Short Stories
I worked for a while with the second cousin of an acquaintance of the notorious Minean nationalist poet, H ...
Ray was stuck in traffic, an unusual feeling in a town the size of his, inching forward through a detour round the railway crossing. He watched the orange text changing on the roadside electronic billboard in the kind of trance he had recently found himself lapsing into more and more. TRACK UPGRADE he read absently. DELAYS EXPECTED. DETOUR AHEAD.
He’d forgotten – they all had. Barrelled up to the intersection into town as usual to find the contractors had been hard at it from 6 a.m. just as they’d promised, a squadron of shining earthmovers and excavators hacking away already. Thousands of dollars being spent every minute by whatever construction company had won the tender. Not anyone local, that’s for sure. Ray might have had some contract work himself, then.
... (read more)Just the slightest movement of the curtain as she stands by the window. Just a touch. That’s how she brings the light in, Jacqui does. Just before dawn, with only the smallest movement of her finger, and in comes the light. I see it reach the Golden Cane Palm, highlighting the larger fronds, their dark becoming green. Jacqui looks at those fronds, as I do, while the light begins to fill the room. She turns her head to me as if in a studied pose, rehearsed.
... (read more)There was a party when I first came to this country. The table was heavy with plates of pizza and chicken balls and Turkish dips with sticks of celery that no one touched. Balloons clustered on the ceiling, trying to escape the heat of the room. A badly lit fire in the fireplace sent out curls of smoke, and a double-bar radiator sat burning in the opposite corner.
‘This is my Filipino brother-in-law, Enrico,’ Alan said each time he introduced me, grasping my arm or giving me a playful punch. At that point, the person I was meeting would clap my shoulder and say, ‘Welcome to Australia!’ as if they had rehearsed this gesture for my arrival.
... (read more)Day I – new suitors
The mountain thinks: Wilson, eh? Finally he comes. About time. The trucks stop on the north side where the Rongai route begins and Kilimanjaro’s powdered skirt tumbles out of Tanzania into Kenya. Her lower folds are less sensitive, but she still feels us among the thousands. In her stones she weighs our upward love and thinks: How much do you really want me? We start late and pad steadily from 1900 metres on the trail’s seamy musk with no perspective on the summit. Above us, only a shrug of fat hills and cloud. Kilimanjaro’s broad, high face (all ice-lashes and airless hauteur) is a vast four kilometres further up. Emmanuel tells us to walk polepole (slowly, gently). ‘Like walking your girlfriend home,’ he says.
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I was only two bites into a corned beef and pickle sandwich and surrounded by unmarked exam papers when one of my students, Nod Clay, walked up and asked me to write him a reference.
‘You got a job interview Nod?’
‘No it’s for court, for assault.’
‘What sort of assault?’
‘With a brick.’
‘Jesus Nod…’
I pushed my chair away from the desk and folded my arms.
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Speeding on the freeway, adrift in possibility, in pursuit of dreams, Bilson, the bookman, collections inspected, autographs and associated ephemera, catalogues, modern firsts, blinks to some sort of blockage suddenly dead ahead and stomping the brake feels that shoelace snapping on that shoe suddenly loose on that foot as simultaneously an exit presents to the left which faster than thinking he takes, slewing and slowing, that rushing madhouse quit.
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