This is brutal and beautiful fiction, harrowing in ways that are at once original and universal. Scene by scene, page by page, the author raises the stakes for both the narrator and the reader, and the result is an unforgettable story that you read breathlessly. The author does an extraordinary job of rendering the particulars of the setting, signaling that this story could only happen where it does—another hallmark of top-tier work. — Guest Judge Bret Anthony Johnston
I have this clear memory of my dad laughing. I just can’t shake it. A cow rammed her head into his shin because he was clipping the ear of her baby.
He chuckled and said in this low tone: “All right, all right, girl. I’m not stealin’ her.”
About a month later the drought came through. I saw the body of a cow that foxes had gotten at. Dad said she would’ve died of anthrax before the foxes ate her. Then the flies. Then the maggots. But it’s better than waste he’d said.
He showed me how brittle skin and meat are, how soft they can get. It wastes away easily, especially in open country. Dad said that a fox will often eat the arse first, or if it were a lamb, the muzzle first, sometimes leaving it alive.
I remember Mum bursting into tears when I told her about the cow and the fox and the maggots. Dad stopped taking me out in his ute after that.
About a year later, Mum brought a man around to the house and said to call him Uncle Anthony.
* * *
The first night Dad didn’t come home he stayed in a tent. Close enough to the house that we could see the lantern shining through the green mesh tarp.
“Just sleep in the workers’ cottage,” Mum said. “It’s pathetic.”
I was on the veranda and I heard Dad hiss under his breath. He said, “Fucking bitch,” and scampered out the door. I expected him to slam the flyscreen but he didn’t. He just closed it gently and drove away. About fifteen minutes later Anthony arrived. His ute was newer—the color of quarry-water when sunlight hits it at the right angle.
“Howdy, Vic,” he said, winking.
“Howdy,” I replied.
Mum ran out. She was wearing a floral dress; one that I knew she liked because she’d worn it to church before, and to Aunty Miranda’s wedding.
Anthony took Mum in his arms. He pinched her bum and she yelled and I wasn’t sure if I was still young enough to be around for that sort of stuff.
The three of us turned to look at the yellow dust cloud rising over the horizon—a great plume that looked like smudged paint.
Anthony and Mum went inside, and I stayed on the porch waiting for Dad.
He parked his ute behind Anthony’s and got out holding a slab of pale ale.
He sat beside me, then began working his way through the beer. After the second, he sighed, “Fucking slut,” and finished the dregs of the bottle. After the third he pulled a pack of Winfield blues out his shirt pocket, twisting his head away whenever he pushed smoke out his lips.
We didn’t talk.
It was getting dark. A roo jumped past and Dad pretended he had a rifle in his arms. He blew its head clean off. I tried to do the same.
Then it was really dark, and I felt like I needed to say something. So I asked if he was sleeping in the tent again, but he didn’t really reply. Instead, he exhaled through his nose and said into his chest that he couldn’t wait for that cunt, Anthony, to come outside.
“He has to come out and have a smoke at some point. I’ll get him then. She doesn’t let anyone smoke inside the house, especially not in the bedroom.”
He offered me a beer. I was fifteen and trying to get used to the taste. So I took it, and I grazed his fingers on accident and felt coy and shy and aware that I was him and he was me. But he seemed happy that I took it. He seemed so happy that he started singing an old country tune: a sad song that I remembered Mum humming while she’d fold laundry or mend jumpers.
He sung about getting old and fed up. He tossed “mama” and “baby” amongst it as well. The beer was mostly gone. And it made the words sound soft in his mouth, like they were sneaking past his lips. He had a good voice; he could hold a tune—but I already knew that from when I stood beside him on Sundays.
He stopped singing when Anthony walked out with a smoke in his mouth. “Fucking hell, Foster. What are you still doing here, mate. It’s embarrassing.”
“Fuck off, cunt!” Dad slurred. He was slumped like wet bread.
“Jesus, the kid’s right there.”
Dad got up and ran at Anthony. But Anthony just put the smoke in the corner of his mouth and slapped Dad across the cheek. He went down with all his weight. Anthony flicked his cigarette into Dad’s belly. “Fucking pathetic,” he said, then looked to me. “Your Mum wants you to come inside, mate.”
Dad didn’t move much; he just writhed around and rubbed his cheek.
I got up and walked over to say goodnight. When I stood there, seeing his face covered with dirt and ash, his hand reached out and grabbed a hold of my ankle.
“Don’t go in there, Vic,” he said.
I tried to pull away but he yanked my ankle in closer and I’m not sure if he knew how tight his grip was. He would always misjudge that kind of thing if he was drunk.
“You don’t gotta go to bed yet.”
Then he was standing, saying we needed to go for a drive, that he needed to show me something. So I followed him and sat in the passenger seat. He revved the engine, and it wasn’t long before Mum and Anthony ran to the porch. Dad switched the spotlights on, lighting up the house. You could see all the chipped bricks, the greasy windows, and the rust on the corrugated iron roof. I could see them shouting, but I had no idea what they said.
I knew he’d drunk a bit, but he drove well. I wasn’t worried about that.
“You’ll look back,” he said, “and remember the time your old man taught you how to drive. It’s important that a father teaches this sort of thing to his son.”
I looked out my window and it was dark and black as far as I could see. The paddock running beside us became like watered down streaks of paint and I couldn’t make out if it was barley or lupins growing out there. And I felt a strange shame for not knowing.
Dad reached his left arm behind the seat. After fiddling for a bit, he seemed to have found what he was after.
Not long after that the car slowed. He turned into a grass paddock and we were off road, in shrub. The ute handled it; we rolled over thick logs and crushed patches of paddymelon weed.
When the vehicle stopped, Dad tapped my arm and nodded his head toward the window. In front of us, about fifty or so meters away, was this huge kangaroo standing up straight.
“It’s a fella,” Dad whispered. “Look at the size of his muscles.”
The rifle was long and lean—it had a dark chestnut stock that matched the kitchen table. Dad moved slow. He wound the window down ever so gently. I’d forgotten he could be that gentle.
“You’ll remember this,” he whispered, “watching your old man hunt, watching him provide meat.”
I couldn’t understand why the roo hadn’t hopped away. I tried to warn it with my eyes, but it just stayed still. I realized I’d rather let it die than say anything. I realized that much.
Dad leaned half his body out the window and stilled the rifle. He inhaled carefully. Then he tried to exhale with even more care. But he couldn’t manage it. He quivered a little and his muscles tensed and contracted. I could see how tight his skin was, how much time it’d spent in the sun, how often it’d been covered with sweat or filth.
“You watching? Kid?” he said, loud.
He turned back to the roo. It hadn’t moved. He knocked his knee into the door, hard. But it was still there, just staring at us.
When Dad fired the rifle, it was so much quieter than I had expected. It was like the silence of open country absorbed everything. Like the lack of noise swallowed the gun blast. And what remained was so much louder: a screaming silence that must always be there. It screamed for the kangaroo to leave.
* * *
The next night Anthony brought dinner. He asked me to kick the footy with him in the backyard. He told me to run long, so I did—like sixty meters—and he launched the footy way over my head.
“How’d you like that?” he said.
I said plenty.
He arched his back and pushed out his groin. “I’ll teach you one day.”
It was one of those afternoons that are so still and warm that everything feels like it’s made of paper. We did our best to enjoy it. Even Mum. She sat on the porch, watching and laughing when I took a great mark and cheering when I did a good kick. She lit a cigarette and stared at the sky. I knew what she was doing because I’d do the same. When we enjoy a moment, we try to grab a hold of it before it slides away into the next. Then, realizing we didn’t grab it, we try to grab a hold of the one after that, and the one after that, and so on, until we give up and feel this all-coating sadness because we’ve watched those moments leave, and we know that those boundaries will never be crossed.
The night before, there were police cars parked by the house when Dad dropped me back. I was ushered to my bedroom and assessed for well-being. But I wasn’t asleep before two in the morning, especially with the low grumble of whispering coming from the kitchen. It was like a motor, like the crackle of a fire keeping the house warm.
* * *
After that, Dad began sleeping in the shearer’s cottage. It’d been unoccupied for a while.
“You know me, Vic,” he said. “I’ve always preferred having my own space.”
His suitcase was sat on top of the single metal bed. The sink and cooker were exposed. Everything was exposed, really, everything shared the space with everything else.
“A man ought to have his own space,” he told me, heating a tin of beans on the stove. “I’m free out here.” He took a seat on an old recliner, then he started on the beans. I realized that I’ve never seen him cook before.
“I’ll need your help soon,” he said. “It’s almost calving time.”
Later that night, I overheard Mum on the phone to Aunty Miranda. She was in her bedroom and I was standing still by the door, just listening.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said, and at first, I thought she was laughing like this whole thing with Dad and the cottage was ridiculous. But then she blurted out: “He’ll never leave.”
* * *
A week passed and Anthony was always around. On Friday night he walked about in his underwear, swearing at the television.
In her bedroom, Mum sat crossed-legged on the mattress, flipping through a photo album. I stood away from the door, watching her terrible posture. With her foot, she shifted the crystal ashtray back and forth. I wondered when she broke her rule of smoking in the bedroom. Then she looked up and called me over.
“Viccy! Come in,” she said, gesturing with waving arms.
I waded through the clothes on the floor, then spotted the wine glass on the nightstand. I sat beside her, and she ran a finger along a photograph of me and my two cousins, Miranda’s children, at Christmas. We had water pistols and half eaten slices of watermelon; we were by the pool and not yet sunburnt. She breathed deeply and rested her head on my shoulder. It made me so sad when she did that.
“Do you remember nearly drowning this Christmas?” she asked, pointing. “You dove, headfirst, into an inflatable donut and got stuck.” She tried to laugh but coughed instead. “And no one was keeping an eye on you, so you had to struggle with your head underwater to the steps and pull yourself up. I felt awful. You wouldn’t stop crying.”
I could feel the tips of my fingers prune and I could hear my cousins laughing as I pretended to be an old farmer. That’s how I remember it.
“Will you come with me and collect the eggs in the morning?” she asked.
I said yes, knowing she wouldn’t have the same tone in the morning, so I tried to really savor it, even though being there with her made me a little afraid.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought about Dad in his cottage. I knew he’d be awake. Even when he slept in the main house, he wouldn’t go to bed before three o’clock most nights. Sometimes, when going to the bathroom, I’d walk past him playing online poker and we’d have a moment. I’ve never really tried to describe what sort of moment it was.
I went to the kitchen for water, in my underwear, nothing else. I figured I wouldn’t see anybody with Dad not there. But when I got to the kitchen, I heard noises coming from Mum’s bedroom, all these squeaks and moans. I did my best to feel disgusted and embarrassed. But at the same time, I wanted her to be happy, and to feel safe. Before I’d time to leave, the noise stopped and Anthony was in the kitchen with me. He was also in his underwear, and I could see his stiff penis, right through his v-cut jocks.
“Thirsty, are we?” he went, drinking from the tap. “How long you been out here?”
His features were barely visible, except for his eyes, the leathery creases on his face, and the bulge in his underwear.
“What you gotta understand, Vic,” he said, “is that what you heard is completely natural.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. You’re probably getting some yourself already, aren’t ya?” He paused and took a step toward me, like he wanted to ruffle my hair or slap my arm but he didn’t, his tone just dropped. “Foster has caused your mother a lot of pain, but I’m around now, and we make each other happy.”
I said I was going back to bed.
“Look, Vic,” he said, “we don’t want you visiting him at the cottage. We don’t want you watching while he fucking gambles.”
“What about helping him around the farm?” I asked.
He took a moment. “Work is work,” he said. “We can’t avoid that.”
* * *
I’d see Dad driving around the farm, his elbow resting on the open window, smoking. He drove past the house more than necessary. Every now and then he’d approach the house, cap in hand, allowing the sun to eat away at his shaved head.
“I need Vic,” he’d say to Mum.
“What for?” she’d reply, not looking up from whatever task she was doing.
“I need a hand moving some head.”
And I’d hope she wouldn’t allow it. But she always did. Then whenever I was in the ute with him, he wouldn’t talk to me. And we’d just drive around the paddocks while he looked for pregnant cows, mumbling to himself a list of jobs for tomorrow. He’d never swear when talking about the cattle. I remembered him saying, a long time ago, how gentle you need to be with a cow before calving.
At night Dad would drink beer on the cottage porch. On good days you could hear his radio. When the weekend came, he’d drive to a pub in town, get drunk with the same few fellas, then drive home slowly. I always seemed to be awake when he’d come back.
I overheard Anthony say: “He’s ruined the only fucking good pub. Those dickheads just sit there and gamble.”
“Can we not talk about that,” Mum replied.
A couple of the fellas, Ken Fischer and Henry Pritchett, were both local farmers, both pillars of the community. Henry’s brother owned the pub—he was an ex-con. But he didn’t really do anything wrong: I overheard Dad talking to Mum about it a while ago. Tax evasion, serving beer to teenagers, illegal card games. He wasn’t in for long or anything. I think people respected him more for it.
During the calving season, Mum, Dad, and Anthony all had to deal with dystocia—that’s when the calf gets tangled inside the cow. It made them forget about everything. Altogether, they saved about six calves by pulling—all of them up to their shoulders in organs, grabbing and shifting the calves. Then there was the feeding, and Dad got me to make up all the milk replacement so we could take the original milk from the mothers—so we could sell it for cash that never really made a difference. Dad rarely spoke about money. He’d just say: “Anything made goes back into the farm. That’s just how it is.”
* * *
One Friday, well into the spring, Dad didn’t come home after the pub.
“He’d be still drinking,” Mum said. “The man can’t say no.”
Then an entire week passed without seeing him. Mum wanted to call the police, but Anthony said he was an adult, not a child. And she didn’t respond; she just got really quiet.
Anthony pulled me aside and said there were jobs that needed doing. “The cattle don’t wait for your dad,” he said. “You need to be prepared that your old man might not come back. He’s got himself into a lot of hot water.”
“I know,” I said.
“Me and Lauire have discussed, in such a case, that I’ll take over his responsibilities out here. That means you’ll have to step up as well, take on a few more jobs.”
Before he met Mum, Anthony drove trucks across the state for a local company. But he got laid off, dented up one of their rigs real bad. So they drug tested him and found traces of meth in his piss. Once I overheard him saying to Mum that he’d never do it again, that the devil had kept him down for too long.
Anthony was standing beneath the porch, hocking phlegm and spitting it into the yellow grass. “So what was your old man like with ‘em? With the cattle?”
“He was good,” I said. “Calm and stern.”
“Stern? What d’you mean stern? Like a temper?”
Anthony lit a smoke and held it by pinching the butt. Mum held them differently—always with a limp wrist, like the cigarette was heavy as hell. When I was at a mate’s place, and he gave me a smoke, I held it like Mum would and he called me a fag.
“He ever yell at you?” Anthony asked.
I didn’t answer straight away. Instead, I looked behind my shoulder, to the cows in the nearest paddock, they weren’t bothered by anything. “Only if I deserved it,” I admitted, which often I did.
* * *
I was walking back to the house when I saw Dad’s ute. It was parked in front of his cottage. I dropped my schoolbag by the kitchen table and almost instantly Mum said to put it in my room.
“Have you spoken to Dad?” I asked.
She didn’t respond, but began walking outside. So I followed her. I figured that I deserved to be told. But she was heading for the chicken feed shed and she wouldn’t even turn to look at me.
“Mum?” I said, and I was almost knocking the back of her heels. “Mum!”
She opened the shed door and the creak made my whole body feel like it was falling apart.
“Where has Dad been then? Are you going to tell me?”
She carried the metal bucket—full of lupins, wheat, peas, and corn—and it was so heavy it made her lean to one side. She struggled to walk. It made me feel so miserable just looking at her.
“Mum, you need to tell me.”
I stood outside the mesh fence and watched her dump the feed in an almost perfect circle with herself in the center of it. The chickens flocked around her, forgetting to be scared for a while. She was tipping slowly, and her eyes were wide and focused, but glazed, and then I saw the red veins growing in them.
“I’ll fucking ask Dad then!” I shouted. “At least he’ll be honest!”
And Mum dropped the bucket, and it landed face down, trapping some of the grain. She marched straight out the pen and up to me. Then she slapped me across the face. But it wasn’t too hard, she could’ve done it a lot harder, I’ve seen her do it a lot harder. I’ve seen her rip the world open and sew it back up.
* * *
I thought I’d have to sneak out that evening to go see Dad, but Mum hadn’t left her room since five. For a moment, I just watched the sky and all the stars. It was one of those nights when the sky isn’t that dark. Like the sun accidently left part of itself behind, and you can see the details of things and not just the shapes. I figured maybe it was because all the stars were lighting everything up.
I got close enough to the cottage to see that Dad was pacing. I reckon I could’ve been standing right beside the window and he still wouldn’t have noticed me. He was in a mad daze. Like when a work dog gets reversed over by the ute, but isn’t killed, and it just walks back and forth with wide eyes. His face was all bruised up. A cut ran from the bottom of his eyebrow and up his forehead. It wasn’t oozing or anything, but it looked fresh.
I had ideas of what was happening. But I wanted to burst in there and just ask him directly. It would’ve been useless, though. He wouldn’t have said anything. I remembered the time Dad broke his pinky finger. He got it tangled in some string while unloading bales of straw and didn’t say anything till the end of the day. He looked embarrassed as hell when he finally did say something.
* * *
The next day I heard his ute early. From my room I could hear him whistling and cattle calling. Like nothing had happened.
I walked into the kitchen and saw Anthony sitting at the table, smiling. A brown leather duffle bag was at his feet. He just kept smiling at me, even as he reached into his bag and pulled out a pack of smokes. I remembered that I could hear them all night, Mum and Anthony, muffled voices that rose and fell then transformed into yells and sobs.
“I’m not going to see you for a while, Vic,” he said, standing.
“Where’s Mum?” I asked.
“Don’t you worry about her,” he said.
I didn’t know what the hell he meant by that.
“Make sure you help your old man out,” Anthony said. “He’ll sure as fuck need it.”
He started toward the flyscreen door. Then before leaving, from behind the mesh, he said: “You know, I never told you, but you look just like him. More like Foster each day.”
The door clanged shut, because he didn’t ease it, he didn’t wait around to stop that horrible clanging noise it made. He just trotted off the veranda and into his ute.
The door to Mum’s room was wide open. I stopped in the hallway because I could see her in bed, curled up and facing the wall. All I could see was her hair—her sandy, matted hair. There’s something really strange about seeing your Mum in bed. It’s like the order has been messed up. I watched her for a while. Long enough to see that her head was shuddering. I went back to sit at the kitchen table, and just like that I found myself crying. I was able to do it silently, but I did it till my throat felt like it had been left out in the sun all day. I couldn’t think of anything else to do except sit there.
* * *
By the afternoon I’d heard Dad’s ute pass five or six times. Then all of a sudden he was parked out the front. I watched him stand there for a bit, rub his head, spit, toe at the grass. He seemed so uneasy. It was like the boundaries didn’t make sense to him anymore. As though whatever was being kept inside his boundaries had escaped, and there was no use keeping them up. Mum would always talk about boundaries, and so would Dad, but it always felt like they were talking about a different kind.
Dad walked straight through the kitchen without seeing me sitting there. His work boots thundered on down the hallway. There was once a time when Mum would’ve yelled at him for that sort of thing—wearing boots inside. I’d give anything to hear her yell at him for something like that.
Then the footsteps stopped. He said something I couldn’t hear. It was muffled. And while I was thinking about how he would pronounce sorry, the footsteps began again until he stood still in the kitchen doorway.
“We need to go pick up chaff,” he said.
He walked out the door and I took that as a cue to follow him.
In the ute I looked at his hands and saw how dirty they were. There was a rash on his neck, which he mindlessly scratched between tapping his leg, as if the radio was on.
“It’ll be quiet there,” he said. “In and out, so late in the workday.”
I didn’t think he wanted a reply, so I leant back and looked out the window. The day was clear, and the paddocks looked all sleepy because the wind was gentle. I looked back to Dad and it seemed like he hadn’t blinked.
The chaff mill was surrounded by rusted tractors and huge cylindrical bales of hay. The owner of the mill, Sunshine, got out from behind a tractor and approached the ute. He was covered in dust; I’d never not seen him covered in dust. Once, I asked Dad why people call him Sunshine and he said he didn’t know, and it didn’t matter, because that’s what people called him.
Sunshine leant by the passenger side and pulled a half-smoked cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Brought tha young fella,” he said, smiling at me. “How many bags ya afta?”
“Twenty,” Dad said.
Before he got out of the ute, he turned to me and told me to stay put.
“Thought you needed my help?” I said.
He didn’t respond.
A thresher is loud as it gnaws at bales of hay, shredding it to chaff which is then distributed into large hessian sacks. In the car mirror I watched as the two men loaded the sacks onto the ute.
Sunshine had to yell to keep conversation going: “How many calves ya get this season?”
The thresher was so loud.
“Below forty,” Dad replied, which was barely audible.
“Shit! Fuck! Tough year then! Was it the drought?”
Dad kept loading and didn’t reply. So Sunshine cut off the thresher, and there was a violent silence.
Sunshine continued, “So ya gonna have to sell a few head? Cattle sales must be comin’!”
Dad paused. I saw him look straight at the ute’s side mirror, right where I was looking at him.
“We’re selling the lot,” he said.
“Fuck me, land and erything?”
I watched him nod.
* * *
A couple of times Dad told me to pack my stuff up. He’d say it when we are out doing a job together. “Your Mum’s got boxes. Just empty all your stuff from drawers and cabinets into those. Make sure you don’t miss anything.”
I got rid of almost everything. I had this spud gun that I tossed. A collection of footy cards, not the best collection, but rarer than most. A lot of shit from showbags went in the bin. I only had two books anyway. And one of them—this sort of pocket size atlas—Devon Kellock took and drew swastikas in at school one day. I had to turn them all into windows by connecting the lines. Nearly all the pages had been ruined. All these towns and fields had been covered in black ink. No way in hell I wanted Mum to see that. She would’ve been so sad.
* * *
My new bedroom had carpet. The whole house had carpet, except for the kitchen which had checkered vinyl.
Mum stayed in the car for a while, just looking out the window and at the fronts of our neighbors’ houses. And all the houses looked the same—a square arrangement of skin color bricks with a flyscreen door in the center. They all faced each other with a gravel courtyard in between. The neighbors started to gather in doorways, behind their mesh. But I could only see their silhouettes because cheap flyscreen will darken anything. I got nervous that the neighbors might see Mum staring and think we were all strange.
In my room I took a quick look at the atlas book. I flipped to the page with the map of Australia, then with my pointer finger I tried to roughly locate where our new town was. I knew that it wouldn’t be listed by name, because only big cities and towns like Mount Gambier are listed by name, but I figured I’d be able to find the nearby river, and that’d be enough. But it was covered in black. Right on top of where I thought it’d be, a thick black window, done twice over in texta, covered it. I could’ve strangled Devon Kellock right then. I know it sounds stupid, but a real small part of me was prepared to look out the window and just see black texta over everything, like tar, or one of those deep-sea oil spills that Dad would say is the result of a necessary risk. It may be necessary, but it doesn’t mean you don’t feel lousy seeing a beach covered in black.
* * *
On the first day back at school, Devon Kellock wasted no time in asking why we sold the farm. And he did it in front of everyone. The two boys I usually hung around with, Adam Steyn and Daniel Furler, both lived on massive farms. And when they heard that we sold ours, they didn’t seem too hot on me. But I wasn’t bothered. I was getting sick of them.
On the walk home it started pouring down. So I found a spot beneath the post-office veranda, outside where all the post boxes were clumped together, and figured I’d wait it out. I sat down in the corner and sort of fiddled with this smooth sharp rock. It would’ve been great for skimming, so I told myself to hang onto it. What I didn’t account for was the rush of mums coming to check the post-boxes after picking up their kids from school. They’d park facing the veranda, so whatever brat was sitting and waiting for their mum just gawked at me. The mums gave me a look as well.
Then I did something I can’t explain.
I pressed the sharpest point on that rock I found into my calf. I just kept going. It hurt and all, but I wanted to see how much I could take. It started bleeding, and I wiped it away but it kept coming. So I spat on the gash then rubbed a handful of gravel on it to block the flow. I remembered Dad saying, when we were out in the paddocks, to rub dirt in any cuts I had.
Dad’s ute was parked in the courtyard when I got back. He was never back that early. For a while I just stood outside our door, listening to the tele through the wood. The entire housing complex buzzed with teles behind doors, the entire country, probably.
* * *
On a Sunday afternoon I saw Mum in the kitchen. It felt good to see her standing. She used her forearm to push a few strands of hair from her brow. The more I watched her, the more it gave me the urge to do something, anything really.
“Would you mind if I help?” I asked.
“We need to grease a tin,” she said and pointed to the butter. I tried to remember if her voice had always sounded that thin—not raspy, but thin.
By the kitchen window, balanced on the sill, was her crystal ash tray. Inside was a stubbed cigarette, still smoldering, with a thin stream of smoke drifting outside.
“What happened to quitting,” I said, kidding around.
But she just looked at me with these terrible eyes. Eyes that I swore if I could’ve just pulled them out, and tended to them for a while, in private, cleaned and mended them, then put them back in, they’d be okay.
We both held our silence. But she kept looking at me. And I could see the tears welling in her eyes. There was no sound in the kitchen. Except for the afternoon lull of wind and birds and main road.
Then something inside of her switched. “Hundred fifty grams of brown sugar,” she said, flicking her head away from me. “And butter. Two hundred grams of butter.”
I really could’ve cried.
I reached out and rested my arm on her back. It sounds weird, but I wanted to remember what she felt like. I wanted to be reminded that it feels as though you are standing right before the point of too much. You’re feeling the body you came from. You’re feeling the cause. And the blame. And the gratitude.
* * *
That night, because my room and Mum’s were so close, I heard when her door creaked open. And I heard Dad’s voice, though I couldn’t really tell you what he said. The worst bit was that I couldn’t hear Mum’s voice. I had to sit upright and focus on my breathing. I soon realized that I couldn’t stay in bed. So I went into the lounge room, hoping to see him on the couch. But it was empty. So I looked out the window, into the courtyard, and figured he might be in the ute. I went out there to check. But he wasn’t. And the door closed behind me, locking. The doors in the complex lock when they close behind you. It was for safety reasons.
I thought about knocking on the door and waking them up. But something inside of me just didn’t allow it. It was so stupid. Of course he was in the bedroom. He was always going to be in the bedroom. I walked and stood in the center of the main road. I’d never heard it that silent for that long—only those small gaps between traffic, but then there’d be a hundred other noises. But right then it was silent, like being in the country again.
I stood there and looked back at the housing complex. And it was almost like I could feel the thrum of everything to come. I felt all that had happened before me, and all that will happen once I’m gone, and I felt it coming up through the soles of my bare feet, right through the bitumen. It was somewhere between unbearable and not enough.
L.J Bowden is a writer from South Australia, Kaurna Country. His fiction has appeared in West Trade Review, Going Down Swinging, and Swine. He was a finalist for The Best Australian Yarn and the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction. He is currently undertaking an MFA in creative writing at Boston University.