was moving slowly around the room, speaking as she looked down the pages. It was unspeakably serene. I could see, already, that we were going to have something special.

I moved a little closer. I was only hoping for a brief glance at the inside of the room – perhaps to catch some clue as to her identity – but what I got was far better. She looked up. I caught her eye. We both stood there, and I felt an instant connection. It was irrelevant that the glass in the window sliced down between us. It was completely irrelevant that I had never seen her before in my life, because I could see that she felt it too. After several seconds of steady gazing she turned hastily around and disappeared through the door, scrabbling briefly at the doorhandle when it refused to give. I thought, at first, that she was coming out to see me, but there was no trace of her. I stood outside her room for fifteen more minutes – I counted each one, individually and slowly – before giving up and turning away. But I didn’t lose faith. I could see what had happened. Frightened by the strength of the connection, she had disappeared to make sense of it. It was really the only conclusion that made sense. It is certainly true that there were other explanations. Perhaps she had simply been unnerved to see a stranger staring blankly in at her window. It was a cold night, and I was dressed in a thick red coat and hat, with a woollen scarf pulled up over the lower half of my face. I could have looked a little like an unwanted intruder. But that was underestimating the immense power of what I had felt – I knew it was real. I knew, though, that the moment of our meeting – the real beginning of our friendship – had to be something special. So I would hide my identity from my new friend, and then reveal myself when I knew enough about her to be absolutely, wonderfully certain that I was beginning something beautiful. It was hard work. I’m not going to hide that from you. I was exhausted by the end of those first few weeks. First of all I made sure that I knew where she went during the day. I followed her to classes. I stayed far enough behind that I wasn’t especially noticeable, and always had my scarf and high-‐collared coat on, just in case she saw my face. Some days, after class, she would wander into a building right by the university, looking out on to the river. That proved to be a little more difficult to investigate. I couldn’t simply follow her in – I had to tremulously step around the side of the building, struggling to maintain my balance on the stinking, slippery mud, and peer in through the windows. In an empty space at the far end of the building, in front of a straggling line of chairs, a little group of students was rehearsing a play. After that first time, I would come in and watch them like that quite often. I used to quite look forward to these afternoons. My window was right up the back of the hall. It was too far away for me to be easily seen from where they stood. I would huddle up against the warm glass, protected from the glare of the afternoon sunlight, and watch my friend flit effortlessly around the

others. I knew that she had been the right one to choose. Even from this distance I could see that there was something special about her. Not to everyone, perhaps. But it was blindingly clear to me. I made one mistake in this time. Once, I tried to follow her home. It was only the once. I slipped into step behind her, darting back around corners when I thought I might be getting too close. When we were nearly at the end of our journey I stepped cautiously out from where I had been – as I thought – concealed in the fluid shadow of a large bush, and there she was, in front of me, having turned at the slight noise I had made. I couldn’t have said who was more shocked. She was frozen on the pavement a good few metres in front of me, eyes wide as a lemur’s. This close, I could see how tired she looked. Her hair was stringy, and unkempt, as if she had only just risen from bed. She looked more drawn than she had been before I had singled her out. It must have been the play – the performance was coming up; I had read it on the posters outside the building where they rehearsed. A moment later I had turned and sprinted back up the street, quick as running water. I don’t think that she had seen enough to recognise my by, especially not with my high-‐collared coat and the thick scarf. Nonetheless, I was considerably shaken. I allowed her enough time to get home. Then I curled back around to the block of houses where she lived so that I could walk along the street under her window. I just wanted to check up on her – to make sure that she had gotten home all right. Her window was easy to spot. She had all the lights on, even the lamp by her bedside, and was sitting hunched on her bed, a slim silver phone pressed to her ear. I left before she could spot me. I could hear sirens of some kind wailing down a nearby street as I reached my own house. I paused briefly in my regular struggle with the jammed doorhandle to try and identify them. Police, most likely – it wasn’t unusual in this neighbourhood. My wandering mind made a tenuous link with the phone call I had seen my friend making as I walked away. I knew that that was ridiculous, and but it niggled at me, even so, as I finally shoved the door in and found myself safely standing on the stained and splintering floorboards of my house. Lying there on my old mattress, watching the shifting dark outside, I couldn’t help but return to the night’s events, obsessively probing them like a loose tooth. I kept going to the play rehearsals. I enjoyed being there, pressed against the wall, standing still in the oily wind that swept up the bank and carried the faint watery scent of rotting weeds with it. It was rather tranquil. The river itself was liberally scattered with colourful crisp packets and glinting bits of foil, of course, like everything else in the area, but it was easy to detach from that, losing myself instead to the quick-‐moving colourful figures on the other side of the glass.

And yet, that turned out to be a mistake, too. This one was not entirely my own fault. During those pleasant afternoons of observation by the river, I would always pick my sweet, colourless friend out from the others swarming on the inside of the building. I had always assumed that I was too far away for the performers to see me properly, but she proved me wrong. One rehearsal, right in the middle of a frenzy of performance, she turned as if something had caught her eye. She looked at me. Then, stepping away from the whole performance, she started to walk towards me. I know how ridiculous it must sound, constantly telling you about the connection that we had, but it was there. I had no reason to doubt it. I knew it, because she smiled back, and stepped unhesitatingly down from the stage to meet me. It was marvellous. This was all I had wanted. She was on her side of the glass, inside, tidy and safe, just as she had been the first time I had seen here. I was on my side, pressed against the dirt and black scum on the bricks. But this was what I had been waiting for. She recognised me after all. Then she pushed the window open, and it swung right into my chest. There was a curious second during which I felt as if I were floating. Her smile seemed to fracture behind the glass as my balance shifted, the sky slid down to meet me, and then I was toppling over backwards, hitting the deceptively, unforgivingly hard ground, and sliding backwards, down through the stinking mud, until I hit the edge of the river and half-‐rolled into the foaming water. Only the thick layer of reeds, fringing the edge of the river like eyelashes, prevented my momentum from carrying me further. Everything was spinning. I could hear screaming, but I couldn’t have told you where it was coming from – there were words, but I was confused, and it twisted into a pulsing wordless noise. I picked myself up and limped away. The girl was still at the window where she had been before she pushed me. I could see, now that it was her who had been shouting, but even now she was being pulled back. There were dead leaves plastered over my red coat and the scarf, wrapped around my mouth, was soaked in freezing, filthy water. I dropped it on the street. I stuffed the soiled coat into my bag and walked all the way home without it, letting the brisk breeze wrap around me without fighting back. I made it back to my house. I sat on my mattress. It was evening now, and the only light I could see were faint sunset streaks fading into the distance above the rows of houses, absorbed back into the city. It was only then that I let myself smile. She had been screaming. Could it be possible, then, that it had been an accident? There could be little doubt that she had recognised me from the other night. It was possible that she had only come to greet me. Swinging the window open in her enthusiasm, she must have been horrified when I plunged down the bank. Yes, that was it. I would not let this faze me.

I sat at the very back of the theatre the next night. The play was terrible, penned by some pseudo-‐ intellectual student playwright. My friend, though, was radiant. I don’t think that I was the only one who noticed it. The moment she stepped on stage the crowd became more animated. The interminable ripples of rustling and whispering died away briefly, returning to dull disinterest only when she darted back to the safety of the wings. Or perhaps that was just what I saw. I waited outside for her after the play had finished, nonchalantly leaning against a wall, listening to the tiny noises of celebration that slipped out through the gaps in the windows. My red coat was crammed firmly into my bag. I had tried cleaning it, but the mud marks were irremovable, a permanent testament to my undignified descent of the day before. The rest of the cast trickled out slowly, somewhat the worse for wear, happily congratulating each other – and then a cautious face appeared to hang in the doorway, looking carefully around, and I knew that she had come to see me at last. ‘Hello,’ I said. She jumped. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to startle you – I just saw and wanted to say… well, I liked the play.’ She held back for a minute. I felt as though I was being examined. But she didn’t appear to recognise me, not without my coat and scarf, and she accepted the compliment with a tentative smile instead. ‘Thank you.’ ‘I thought it was very reminiscent of some of Pinter’s early work,’ I hazarded vaguely, remembering the book I had seen her reading. I had known a couple of English students in the past and this was the sort of thing they often said. The smile seemed genuine this time. ‘Yes, I was very influenced by Pinter when I wrote it.’ I was surprised. ‘You wrote it?’ ‘Yes, I did.’ ‘Oh. Well, it was… it was very good. You were good.’ I could feel the moment slipping away from me, twisting out of shape, and I tried to wrestle it back into what I had wanted. ‘In fact, I loved it. Would you like to meet some time and talk about it? I’m very interested in, you know, this sort of thing.’ She had still been standing in the doorway, lingering in the semi-‐shadow, but now she stepped out to meet me. I could see how tired she looked now. There purple smudges under her eyes, visible even under the smeared stage makeup. It must have been the late nights. I had passed her window several times at night, and she always seemed to be awake, sitting up straight at the end of her bed and gazing through the glass as if she were looking out for something. ‘That’d be… really nice, actually.’ And just like that, she slipped down to stand beside me. ‘I’ve been having a bit of a hard time recently. I’m Ellie.’ ‘Alice.’ We fell into step, talking as we went, about Pinter, about the play, about everything I knew she liked. It was that easy. The social rhythm was thrumming around me, and for once, I was part of it, plugged into

it. My bag swung by my side. There was an ominous aroma of stale river-‐water hovering up from it; the smell had been clinging on to the folds of my red coat since the day before. I zipped the bag up firmly to hide the garment and walked away with my new friend, past the river, past the sea of windows staring blankly back at me from the street.

Bostan Nurlanov Celia When Celia died control of her Facebook page went to her sister Maggie. Maggie was at home alone when a policeman called and told her that Celia had been found on the rocks at ___beach, that she had probably fallen from the cliffs above. He was very nice – when she didn’t reply for a while he said he understood that she “needed time to make sense of this tragic event”, and that if she or anyone affected by the event needed the support of a counselor that all she needed to do was call back this number. Anyway when he hung up Maggie immediately went to check Celia’s laptop, and it was left on, and still logged into her Facebook. Maggie agonized for a while about what would be the thing to do, and then on the phrasing of the status she was writing, but eventually settled on: “This is Maggie ____. I am tron by grief to say that… my beloved sister Celia___ has been found dead in a climbing accident… I don’t know what to say… RIP Celia we grieve your loss.” She felt stupid and clumsy; immediately after posting it the “…”’s and the stupid words “grieve” and “loss” felt embarrassing and clichéd… but there was something poignant in that last full stop. So that was how most people found out, even their dad who was overseas. No-‐one liked the status. The first comment, immediately after posting, was “????? L L” from an old highschool friend, and then a lot of similar ones, lots of people going “seriously?” and “this better not be a frape… i’m feeling sick”, and later an aunt said “shocking…. so young!”, and finally an hour later (an hour Maggie spent aimlessly walking around the apartment, returning to the laptop again and again) her dad commented “Maggie, is this true?”, and Maggie tagged him in her comment and said, “Joseph____... Yes. Will you come home?” and then he called her and Maggie rushed to the phone, and the just couldn’t say anything, their voices sounded unfamiliar to each other, and he did say he was coming home, and then the last thing he said, just before hanging up, was “Celia…”, and with “…”’s, so it seemed. Maggie stood by the phone a second, then went back to Celia’s computer. There were over 50 comments now, some long eulogy-‐like things, and wallposts, and statuses with Celia tagged in them. Maggie decided to change Celia’s profile picture – superimpose an RIP below her face with photoshop – and she spent a while looking for the most austere font, settling on Book Antiqua. People started commenting on the photo as soon as it was posted, too. 35 people had also sent inbox messages but Maggie didn’t want to answer them all, or even let them know she’s seen them. After the profile picture she thought that was enough for the day and logged off. All she wanted to do was just crawl into bed and sleep and sleep and she didn’t even change out of her clothes or brush her teeth, she just changed Celia’s Facebook and email passwords and slept. The next day Maggie called the number the policeman had been on to ask where Celia’s body was now. A tremulous voice on the other end told her where and insisted that the policeman must have told Maggie already, that Maggie had just forgotten.

That week there was a family reunion, the mother and remaining daughter joined by the father and some extended family. Maggie silently hugged them one by one as they entered the apartment, then ran off to bring drinks and nibbles on platters to the living room. She had set up lots of extra chairs there, and everyone sat on them, not talking, clinking their glasses and slowly chewing. White light pooled at the sides of their faces and in their glasses. Joseph and Maggie’s mother sat side by side, looking ahead. The favourite uncle said “It’s just such a shame” and everyone gave him a pained smile, and he went off to the bathroom. An aunt said, “Someone should see about… funeral arrangements” and burst into coughing as if she had been trying not to all this time. Maggie said she would and left to her room. The silence was rankling. She googled it and thought that White Lady Funerals sounded appropriate. A woman’s sensitivity. She made a memo on her phone with their number, and looked hard at it for a long time. She had to go back there and join her family and she didn’t want to. It had been such a grey week. They all looked so grey. They all looked at death’s door. She got up anyway and made her way back but this time there were sounds, it turned out they were all talking amongst themselves now, about Celia when she was little, her potential and what she had been studying, and also things not to do with Celia. Joseph and Maggie’s mother were the only tense ones but they were still talking, something about the cliff. Two aunts clinked glasses. When Joseph saw Celia come in, he said, “Oh Maggie, could you turn the light on? It’s getting dark”, which she had kept off because she felt it appropriate to the occasion. That night she put out another status from Celia’s account: “Family reunion today”, then the tagged names of everyone who had Facebook, “it looks like we’re all dealing with it well.” And there was another stream of support, and lots of people liked it, too. They played a slideshow of photos of Celia at her funeral, running behind all the speeches. Countless parties and fake kisses and faux-‐lesbian leg drapery and the appearance and disappearance of boyfriends. It was hard to do a serious, compelling speech against all that. Maggie decided to talk mainly about Celia’s obsession with France, how she learned the language and read some Proust in it, and how she had been planning a trip – her first time overseas – next year, a topic Maggie thought would be poignant, but the audience kept tittering at the screen behind her. They buried the body in silence, outside, a relief. There was foliage and mist – appropriately ethereal. The priest said a few words and with a pulley system they lowered the closed coffin into its rectangular hole, and you’d feel you had to look up, too, to the obscured sky. The coffin was too mundane. Because Maggie didn’t know any of Celia’s actual friends she didn’t know about a lot of things, like Celia’s Youtube account. Celia played bass in a band and studied it at uni, and had a few videos up showing off

her elaborate pedal setup, which could make the bass sound like anything, like a spaceship. It was a pretty popular video, people kept asking where they could get this or that pedal, or asking her to make more videos so they could see her actually play, or telling her her tone was shit, and that this or that pedal sounded corny or fake. Some of Celia’s friends commented and told everyone the news but they were soon shunted down by new comments. It’s a weird feeling. Maggie thought she got over it pretty well but she didn’t. Months later she still felt tired, didn’t go to work or class, just lay fossilized in bed, unable to cry. For a while she thought maybe if she cried about her properly, then she could start a healthy grieving process, but every time she got close to actual tears, sobbing, there was a weird tightness inside her and never release, never. Celia’s Facebook was regularly updated with new photos she dug up, and things like “Is with Him now… <3 “, “We all miss you heaps L “ and Celia’s friends kept posting on the wall, little memories they shared together, injokes Maggie for the most part couldn’t understand. The activity died down – comments, likes, 3, 6 months later – but Maggie never ceded the account. She hardly went on her own anymore. One day someone commented on Celia’s status for the day, saying: “I’m sorry but… Maggie, stop it, you’re making my newsfeed sad :P “. Such a weird feeling, that, such a special species of feeling. Take away the browser and a whole species disappears! Mr D One of my highschool teachers, Mr D., died last week. I found out on Facebook when people posted RIP statuses, I saw one and looked at it a long time and didn’t believe it, he’d wished me good luck for university last year, and then I saw more. I returned to the essay I was doing only all its words seemed to fall off the pages like hairs… I got up to do something or talk to someone, and had a cup of tea, remembered again the last conversation we had, he said his son M. had gone to Oxford too, and was enjoying it, (I didn’t end up at Oxford) and how his face had moved around, it was awkwardly personal for me and I didn’t put thought into what I said back to him. I got back to my parent’s place; it was dark early, all its windows looked like black glass. I stood with my head against a mirror near the front door for a long time, at least partly for attention (I had not been on speaking terms with my parents for a while), and then my mum gave it to me, and I told her my teacher had died, and we ended up talking about other things. Then the essay was late, I was meant to be working simultaneously with someone else to get us both to finish it, and I told her firstly about Mr D.’s death and how I had that conversation with him, then said, typed, valar morghulis, and started working again, and sometime later I suddenly found myself crying for the first time in six years, my sister later

told me she thought at first it was some dog outside, and I covered my face with both my hands like a girl and for some reason told everyone not to touch me. The funeral happened a week later; before yesterday. I had soccer afterwards but I didn’t know if I’d be up to it – if it’d be appropriate – but I brought a change of clothes anyway. Walking from the train station to the school I met K., we shook hands, everyone meeting someone else that day would shake hands with them, and after an exchange (K. had known Mr D. through rowing, I had known him as a teacher) we walked the rest of the way mainly in silence, being rained on. He didn’t have a formal suit and just wore black casual clothes, and I’d worried a lot about what exactly was appropriate to wear, too, I didn’t specifically have a white shirt with buttons or something. We got there, there was no nostalgia in the school’s buildings though I hadn’t been there since graduating, in the lobby outside the hall where the service would be there was a crowd so similar in texture to the crowds that usually gathered there for concerts, and we got pamphlets that told us what hymns we’d be singing, and K. went into the hall while I went to the bathroom and so we were separated. The hall is underground, its walls are equal part boards of wood and slashes of rock. I was struck by how I’d seen it fuller than it was now, in school assemblies, and sat next to a friend of mine, G. He lamented the sad context of our reunion (after we shook hands), and affirmed how truly great a guy Mr D. was – I knew G. would know exactly what to say. I flipped through the pamphlet – at the end there was a picture of Mr D., in a boat and facing away from us, lighted orange by a probably setting sun, and worried whether or not I should say it, then said it: “a poignant picture to choose”, and G. laughed, I don’t know what I was worrying about. While everyone filed in a musician guy from the year above us was playing tunes like Over the Rainbow on the piano onstage, and I said something about how relentlessly he pulled the heartstrings and G. just laughed again. The service started with a speech from the headmaster, who said something about how he still couldn’t believe this was happening, and he meant it, there was real panic in his voice. There were speeches from Mr D.’s friends and relatives, they said how much of a family man he was, how he always kept that ultimately separate and above his work, how he had loved his wife, how much he had achieved in sport and in teaching, how much of a rogue he was in his youth, how surprised he was by the amount of support he got from friends he didn’t even realize he had, and from the teaching stuff, and one of my other highschool teachers, Dr. D., read the ending of Beowulf for him. For some reason I didn’t like how one of the relatives spoke, he wasn’t solemn enough. There was a lot of emphasis throughout on how he lives on in all of us, by making himself into a man who so many loved, and I thought that wasn’t true, we’re already forgetting him as we speak and that’s the real sadness of it. There was a bit of music, the students had an acapella group, and a singer with a guitar, and then an old man played a guitar melody, without any chords, close to the end. The last guitar had a distractingly out of tune string and the singer/guitar wasn’t very suited to the acoustics and sang the refrain shockingly loudly, doing this head waggle as if pained – every time the same head waggle as if he’d practiced it. They had a slideshow of photos of him,

mainly with his family. The coffin was on the stage the whole time, looking very solid and polished; the pallbearers took it away, I think, to the solo guitar. I looked back, then, and saw K. sitting all alone; surrounded by people he didn’t know. Then it took a very long time for everyone to get out of the hall, as there are only two exits, and while waiting all the little things slowly grew on me; how insubstantially I had actually thought about Mr D. before now, what his life must’ve been like, how special it should have been that he mentioned his family to me; how brave all the people who played music for him must’ve been, how much love they must’ve had; how the whole thing was for his friends and relatives, those were the people who took the loss, and how stupid and thoughtless of me it was to think one of them didn’t match up to my standards; how I somehow still felt like he was alive, imagined seeing him walking around and asking him something and imagining his response, so the consolation everyone offered, the memories of Mr D. being another kind of Life, might be truthful, or truthful enough. Still I feel there’s something missing, incomplete, like something more could’ve been done for him, and that would bring us real closure, acceptance... I waved to Dr. D. and he approached and we talked for a bit about other things, and I said hi to some of the people I knew in the lobby, and heard another old teacher say to someone “The joys of university life!”, and decided to play soccer after all, I thought – you know the kind of thing you think – what would Mr D. do? It’s 2am and I’m relentlessly listening to music in bed: a new all grown up Vampire Weekend song, a Keith Jarrett solo, the Atoms for Peace album, the first few prelude fugues in the Well-‐Tempered Clavier played by Richter, a Calvin Harris song, Paul’s grandpa voice on Blackbird; thinking of nothing, the ceiling I’m pointed at strangely oppressive, in dust and darkness, unsleeping. Midnight the next day I’m arguing with my sister in the pale blue light of the kitchen, I’m saying that abortion is Not a Gender Issue at all and that the rhetoric of “a woman’s right to choose” is misleading, that it’s a basic ethical problem where the right to bodily autonomy of two individuals comes into conflict, and she says, flushed from argument, how it only happens to women, and how it has so many connotations that are gendered, like Motherhood. 10am and I’m editing some other part of this book. 3pm and I’m underneath the house, standing on a piece of mud, trying not to get dirty or wet, scooping brown water into a bucket and passing it to my dad; heavy rain collects here and eventually floods the house. What I’m using to scoop with is: the bottom half of what was once a bottle of Ice Tea. Later I’ll have to throw away the shoes I’m currently wearing, so wrecked they are by this experience. And it’s evening and I am facing evening’s orange light; the light that touched Mr D. and his boat in that poignant photograph that still left something missing, something waiting to be said. I still think like he’s alive, feel his spark in a tactile kind of way, can still imagine all the things he’d say and remember what he did say, so where do I end it? When do I stop writing? Can it end? Facing the orange light of evening I bitterly find out that we can do no better for him.

Liz Abbott Cocoon I once found a stone on the beach.. Shaped like a human heart and coloured soft pink (but dark red when it was wet) it was your heart. A gift you gave that now serves as an ugly reminder that you are no longer the man I once loved. If you wanted me to leave, all you had to do was ask. I had been longing to go from this place but have always felt drawn here by you. You cemented me in place, my body immoveable in your concrete grip. It wasn’t your fault that you lost your mind. The spirits had come and occupied your body, their ghostly vapour pulsing through your veins like some kind of sick drug. Your golden crown had soon disappeared, replaced by a ring of grease. It sat atop your head as if it were a warning to others: I am not normal. You devoted your time to the couch, your one true love. You sat there, sedate, as if waiting for someone to come rescue you from your own insanity. Your internet connection became your only tenuous link to reality as video games and crusades took over your life. I drifted through rooms, more useless than I had thought possible. Despair infuriated you, as if your past were chasing you around with a whip, constantly at your heels. Sometimes it was I that whipped your sense of self. It was as if you had ripped happiness from my clutches. Just as I had wearily found it, hiding amongst the flowers behind the tree near my house you had grabbed a hold of it and run away faster than I could chase you. When you were standing on the balcony ledge I thought you were an angel. Your body tempting fate. You wavered in the breeze, like a leaf at the close of autumn clinging desperately to the tree and yet wanting so much to join its equals on the ground. The second time you had tried to leave us your brother had found you out in the middle of the dam. Told to search for you by your mother he had reluctantly climbed into the beaten ute and set off down the driveway, thinking you had maybe walked to the mailbox in a moment of misery. The always-‐on headlights were dim orange beams as the night seemed to swallow them whole. At the edge of his vision, a flash of your blonde hair caught his eye. He stopped. Engine rumbling, radio mumbling. “Fuck”.

Up to your waist in thick sludge. Your footsteps had kicked up the sediment from the bottom of the dam turning the water into a brown pool. Swallowed in a thick paste. In the distance a fox’s scream broke through the night. Your face was like stone as you stared at the water’s surface searching for what answers lay within its depths. Jack had opened the ute door and climbed out, his feet burning on the still-‐hot red earth. Didn’t move as ants climbed up his legs and clambered over his toes. He didn’t have to say a word, didn’t want to. Time crawled by lazily, unwilling to pass and allow you to escape this moment. Kept you drawn into its grip in the icy waters. Slowly you emerged from the dam, your clothes dripping and muddied, your shoes overflowing and socks squelching. Too wet to get into the car you set off slowly up the driveway towards the house, Jack following behind in the ute. You trudged along in the glow of the headlights as the car slowly trundled behind you. I had only tried to help you. The men had promised you would be better. Their white coats spoke the truth and I had to listen. Our white knights. I put out cries for help and they came to me, with words of golden hope. You only became worse. The pills you took so devotedly each day were unfulfilled promises. Your Mum would have known what to do. Who to call. Why these things happen and how you make them stop. But you didn’t want her to know. Your only energy came from your anger. No one ought to know. When we were children we couldn’t have dreamed of times like this. When the world was so bright and open and the biggest troubles we had were how to get down from the highest branch on the trees we climbed. Your words cut me open, spilling dreams and draining memories. My body as hollow as your soul. I had vacated the premises. Left permanently. Going nowhere, not coming back here. A crack emerged in our history, splitting you from who you once were and who you had become. My bed was never empty as you lay next to me, fetal. Crying. You were never alone and yet you always were. You’d lost the ability to make yourself happy: to see beyond the darkness shrouding your eyes. You were haunted by shadows. Chased by your nightmares. When you spoke, you asked me of the stars. How many were there, where did they come from, could you go there? You gazed out the window at the sky, temporarily abated of paranoia. In those moments you were still. I didn’t leave you because I didn’t love you. I left because you would never again love me. Your heart was broken and twisted. It pumped in reverse, sending out old blood and sucking in the new. You never stood a chance.

My head was wrapped in a cocoon of silk. My thoughts spun endlessly, winding up and becoming tighter, the silk wrap strangling me. I could feel the fabric pulling at my head. My forehead. When the sun fell and the coolness of night set in my mind raced. Thoughts of who I have been and who I want to be and who I am now. What I'm doing right now. And the world "relax" swirls around my mind like a teasing child and I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that I Am Insane. Now the sun shines into my room when I awaken. The world reverberates with echoes of opportunities yet unknown. The space between us is best. I have a chance to live. You have a chance to breathe. I heard you escaped your personal prison, venturing into the daylight for cigarettes one morning. I heard you took your bicycle, and when you got to the servo you didn’t stop. You pedaled past the store and down to the lake. For once the water had been clear and you could see the bottom, even right at the centre where it’s deepest. You abandoned your bike and stripped yourself of shirt and shoes and dove beneath the shimmering blue surface. A flock of seagulls flew away. You surfaced, drawing breath deep into your lungs, water rolling down your face. A jogger passing by stopped and asked if you were ok, and you had said “yes”.

Natasha Seymour Going Nowhere When Samantha Drew left home that morning she was wearing the dress that made her think of Peter. The midmorning was promising in the way that mornings often are when the coffee is obliging and the shower is generous and the sun winks at you as you walk out the door. And despite being bothered by the grass that was slightly too long, she felt compelled to hurry and so, unfixing her key from its hole, began to leave. As she walked the harsh midday sun bore down on her and she thought of nothing (but in came visions of his face as he had smiled at her before the jump). She thought not even of the man selling the Daily News on the street corner, (but there was the smell of the white water made reckless by the storm) nor the tribe of children filing off the bus, nor the girl half-‐hidden in an alleyway snapping photos of passersby (but she could still feel the tingle of her hand in the sudden absence of his). She paused to retrieve a mint from her bag. In the window of a café sat a woman in a large blue hat and a tweed coat who held a small book open in one hand and her drink in the other. It was not merely her flamboyant clothing, but the way she mouthed the words in the book to herself as she read them, and the odd expressions that matched accordingly, that imparted to her all sorts of eccentricities. The door, temperamental and hinged on rusted steel, flung open to her right; wind chimes flayed and clunked against each other, making a dulled baritone sound; clouds soaked in sunlight but telling of rain knit themselves together, and Samantha Drew entered the room. As she lingered in the queue, her attention was caught by a woman who had just stood up, all blundering and disheveled and wearing upon her head a gargantuan hat. As she stared, the woman wobbled dangerously toward her and before Samantha Drew could move from her path she had lurched onto her person and thrown her drink down the front of Samantha’s dress. The woman’s cheeks took on a faint blush and she began to stutter out mortified apologies, crying -‐ Oh dear god, oh god, I’m so sorry -‐ and attempting frantically but to no avail to make amends with a sopping napkin. Seized as she was by absolute horror, Samantha Drew glanced down at her dress, which was in a state of tremendous mess, before looking once again up at the woman in surmounting exasperation. Dissolved however, was her irritation at the union of their gaze, distracted by a great tug of recognition and a stirring of buried memories. The woman, as she was preserved in her memory, was not a woman at all, but a girl who she had called Eliza, a girl of fifteen, just as she was.

They had each borrowed out a deliciously large paperback novel and Peter had convinced her and Eliza to skip class for the worthy purpose of falling asleep reading them in the burning, drowsy sun and amongst the dewy timber climbing things in the park behind their school -‐ forgotten by others but beloved by them. A skip in their step and a flightier one in their hearts, they would talk in feverish detail of troubles they never dared divulge to anyone else and would lazily pass back and forth idle remarks and observations taken in the turn of the day. They were scared, they agreed, scared of growing up. They were terrified that their adulthood would mean their irrelevance and that one-‐day they would find themselves going nowhere at all. At that moment they were arrogantly assured of the existence of their own significance and of the importance of their own lives, enhanced so by their own vitality and the burning heat that coursed through their veins from the rays of the sun but also in their hearts. But she and Eliza had, as most young people do, fallen out of each other’s lives. And until now, Samantha had forgotten the park and the books and the feeling, just as she had forgotten Eliza. Indeed, here Eliza was, hunched forward before her, still dabbing and sponging with the napkin now ceased to serve its purpose and still prattling hysterically at Samantha Drew-‐ I’m sorry, oh my god, I’m sorry -‐ and still eschewing her gaze. Samantha, in the grips of an inexplicable panic and stirred by her own irrationality, muttered -‐ silly woman, It’s fine – then snatched the sodden napkin from her grasp and swiftly departed from the coffee house. Outside, the clouds had gathered sternly together in a congregation to bombard the city with rain; she reassumed her journey with an unnerving sense of suffocated purpose and misplaced direction. Meandering her way down the path, which seemed to know where it was going, the rain plunked and splat against her skin, and the wind picked up her hair and smothered her face with it, and a lone pigeon sat atop a lamppost and watched her stroll with beady eyes. She breathed through the damp air. She took a seat at the bus stop – the one she and Peter would always wait at -‐ and as she did so she saw that there was a young man already waiting there. He was adorned smartly in a streamlined suit and nondescript tie, shoes that shined and toed at a point, his hair combed back and obediently in place, only mildly damp from the rain. In the curve of one arm he cradled a buckled leather suitcase that enclosed within it documents important enough to require a lock, and in the other he grasped the hook of a dripping umbrella. He was absorbed in whatever was on the phone in his palm, his large brow gathered together and his thin lips pursed. Samantha had not expected, as she sat beside him, to feel what she did then: for in the pores of his skin and sunk inside his leaden pupils there was to be gently suffered a thousand memories of many days and a thousand feelings of many moments; and there he was, in her memory, as he was back then; there was Alex. The three of them had gathered together in their college dorm, a white circle of chalk drawn around them, with their palms turned upwards and their fingers interlaced, humming softly. Their hum grew louder and

shriller until the fusion of their voices, two deep and one feminine, could have been enough to extinguish the candle that sat, stout and tall but slowly diminishing into waxen liquid, on the weary floorboards. They were so very alive back then, so eager to dissect all mysteries and to test all boundaries, and to be so enthralled by everything that was new and different and exciting. Peter had always been the wild one, and just as it was Peter who had decided they go down to the ocean that night, it was Peter too who had suggested they hold a Séance. They sang drunkenly and in trance – Oh ghostly spirits from beyond the grave come out from behind the iron black curtain and join us – and Peter and Alex rapped their knuckles in time on the hard wood floor while Samantha leaned in to blow the candle out. They opened their eyes and held their breath in the silence, but all they saw as their sight adjusted were the scattered bugs that had flocked to the candlelight and floating dust particles illuminated in the light shaft cast by the moonlight. Meeting each other’s gaze, they bust the sobriety with their laughter – hysterical and all at once, and fell together on the floor in unmitigated ecstasy. Samantha watched Alex stubbornly key things into his phone and longed for him to see her; to do something that might burst the perpetual anguish that simmered and hissed in her gut. At last, he felt her gaze and looked up. Her stomach lurched; his eyes widened; the sky split with thunder and lightening and opened its great mouth once again in an erratic assault of rain. The last time Samantha had seen Alex had been at the funeral. They hadn’t said a word to each other that day, and when they had woken up beside each other the next morning they hadn’t needed to say anything then either. Peter had been the bond that had melded them together, and he had left them in death, physically bound by the fraying ropes of their wretched past, but forced still to ache alone -‐ separated and apart. A bus had pulled up at the street corner just as Alex opened his mouth, and Samantha leaped to her feet, as the sun tried in vain to fight its way from behind the clouds. Once on the bus, she calmed her rapid breathing and took to pressing her finger into the gap in the window, so as to stop droplets of rain from coming through. Peter had taken the bus home with her every afternoon. He had told her to meet him time and time again at 3:10, and although she could not possibly forget, he told it to her everyday anyway. As if he was afraid someday she wouldn’t be there. He had walked her home as the blossoms grew amongst the leaves and then as the petals fell and the leaves flushed oranges and reds, and even as they too fell to the earth and the trees were left bare and lonely. One week, he had tie-‐died an old shirt purple and wore it everyday for until she had complained of its smell. Another week they had browsed the fruit markets on the weekend and he bought her a giant punnet of voluptuous strawberries. The week before, they hadn’t done anything in particular, but that was okay too. And then the day she had been struggling so endlessly to fight off -‐ it was still there in her mind in a sporadic mess of light and sound; water and pain – came roaring and tearing back to her.

They had stood by the mouth of the ocean’s depths, on the rocky gorge that hugged the cliff, leaning into each other, his arms around her, recklessly pulling her forwards yelling -‐ let’s do it, let’s jump in! – and she had shook her head feverishly at him, screaming in his ear – Peter don’t be stupid! – but knowing that it would do no good. He was always looking to be doing things that could eat away at his constant state of perpetual restlessness, and this was his final scheme. They must have looked ridiculous, stood there in the middle of a furious storm, with the wind and the side-‐ways rain nudging them inches further, closer and closer, until the savage water spewed up white foam onto their bare toes. In the middle of it all he had grasped her face in his hands and pressed his lips onto hers – a kiss that left the taste of finality on her tongue – and she had felt her heart and his heart pounding in time with petrified adrenaline. She felt for his fingers as they loosened around hers and then again as they disappeared from her grip; as he drifted away from her she reached out to grab again and again at thin air, hopeless and defeated. She was almost blinded by the rain that stabbed needles into her eyes and deafened by the howl and snarl of the wind, but still she caught his choked cry of -‐ I love you Samantha Drew! – and she cried back – Peter! -‐ as he dived elegantly and with a smile, down, down, down and into the mouth of the sea that swallowed him whole. But there he was! She could see him from her window. He flickered through the rain-‐streaked pane. He waved nonchalantly in the easing downpour. Her Peter. A glance down at her watch told her it was 3:10. He had come to meet her, just as she knew he would. She yelled Stop! Her voice echoed in the near empty bus. It continued on. Stop! She cried. Stop! Stop! Why would the driver not listen? Why did he not stop? She jumped from the moving vehicle and fell straight into Peter. He held her close and whispered something unintelligible into her ear. Looking up, she saw her reflection in a window. She looked old and downtrodden. Her hair was drenched in rain and her dress was stained and soaked. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her arms were empty. In the reflection, there was only her. Her bare arms enfolded the damp air. Only the wind whispered sweet nothings into her ear. As the rain ceased and gave way to the kind, delicate afternoon sun, her mind began to clear also, and it dawned on her that she had in fact been going nowhere at all.

Emily Han A Letter 2002, Australia ‘If you keep lying to me like that, man, there is nothing I can do to help you.’ The officer shrugged and leaned back into his chair. He had lost his last bit of interest and patience with the Middle Eastern man sitting at the other side of the desk. After three hours of questioning, there was absolutely no progress. After the interpreter repeated in Afghani the last words of the officer, the man’s heart turned into a dead knot of agony. He was about to burst into tears. A torrent of Afghani words flooded out of his mouth, he pleaded, and pleaded. The sorrow accumulated in his eyes suggested a heavy stone that even the strongest soul couldn’t bear. The officer was packing up his stuff while half-‐listening to the interpreter’s speech. He impatiently looked at his watch for a few times. ‘Still the same stuff. That doesn’t explain the fact that you worked for the Taliban for years. Sorry, the interview is over. Visa denied.’ The man sat up straight as though he was stricken by an electric shock. His body shook like a dead leaf in the wind, falling down into the overwhelming grief. ‘I no lie! Why no believe! Why?…’ The simplest English words, but with the deepest resentment and desperation in them, cried out with a broken voice, was resounded in the room. The man hopelessly lowered his eyes, face clouded with pain, still mumbling the words ‘lying..no..’ He sat in his room for the rest of the day, having himself locked in deadly silence. The next day, his limp body was found soaking in blood. His lips were sewn shut by rough jagged needle stitches; the puncture marks of the thick sewing needle visible as dark blue holes. This was a silent protest against this unfair world. ‘Why is a religion as beautiful as Islam twisted and turned into the inhumane oppression of the Taliban?’ When the needle first stuck into his lip, his body shook with pain, but his mind felt nothing. He recalled the moment he gave the order to start stoning for the first and last time. The sinner girl cried and screamed until she lost consciousness. Her desperate tears and bruised body remained in his mind for years and years, and had shaken his view of the world. For the first time, he started to doubt the Taliban ‘justice’. Another heavy question struck his mind as the second stitch went. ‘Why aren’t people free to choose their own belief?’ Blood spurred furiously. Anger filled his mind when he thought of the hardest time he had had. As his faith in the Taliban started to disintegrate, he refused to participate in stoning. Pressure was put on him by his Taliban Brothers, and insults such as ‘coward’ were directed at him. Discrimination, violence, and the abuse of power, the ugly sides of his job disgusted him so much that he had to be honest to his feelings and quit. That decision awarded him the top place on the wanted list of the Taliban government, and since then, his family had never lived a single day in peace.

As the third stitch pierced his flesh, he found his hands and clothes covered in blood. ‘Why wouldn’t Australian trust someone who risks his life to refuse the wrong?’ He recalled his journey to the border of Pakistan and across the ocean. It took so long that the hope and relief that filled his mind when he left Afghanistan, was gradually eroded by the anxiety and frustration experienced. When the storm struck their boat, the frighteningly pouring rain and roaring wind blew away his last bit of strength. He wrapped himself into a tight knot trying to block out the sobbing and screaming of the women, children and men, as well as the endless crying of the ocean. He, and many other refugees, had suffered all those desperate moments only to be questioned, doubted, questioned and then refused by this country of peace, love and freedom. In this detention camp, sadness, extreme sadness was seen and encountered every day. The most unbearable sadness is of souls that are not recognised or trusted. These people were kicked around like footballs, and then goaled back to the origin, to the deepest suffering. It was a humiliation. Weeping, he stuck the final needle into his lip, and fainted. ‘Why wasn’t a life or death decision made after thorough consideration?’ The last question bounced around his mind before he fell into a peaceful sleep forever. Consciousness was given up by his body to escape from physical suffering, but what could the mind do about sorrow? It had to be burdened and tortured until the very end of life. 2002, Pakistan It was a cool Friday night. Aila and her family were seated around the dinner table. Meat had been absent from this old wooden table for 3 months. Making ends meet was a struggle for this Afghani family. They had crossed the border a year ago, having all their money paid to the people smugglers and those guards along the way. However, it was a hopeful family despite all the financial difficulties. Aila was talking softly to Aasia, her daughter. The little girl’s name meant ‘hope’ in Dari. Though she could barely talk in sentences yet, it was a lovely conversation. ‘Where is Daddy?’ ‘Astraly—a!’ ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘Daddy!’ The whole family laughed at her happiness. ‘Peace to you, Sir. Here’s your mail.’ A mailman called loudly at the door. The sound of cutlery and plates tinkling and families chitchatting faded, when Uncle Ali went to get the letter. As he opened the letter, his smile disappeared, and a cloud of grief climbed up. Aila’s heart sank when she noticed that the writing on the envelope was not her husband Nemat’s familiar style. ‘What happened?’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Peace to Nemat…he has gone to Jannah (heaven) forever.’ Uncle Ali buried his face in his hands, answered with a broken voice, while Aila sat there with no words, no tears, and no light in her eyes. She feared to think about the future, and feared to look into Aasia’s eyes. The food on the table turned cold. Grief made the night seem so long and dark. But life had to continue for this family. 2041, Afghanistan

Abdul was giving a flight lesson to some new soldiers when he got the message that his grandmother had passed away. He dismissed his students straight away, and went home as fast as he could. Indeed he hadn’t spoken to Grandma for a long time since he joined Al Qaeda. He still didn’t quite understand why his beloved Grandma was so mad at him when he bragged to her about how he and his friends turned a Shia boy in their class ‘into Sunni’ using their fists. He believed only strict rules indicated by Allah could make people behave, and hold a family, a country and the world in place, and only punishment could make people obey the rule. And his homeland could get peace only if the whole world functioned according to Allah’s direction, therefore after graduation, he went on to pursue his ambition of making the world a Muslim world with many like-‐minded friends, and he soon became one of the younger leaders of Al Qaeda. He was a bit surprised when mother handed him an envelope. It smelt like ocean, cigarette, and tears. ‘Grandma left it for you. Sit down and have a good read.’ Said Mother, ‘they were from your grandpa.’ ‘Dear Aila, I’ve been on the sea for days. Do you still hate me for leaving? Sorry Aila, I can’t stand working for the Taliban anymore, witnessing so many innocent lives being stolen. They have stolen thousands of mother’s right to watch their children grow up; they have stolen thousands of girl’s faces and their dreams of being able to read. They call this a victory of the Sunni when both Sunni and Shia people are crying. They call this a victory when the world trade centre and thousands of innocent lives were destroyed for no good reason. Allah, please bless the land of Afghanistan! It is suffering so much! But all that I can do is to be a coward and flee.’ ‘It felt like your own life is not worth living for, when your life totally depends on another person’s decision, another person who never really cares. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I were the person who’s in charge, and then I realise I was always that person when I was working for Taliban, the person who give an order to shoot, to fire, to ban, and later, to stone. The decisions I made hurt my own people so much.’ ‘What if we don’t regard everyone as our enemy? What if we trust and love the world? I probably won’t have a taste of that feeling in my life, but I wish my daughter, my grandchildren could live in a world without so much hate, and so many enemies. I wish they could drop their guns and smile at the world and say from the bottom of their hearts, I love it.’ Reading through all the words, strong or soft, with tears or not, Abdul got a strange feeling that he wasn’t as brave and as powerful as he thought. His grandpa, an ordinary man, has shown him a better way of healing the world, and another definition of a brave heart, to refuse the wrong, and to love the world. For the first time, he cried like a little boy. The sadness, the conflicts that his Grandpa suffered, he was determined to end. Nemat would probably never imagine that his letters from 40 years ago actually prevented another 9/11 attack, and saved thousands of lives.

Duncan Koenig

My Brother

I stood in the elevator with mum. It was quiet. The doors pinged open with a squeak and we stepped across the breach. Our footsteps were quiet on the carpeted floor as we moved toward the end of the corridor. Automatic doors opened into a white room, with people in white coats tending to shadowy figures inside white beds. There was a reception area to the left where 3 ladies worked on computers and took phone calls. We headed down the aisle towards the bed in the corner of the room where a man sat slumped in a red arm chair. The man was pale and held a small white pillow to his chest. He seemed frail, his arms lacked muscle and his long legs were weak. His pain-‐stricken face hugged his skull and created craters in his cheeks. The chair he was in seemed to cradle his figure, the red cushions caressing his willowy frame. Mum sat beside him and I stood. The man turned his head slowly and painfully toward me and said, “Hello, brother”. Marfan Syndrome; proper noun; a connective tissue disorder caused by a defect in a gene called fibbrillin-‐1. This disorder is associated with an increased frequency of aortic dissections. Patients with Marfan syndrome are often very tall and lean with long extremities, abnormal joint flexibility, and dislocation of the lens of the eye, cataracts, secondary glaucoma, myopia, strabismus and corneal flatness. Being told that you have a genetic disorder can be hard to grasp at first. The news strikes you like a punch in the face. It is abrupt. It is painful. And it knocks you about. The idea that your body doesn’t create a protein that could result in major surgery down the track is hard to accept. However it isn’t the diagnosis that shakes you most. It is the realisation of the opportunities to be missed, of things you can never do. NEVER play a game of tackle rugby. NEVER join the army. NEVER represent Australia in your chosen sport. It is this realisation, this diagnosis, that my brother, Jamie, and I were given. He was 9 when he was diagnosed with his first aneurysm, which would have made me 3 at the time. Amazing then, that I still remember the sombre mood about the house the day before his operation and the balloons covering his bedroom ceiling on the day he came home. However the time in-‐between these events has unfortunately faded from my long term memory. From what I

do remember though, Jamie recovered relatively quickly, shown through is return to beating me up in his spare time. Life slowly returned to normality. Jamie and I went to yearly ultrasound check-‐ups to search for new aneurysms. The check-‐ups were uncomfortable to say the least. The cold goo upon your chest is slowly spread by a mouse connected to the ultrasound machine. The pressure upon your ribs is enough to cause bruising and some major discomfort. However it is a necessary ritual that has undoubtedly saved both our lives. I went into my early teens and my brother approached his twentieth birthday. Jamie was living in Darling harbour now with his best mate Sam. Up to this point in our lives my condition had been relatively mild and stable. I had learnt to live with my condition through my first two years of high school. Things were going well and I was enjoying life. My brother was becoming a tank of a man and seemed to me like a walking 6 foot 8 mass of muscle. To say that Jamie was fit would have been an understatement. He was massive. In 2009 Jamie went in for his yearly check-‐up and his results came back. He had an aneurysm next to a major valve for the heart and it was at an operable size. The news wasn’t a big shock. Jamie had been doing weights and strenuous activity, against the warnings by the doctors saying that high blood pressure is what causes the stretching that is an aneurysm. So we prepared again and Jamie opted to have the surgery done just before Christmas, in December so that he could spend his recovery with the family during summer holidays. I wouldn’t say we weren’t worried about the operation. Open heart surgery is a big deal. But we knew he would be ok and that was enough for us. But first we would need to find a surgeon. The operation would be complex. Jamie’s valve had not yet been damaged and he was keen to keep it and not have a mechanical one that would result in him having to take warfarin for the rest of his life. Eventually we found a surgeon who seemed very capable and Jamie went in for his operation on the twelfth of December 2009. The post-‐operation report would show that Jamie cheated death twice that operation. His aorta was paper thin when the doctors went in to repair it, he would have died had the operation been left another week. On top of this the previously repaired part of the artery had calcified and cracked when touched by surgeons. Had Jamie not been on the heart lung machine he would have almost certainly had a stroke and possibly died. After the operation Jamie would spend two days in ICU followed by 1 week in the general ward. The car trip to see my brother was quiet. Mum suggested I didn’t see him in the ICU, telling me that I would never forget what I saw. I was determined however to see my older brother whom I looked up to so much. Mum was right, of course. That memory will not leave me until the day I die.

Tubes. Everywhere. He seemed robotic. Like something out of a cyborg film. Red tubes, green tubes, clear tubes. All with a specific purpose, no doubt to save his life in some way or another. Between 4 and 6 protruded in a cluster from his

chest. 2 came out from needle tips in his left wrist, lifting the skin uncomfortably. He held a small white pillow to his chest protectively, clutching at it in pain with every breath he took. A small strip of gauze could be seen stuck to his chest behind

the pillow, covering the wire and staples holding his sternum together. He was thin. He was pale. The skin on his face hugged the skull beneath, his sunken cheeks resembled craters from an asteroid. Every breath seemed painfully difficult even with Â

43 Â

the effects of morphine. But he soldiers on, battling through the pain and discomfort of his surgery. This is the man I admire the most. This is My Brother. Later in 2010 I was diagnosed with an aneurysm. It wasn’t a terrible shock; I was prepared for the news. Anxiety crept into my life for a time. I worried for my health, for my heart. At the time I felt like I couldn’t communicate with my family because I had no way of communicating with them any longer. I felt as though my aneurysm secluded me, made me a different person. Eventually I asked Jamie what I should do. He said: “Live your life. Don’t worry about the things you can’t change. Worry about the things you can. Deal with the aneurysm when it is time to deal with it”. It took me a while to realise just how happy and wonderful a life one can live, even with a genetic disorder like Marfan syndrome. One is only a sufferer of a disorder, Marfan syndrome or not, if he or she chooses to be. My brother and I chose not to suffer from, but to live with this disorder, to soldier through it and to seize opportunity from it. Any person with any condition, disorder, disease or illness can push through with the right attitude on their side. My brother

and I will deal with our conditions when the time is appropriate. Until then, we will live our lives.

For My Brother

Adam Ridwan Observations of a First-‐Year Psychology Student I It was just a Freudian slip of the tongue but I responded with Yes. I am studying to become a mind reader. II I constantly suppress the desire to use my newly acquired knowledge of the most popular psychiatric disorders to diagnose my family’s many problems. My Mother Ceri is a 46-‐year-‐old Female with MCLPD (Mid-‐life Crisis Personality Disorder). A phobia of the ageing process have manifested in mild Shiraz dependency, nudist tendencies, and smiling at babies for far too long. My Father, Eddie is a 50-‐year-‐old Male suffering from 50’s Housewiphrenia. With Ceri as the breadwinner of the family, Eddie has become hyper-‐vigilant in regards to his role as housekeeper. This includes an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness involving the need to constantly dress in an apron and protective washing-‐up gloves. My eldest Sister, Sophie is a 28-‐year-‐old Female with a classic case of Bold and The Beautifulism. Symptoms include delusions of grandeur (carrying around her Year 10 Student of the Week certificate) and auditory hallucinations (responding to her name being said on TV). My other sister, Amy, is a 24-‐year-‐old Female who exhibits Middle Child Syndrome. Traits are as follows: attention seeking such as wearing brightly coloured and/or short clothing and strange employment choices (from ostrich farmer to trapeze artist). And me? I am Adam. I have a blinding lack of self-‐confidence which turns every molehill into a melodrama, or as it says in bold letters on my CV: Weaknesses: Perfectionist III My first day of work at Beaky’s Bookstore and I made the mistake of telling my Boss I studied Psychology. I spent the next few years earning my wage not by selling books but by instructing him on how to deal with his adolescent daughter Shae-‐leigh. Apparently, she wasn’t listening to his life lessons (instead growing a fringe that hid her lovely, blue eyes) and listening to Marilyn Manson (or something equally as rebellious) behind locked doors. I told him she probably just had penis envy. IV Dinner parties always regress to a game of Adam, Why Can’t My Boyfriend Get It Up?

V In a Social Psychology lecture they let us in on the secret of how love works. It’s a combination of neurons, pheromones, facial hair and coincidence. I proceeded to buy one of those brain-‐training games, douse myself with cologne from a phallic-‐shaped bottle with Ryan Gosling plastered on it, continued to curse my thin-‐and-‐wiry, half-‐Asian beard, all while trying to make eye-‐contact with everyone with a pulse who happened to come into work. No luck. VI The Modern Art Gallery had a two-‐for-‐one deal, so I made the trek with my best friend, Josh. He loves art. I there’s something strange about trying to extract meaning from a canvas painted a slightly whiter shade than the original, or shit smeared onto some political cartoons. I stopped to look at a series of works by ‘Anon.’, some Rorschach-‐esque smooshes of ink, vaguely in the shapes of bats (or two people doing the tango, depending on your level of insanity). I saw the couple tango-‐ing and started to think that the splatters were probably far more fascinated by us. Two lanky boys standing, hands glued to their hips, staring, burning holes through the walls as they searched their brains trying to retrieve the wittiest social commentary they’d heard on the radio earlier that day. ‘Hermann Rorschach is possibly the only attractive Psychologist, like, ever. He was the Brad Pitt of the Psychology world,’ Josh blurted out. I scoffed at him, only to whip out my phone in the bathroom and Google ‘Hermann Rorschach attractive’. He did have the combover/moustache combination that I had been feebly attempting since puberty. VII The first entry of my dream diary reads: A pony with the head of my First Girlfriend floats above my naked body. Fire and brimstone and spiders extend from her eyes. I woke up in a sweat and could only conclude that this was my subconscious informing me I had lingering commitment issues. VIII The Uni Bar put Speed Dating on for all the single students looking for a root soulmate. I took Josh with me. There were hoards of horny Uni students, tongues wagging like Pavlov’s Dog after hearing that bell. I sent Josh, tail between his legs, down the other end of the table to try woo the pretty blonde with the pink bow in her hair while I chatted to the brunette with long, wavy locks. She was strikingly beautiful but hid her charm under a stained, grey sweatshirt and a thick aura of defence mechanisms. Twelve minutes of the obligatory dance around the Top Three First Conversation No-‐No’s – Politics, Past Relationships and Penis Size, and she shuffled her way on to the next salivating salamander.

After a couple more beers and several blows to my self-‐esteem, Josh wanted to leave. He grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the corner of the Uni Bar. He continued to squeeze until I could feel my skin ripening like a plump tomato. “Josh. You’re hurting my hand. Josh.” “Adam, I can’t do this. I think I’m gay.” Josh loosened his grip on my almost bursting hand, his cheeks now a similar Tomato-‐ey hue. The only thing I could muster up in support was, “Ten years ago, you would’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness and sent to Jesus camp. Thank your lucky stars you live in 2013 where you’ll merely be shunned for your affliction.” He shoved me into the wall and scampered out the door. IX The most interesting subculture is definitely ‘Gym-‐goers’. In an attempt to maintain the habit of a midnight scavenge of the cupboard AND a fairly proportionate figure, I had signed up to the local ‘Fitness Centre’. I was not sure what to expect, but it was an assault of the senses. Obscenely short shorts barely holding the monsters beneath, fluoro outfits stamped with inspirational slogans, a red-‐and-‐blue clad Boxercise class testing catharsis, men with bulging biceps far more interested in their mirror image than in me, wide-‐eyed and flat-‐footed, taking in the sights. There was a sweaty sense of unease in the air. As if I’d walked in on a Seventh-‐Day Adventist congregation with an ‘I <3 Charles Darwin’ tee-‐shirt. But I was determined to push past the stench. After all, I had paid a large sum of money in the hopes that I would no longer have to wear a rash-‐vest to the beach to hold in the lumps. I walked up to the treadmill, the least menacing of the menagerie of the mechanics laid out in front of me. I placed one leg onto the machine, my knees suddenly jelly-‐like. Three minutes and twenty seven seconds later… Fuck it, I’ll just buy fat-‐free-‐ice-‐cream. X The second (and last) entry of my dream diary reads: Standing in front of a crowd of 500 leering people, I start my flute recital. I look down and I am no longer wearing clothes, my legs now stuck like concrete to the floorboards. I woke up in a sweat and was certain that I would never learn to play the flute. XI We learnt about a subtype of Obsessive-‐Compulsive-‐Personality-‐Disorder that involves hoarding, and I was almost 99.99% sure that I had it. Even just typing that made me want to round it up to 100%,

though. I didn’t buy many things, but as soon as something was mine, I couldn’t let go of it. “What if I need this figurine of a cat with a moustache one day?” It’s a serious question. My OCPD had started to cause strain to the few relationships I treasured. I own seven pairs of pants, but I could only bring myself to wear two, repeatedly. My Mother moved one of these pairs, the brown ones, from its usual spot. I’m sure she was washing it, but I proceeded to take a vow of silence until she admitted she’d fucked me over. Josh had also become angered by my constant need to document my life. I had to take photographs of everything, including breakfast, basketball and bath time. “Memories are so fragile, Josh!” “Get that thing out of my face, I’m trying to eat my bloody food” “But…the light is just so transient this afternoon!” I exclaimed excitedly. This had become our regular conversation. We still ignored the awkwardness of the other day. I felt the words I needed to say gurgling in my gut, bubbling up towards my throat. I just hoarded those as well, stuffing them further down. XII Christmas has got to be the creepiest Holiday of the year. I’m not saying you are definitely a sociopath if you have a curly, white beard, don satin red robes and your best friend Rudolph has been snorting too much coke. But, if you’re willing to let a thousand kids a day sit on your lap and ask you why their Daddy doesn’t say he loves them more often, then there’s probably something wrong with you. XIII I went to visit my Grandmother at the ‘Green Hill’ Nursing Home. She’d been diagnosed with Stage 6 Dementia: Severe Cognitive Decline. She didn’t remember much. She didn’t recognise me. But she looked happy. The nurses said the one memory which stuck deep in her brain was her Seventeenth birthday. She had gone to the beach with her Father. Her favourite Jazz Orchestra had set up a rotunda and her Father had stuffed a lounge-‐chair in the boot which she parked firmly in the front row of the sand arena. Night-‐ time had come and to her surprise, she was brought up on stage to hear the final song: Louis Armstrong’s La vie en rose. She pressed my head, for all she knew, a strange man, to her heart and muttered in my ear “I’m in a world apart, a world where roses bloom”. I imagine an endless concerto replays in her mind. XIV Philip Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment revealed that it only took placing completely normal, caring humans into roles of dominant control to turn them into cruel, often violent humans. We need to stick to our roles, otherwise how will we know what colour clothing to wear, how to think, how to feel, who to love? Josh and I were friends, same-‐sex friends. Same-‐sex friends who wore safe, dark colours, thought about inane things like how rich we were going to be in the future, felt nothing but admiration for each other and most definitely, didn’t love each other. Men don’t love.

It was probably this adherence to roles that made me hit Josh. We still hadn’t spoken about what happened at Speed Dating. We had been playing a video game where you compete to shoot the most baddies. Josh’s hand-‐eye coordination was far superior to mine and this meant I would almost certainly always lose. My visit to my Grandma had made me particularly vulnerable and the seven-‐game losing streak had snuck into my head. “You really suck at video games, man.” “Yeah, well at least I don’t suck dick, you faggot!” It just came out. I didn’t mean it, I swear. My face was still stuck on game-‐mode, and the shock of my own words hadn’t moved my stare from the TV. “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I want to suck your dick!” His tone was more serious than I’d ever heard him, and without looking I knew I had hurt him. I couldn’t look at him. The adrenaline of the video game mixed with the strange tension between Josh and I had taken a hold of my head and I could feel my brain get darker, the lights behind my eyes flickering at a faster rate. My sympathetic nervous system was overactive, the sweat building up on my furrowed brow. My biological options were one of two: Fight or Flight? I hit him. I wasn’t a big guy but I hit him harder than I had hit anyone before. The new feeling of my fist smashing into the fragile nose filled me with instant regret. I finally looked at him to see the blood slowly trickling down his face as he squinted his eyes, looked back at me for a few seconds and walked away. Men don’t love, men fight. XV I’d started smoking. Trust me, I understand the brain from its’ most frontal lobe to that dangly thing that sounds like it forms part of a tree. I know that smoking is just an oral fixation; a way to delay the inevitable realisation of your worries and bring you closer to sweet, sweet death. But, what’s so wrong with an early death? Who wants to live forever in a world where people need to talk to other, slightly-‐ more qualified people about their problems just to confirm that they are in-‐fact, so fucked up that they must take a sugar-‐coated pill three times a day and have another six-‐to-‐seven years of counselling before they can be accepted back into society. Only to fall in love with your best friend and be back on the couch? As they say, nicotine-‐induced ignorance is bliss. XVI “So, does that mean you can, like, hypnotise me? Make me yap like a seal, or whatever? One time I was so drunk I tried to balance a ball on my nose. It didn’t go so well.”

“Were you drinking red wine? No? White? Ah, that would be it. Red wine has hypnosis-‐inducing properties. I would say that if you had been drinking red wine you very well may have been able to balance that ball on your nose, all while clapping and yapping!” XVII I had smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes before I went to meet Josh at the café. My teeth were furry, and I would’ve felt the need to go home and brush my teeth if not for the head-‐numbing effect of the fags. I had dressed in the shirt that Josh always said brought out my eyes. I had rehearsed a six-‐point-‐plan for how the conversation would unfurl. I saw his gangly, white figure approaching and I clutched the cigarette packet in my pocket, fumbling around for another death stick. It was too late, I would be having this conversation without my little friends. “Hi, Josh.” It wasn’t going so well. His nose was still slightly bruised, and my eyes were switching focus from the bruise, to his crotch to his eyebrows, not quite landing on his sharp, hazel irises. I was losing his attention. I had tell him now. The six-‐point-‐plan turned into battle-‐stations as the four lattes and twenty-‐ seven cigarettes brought the hoard of words steaming to the surface. “I know you hate me, but…but….I think I love you. Wait, I don’t know what that means. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Like a bee loves honey. No, wait. Like a bee would die for its’ honey. Like a bee pollinates the flower and spreads its seed around. You’re the flower. Like… Ugh, I don’t know. I just need you.” XVIII I’ve decided that Dr. Adam: Clinical Psychologist is my destiny. This is for three reasons: 1. The majority of time spent at work will be cross-‐legged in a chair of my choosing. 2. I want to help people. And, 3. I’m naïve enough to think that people who deal with their problems in the absolute worst way possible are the ones most equipped to give advice to others. XIX It was Spring and I hadn’t seen Josh since the vomit of words had come spewing out of my mouth. The cherry blossoms had begun to burst out of their hard, uninspiring sticks which went unnoticed for eleven months of the year. Josh had hugged me and told me to forget about it, but I knew he was lying. He was never a good liar. His tell was the distinct twitch of his left eyebrow. He was probably trying to be reassuring, but the right brow didn’t have quite the same dexterity as the other, leaving the lie firmly plastered on his face.

I had recovered from the crippling depression resulting from the inability to express my love. I stopped smoking, even forming a far more healthy addiction to treadmill-‐endorphins. Josh was also in a good place. I heard he told his parents that he was attracted to men, and they still loved him after. He had begun dating a French boy from the University, who apparently was at the Uni Bar Speed Dating that year, unknowing of the relationship unravelling around him. I was happy for him, and as I entered my Second Year as a Psychology Student, I was happy myself, knowing that happiness was not as simple as they told us it was. It didn’t come down to a burst of neurotransmitters fizzling in the pleasure-‐centres of the brain, it came from the realisation that having a grasp of the mechanics of the human mind made me no more able to control my own. XX The best part about knowing how to read minds is that you know that nobody can read yours.

Maddison Williams Puppet I paused for a moment to look out the sliding glass door, dirtied with dust and speckled white build up; the puppet, alone at a leather topped desk. An UAC admissions preferences form lies before me. Three pots sit outside, embracing exotic flowers: snap dragons, tulips and lilies. Symbols, inspiring creativity and vibrancy and fun and freedom. Beyond the pots lays green crab grass splattered sporadically across dirt, leading into a yellow paddock. I feel the puppeteer reach out to me, strings binding me to my chair, instructing me to do their will. At school I walk towards Matt and it pulls the strings, causing the sides of my mouth to flee skyward. It instructs me to embrace him and the ceramic of my skin is absorbed into my body. Only I can feel the coldness. I take his hand and my stomach rises to my chest. I see our hands entwined and feel dirty guilt, and distance. I shirk away in disgust as he squishes his face in that utterly moronic manner, telling me “I love you”. As the days pass the flowers will wither. The dry heat of the summer will cause the colours to fade. The snap dragons will close and the tulips will fall and neither will remain strong and defiant of their background. It is all consuming. Every tractor, every crop of wheat only exists because it is permitted to, because it is absolved into the tradition of the land. Every woman exists to serve the land, and the land’s men. I look away, as he questions, “What’s wrong?” I think of reasons, justifications to become absolved from my duty. I may offer him excuses of other commitments, or of a fear of commitment. I dare not tell him I long for freedom of this place. I dare not tell him of my fight against the puppeteer. I dare not tell him that the exoticy of the flowers outside my window promise a hopeful craftsman other places and times and possibilities. “I’m fine.” I reply, smiling tightly, not quite submissive enough to offer the strings an entire grin. He is not happy with my answer, he never is, but I have nothing left to offer him. The land demands my silence, and silence is a sacrifice. I nod in response to him as we walk and he talks. At home, my father trawls along the backyard, weighed down like a pack horse with a cheap container filled with expensive chemical. He sprays straggling weeds which have risen up in defiance of the land’s rules and customs. They have become lecherous parasites, sucking the nutrition of those who have played by the rules, done their dues. Unintentionally, the poison reaches the fading black pot of exotic flowers. He is apologetic but “Shit happens”.

High-‐school concrete decorated with pink chewing gum, greyed under the many feet which have strode upon it, refuses to cry in indignation as Matt’s and my fully enclosed leather school shoes force it into submission. I go to speak and find myself lacking in permission and wish briefly to lie down, alongside the chewing gum and hairline cracks and wonder if anyone would notice. I am not empty because I am not loved. Nor am I empty because I have no one to love. I am incapable of feeling and joy. I am forced. Matt mentions next year and lists our awaiting adventures, together. He wants to travel twenty kilometres south to the river, where we first rolled in the sand and exchanged our damning vow to love. He wants to explore my bare back as we roll around, cramped in the back of his blue commodore. He wants to progress down the aisle. I know all this, and barely listen. I have heard it before. Tears well in my eyes, a response to an internal dialogue only I can hear, of which only I have control. He turns me to face him, soft in his touch. I feel both repulsed and an intense need to let myself escape into the bliss of his hold. I can’t tell where either impulse comes from. At my desk I glare at the form that sits alongside stray pens and highlighters. A whiteboard that for an entire year I have been meaning to hang sits slanted with notes for assignments long since forgotten and disregarded. I let my two hands cover my face for a brief moment, allowing myself an indulgent opportunity for self pity. I wipe the board clean and set it aside once more. Then, swallowing my pride and the great lump in my chest I note down my first university preference, situated only twenty kilometres away, in a large town of thirty thousand people. “Happy one year anniversary, baby.”

Elise Horspool Untitled ~*~ When I was a child, I saw my older brother murdered in front me. I remember the flecks of blood spraying up my cheeks and over my lips, when I licked them later they tasted of copper and salt. I licked them until they were clean. I saw his face. Not my brother’s; the murderer’s. He looked right at me. I was shaking so much that his hand on my shoulder felt like a solid, cement grip that pinched my skin hard enough to bruise. But it was enough to stop me shaking. He smiled at me. It would have been pleasant enough if he were a stranger on the street, or my 2nd grade teacher. But it wasn’t, it was the man who murdered my brother. He calmly crouched on the grass and wiped his hands; smearing the sticky blood into the bright green blades. It dried under his fingernails like a dirty stain. I remember that detail vividly. His hands were big, and would have probably totally eclipsed my tiny palm. The smell of grass assaults me daily wherever I walk. He got up again and shoved the pistol into his pocket and patted me on the head like I was a puppy. Then he walked off. But then he paused and whipped around on his left heel; smiling that pleasant smile. I thought he was going to pull the pistol back out and shoot me point blank like he’d done to my brother. He didn’t. He rummaged and I heard crackling, incredulously I watched as he produced a lollypop and held it out to me. I took it, smiling weakly as I watched the man who killed my brother jump into his car and drive off. The lollipop was red. -‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐ “William, you have to testify.”

“I can’t, I don’t remember what he looks like.” “Will, please. They won’t even see your face, you just have to write it down darling, on a piece of paper and sign it. The prosecutor and two lawyers will witness it and then you’ll never have to think about it again.” “No. I don’t remember anything.” “William…” My mother’s face had been contorted up in agony, or perhaps as if she were sucking on a lemon. My father read the paper in his armchair; but I knew he wasn’t really reading. He was listening. I continued to ignore my mother; I was sucking on a lollipop loudly as if to disrupt her. I was being completely insolent, I didn’t want to testify. I saw his face, but that didn’t mean anything. My mother’s pleading had turned into a low hum in the back of my mind, gently vibrating in my ears. I focused on the lollipop, devouring it like a dog with its bone. The only noise that drew me away from it was the rustling of the newspaper and the ping! as my dad got off his lazy boy. And then he was in front of me, gently prying the lollipop from my hands, ignoring my sticky fingers and hands. He sat it aside, and grasped my shoulders; embracing me. “William please testify.” The pleading in his voice was different to my mother’s. There was an undercurrent and tremble of pain in his voice; it was so soft and his hazel eyes looked into mine intently. I couldn’t look away in that moment. This was my father; my father who taught James to fly a kite, who then in turn taught me. That’s what we were doing down in that meadow. When the police found us, the kite was stuck in a tree; the sails flapping in the breeze, its colourful tail tangled in the under bush. James was still clutching the line. I let my gaze wander, slowly away from his and shook my head. My father’s warm hands lifted off my shoulders as if burned. I heard the ping! and rustle as he resumed reading. My father cried that day.

-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐ I never testified. The trial was all over the papers. I never entered the courtroom; but my parents did along with dozens of other crying, angry, horrified parents whose children never came home from playing soccer in a vacant lot or school. Or perhaps they never came home from teaching their little brother how to fly a kite in the meadow down the road. There was only one other witness; a boy like me, but older. His younger brother had been murdered while trying to catch tadpoles down by the creek. He had seen it all and had chased after the murderer like a madman. He couldn’t positively identify the murderer, and the murderer got off. The witness killed himself the week after; he couldn’t live with the thought of his little brother’s murderer getting away with it. He felt it was his fault for not protecting him better. Years went by and my father still talked to me, the pain present in his eyes, and a little love lost for everything. My mother mumbled away in the kitchen, always cleaning; rubbing vigorously at the stainless steel sink until her fingers bled. The asylum warden came and took her away when I turned ten. My father continued to read the newspaper and teach me my timetables. He died of a heart attack after my 21st birthday. He never saw me get married and he never met his grandchildren or daughter in law. I named my firstborn James in memory of my brother, my second born Phillip in memory of my father. My third born and her mother were killed in a head on collision before she had even left the womb. I was going to name her Delia in memory of my mother. The three of us lived life in solitude. We moved into my old home; a two story house that had felt empty since my brother had been murdered, my mother was taken away and my father died. The boys were so little. They played with James and I’s toys, always asking when mummy and Delia in her tummy were coming back. I always shook my head and settled into my father’s lazy boy; watching as they played Go Fish!.

One day James never came home from kindergarten, Phillip was napping in my lap and stirred at the ping! when I stood up. I panicked for a full five minutes before I settled Phillip into his crib and called my neighbour to watch him. Just as I was reaching for my coat and the front door; the door bell rang. I felt sick but slowly opened it. I felt my heart painfully stop and my jacket fell to the ground with a rustle as I stared at James. He was smiling toothily and his little hand was eclipsed by the giant palm of the policeman from down the road; Robert. “I found your little ‘un Will. He was playing in the meadow with his cars, he musta gotten a wee bit carried away. I told him his daddy would be worried and decided ta bring him home….he was wonderin’ whether little Philly would be sleepin’, I think he likes playing with the baby……Philly’s a little un’ isn’t he? Gerald ma own little un’…….” I stopped listening to Robert, his words falling on deaf ears; James was still grinning and said “Hi Daddy,” cheerfully around a bright red lollipop as he waved enthusiastically. I shivered and the smell of grass assaulted me, “Honey, where did you get that lollipop? Did Robbie the Policeman give it to you?” James sucked it noisily for a second before pulling it out of his mouth with a pop! “No no Daddy! Robbie didn’t give it to me! A man in the meadow gave it to me, he asked me about my cars and patted me on the head like I pat the puppies at the pet store!” My son’s exuberant voice chirped happily, chattering like a canary as he waved his hands about; but I stared at him in horror. More specifically, I stared at the red lollipop in his sticky hands. Robert was still chattering in the background, I smiled at him and pulled James up onto my hip; he was getting far too big for it but I didn’t care. “Thanks Robert.” He nodded and tipped his hat at James. I shut the door and bolted it fast; the echo of it slamming woke Phillip up and I heard him cry. They both slept cuddled in my arms in the chair that night.

-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐ Not long after Phillip turned seven, Robert appeared at my door again. This time he wasn’t smiling. I followed him to his car, Phillip was safely at his best friend’s house, and assuring me he wouldn’t venture anywhere without Molly, Peter’s mother. James hadn’t come home from school. Robert, who by fault was never sad, led me to the morgue; eyes downcast. I coughed into my fist and my eyes stung as the hall got colder, and colder; darker and darker. When my eyes adjusted to the limited light, I could see tiny feet poking out from under a sheet; a tag tied to the big toe like a price tag to a toy. The cold air made my eyes sting furiously as Robert lifted the sheet. James. He smelt like grass and he still held a red lollipop in his hand; eyes surprised and flecks of blood spraying downwards all over his face. I remembered his face. -‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐ “Come on Will! Lift it higher! Higher! Run as fast as your little legs will go!” I ran screaming across the meadow, weeds brushing my ankles as James ran by my side; cheering and cheering and as I pumped my legs faster and faster. A breeze pulled so hard on the sails and frame that I chucked it skywards in my excitement. The breeze caught my little kite and I felt the line pull and pull until it hit resistance. Beaming; I handed it over to James, he grinned at me so brightly it felt like warmth from the sun. Chuckling he ran down the meadow; the kite soaring higher and higher and the tail whipping along happily in the breeze.

I watched him as he stood there, face and arms upturned towards the sky. -‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐

Emily Hitchman The Catholics The baby was born. Its eyes flicked back and forth a few times, and then settled on the middle distance. It flexed its limbs with mechanical swiftness. It appeared to crack its neck from side to side. It arched its feet, balled its fists, and began converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Face red and wet with sweat, hair falling in her eyes, Seneca struggled to sit up on her elbows and look at it. The doctor knit his brows. ‘It’s a boy,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ A nurse took the baby, washed him, and swaddled him in blankets. He did not move or make a sound. Then the nurse handed him back to the doctor, who handed him to Seneca. She held him crossways on her stomach, her own pulse still beating roughly through her neck and forearms. The baby gazed into the middle distance. ‘Hello, baby,’ she said gently. The baby stayed altogether still. Seneca’s brow twitched. She kissed his forehead experimentally. The baby did not move. She jigged him a little in her arms. He blinked, and did nothing more. She exhaled forcefully and then squeezed him, holding him tightly into her chest. The baby tipped his head a little, to get at the air. Seneca let her head flop back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Just then her husband leaned over and fluttered his fingers in front of the baby’s face. It blinked again. He motioned the nurse and met him in the corner of the room. ‘Is that normal?’ Seneca’s husband asked. ‘Couldn’t say,’ said the nurse, turning his equally bewildered-‐looking face away. ‘It’s my first day, see.’ ‘Oh yes?’ said the husband, disapprovingly. The two returned to Seneca’s bedside. ‘Well, what a straightforward delivery!’ started the doctor, brashly. ‘We’ll give you two – three! – a minute together. I’ll be back soon to take some measurements.’ He hustled the nurse out of the room, the door clicking loudly behind the two of them. The baby didn’t flinch. (‘Is that normal?’ asked the nurse on the other side of the door. The doctor looked away. ‘Well, naturally we’ll run some tests…’ he said, trailing off, ‘All sorts of tests…’ before striding purposefully down the corridor.) The afternoon, the baby was measured, tested, and scanned for everything – brain activity (‘Unfortunately, your son is brain dead,’), signs of intelligence (‘Unfortunately, your son has severe

mental difficulties,’), hearing (‘Your son is deaf,’), sight (‘It seems your son is totally blind,’), speech (‘He’s apparently mute,’), disease (‘I’d wager your son is slowly wasting away.’). The baby was perfectly healthy. After several hours, the doctor returned, baby in arms, nurse in tow. ‘How are you two?’ he asked brightly. ‘Feeling any better?’ ‘Not much.’ The husband pulled loosely at his shirt collar, eyes fixed on the baby. The doctor crossed to the bed and handed the baby back to Seneca, who was stretched out diagonally across the bed in exasperation. The husband leaned forward anxiously in the cheap, scratchy armchair. ‘So?’ he asked, expectantly. The room was silent. The doctor’s eyes flicked from the nurse, to Seneca, to the baby, to the husband, and back to the nurse. He cleared his throat. ‘The baby is perfectly healthy.’ he said. The husband looked at the doctor, then at the baby, then at the doctor again, and then at Seneca. Seneca looked vaguely back at him, her eyelids barely parted. Abruptly, she rattled the baby on her stomach, his arms and legs quivering inertly. Everyone in the room looked towards the baby. His faced stayed quiet. ‘That’s not normal,’ said the husband, eyes accusing the doctor. The doctor smiled awkwardly, showing a few too many teeth. ‘What’s happened to him?’ the husband demanded. ‘Well, there’s nothing physically wrong with him, I can assure you,’ the doctor began, knuckles whitening around the baby’s chart. ‘It was a neat delivery.’ ‘Alright,’ said the husband, no more soothed by this than Seneca, who had been groaning quietly in the bed since the doctor had returned. ‘So, naturally…’ said the doctor uncertainly, ‘naturally, that’s all we at the hospital can do for him, except monitoring…’ He spoke the last syllables slowly into the floor. The husband narrowed his eyes. ‘And what is it that you suggest we do?’ The medical staff exchanged glances. ‘We’re perfectly happy for you to take him home,’ ‘And do what with him?’ Seneca growled tersely. ‘He won’t eat, he won’t sleep, I don’t think he’s even pooed.’ ‘Oh, newborns do things in their own time,’ said the doctor grandly, elongating the vowel and making wide gestures with his arms. ‘It’s perfectly normal for–’ ‘Oh, normal, normal, normal, he’s not normal! He’s a robot!’ cried Seneca. The baby, who had been thrown around on her heaving stomach during the outburst, readjusted himself stiffly, then lay still. The doctor looked at the floor. ‘What,’ Seneca enunciated after a silence, ‘are our other options?’

‘Well,’ said the doctor slowly, feeling chastened, ‘obviously I don’t know how you would feel, but we do have a number of in-‐house ministers, spiritual counsellors, a non-‐denominational chaplain–’ ‘Terrific!’ Seneca bellowed. ‘Bring them in!’ The doctor jumped and left the room nodding quickly, nurse trailing after him. After they were gone Seneca gestured at her husband to take the baby, which he did, and fell back on the pillows. Twenty minutes later there was a quiet tapping on the door, which the husband rose to answer. He and Seneca had taken the time to compose themselves; she was sitting up in the bed against straightened pillows, holding the baby to her breast, he had tucked his shirt into the waistband of his slacks and combed his hair (as had she). They baby lay in Seneca’s arms, motionless as ever. The doctor and nurse (who had not yet contributed anything to the events of the day but felt nonetheless attached to the unusual case) strolled into the room followed by three men in dark suits – one sporting large glasses and a beard (both very thick), one a conspicuous silver cross, the last younger than the others, unadorned, frowning, and decidedly rumpled-‐looking. The three men settled in a line at the foot of Seneca’s bed, looking as though they would really rather not be standing quite so close to one another. The doctor stepped up to the bed. ‘This is the child in question,’ he said, not looking at the men. ‘May I?’ Seneca offered him the baby. ‘Thank you. This is Father Gregory,’ he gestured at the men, ‘Father Benjamin, and– er, Adam, our… spiritual aid.’ The last man seemed to become even more rumpled. The doctor continued on blithely. ‘As you can see, very little movement, minimal response to aural stimuli–’ the doctor clicked his fingers clinically around the baby’s head– ‘little to no response to visual stimuli–’ he waved his free hand in front of the baby’s face– ‘physical stimuli–’ he gave the baby a gentle prod. ‘There’s some evidence of other reflexes, but little of anything, really. But like I said, medically speaking, he’s in perfect shape.’ The men peered at the baby. It lay obligingly still. The first man nodded slowly, furrowing his brow. ‘He’s seen a psychologist?’ he asked. The doctor paused. ‘Er, we consulted with a psychologist earlier, but this isn’t really what they tend to deal with.’ The man continued nodding. ‘May I?’ the second man asked the doctor, holding up a fat finger. ‘Yes, yes.’ said the doctor. The second man poked the baby’s forearm gently. The baby didn’t move. He waved his hand in the baby’s face, as the doctor had done. The baby didn’t respond. He gave its foot a squeeze and it stayed perfectly still.

‘Fascinating,’ he said breathily. Seneca rolled her eyes. The scene was still for a few moments – the doctor awkwardly proffering the baby, the bearded man and the man with the cross hovering over it, hands to their mouth, as if to cover up the fact that neither of them knew what to say. ‘So…’ said the doctor, his arms beginning to tire, ‘You’ve seen similar symptoms before, then?’ ‘Symptoms?’ said the man with the silver cross. ‘Well, yes, cases.’ said the doctor. ‘Medically, of course, he’s in perfect health.’ Seneca’s husband narrowed his eyes. ‘So, have you encountered anything… like this, then?’ the doctor asked again, a little terse. ‘Oh, yes, I should think so,’ started the bearded man gruffly. The doctor blinked quickly a few times. ‘Oh?’ he stuttered. ‘Real-‐ly?’ ‘Why, yes! There was a distinguished man in my parish once – just stopped speaking one day.’ A pause. ‘Right.’ The doctor looked uncertainly around the room, all at once feeling like this had been a ridiculous idea. ‘And so what happened to this… man…?’ ‘Well, the doctor diagnosed him with laryngitis,’ the bearded man’s voice reverberated around the room, ‘and he got well again.’ Seneca bit the insides of her mouth. The second, cross-‐wearing man frowned, pinching his chin with a knuckle and thumb, and leaned forward conspirationally. ‘Is there a chance that this baby has laryngitis?’ he asked. The doctor stared at him blankly. ‘Actually,’ he started, ‘actually no, the baby is in perfect health.’ The first two men started nodding briskly and speaking in low, serious voices. ‘Right.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I see.’ ‘How troubling.’ ‘Yes.’ said the doctor, with finality. ‘Yes.’ The room was still again. ‘Look,’ said the third man after a while, the first thing he had said since coming into the room. The gathering turned to look at him, startled. ‘May I?’ He asked. The doctor handed him the baby. Amid mounting protests he pinched the baby’s wrist, blew roughly in its face, and shook it up and down. The doctor looked horrified. ‘Adam!’ ‘Look,’ said Adam again, ‘I’d say it’s just not conscious.’

The room quietened down. ‘Pardon?’ said the doctor. Adam sighed. ‘Limited consciousness.’ Seneca’s husband looked at her. She looked at the doctor. The doctor looked at Adam. Adam looked at everyone. The first two men looked at each other. The nurse looked at the floor. ‘And what’s that?’ asked Seneca, after a long pause. Adam made a short tutting noise. ‘Not enough consciousness to go around. Record numbers of births. Usually they don’t carry to term, but sometimes they are born. Then… this. He’s not conscious. He has no consciousness.’ Adam gestured with the baby matter-‐of-‐fact-‐ly. Seneca, her husband, the doctor and the nurse stared at him. The first two men nodded their heads knowledgeably. ‘Wait, you believe this?’ the doctor looked at them incredulously. They paused, and then quickly shook their heads. The doctor threw up a hand in despair, turning away. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ said Seneca’s husband shortly. ‘You’re making it up.’ ‘Sure it does,’ Adam replied, with an odd sense of assurance. ‘Growing population, more people being born than dying, growing life expectancies… It’s all in circulation. Pussy’s bow stuff.’ ‘Right, okay,’ said Seneca suddenly, ‘so we just have to wait for sometime to die? And then he’ll just spring to life? Is that what you’re saying?’ ‘Sort of,’ said Adam mildly. ‘Well?!’ He flinched. ‘You have to wait for enough people to die… there are probably babies like this all over the world… you could think of it as a ‘turn’ system, I guess…’ ‘No thanks.’ said the husband, looking away in disgust. ‘Alright,’ started the doctor. ‘I think that’s probably enough for today. Let’s give the parents some rest.’ Adam shrugged his rumpled shoulders and handed the baby back to the doctor, who handed him to Seneca. The three men left, followed by the nurse. ‘Thanks,’ Seneca called unenthusiastically after them. One hand on the doorknob, the doctor leaned back into the room. ‘I do apologise,’ he said, looking sheepish. ‘Adam’s relatively new… We’ll run some more tests in the morning.’ he pulled the door shut with a clack. Seneca and her husband quickly became used to their son’s unusual temperament. Seneca had got into the habit of holding him always at her ready breast, as he would give no indication of hunger before becoming malnourished. Eventually they had a special sling made. Each night they put him into his cot and checked him exactly three times, spaced five minutes apart, until he fell asleep. He woke up each

morning at 6:47 and slept four times a day. After a while they began to think of him as just a particularly cooperative child. One day, several months later, Seneca and her husband woke in the night to a baby crying. They were startled at first, but quickly clambered out of bed and into his room. They peered down into his cot – inside, in the dark, their son was flailing his little balled fists, kicking his legs, and screaming his lungs out like it was the first time he was using them. Which, of course, it was. Seneca brought the baby into the hospital for shots when he was two. She and her husband had planned a holiday – the packing was done, the flights booked – and it was the first time since he’d been born that the baby had been back to the place. Like Seneca’s labour the first time around, the visit was short and medically uncomplicated. Adam passed Seneca and her son in the corridor on their way out. He had grown a scraggly beard since last they met, and Seneca did not recognise him at first. He approached her, they exchanged pleasantries, he mentioned he had become a missionary. Seneca introduced him to her son. The boy’s eyes gleamed as he vigorously shook Adam’s hand. Adam looked at him, smiling.

Aziah Williamson The Wisdom of Goldfish The summer rain tapped haikus on the leaves of all the trees, veiling the garden in a wet grey shroud. Overlaying the watery background percussion came the steps of small, gumboot-‐clad feet, moving forward a few paces, stopping, going on again. The rain never concerned Sachiko. Nothing concerned her these days, neither Doctor Yamamoto’s insistence she leave the care of the garden to another, on account of her condition, and nor her condition, especially. Her only real concern was the garden. There was pruning to be done, after all, and weeding, and any number of chores to keep it alive. The garden was the jewel of her home, manicured with a precision usually only reserved for ikebana, or flower arranging, yet with a Zen-‐like simplicity that gave visitors a taste of perfect serenity, removed from the stressful modern world. It was large and circular, bordered by such high stands of bamboo they were once the tallest things on the street, until the apartment block was erected two decades and two blocks away. Stands of oak and maple, interspersed with azalea bushes, followed the path of a narrow stream which could be crossed by way of a small arched bridge before terminating at a waterfall at the western boundary. Two cherry blossom trees stood at the garden’s centre, limbs outstretched over a large pond, for which there was no input of fresh water but the rain itself. Perfectly round, it bore no decoration. No lilies, no water grasses, no rocks, nothing to interrupt the path of the fish that inhabited it: two fat old koi, circling and interweaving, circling and interweaving, tirelessly, endlessly, day after day. One was larger than the other, with scales a brassy, burnished colour like old copper or bronze, while the other, ordinarily bright silver, was today a dull grey. It mirrored the sky; the other, the sun. Sachiko fed them at dawn. It was noon now, or thereabouts. Sachiko rarely consulted the clock on the wall in the living room. Time to her now was of no real consequence. What changed with its passing beyond the walls of her garden was now as remote as the stars or the moon. A long time had passed since Sachiko had last crossed the threshold, thirty years perhaps, but her withdrawal from the outside world had been gradual, a slow dawning of awareness that of all the goings-‐on out there, she had no desire to be part of any of them. Time simply flowed around her like a river around a rock, unmoved and immoveable. If not as eternal. Yamakawa-‐san. Doctor Yamamoto’s face was grave that afternoon in the gazebo, where Sachiko met guests. If you do not get treatment soon, you will die within the year. Sachiko just sipped her tea and said calmly I will die whether I get treatment or not, in the end. Isn’t that the way of things?

The garden had lived for sixty years. In that time, the bamboo had risen to such a height that it all but blocked out the sight of the city skyline as it changed. When Sachiko was a young woman, newly married, she had immediately set to work on its construction, and aside from a brief hiatus caused by the birth of her son, its maintenance had continued unabated ever since. Plants had been moved and replaced if they died, but the general design remained the same: a pair of concentric stone paths spiralling toward the centre and ending at the sakura trees at the edge of the pond. The only real alteration came with the arrival of the fish, but that was not something Sachiko had brought about. Where the pond had been empty before, one day they were simply there, as if they had always been. She took it as a matter of course; besides, they provided an odd sort of company, swimming the way they did, peacefully and diligently, like there was nothing more important to them in all the world. It was some time before she realised their strangeness. The fish had been with her three months or so, much of her time in those days spent nursing the injured and radiation-‐sick. Before marriage, Sachiko had been a nurse at the largest general hospital in the city, but this was a sickness she had never before faced: people wasting away before her eyes, who days before had been healthy. Their hair falling out, often their teeth as well. Swollen, bleeding gums that reduced their cries to muffled moans. Skin lesions, necrosis. She made them as comfortable as possible and conducted what small ministrations she could, but the doctors were as ignorant as she of the mysterious illness. The worst of all her patients, however, the ones for whom she could offer only a kind word, were the burn victims, those caught in the city’s centre at the moment of the explosion. Never had she looked upon another human with revulsion before, but when they came to her, their skin hanging off them like grotesque kimono, melted and distorted, crying out in unspeakable agony, she would look away in fear. Finally her sense of duty forced her hand, but there was little to be done. When they realised that too, their numbers thinned and they wandered off into some future in which she had no part. Up until a week after the blast she would still be opening her door to a desperate mother clutching a dying child and begging for help. The first several weeks were a flurry of activity that over time had become little more than an indistinct blur. Sixteen, eighteen hour days, after which she would collapse onto her futon, dazed and exhausted, only to wake a few hours later and do it all again. For a time the unreality could be ignored, the grief postponed, and for that Sachiko supposed she was grateful, but one day, a few months after, she arrived at the hospital only to be sent home again. You are clearly fatigued, Yamakawa-‐san, the head doctor had told her, go home and rest. She had protested, of course, but the doctor’s word was final, so she had walked home, a journey of over an hour through a landscape as nightmarish as it was familiar. Fortunately, she lived far enough from the city centre that her immediate neighbourhood had been only moderately damaged; her home, at the end of her street, was almost untouched, as if the hands of her ancestors had reached down to shield it. When she arrived, she passed right through the empty house without even pausing to remove her shoes, and followed the spiralling stone path through the garden to the pond. The fish were there, as they had been for the past few months. The big gold one and the smaller

silver, swimming as they always did, in a figure-‐eight pattern. On reaching it, Sachiko’s strength failed her and she dropped to her knees at the water’s edge. Her proximity didn’t disturb the fish in the slightest. They didn’t seem to notice her presence at all. She watched them a moment, then, tentatively, reached towards the water and cautiously dipped a finger in, hoping to startle them, craving the acknowledgement. Instantly, ripples spread out from the point of contact, spanning out to lap against the edges, and, as if by some command, the fish stilled. A vision began to take their place, and Sachiko blinked hard several times before she realised that her vision wasn’t failing her. The fish were vanishing before her eyes and something else was taking their place. A scene, a cityscape, covered the surface of the water like it was a film projector screen. Frightened, she pulled her hand back, and as soon as she did, the vision faded and only the fish occupied the pond once more, swimming calmly. It was some time before she tried again, and when she did it was not a city she saw but faces. Two familiar faces so dear and so painful to look upon that she turned away, the first hot tears stinging her eyes. They never grew less painful, the visions—she simply learned to bear them, given time. So much time. So much pain, she could fill oceans. No one had seen them. Masashi had taken Soichiro out for a walk that morning, Sachiko knew, but where she couldn’t begin to guess. So after some of the dust had settled and she could leave the house, she went searching, travelling almost the entire length and breadth of the ward, and further, towards the heart of the city, even though she desperately hoped they had not strayed so far. Along the way, she helped pull children out of the rubble, some Soichiro’s age, and saw families tearfully reunited. The sight rubbed at her soul until it was nothing but a raw, weeping stump. The memories washed in like the tide this summer day in the garden. They always did this time of year. The rain had slowed to a sun-‐shower, the golden disk peering from behind the clouds at last. Sachiko concluded that it would be a fine afternoon, if a humid one, as she squinted into the bright sky, the deep lines of her face contracting. Turning back to her garden, she took her shears from her gardening apron, knelt stiffly and examined the plant stretching to knee height. It was a small azalea bush, only planted the week before, but already beginning to wither and brown in the summer heat, the fine rain falling too late now to save it. It was the first of August, and the heat had been oppressive for weeks, enough to make her work in preserving the trees and other plants, a strenuous occupation. But labour invigorated Sachiko, and as she trimmed the dead stems from the azalea and sprinkled a handful of fertilizer from a bucket at her feet, she felt at peace. With herself, with the world, even with the sounds of traffic to the east, no longer drowned out by the rain. She rose, dusted herself off, returned the pruning shears to her apron, and went back towards the house for a cup of tea. Every day it was the same— first she would check on

the condition of the plants, then perhaps skim the leaves out of the pool into which the little stream flowed and prune the bushes lining the stone paths back into a spherical perfection if a leaf or a stem strayed from her design. Finally, when her work was complete, she would make tea and sit on the little bench by the pond. After a time, she would ask them a question. And the koi would answer, in their peculiar way. ‘Tell me’ she said, ‘how long now?’ As always, she leaned forward in her seat and placed a quivering index finger into the water, disturbing its glassy surface. The rain had stopped barely ten minutes before, and the copper fish caught the rays of the emerging sun, reflecting dazzling gold into her eyes as the silver flashed and twinkled with every flick of its large tail. With Sachiko’s touch, the fish stilled, the water turned opaque, and an image resolved itself. It was Sachiko, sitting where she was now, head bowed over the pond. With a sigh, she lifted her hand from the water and sat back in her seat, the vision dissolving the moment contact was broken. Serenely as ever, the fish resumed their course. The next day, the second of August, was the same. Sachiko tended the garden, made a cup of tea, and asked the two fish her question. Again, they showed her the image of herself, alone, staring down into the pond, just like it was a mirror. And again, the next day, the third. And the fourth. Time flowed around her, ceaseless like a stream, while Sachiko was still as a rock. Her pillow was wet when she woke up. She didn’t know where it came from, either nose or mouth. At first she thought, irrationally, that it was the radiation sickness, and her gums had bled while she slept, but it wasn’t, and they hadn’t. It had been too long, nearly fifty years. She had dreamed of fire and pain. Distorted people walking through clouds of ash, all melted like the wax of a candle, terrifying ghouls. She had seen them, Masashi dragging little Soichiro, injured, the boy screaming , his ruined, burned face pooling in rivers down the dome of his skull— It wasn’t blood that had drenched the pillow after all. Shaking, face damp and sticky with sorrow, Sachiko rose, wrapped a robe about herself, and went out into the garden. It was under the bright crescent moon that she came to know she was dying. On the fifth day, Sachiko found she could not get out of bed. Her arms were too weak to lift, and her legs unable to support her weight. She called Doctor Yamamoto. While he performed all the futile little courtesies she would allow him, Sachiko asked ‘Could you check the garden for me? There is a dying azalea.’

The old doctor shook his head wearily. ‘Worrying about a flower in your condition, Yamakawa-‐san. That garden has stolen your life away.’ ‘No. It was taken long ago.’ The following day, the sixth of August, Sachiko woke feeling astonishingly, rebelliously, alive. It was the sixtieth anniversary. She dressed quickly, and then, stepping into her gumboots, went out into the garden. Somehow she expected it to have declined in her brief absence, but her usual inspection revealed nothing odd. The azalea was even still hanging on to life—in fact, it looked better than it had two days ago. The sun beat down remorselessly, but Sachiko enjoyed its heat, surveying her garden with the satisfaction of an artisan after a job well done. At noon she made her tea and went visiting company. The path down to the pond seemed longer today, but when she got there, she found it had really taken no time at all. ‘Hello, old friends.’ The koi appeared to be swimming more leisurely than usual. Sachiko sat and sipped her tea, following their movements through drowsy eyes. She was tired now, after the morning’s work, the vigour and energy she had felt on waking long since diminished. All that remained was the question. ‘Tell me, is it today?’ It was a low bench, such that she could reach over and touch the water without exertion, but she waited until she had finished her tea before she prompted the fish to reveal their secrets, patiently. A virtue acquired after a lifetime of waiting. ‘Show me their faces’ she implored, breaking the surface with a gnarled finger, ‘let me see them again.’ She had never given them a direct request before, but when nothing happened, she sat back in her seat, not puzzled, not perturbed, just sad in a way she had not been in sixty years. It was a raw sensation, not the dull pain she had since become accustomed to, and it brought with it memories long buried. A joke shared, a petty argument, a long hot summer’s night in the garden. The onslaught was so sudden, so overwhelming, the tears were coursing down her furrowed cheeks before she could feel their wetness. ‘You showed them to me once before’ Sachiko said hoarsely, her old voice cracking with sorrow, ‘so why not today, of all days?’ The fish didn’t answer. An errant cloud covered the sun. The light reflecting off the surface of the pond winked out like a thousand extinguished candles. Sachiko looked up. The cloud reminded her of another, sixty years ago today. That cloud had accompanied weaker nuclear forces than the sun, she knew, but those had been all the more devastating for their proximity. And like that dark cloud, long since dissipated, this was the only cloud in the whole sky. She blinked as unwelcome pain welled up inside her and overflowed from her eyes. Her body trembled, all the exertions of the morning finally threatening to overwhelm her. The ground pitched and rolled in a fit of vertigo, and, gasping, Sachiko fell painfully to her knees at the water’s edge. Her vision was blurred, but not from dizziness. She dashed the tears away.

One stray droplet landed in the pond, sending out tiny, almost invisible ripples, and the koi, in unspoken acquiescence, stilled. A vision formed, but one unlike those of previous days. In it, Sachiko was sitting at the edge of the pond, much as she was now, but that wasn’t the remarkable thing. For the first time, she wasn’t alone. Masashi and Soichiro were there, the boy with his little toy boat bobbing merrily on the surface of the pond. Puzzled, Sachiko just stared. Her vision-‐self was laughing. Masashi patted his son’s head good-‐naturedly. She was seeing their last afternoon together, before immense forces, guided by some unseen mortal hand, stole them away. The vision faded. The sun, like the house lights after a stage play, burst free of the cloud and bathed its light over the garden again. Suddenly, Sachiko felt very tired. The warmth made her sleepy, peacefully so, in a way she hadn’t felt for a long time. The stones beneath her were warm, and she laid her head down on them, watching through lidded eyes the dazzling sky dance of the fish. Twining in motion without beginning or end. Aloof, distant, they reflected the sun like they reflected her affections. Yet it was they, the silent sentinels, who were the only witnesses as old Sachiko, buoyed by the newfound lightness in her heart, closed her eyes and followed the ceaseless flow of eternity

Danae Williams Chronic The decision had been made. Moving into a cramped apartment with unsettling stains on the carpet seemed necessary. Sharing said apartment with a hyperactive, fridge-‐raiding philosophy student nicknamed Lemongrass also seemed necessary. This was the beginning of something big. David felt himself on the edge of a breakthrough. The tips of his fingers tingled on the clacking keyboard. At the back of his mind he maintained a vague awareness of the girl who wanted his love – the girl waiting on the couch wearing nothing but a wisp of silk – but he was so close. And this was their future. This was what he had quit his job to do. “Hey, Mr Workaholic,” she said. “I'll be done soon.” Even as his fingers pounded the keyboard, he marvelled at her patience. Jane had paid his rent for over a year. Every night she came home from work to find him clacking away like some sort of mad scientist, and every night she made dinner, even though it made more sense for him to have it ready for her.

“You're like a robot the way you work. I'm gonna call you Davebot 85.” “Davebot 85 at your service,” David said, doing his best to sound like a machine. “At my service? Come over here then, Davebot 85.”

“I'll seriously be done soon, J.” “You haven't even looked at those rissoles.” “Rissoles?” The plate beside David's mousepad suddenly made itself obvious. He couldn't remember Jane bringing him any food. Plucking a rissole from the pile, he tried to remember if he had said “thanks” or at least smiled in acknowledgement. He was too excited to eat, but he stuffed the rissole into his mouth to make her happy.

“Come to bed, Davey.” David knew what that meant, but the thought of abandoning his task agitated him. Even when she threw her shiny black underwear at his head, his attention remained fixed on the screen. He had been castrated by his own productivity – his obsession. In an effort to buy more time, he promised to stop in half an hour. Jane said nothing when half an hour came and went, which made him feel like a child getting away with something naughty. At some point she fell asleep, leaving him to carry on guilt-‐free. He only stopped when his eyelids began to

droop. If he could have pushed himself on through the night, he would have, but the quality of his work depended on adequate rest and a clear head. The rissoles looked appetising all of a sudden. He bit into one to find it had gone cold and hard. He wished he had eaten them earlier. Jane looked good in her silken nightie. She always curled up in a ball when she slept. Standing up from his chair, he wondered how he could have ever turned her down. It seemed like a crime to keep such a creature waiting. As he lay down beside her, he thought about the fact that she was far too good for him. Not only was she beautiful, but she was going places. Her films won awards. Some government department had hired her to make a documentary about something or other. She paid his rent, even though he was a fully qualified software engineer. Men loved her. Despite knowing all of this, other thoughts quickly pushed to the front of his mind. Thoughts about potential clients and structures and interfaces. Thoughts that kept him awake, even though his body yearned for rest. Years of battling insomnia had taught him nothing about how to shut down at the end of the night. The first rays of sun tickled his skin as he finally drifted to sleep. Jane had already left for work when he woke up a few hours later. He wished he could have given her a kiss goodbye.

Jane used to believe in David's project. She supported him without complaint, even though it meant moving into one of the scary suburbs and only turning on the heater for a little while each day. She cut back on buying all those expensive beauty products she loved. Her time in the shower halved. She only went to dinner with friends once a fortnight. Deep down David knew she was slipping through his fingers. She had bigger and better things to do. More attractive, less demanding men offered her fresher, more available love all the time. If he hadn't been so driven by his obsession, he might have been able to prevent it. That night he heard her laughing in the living room with Lemongrass – laughing and laughing and laughing. Something in her laugh distracted him from his work. There was something in it. She never laughed like that for him anymore. Wanting to investigate, he went to the fridge for some milk. Jane sat beside Lemongrass on the couch in front of the TV. They had muted the sound in order to make up funny conversations between the people in the ads. They giggled at each other as they spoke for a middle-‐aged couple advertising insurance. “I got massive bollocks,” Lemongrass said. “How massive?” Jane asked.

“Huuuge. Like two hairy beach balls.” “Can I see?”

“Sure, if you buy insurance.” They burst into laughter when the advertisement came to an end. David considered joining them, but he was so close to finishing a chunk of work. He promised himself that as soon as he had gotten to a certain point, he would take Lemongrass' place on that couch. Until then, he was glad for someone to keep Jane company. They continued to laugh and talk and enjoy each other when he returned to his computer. At some point Jane brought him a bowl of steaming pasta, and he made sure to thank her this time. He tried to hold her gaze as he took the bowl, but she spun on her heel and hurried back to Lemongrass after no more than a distracted “Enjoy!” At bedtime she tried again to lure him from his work. He surrendered out of fear, knowing too many rejections would make her feel neglected and unwanted. Even as she fondled his belt buckle, he found himself thinking about new features he might add to the project. She abandoned the buckle with a frustrated sigh when he failed to look enthusiastic. “That project is consuming you, Davey.” David hung his head. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm getting kind of sick of it.” “It's gonna make us a lot of money. I've got people interested.” “I don't care about money. I care about enjoying myself.” “We can enjoy ourselves more once we have the money. We might not have to work again for several years if this takes off. It's hard now, but it's going to be great later. You just have to be patient.” Jane rolled over and told David to do whatever he wanted. Feeling guilty, he returned to his computer in silence. For a brief moment he thought he heard something like stifled crying. He looked at Jane, then back at the screen, then back to Jane. The ping of a notification stopped him from going to her. A chat message from a potential client flashed before his eyes. He typed an immediate response, his skin tingling with excitement. He had probably just imagined the crying

anyway.

The day Jane left with Lemongrass, a potential client offered David a large sum of money in exchange for a three-‐year product licence. Jane's abandonment stung David beneath the joy of his success. Somewhere beneath the fantasies of money, success, and freedom, a feeling of having lost something precious lingered. He spared five minutes in the shower to sob uncontrollably. She used to call him a workaholic, but he only truly became addicted to work after that. He drowned himself in it. When he wasn't working, he felt like smashing things and yelling. Work kept him sane. Now that he needed to pay his own rent, he realised how little money he had. The clock was ticking. Ten-‐hour days turned into twelve-‐hour days, and twelve-‐hour days turned into fourteen-‐ hour days. Eventually it got to the point where he just slept three or four hours at some point during the day before getting up, making a jug of coffee, and going back to work. He rented Lemongrass' room out to a South African student called Robbie when things got desperate. Robbie liked to blast electropop through the apartment and smoke a pack a day. He watched unsettling films by a schizophrenic Russian director and drank cider. His hair hung at his shoulders in greasy brown waves. Overall David liked him. They always greeted each other whenever David left his room to get milk from the fridge. That afternoon the milk smelled funny, so he opted for orange juice instead. A high-‐pitched whining sound stole his attention as he poured himself a glass. A mangy dog blinked at him from the doorway of Robbie's bedroom. “Um...” He looked at Robbie on the couch. “Why's there a dog in your room?” “A what?” Robbie said distractedly. “A dog.” “Where?” “In your room.” “Is there?” David laughed out of frustration. “You can't have a dog in your room. The landlord doesn't allow pets. You have to get rid of it.” “I don't have a dog, mate. It must've wandered in.”

David found Robbie's lack of concern annoying. Clearing his throat, he picked up the television remote and turned off the screen. Robbie looked up at him from a box of cold pizza, his bushy eyebrows raised in amusement.

“Can you get the dog out, please?” Robbie smirked. “You're so uptight, mate.” He tapped the space on the couch beside him. “Siddown.” “I'm working at the moment.” “Just sit down, dude.” More confused than annoyed, David sat on the couch and awaited further instruction. Robbie pulled a little bag of white powder from the pocket of his jumper. “This'll help you get shit done,” he said, waving the bag in front of David's face. “You won't need to sleep, and you won't need to eat. When I've had a hit of this, my productivity goes through the roof.”

“What is that?” “I like to call it Charlie. First one free?” David frowned at the offer, his head shaking from side to side. He had a bit of a history with drugs, and he didn't particularly want to go down that path again. Cocaine had never been on his to-‐ do list anyway.

“I'm drug-‐free these days.” “Shame.” Robbie shrugged. “Well, if you change your mind.” David stood up. This was all a bit much. How had he gone from living with his beautiful girlfriend to living with a greasy South African cokehead so quickly? He told Robbie once more to get the dog out of the house, then left the room in a hurry. This was all just a bit too much.

David felt himself slowing down as the day went on. That little bag of white powder came to his mind in moments of fatigue. It came to him whenever his body told him he needed to stop, or whenever his mind told him he was going to fail. Chemical stimulation, he thought, could be a very productive thing – he knew this from his own experimentation. At 3am, when his brain finally turned to mush, he went outside in search of milk. The mangy dog whined at him from beside the couch. Smiling innocently, Robbie stroked the dog's ears.

“Changed your mind about Charlie?” “I told you to get rid of that dog.” “Have a heart, mate. It's raining.” Milk spilled all over the counter beside David's glass as he poured – a symptom of his body and mind shutting down. He thought about Robbie's offer. He thought about how great it would be if he could just push himself through the night. Maybe there was nothing wrong with a little help from Charlie now and again. Responsible drug use never hurt anybody. As long as he only did it once or twice, he would be fine. He sat on the couch beside Robbie with a nervous smile. Robbie ruffled the dog's ears. “I called him Lysander.” David huffed a laugh. “So listen –” “You want that Charlie, right?” David hesitated, then nodded. “I knew you'd change your mind. I could see it in your eyes. You snorted anything before?” “Ketamine.” Robbie took out the little bag with a knowing smile. David knew what to do, and he knew what to expect. For some reason he felt self-‐concious snorting the powder in front of Robbie, but he did it without a moment's hesitation. The high flushed through him in waves, starting at his toes and rising up. Robbie laughed, so he laughed too. An intense feeling of optimism came over him. Everything was going to be okay. No, more than okay. It was going to be fantastic. He was fantastic. “My project is nearly finished,” he said eagerly. “That's great, mate.” “I have three potential clients,” he continued, talking more at Robbie than to Robbie. “One's offering a shitload of money. I'm going to be so rich once this gets off the ground. I'm going to be so rich. And I'm so close. I'm so close. I've come so far and I'm nearly there. Shit, man, if Jane had only waited. She has no idea how amazing it's going to be. I don't even need her, because I'm going to be so rich anyway.”

“Yeah, man. Definitely.” David grinned at the feeling of his body flushing with energy. He felt new and vibrant and full of life. He wondered why he had ever felt tired in the first place. Thanking Robbie, he sprung up from the couch and hurried to his computer. He was going to get so much done. So much.

All the walls in his way had been knocked down. All the shackles restraining him had shattered. His fingers danced across the keyboard. Code poured on to the screen line after line. He had never felt better in his entire life. The high wore off after about twenty minutes, but he remained energised and productive as the sun rose outside. He returned to the lounge room later in the morning, half hoping to find Robbie lying on the couch. Lysander whined at him. He thought the dog might be hungry, so he lured it to the kitchen with a slab of steak. As he watched it snaffle up the meat, he realised he hadn't eaten in almost two days.

* David lost himself more with each day that passed. Every night when his body began to shut down, he scored a hit of coke from Robbie to perk himself up. He didn't mind spending the money if it meant the whole thing would be over soon. He cut back on food to help pay for it – he wasn't hungry anyway. During one of his comedowns, he realised he hadn't seen anyone other than Robbie for months. That seemed impossible. When the money started rolling in, he would be able to be the person he truly wanted to be. Maybe Jane would come back to him. The coke fed his insomnia. Sometimes he went for days at a time without sleeping. His body complained with little aches and pains. The main problem was keeping the headaches at bay, but he took plenty of painkillers for that. He emptied a packet a day. One morning, after a particularly intense session, he fainted on his way to the kitchen. Robbie found him passed out in front of the bathroom door, but decided not to call an ambulance – too risky. When David recovered, he took another hit of coke and returned to his computer, where an unpleasant surprise awaited him – a message titled “It's Off” from one of his potential clients. His heart raced as he read it.

Hi David,

We're going to have to withdraw our offer. A much larger company has just released a very similar piece of software to yours and it's half the price. I don't think you're going to be able to

compete, but best of luck.

Michael P.

David's breathing grew increasingly heavy as he stared at the message. Rage pooled in his fingertips as they trembled over the keyboard. Grunting angrily, he stood up and paced the room. It couldn't have all been for nothing. It was all too much. Colours blended into each other as his vision blurred. An overwhelming dizziness threw him to one side, making him stumble into the wall. A smell of burning toast filled his nostrils. He tried to call for Robbie, but his voice came out strained. The last thing he heard was the sound of his own body hitting the cold floor.

His eyes flickered open to fluorescent lights. Unfamiliar voices came from all directions. A face appeared above his own, bright and smiling. An angel's face.

“You're in good hands, Mr Walt. You've suffered a minor stroke.” The news pinned David against the bed like a weight. A stroke? At his age? He opened his mouth to speak, but he lacked the strength. “Drug use can sometimes raise the risk of stroke. Also chronic insomnia.” The nurse placed a cold hand on David's forearm. “You're on the road to recovery now, Mr Walt. You just relax. The doctor will be here soon.” When the nurse left him alone, David stared out the window at a pair of kids kicking a ball around outside. They looked so alive. He realised that's exactly what he hadn't been over the past couple of years. He thought he should feel stupid. Or irresponsible. Or gullible. But what he really felt was relieved. The money he had lost now seemed of little consequence. The money he could have made mattered even less. Life had given him a second chance.

VISUAL ART

Prize Winner: Rin Rin Ly

Samuel Guthrie

Erin Walsh 6 Years and Counting

Elise Horspool

Adam Spence Spring A Web