Fiction Archives | Page 2 of 3 | Giramondo Publishing

Goodness had no boundaries. Goodness was blindly devoted; Goodness let herself be walked all over by others; Goodness always came away from the P and C meetings finding that she’d become the fund-raiser, the secretary, the fete coordinator.

If he closed his eyes momentarily, she reminded him of the lizards that ran briskly through the houses near the sea, in those humid afternoons of endless play and mystery, into the night and unaffected sleep. Instead of giving over to this, he used the words that made things tidy and distanced him from the past. This was a form of illusory control over his life. We create and depend on the tools that keep us standing up.

I dream of the first cherry of summer. I give it to her and she puts it in her mouth, looks at me with warm, sinful eyes, as she possesses the flesh. Suddenly, she kisses me and gives it back to me with her tongue. And I’m hers forever, the cherry stone rolling up and down the keyboard of my teeth all day long like a wild, musical note.

The mother focused her shouting on the feathered-hair lady, who shrank further in horror. Good girl, I thought. She’d properly identified the threat: it wasn’t the boys holding her down, not the crowd, but the moral centre she had to subdue. When you try to make people understand, they roll over you. Her only chance was force.

He bolted, his body casting crazed silhouettes that led the way. Starlight. Shrubs. Tussocks of grass. A soft, sandy floor to run upon.

Our mother’s face was triumphant in the torchlight, but she refused to tell us what she’d found. Though my sister kept on asking her, I held my tongue, believing there was not, and never would be, anything down there but cold and darkness, and full of anger at our mother’s ignorance and spite.

The last thought in the old man’s mind, before he pressed his foot on the accelerator and brought Quicksilver down to lie disabled in the dust, was of the friend he hadn’t written to. It was as though his voice came back all in a moment and he shouted his explanation to this ghost with his faculties intact, this ghost who listened and who understood.

First she would point at an area in the forest, one she’d usually primed and primped before she dragged him there, a little bed-making staked by two intersecting branches, and when she was sure they were quite alone, she would start running around a circle, with him close on her heels, and they would go on like that with increasing jubilation and abandon, until in the gathering fog she would stop, her firm arms enfolding a tree, and he would pierce her in the rump with such force, coming almost as soon as he entered.

The fine for a surplus child was equivalent to the annual income of an average household, and for homes already cluttered with children, every child was more or less the same. Getting rid of one was the decision most likely to ensure more comfortable lives for everyone else while causing minimal harm – so Mr Decimo came to this conclusion, discerning the logic behind his mother’s choice, even though he’d never met her.

The young men who had come to pray at the dargah, or to eat lamb kebabs in one of the Muslim restaurants, or simply to watch the sea, began making a semi-circle around Ratna, watching, as he put down on the stool, a mauve photo album, and the seven bottles of white pills. With grave ceremony, he then rearranged the bottles, as if their position had to be exactly right for his work to begin. In truth, he was waiting for more onlookers.

Here I am, decades late, looking for things to touch that remind me of the Flowers. I was always between them, like a child between its parents, like a child burrowing into its parents’ bed. They were unbreakable, the only certainty. That is what I saw then in that darkened bar. Her hair glowing about her patient face. And I was? A mouse he laid at her feet.

In all weather, but most often in winter, when the days are so short and so cold that seven-tenths of a guard’s life is lived in the dark, or half-dark.

If you can’t see them any more, then I think I must really be dead. Record in the case notes which of my conjectures you can confirm or dismiss. Draw what you can; measure what you can. But first and foremost: sharpen your scalpels, gentlemen, so that you don’t make a mess of it.

Fish can all turn and flit in absolute synchrony, iron filings will point to the pole, well we’re all arranged like that in a focus on the door, something has signalled to the herd that this is what we will do and we do it, we do not move even though the rain begins again and satins darken, shirts cling and faces mercifully run rivulets.

One of the four bedrooms of each of the display homes would be furnished with an imaginary white Australian boy in mind. The room would most often be arranged to suit the taste of a sporting boy, with posters of the Chappell brothers dressed in World Series Cricket uniforms taped to the wall, Little Athletics ribbons pinned to the pinboard and empty Clarks’ running shoe boxes under the bed.

When she and Didier had first met a few weeks ago, he had been impressed to hear that she was an Australian. ‘La sauvage,’ he had said. ‘So wi-i-ild. L’Australie, c’est la sauvage.’

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Fiction

Goodness Itself

The terrain of his eternal amnesia

What Do You Want with Me, Love?

Every Day for the Rest of His Life

Min-Min

Two Wrecks

Quicksilver’s Ride

The Story of Mukaburung

Scrap

The Sexologist

The Flowers

The Wall

Three Stories

The Marguerite Flower

Dusk and The Public

The Umbrella