Short Stories
Certain days: it is easy to imagine this small, once-prosperous river town (barely distinct from many other small, once prosperous river towns) as if you are only passing through it, shunpiking the thruways in favour of the scenic rural two-lanes on a road trip in your better, your best life. The life in which your formidable boxer-turned-human-rights-lawyer wife has simply pointed to this town on a much misfolded map and declared: Here, lunch.
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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 ...
The Hair
Tom wasn’t supposed to bring the wig home; it was peeled from his scalp like a banana skin every night. Then it was arranged on a faceless polystyrene head that sat in front of his dressing room mirror.
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In the car we wound around the bay, which, on the map, made the shape of an ear with a tear-shaped island off the coast like a jewel earring. My mother and I were going to see the lighthouse out on the cape – or what was left of it anyway, which was not much, she told me, but stones and rubble ...
... (read more)Jolley Prize 2018 (Shortlisted): 'Between the Mountain and the Sea' by Sharmini Aphrodite
It was the first thing she noticed: all the clocks had stopped. She only mentioned it when she was shown to the dining table and the woman – his grandmother – placed in front of her a glass of bandung, bright pink and sweating. Thanking her, she held the glass, the chill of it shocking the heat of her palm ...
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Before I learnt the language of map-making, the word cadastre sounded like a timbre or a cadence. It was a momentous drum, a hollow ratatat. Bone, fire, dirt, stone. Like a shout, a ring, a knock, a blow. But when I learned maps, I discovered cadastre meant the legal boundary. There was no sound to it at all, only lines ...
... (read more)That winter it was bad and he often woke a little before midnight with his teeth aching and he would dress quickly and walk through the snow for an hour or so and later, when he came home, he saw the lights burning softly at her window. She didn’t seem to sleep much. Sometimes he stopped in the hallway and listened at her door but there was little to hear. Once he heard the squeak of a cork but there weren’t any voices and he liked the thought of her having a late night drink, alone, while the building slept.
... (read more)You are meeting with your PhD supervisor. You’re in his office – there’s a desk, books, framed degrees, and a wife, also framed. And there’s you and your supervisor seated on opposite sides of his desk. You’ve just completed the first confirmation for your PhD. Confirmation had once made you think of young girls in white tulle dresses, of people who have faith. At university, confirmation is when the school deems whether or not your research is viable to continue. It may not be if your theory isn’t new enough, or your proposal is too ambitious or it’s half-cooked, or maybe you’ve not been working hard enough, or maybe you’re a stupid girl. There are a number of reasons why the university may not have faith in you.
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