Reading short stories feeds the imagination. We are taken to new and surprising places quickly. Like putting on a VR headset but the effect is entirely achieved with words. I continue to be surprised by what can be achieved through good storytelling. The stories in this collection are very different, and in selecting the order, I have paid attention to this individual difference as well as the commonalities between stories. Somewhere in here, we find ourselves. Somewhere in here, we find each other.
We start with the 2nd prize-winning story, a speculative fiction story in ‘Sheen’ by Else Fitzgerald. The ‘sheens’ are all that’s left of our planet and they narrate the eaten landscape with their own languages and histories.
It was so little I don’t know how she seen it, but Roanie was often looking around us harder than anyone. She broke out of the line and went ploughing off into the deeper sand. I plunged after her, not wanting her to get sucked down while everything was still soft and unsettled from the storm. When I got to her she turned, a small bundle tucked in her arms. It was small and shaped like a human, but harder and it didn’t move, made of a plastic not unlike our own skin. Its little eyes were stuck closed with sand but Roanie brushed them with her fingers and they blinked open. One didn’t go up all the way, and underneath the eyes were still.
The othering of the familiar leaves the reader thinking of objects in their life, those that feel like a ‘second skin’ but void of life and meaning compared to the scale of environmental collapse and big-scale loss.
Highly commended ‘Treacle Eyes’ by Judyth Emanuel is also playful with language. The story follows two teenage twin sisters, Jani and Joanie, developing their separate identities in a sensory-filled world.
Sometimes we lay us down. Twofold not much apart. Laid in the shade on the front lawn. Blowed dandelions. Knees warm bent. Summer day. This smell of damp grass. Must have rained before. Not heavy. Just dewdrops sprinkled. Jani sat in the sunny place. Jani a bit tipsy from cheap burgundy. I had a sip. Grimaced, ‘Yuck.’ Licked the tip of my finger. Held it up wet where. Seen which way the wind blew. Didn’t want a screwed expression forever. Didn’t want to get trapped.
As the sisters get older, the quieter, risk-averse Joanie fears their different paths will throw them apart. Not much is safe, and everything must be compromised.
‘Oh, the Water’ by Keren Heenan shows an Australian bush landscape where youth grow up and learn to manage their emotions. Our young male protagonist takes his dead father’s fishing rod out to the river for the first time, during a downpour, and finds there are guides everywhere he looks.
And the neighbouring story ‘Of the Water’ by Jo Morrison also moves with this theme. This time the water is saltwater, and the narrator’s lover is a keen surfer.
Sometimes I think you were born of the water, a child of the sea. The clues were all there, in the dips and shadows of your body, the salt on your skin.
The story shows water in a particular Australian context can both give life and take it away, the danger is always real.
In Yvonne Edgren’s highly commended story, ‘Small Disturbances’, a migrant grandmother of a minority language holds a fragile relationship with her Australian grandchildren. Liv, the oldest, is a keen thinker and decipher of her surrounds, in a large sprawling house, quiet except for the periodical sounds of the clock.
John Jenkins’ ‘Through A Latte Darkly’ observes quick-witted coffee shop banter between two ex–
AA members. Marco works as a barista and always serves coffee to his friend with an entertaining story and a few jokes. Their friendship feels to be the foundation of resisting addiction.
‘A Single Life’ by Marian Matta describes the trickiness for a loving couple of significant age difference as they descend into old(er) age. After Nell’s life-threatening fall, she begs Phillip to consider other options. Their life together may no longer be sustainable. The couple’s tenderness and care for each other breathes light into the page.
‘London via Paris and Rome’ by Andreas Å Andersson is an original mix of sharehouse story and young backpacker story that explores the movements and relationships of the Union Street house’s inhabitants, Mitch, Ron and Myra.
‘Things to Come’ by Charlotte Guest is a story about a long parting and illness. At the doctor’s surgery, faced with the prospect of needing a carer for her senility, Olive is asked to think of someone to call. She thinks of her ex-partner, much in her mind but not in her life, ever since he told her forty years ago he could no longer have contact with her.
She never could persuade him that it’s okay to be unruly, that relationships are more innately liquid than he let them be. And yet she understood, like everyone understands, the need to alleviate pain.
A reunion under these circumstances moves with new and old language, repetition and rituals.
Winner of the Southwest prize, ‘Harbour Lights’ by Leslie Thiele moves from Western Australian city and country and traces the pain in between spaces and adolescence and adulthood. Our narrator, Tanya, is confronted by her high-school attacker ten years on, now married to her new boss. Her home is threatened and her courage is tested; and her husband and child do not know of her silent struggle.
‘Dependence Day’ by Sophie McClelland is the story of a hundred-and-two-year-old man and his carer, his granddaughter. The wrestle for care and control of mind is present in his waking hours, and the all-present grief for his late wife.
‘Ms Lovegrove’ by Emily Paull describes the ambitions of a young university drama student, Nicole. Her life is changed by the arrival of a new tutor, Ms Lovegrove, a high-profile former star, who seems to be unimpressed by our narrator and her fellow students. To her surprise, Nicole is chosen to play the female lead in A Streetcar Named Desire, but Ms Lovegrove’s method acting training begins to put our young character in an unsafe position.
The highly commended, ‘Better Than the Farm’ by Miriam Zolin explains to a Sydney newcomer the tips and traps of living in the monster city. Certain train stations are to be avoided, pedestrian etiquette is to be observed.
Step out of the train. Shuffle forward with the mob. Follow them up the stairs and into Greenwood Plaza or out onto the street. Try not to think of sheep dogs and woolsheds. Stare straight ahead and step aside for the ones on urgent business.
‘M’ by Belinda McCormick charts two homeless friends’ journey, as they buckle in to survive the winter. Desperate for food, M trades sexual favours for hot noodle soup. M brings the food, while Gus is watchdog, with an eye and ear for danger. But things start getting precarious when the restaurant owner begins to expect more from M, and Gus’ protection can not prepare them for change.
‘All the Places You Have Been’ by Erin Courtney Kelly opens in the queue to see the corpse flower, which blooms for only three days once every thousand days, where Clare and her daughter are hoping to catch a glimpse of it despite lining up in the South Australian heat. The story moves to explaining the meeting between Clare and her daughter’s father, which took place in a pub overseas. He caught Clare’s attention because of the way he smelt ‘like the forest’. Smell moves back into Clare’s life, in the overpowering stench of the corpse flower, drawing her back to the unanswered past.
‘Still Life with Dying Swan’ by Gail Chrisfield shows the tender moments between a mother and daughter. Ali’s mum is dying and she is trying to manage. She brings her mum to a health spa by a lake where swans flock. It’s meant to be relaxing, but for Ali nothing is right.
‘Joiner Bay’ by Laura Elvery, the title story in the collection and winner of the 2017 Margaret River Short Story Competition, is set in a coastal community. The schoolboy narrator’s best friend has just killed himself. But that’s not why the boy is running. He can soak the whole bay up in his shoes if he tries. He has his dad giving him a ten for a PB. He and his dad both use the shared downstairs space as a gym.
On the footpath winding up the hill, I dodge dozens of jackfruit that have split open. They are fat, fluorescent, mammalian. I see and hear the ocean. I try to steady my breath in through my nose and out my mouth.
When he slows down, he listens. And with the help of the school librarian, who recommends him books, he can start to make sense of his friend’s sudden death.
These are beautiful, charming stories, top to bottom, stories I believe will enrich any reader.
Ellen van Neerven
Ellen van Neerven is a Mununjali woman from South East Queensland and the author of the award-winning short story collection Heat and Light (UQP, 2014) and the collection of poetry Comfort Food (UQP, 2016).