Short Stories
We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take ...
... (read more)She says it was a man, an old man (but all men are old to her), which man, what did he look like, what was he wearing, what did he do ...
... (read more)Before the ceremony began, the woman with hairy legs and an air of having just abandoned a cigarette wandered as though at a party to the coffin where – though it was impossible and not so – Clelia’s mother, Margaret, was. Three days ago, four days ago, Clelia had said to her mother, ‘Come and see the blossom I’ve brought back.’ She had just returned to Sydney after a three-week absence in the mountains.
‘Can’t it come to me?’
‘No,’ she said gaily, insistently, not thinking really, never wondering. ‘No, you’ll have to come out here. It’s so tall. I can’t move the vase.’
... (read more)Jolley Prize 2015 (Winner): 'The Elector of Nossnearly' by Rob Magnuson Smith
One by one the Shetlands had emptied. Father said we had to make ourselves known or we were next. He was trying to get into the Scottish Stud Book and Elector was his answer. I didn’t care. I just wanted to ride Chicken.
...It takes more than half an hour to put on all the layers of the dry suit. First the woollen thermals, then the thick undersuit and the neoprene seals around the neck and wrists. Finally, the membrane shell. All this before we even look for the hole in the ice. By the time we hit the water we are as plump and blubber-thick as the more cold-adapted creatures: se ...
I trace my encounters with time travel to perdurantism and poetry. In the spring of 1981, I was appointed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado to probe a wormhole, an undertaking of ambitious design which would allow information to travel faster than the speed of light. As the universe was changing, the preparations were endless. O ...
Georgie heard it too. On the very first morning of this story, though so much had gone beforehand. The usual warbling of the typical magpies, if anything so mysteriously complex as a magpie’s song can be called typical. There she’d lie, day after day, alongside Muir in their countless beds, in cramped corner flats and large creaking homesteads, in cold fibro shacks and bedsits baking for the lack of ventilation, listening to the warbling giving birth to the light upon its loom: the many coloured strands of light that, no matter where they were, began each ordinary day. Muir would hurrumph in bed – he was a cranky sleeper; he dreamt of his novels’ characters, he told her, was not to be disturbed, except for sex – his thick freckled shoulder would rise against her and she would sigh and listen, to the coming of the light, until it was eventually strong enough for her to muster the energy and get the kids ready for school. More often than not it was a new school.
... (read more)He was a man with a pinboard, and that boosted him a hundred points in her nervy evaluation, the first night she saw his room. On the pinboard were tickets, a laminated backstage pass, a wrapper from a Swiss chocolate, all those things that could wait for drowsy burbling nocturnal stories in the dark, the recounting of Times Before Her recited off like threaded bead ...