Short Stories
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.
... (read more)Worlds in Collision edited by Ken Booth and Tim Dunne & Terror by John Carroll
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.
... (read more)A bloke I know classifies all birds as either shitehawks or dickybirds. Who knows, perhaps he doesn’t believe it either. Problem is, the line keeps shifting. Too many birds just don’t fit these categories. Take the shearwater. It flies fifty thousand kilometres a year in an endless quest for summer. Small it may be, dickybird it ain’t.
... (read more)The boy’s heart sank when he saw the ship.
For as long as he could remember he had held the dream of his first ship. She would be long and sleek, riding low in the water, white, with touches of blue along her prow. The funnel would stand high and proud, with the scarlet insignia of the line.
... (read more)