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Story

'Metal language', a new story by Beejay Silcox

by •
June–July 2019, no. 412
Story

'Metal language', a new story by Beejay Silcox

by •
June–July 2019, no. 412

I am a girl who knows how to hold a gun. On weekends, Dad drives me out to the pistol club, while Mum pulls white-sapped weeds from the garden. She plants natives that can handle the salt in the air; angular, bristling plants with angular, bristling names: banksia, grevillea, bottlebrush. A line of Geraldton Wax along the verge to replace some mean and blighted rose bushes. She knows we won’t stay long enough to see them tall. We never stay. She plants them anyway.

There is always a pistol club, and so I pack my gun box and Dad and I drive out, away from the wind-churned coast and deep into the canola. In a converted dairy shed we stand next to each other and shoot at paper targets alongside sharp-eyed farmers and retired cops. They are men with enormous hands and wide, sun-ruddy faces, and they are always watching me. There’s never been a girl in the shed. Wives, sometimes; sons, often. But the men never bring their daughters. A girl is alchemy. I change something, curdle it.

‘First time for everything,’ they say.

And there is.

‘Show us what you can do, sweetheart,’ they say.

And I do.

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Beejay Silcox

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, the Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival, and chair of the 2024 Stella Prize. She was also the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The New York Times. Her award-winning short stories have been published at home and abroad, and have been selected for a number of Australian anthologies.

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Comments (3)

  • Such a wonderful story! You are an amazing storyteller Beejay.
    Posted by Isabella Pineo
    02 May 2019
  • I loved this story.
    Such an immersive experience. The writing evokes memories - sounds, smells, tastes of the coast and the bush ... of family and expectations and belonging.
    Of earlier years of questioning my place in the greater scheme of things.
    Of the confidence and contentment of being happy with myself.
    Thanks Beejay
    Posted by Rod Nunn
    27 April 2019
  • This is such a clever short story. Those who still remember Randolf Stow will get their little dose of Geraldton Wax. Those who love the smell of gun oil will have that virtual olfactory experience. The readers who can relate to the Mother planting a garden that she will never see mature will see that for what it is in their own lives. However, the diamond in this story is about a subtle, different view of gender that the cut-out male shapes would never have experienced before.
    I guess I must do something about my red hands pocked with skin-cancer scars though!
    Posted by Dr Neil MacNeill
    25 April 2019

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