October 6, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
The internet has a beating heart and it goes to the rhythm of –
When you don’t open an app for a while it will gain sentience. I tried taking a week off of social media and got to five days (also a working week for the unemployed) and each day my phone came more alive talking that internet language:
Redacted and 64 other accounts you follow have posted on Instagram. Redacted uploaded a story on Facebook. Redacted recently shared a new reel. Do you know redacted? Do you want to sync redacted from your contacts? Do you want to follow redacted? Do you want to hold redacted’s hand and tell them your secrets and braid each other’s hair?
It reminds me of when I was 12 and had my first blow of agoraphobia, though I didn’t know then that’s what it was, an event made up of no understanding and all experience. The suddenly inability to go to school, to sleep alone, to exist as a human how I had before. It was all very dramatic. My parents were forced to worry about me in a way they’d never needed to and it didn’t suit any of us well.
I had to go see the school counsellor who sat me down and said much of the same as my apps; that my friends were making new friends, and things were changing, and I was being left behind. At 12 you can’t know what that all means. The passage of time, the concept of things moving on without you. It just sounds like being dead. And what’s a 12 year old supposed to do with that? What’s the threat of time passing when you can only perceive forever?
The counsellor was too old and too mean to change me anyway. So far removed from the quietness of a child’s defiance to understand it was only made of fear, all the way through.
Is that what you want? For all your friends to forget about you? She’d asked.
Oh brother, I’d thought, my stomach hurts.
In abstinence from the apps my hands grew idle and my mind quiet from the voices of others and I felt again in an old way what it meant to be singular. At the centre of your own world but on the periphery of that great other, where everything was happening and where you were not. It made me think of Bane and his monologue in the Dark Knight Rises – him telling Batman how he was born in a pit, and that made him one with the darkness on a level that
Batman never could be; he who chose it. I couldn’t decide which one I was, Bane or Batman – the chosen or the chooser of the deep dark.
The apps pierced through: are you sure you don’t know redacted?
I didn’t know redacted. I knew my whispering girl on YouTube, the only app I decided to keep using, staying away from the comments and the shorts. I have a premium account on it that I worked real hard for, downloading a proxy to connect to Turkey where I could get it cheaper so someone could whisper-read me a book and tap on its cover as I fell asleep without an ad interrupting.
[I do often consider what my ancestors must think of me, the rotten fruit of their labours. All those soldiers and mothers and otherwise wounded warriors looking down at all this (I’m pointing, round and round, at my many comforts) and seeing someone crouching beneath a tall ceiling, collapsing under the weight of nothing. It’s fine though, really, and if it’s not I can bring the ceilings down lower, and if my ancestors hate that too – well, what can any of us do for the aches of the dead?]
My whispering girl only chooses books I’m pretentious enough to think are stupid, lending themselves so easily to boredom and the eyes closing. She’s younger than me but/ and pregnant and has started inviting everyone to take a deep breath with her at the beginning of her videos. Naturally, I comply. Thinking, nothing is happening and maybe that’s it.
I started wondering though if anyone from my apps missed me. If anyone had even noticed I’d been gone. What was the weight of one person’s absence? What was the sound withheld from the collective of voices? I knew what I was asking was much bigger, the tiniest babushka doll in the set of worries I was too defiant to open.
For those who’ve seen it, you know Bane’s monologue ends on this, a note of defiance. But maybe you hear the fear also, all the way through, when he says: I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
When I log into my apps again it’s to see the photos my friends had posted of us – the friends the counsellor had long ago threatened I’d lose. They picked the ugliest ones but it’s fine because I’m in them, because I was there. Because I wasn’t born here; not in this darkness, not in this pit, not even in this country. I was brought here by a patchwork of choices, made by and for me, and that’s the least important part actually. The darkness doesn’t belong to me, or to you. It holds no loyalties, it promises no victories. It denounces itself with its own emptiness. It falters with what it means to use as a threat; some substance of the very end.
That’s only for the dead though, for us alive and itching and and online and pleading, it is still redacted.
June 22, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zoe Karpin is a short story writer and has been a teacher for many years. Her short stories are published in Mascara, Sudo, FemZine, Going Down Swinging, Dot Lit, Hecate, and forthcoming in Kalliope X.
How it Happens
Her first permanent appointment and a regular income; she could pay her way with her lover. Her new faculty room; her face turned to sunlight streaming through the north-facing window, needing to be here, needing to be somewhere – why not here? As events had worked out and oh to belong eventually – part of this scenery like the great eucalyptus, its limbs raised over the building and girth so wide -three people could rest against it.
At morning break. She was slim wearing a tight grey pencil skirt plus black pumps but weary. Up late at night preparing work for students, no way around this, the early days.
In the centre of the room dolmades and cheese were set out on the large table; her inaugural group morning tea. Food graciously displayed on hand for consuming. Winding strands of long dark hair out of her face, I must join the eating.
Her fellow instructors gobbled the dolmades. The vine leaves used in these dolmades, ‘freshly prepared following an old Greek recipe off the internet,’ the cook said.
‘Go on Olivia’, take two.’ They were watching. You have not eaten our food before. Smiling, liking dolmades and expecting to want more, a dolmades hovered near her lips. However, so disappointing- not enough lemon, too greasy and the rice so gluggy. Swallowing though, bit after bit. Dissimulation – she had to do work for the next instruction, sunk into her seat at her desk. Olivia, not fussy, not unhealthy, not obsessed about her weight, was just demanding of quality when there was no real obstacle to acquiring it. No war or famine, poverty nor any other cataclysmic event stood in anyone’s among the staff and so many sources of information about good cooking; books, internet, tv etc. No excuses. The rest of the faculty were still gobbling the dolmades- a whole heaped plate of them and still praising them. Suzy unloaded cheese and cucumber sandwiches from a large plastic container onto emptying plates. ‘Wonderful, yummy.’ many said.
But she kept her head on her work; not so nice-processed cheese and vanilla pasty bread.
But everyone, even Jasmine in the desk next to her, who ate tuna salad every lunchtime, praised the sandwiches.
The bell rang. I am released to teach.
After 4:00 pm there, alone- working back, gazing at five dolmades wearing tutus of oil and crumpled sandwiches, the leftovers on the enormous table in the heart of the room, abandoned like her to get stale. The cleaner was not fancying them but muttering, ‘What a wasteful lot you are.’
Her face aflame with shame. She prepared and cooked exact amounts of food for her purposes.
If she forced all the food down together however- the excess greasy oil in the dolmades would counterattack the staleish, insipid bread of the cheese and cucumber sandwiches. And more -even though the cheese was a processed mildest cheddar, synthetic like, and the cucumber was sliced in unforgivable thick slices she might slosh it all down with a hot cup of milky tea.
She was there working; swallowing and chewing away, the cleaner vacuuming around her. But regret hit her hard. Later. As if there had been a military assault on her taste buds. She insulted them, too; her mother and grandmother who passed on to her appreciation of good cooking.
Then Jasmine made cannolis. She was not Italian, but she was so proud of them, a special for the latest monthly faculty morning tea.
‘Look – please take one,’ she said to Olivia. ‘ I’m a good cook, you know.’ Once again to Olivia.
Olivia blushingly,’ of course, I’ll have one. What had Jasmine been sensing?
Not even having to taste the cannolis- to know they were ill conceived, too thick and doughy, white instead of brown, not fried enough. Filling with chocolate not ricotta cheese. A travesty.
The cannoli. Any tooth aching sweetness she could get past by drinking her coffee, biting a mouthful like diving into a pool of cold water on a winter’s day. It’s sticky, tacky, soft, gooey, doughy shell more sickening than expected but she was saying unbelievably. ‘I’ll have another.’ She gave Jasmine a thumbs up. Jasmine hugged her around her waist. She could finish the cannoli under the tree outside.
On another morning, the head of Department Linda carried a large cheesecake she had baked. Everyone was saying and laughing. ‘It’s a welcome for Olivia,’
But cheesecake is tricky, and the base was soggy and the creamcheese drippy and cloyingly sweet.
The cake was a gun to her head. She couldn’t swallow more after the first bite but did. Everyone ate their slice and they all said,’ delicious.’
‘How wonderful a head who cooks for their staff.’
‘Give the four pieces left over to Olivia, our newbie. ‘
The four pieces were wrapped in cling wrap and then put in a brown paper bag and presented to her, –
She would drop three slices into the neighbour’s compost and one slice to their dog. Certainly.
A long hold up on the Hume highway homeward bound making it later even, again. The brown paper bag was on the front passenger seat, almost a companion, slightly cosy. Their hospitable gesture. She yawned and sighed and that slight hunger gnawing stomach, usually dismissible -nutrients in her blood like glucose, amino acids and fatty acids possibly, at a low concentration.
She shoved the three pieces of the cheesecake, one after another, into her mouth, swallowing a double-edged sword of the collegial affinity she was so wanting and the disfavor at the means of its execution.
Each swallow the cakes’ vileness was less and less irksome. It went on like that. More poorly made cakes at morning tea, more swallowing but less and less disgust every time. Enjoyment even. Pleasure in the desensitization; denaturing, cheapening, debasing and corrupting and she was talking to everyone then, Pete, Suzy, Maria, Janey, Gracie, Andy, Rog, Jazzie, even Linda.
May 9, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
S.V. Plitt is a queer author living and working in Naarm, Melbourne. Son’s writing has been published in Archer magazine, Darebin n-SCRIBE, and won second place in the Odyssey House Short Story Prize 2022. Their manuscript ‘Strange Intersections’ was Highly Commended in the VPLAs Unpublished Manuscript Competition 2022. They also appear on the (Un) Marginalised Season Two Podcast, discussing themes included in their writing, such as gender identity, mental health, religious oppression, and intergenerational trauma. Son draws inspiration from volunteering as a carer and their work in customer service.
A Fairy God Princess
A subversive tale of feminist woes
There once was a Fairy God Princess.
She kissed a lot of toads looking for her prince.
Not only toads, in fact.
She pranced through the forest kissing lizards and lions and amorous amphibians.
With each slippery kiss, her disappointment grew.
The disappointment grew and grew inside her belly like a bag of snakes in a battle for sovereignty.
Battling for the prize of turning the princess into a lizard, or a lion or an amorous amphibian.
They fought fiercely, keeping the princess up at night.
Whenever she drifted into an exhausted slumber, the lizards or goannas, the toads or the lions would pull the tendon by her tailbone.
Like a puppet, her legs wriggled and squirmed out of bed and tried to run away with her.
To turn the princess into a toad or lion or amorous amphibian.
To make her a bride.
But the princess was also a warrior and worried that if her legs ran away with her,
the battle in her belly would boil and boil, filling her up with a storm for scales and fur.
She begged the moon and the stars and the emptiness in between,
that the lizard prince whose eyes gleamed like black jewels,
the prince that had so chivalrously waited in the forest for a decade,
that he might be the victor, in this battle of bravado that boiled in her belly.
But like all the contestants, his price for saving her from the lions and the toads and the amorous amphibians, was sovereignty. To possess the flesh in which she resided. To grow a lizard in her belly. To grow a king.
The Fairy God Princess, the warrior that worried, knew deep down that the flesh in which she resided, could not be divided. It was hers and hers alone.
No heir, no king, no lizard, no amorous amphibian, no lion, and no toad would chain her to the future. She prayed to the moon and the stars and the emptiness in between.
An answer came. It was a vast and empty silence that spread through her heart, her belly and her mind. She relinquished her title. No more a Fairy God Princess.
She remembered her true identity and became they. They knew the I in them. Their I was in all of the fairies, gods and princesses, in all of the princes, lizards and toads, all of the goannas, the lions and the amorous amphibians. They were all of it and nothing. And belonged to themselves and no one.
And they all lived ever after in a confusing land of grammatically problematic pronouns.
March 13, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maja Rose has returned to her hometown of lutruwita (Tasmania) having lived in London, Brighton, Melbourne, and Sydney. She completed a BA in English Lit/Media (Hons) at La Trobe University, and a Creative Writing residential summer at Oxford University. She has a background in screen production and currently works in the library at Risdon Prison.
Movement
My father, Otto, is gutting fish on a makeshift table in the backyard, a thick piece of wood with a surface of dusty splinters laid out on some iron contraption that in hindsight, maybe he keeps just for this.
Skrrth, skrrth.
The edge of his knife flicks scales off the plump bodies in easy, smooth movements of his nut-brown, knobbled wrist. Silver flecks winnow up into the air, caught for a moment by the wind before they fall into the grass. Tiny mirrors, reflecting nothing.
“Have you ever seen a squid beak?” he asks me.
He caught all yellowfin mullet, one calamari squid. I took a photo of the bucket, a mass of shining light in blue plastic before he turned the hose on them and the blood I hadn’t been able to see rose up from the bottom and turned them all muddy.
“I don’t think so,” I say, and come to stand beside him.
He rummages through the squid’s face. An eyeball pops out, and I have to look away before I gag.
Then he pulls out the beak, a little knot of black.
“See?” he says, making it open and close. “Just like a parrot.”
*
My other father, biodad, sends me a message on Whatsapp.
I’m about to board the plane now, darling. I’ll call you when I land in Paris, if you’re still awake.
Sometimes I wonder how we came to this gentle, easy way of talking. There’s a part of me that thinks it’s because I stopped caring. I no longer have expectations, so he can no longer let me down.
The day I saw him in Bangkok and realised that, in 25 years, I had never spent a night alone with him, I came to an understanding.
This is just a man. A man who you are only connected to through blood and semen. What a strange thing. What a pointless reason to be in this airbnb together.
But I don’t feel anger anymore. I don’t think.
Is it worse to feel nothing?
When I see that he’s landed, I don’t open the message. I’ll wait until later. It’s too early to call.
*
When I was very young, a year into Otto’s arrival into my life, we made up a game together. A friend had made a chaircover out of knitted soft toys, little clowns and dolls and bears that held you up as you curled tight and read a book (I had just learned how to read).
On the left arm, there was a tiny little postman, with a hat that you could remove, and a red satchel with a bone button that you could flick open with one finger. The satchel was very small, but big enough to hold a note, if you folded it up very tight.
The postman would carry notes between Otto and I, and I think I believed that the postman was also, perhaps, a fairy. Overcomplicating things for the sake of magic was a common pastime of mine.
Would you like a cup of tea? Otto’s note might say.
Can I call you dad? said mine.
*
I had an argument with dad after I first flew home from living overseas. My grandmother—biodad’s mum—had just died, and I’d scattered her ashes with my cousins on the river. Mum was in a new relationship for the first time in years, and it made me feel uneasy, unsure for the first time where I stood in my relationship to her. I felt like a kid, even though I was 29.
My grandmother dying was a reminder that I was on the outside of that side of the family, both because of my dad’s actions and my own. I had put up boundaries in my teenage years to stop myself from hurting, but it had kept me from connecting with the rest of the family, too. I felt guilty about having been away while she was dying, and guilty about having been away from everyone for longer than the three years in Thailand would account for.
*
Dad has had another daughter. I think she’s so beautiful, the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. I was on the beach on Koh Kradan when he called to tell me.
On the other side of the world, the sky was orange and pink with sunset, and I had taken a photo a few minutes before he called. I’d like to think it was taken as she emerged into the world, and I had felt it and knew I should document it.
When I come back home, dad has too many glasses of red wine and tells me I don’t love him, or any of my family, because otherwise I never would have left.
“Say goodnight,” dad says to my sister, waving her chubby little hand at me. “Say goodnight to your big sister; she’s going to leave you again. And this time she isn’t coming back.”
*
Biodad told me that he’d wanted to marry my mum when he found out she was pregnant with me. He spun a fantasy that I desperately wanted to believe.
When I told mum, stars in my eyes, eighteen and stupid, she laughed so hard she fell to her knees.
“Oh really?” she said, still wheezing on the floor. “And when was he going to propose? Before or after he recorded our phone conversations to give to his lawyer?”
*
Dad holds the squid beak in his hand, clicks and clacks it shut as if it’s speaking. My sister runs up on steady legs, demands to see. Dad smiles at me, sunshine in his leathery face.
“Can you pick her up?” he asks me. “My hands are dirty.”
We stand together, all three of us, the fruit trees’ heavy perfume mixing with the tinny stink of fish guts. Dad nudges me, winks as he makes the squid beak clack in my sister’s face.
I wonder what he would say if I told him I was thinking of moving away again.
January 23, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born and raised in China, Jing Cramb came to Australia for postgraduate study and is a teacher in Brisbane. Her short stories have received a Highly Commended Award in Peter Cowan competition and have been shortlisted for Deborah Cass Prize.
Lisa looked like a Laughing Buddha when she was talking about her son Oliver. It was quite remarkable because Lisa was not Asian, but an Australian redhead. Her eyes squinted into a slit almost disappearing from her face, only leaving her nose, permanently shining with sweat from the heat in the café kitchen. Her face looked happy and content. My grandpa would say with a face like that she ought to have good luck.
“Oliver got into this prestigious local school”. Her voice was infused with sweet excitement sounding like a chirping bird. I had already heard the news. I was not sure if the word “prestigious” should be used for a public school, even in a good suburb, perhaps I was wrong. English is a difficult language.
“The kids from the school look…”, she paused searching for the right word and then said “clean”. As if I didn’t understand she stared at me, drew closer, whispered it slowly in her low husky voice “C-leeaann”.
The word echoed around me.
So, Oliver will become as clean as the other students, who wear freshly laundered and ironed clothes, shiny polished shoes, shower twice a day, rarely have acne on their faces and are all fit because of the healthy food they eat. As opposed to someone who looks “dirty”.
I looked clean I suppose. Last week, a grey-haired, stern-faced lady told me “You don’t look like a waitress, you are…too clean”, as she examined me making her coffee. Her silver- rimmed glasses seemed to emanate cold air and sent a chill down my spine. I didn’t know what to say. I was embarrassed, trying to work out the meaning behind her comment and being the centre of attention. I looked at her and smiled. She did not smile back.
The coffee I made her was burnt.
I might have accidentally fallen into the “clean girl” category, as proven by my pale-yellow skin and the lady with the authoritative look. It should be an honour for a girl like me. I grew up in a heavily polluted industrial city in the north of China. The sky was permanently grey. A big open rubbish dump was a few hundred metres away from the little one-bedroom flat where my grandparents and I lived. Sometimes stray dogs roamed around with unknown items dangling from their mouths, followed by a swarm of flies. The public squat toilet, with window frames but no glass, was always freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. There were no divisions in the toilet, everyone was on display, everyone was equal. Giant white maggots moved slowly over the cubicle floors.
My thin, brown, wrinkly no Laughing Buddha-faced grandpa always sat cross-legged on the couch next to the little dining table. At lunch time, he would fling his head back, scull a shot of warm rice wine and smile at me. His teeth were stained with excess alcohol, black tea and low-quality tobacco, a couple of teeth missing. He wished that one day I could go to a university in the capital city, unlike him. He had never been away from his hometown. He and I did not know that a decade later, I would come to this clean country, live in the clean city, breathe in its clean air and become a clean person. Unlike my grandpa, who never had a chance to become, clean.
August 12, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rayan Chakrabarti is a writer from Kolkata, India. His poems have been published in Mulberry Literary, Monograph Magazine and Indian Ruminations. He likes to travel to the hills and play the piano.
Becoming Cyborg
Now I become Shadow,
Accept me, Mother
now I shed teeth and penis,
accept this haunting.
There is that time, vast oceans of heave, that exists before the discovery. And though the house in the nerves has shifted, and corrugated tin has started to take measure of the tea, the lack of the discovery means that everything is yet equilibrium. In fact, the ants are bubbling away in the sauna of rice, and deep sparrows have risen from the colouring book. A long family of the day will be upon the silverware, polishing off the sun in reflection.
I have left my body to become a spectator to its contours. Just around my hip, I’ve discovered a new mole to gnaw into, bread it into knead, make it palatable. I’ve locked the door to immerse myself in its expanse. Still, a night has to travel before the morning breaks it open. A half-brewed tearcan melts from ice-cool on the bedpost.
Midnight has brought with them a new audience. Grains of metal, flying in from a faraway galaxy latch onto my armpit. Some of the blood has found a station there. In the moonlight, when their arrival announces a river, you can only hear the softness of the steel bed.
But who are they, hunting for new territory at this part of the night? Known customers trudge along the margins of my vision, travellers to a fasting star.
The Almirah, bank of dreams, kneels around my childhood. Monsoon wells in the hippocampus, stinging of death. Mother burned at the stake, for whose sake do we go on living? Perhaps, a summer of longing, last summer with toffee and younging.
The Crow, measurer of blight, gossips around my neck, pecking veins, counting on the quick shine and gloss. For him, it is a step out of routine, but he’s been out for vengeance since I stopped feeding their offspring last year. Feeding them goat’s brain and koyel tails, so they can prey and wring. I too shall become nest and birthing.
Tree of sorrow, Tree of light, become creeper around me, take my fingers as yours, make me disappear before they break the door down, before the final shock of parenthood, let me become leafvein and telephone pole charging electric through the city.
In some stills, the morning is.
Fear not, trees of sheath surround you,
bark of wire and calm.
July 28, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chelsea Harding is a young writer who lives on King Island.
Silence
You open your tired eyes, the harsh morning sun glaring back at you with an unknown source of rage. You respond to this mysterious anger by closing your sensitive eyes once more.
The sun burns your face, frigid air nips at your exposed skin and goosebumps run up your body, as if competing in some sort of race. Flowers and shrubbery tickle the sides of your face and arms, dancing with the wind, as you focus on the sounds surrounding the place you now lay.
The sound of water immediately fills your ears, splashing and sploshing and swirling in circles, sending a satisfied smile to your face. It bubbles up, then falls down, stuck in a never-ending pattern. Searching for another sound, your focus switches to the rustling leaves, brushing against one-another. You find these sounds oddly calming, like a cool shower on a hot summer’s day, or the smell of fresh parchment in a new book.
You lay still, listening intently to the flow of the water and soft movements of the trees, their leaves and their branches swaying with the rhythm of the breeze, feeling yourself relax at the noise, until it stopped.
Everything stopped.
You force your sore eyes open, despite the pain your eyes endure in the scorching sun, sitting up in your spot. Everything is moving, you think, so why can’t I hear it?. The longer you think, the more confused you grow, like something was digging deeper and deeper into your brain every time you try to focus.
Silence never seems like it’s such a dreadful thing, like it’s something you could easily ignore, but it’s not. Silence is so undeniably loud, so insanely loud it’s irritating. You can hear your heart hammering in your chest. You can hear your breathing increasing by the second. You just can’t figure out why everything has gone so abruptly quiet.
Confused.
Scared.
Alone.
Tired.
The words seem to ring in your ears, engraving themselves in your brain. You feel your eyes closing, pulling themselves shut with unignorable force. You close your eyes, letting yourself click back into a sleeping state, blacking out and forgetting this ever happened.
Everything stopped.
Machines
As the cogs began to turn once again, a flicker of light sparked from within. Watching, waiting, anticipating its the first move, the rise of the machine was imminent.
The light shone brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding. The cogs spun and churned, emitting a swirling rainbow circle of light resembling an eye.
It twitched. Once, twice. With each subtle movement the machine’s confidence grew, blooming like a ruby rose in a field.
It stepped forward.
December 3, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
T.L writes fiction, short fiction, poetry, and reviews. Her work has been published in Mascara, Cordite, Southerly, Best Australian Poems 2014, and Griffith Review, among others. In 2016 she won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature. Her second novel, Autumn Leaves, 1922, was released in August 2021 by Pegasus Books USA. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University. She lives on Bidjigal land in Sydney.
Butterfly
A butterfly battles across Parramatta Road. It’s big and black, with white eyes on its wingtips. Even so, the wind in this storm-season is strong and each car and truck that rumbles beneath it sends fresh blasts to blow it off course. It tries to reach the other side of the highway, but it keeps falling, struggling up and then falling on to the road and almost smashed. Then it rises again, against the wind, against the traffic’s displaced air. I wait in my car and the radio blasts, a doctor from the children’s hospital in Kyiv, the broadcaster prompts him, the boy was six, he had bullet wounds, yes, in his chest, his abdomen, his head. The trucks are constant, the cars, the noise incessant. It’s not gridlock and the heavy vehicles, dirty after all the rain, barrel down the hill. The radio continues, the doctor’s words are scattergun, the baby had wounds. Yes. Shot wounds. Yes, the baby was shot in the head. They shot the ambulance. The Russian soldiers, yes. The ambulance called me. On the way to the hospital. The baby died. The butterfly crosses at the lights, where I wait, trying to get home before the next onslaught of flooding storm. The butterfly pushes itself up and up, black wings in a grey sky, up and up. The radio drones on, another city, another basement, I’m in Mariupol, still, I can’t get out. I saw them, my neighbours. They are on the road now, a mother and her boy and her girl. Before they were on the road, they went up, higher than the roof of the church, it seemed impossible, they went up and up, they were flying. Up and up, black wings in a grey sky, up and over the truck, over the next truck, it dips and is almost smashed, then it rises, it reaches the other side of the highway and the trees that stand staunch against the heavy, threatening sky.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Belle is a non-binary writer from regional NSW, most of their work is based around LGBTQ+ topics and working towards a greener future. They also love a good oat milk iced latte.
The Last Choir
There will be little nothings that follow. Moments found between parchment and stone. A leaf, floating in the wind will be a great moment of joy for the world.
Momentous, even.
Because there will be no songs after the last bittersweet verses of a choir. The whales in the deep seas have melted. The moonlight has become lonely without them. There are no strangers to gaze up at the sky and wonder if a better life awaits them over the next hill.
The last of the symphonies played out long ago where only sand remains now. The bones are bleached, a poppy has sprouted through an eye socket. Congratulations to the skull of the loan shark, who managed to bring some beauty into the world. One hundred years after his death.
There is no music in the world, for now. But there are germs and seeds still. Enough that one day, there will be birdsong. Crickets in the evening. Cicadas during the summer.
But no more choirs to mimic them.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zoë Meager is from Aotearoa New Zealand and has a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. Her work has been published abroad in Granta, Lost Balloon, and Overland, and at home in Hue and Cry, Landfall, Mayhem, North & South, Turbine | Kapohau, and anthologised in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and two volumes of Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy.
Come a gutsa
The crazy lady has climbed into the orange rafters of the rollercoaster. She clings not to the tracks, with their promise of tick-tick-tick teeter-tease then dive whoosh swoop zoom whee! but just beneath, where deep iron shadows criss-cross her body.
Down on the ground, slight park attendants with brightly-coloured t-shirts and pale voices address the waiting crowd. The crowd has already purchased its tickets, already queued in compliance with the park’s stated queuing code, already eaten the fairy-floss-hotdog-chips, and now it wants the simulated near-death experience it was promised.
The mother koala and the baby koala are curled into a ball and pressed like grey chewing gum into the junction of two orange beams. They are so close—the crazy lady could almost reach out and touch them. The mother koala listens to the crowd below with eyes half closed. She rearranges the baby koala against her, squeezes, rearranges, squeezes. She does not attend to all the railings to bounce off on the way down. She is thinking about the khaki-coloured leaf that is good to eat. She is thinking about drinking, the liquid taste of earth that is chattering cool.
The crowd below stares up with stones for eyes. Pie holes drawl open, half-chewed words spill out: We’ve been in line for bloody ages, we want a go on the ride! Those koalas jumped the queue, they shouldn’t get to zoom! Those bloody koalas should go back to where they came from.
All this quick year, the crazy lady has heard the country fires drawing closer. She has wandered through old banks of trees, heard the fruity thud of desiccated bats as they hit the ground, she has picked them up, said goodbye to their closing eyes. On dusty streets with shouts and sticks she has broken up squabbles between dingoes and domestic dogs. Seen a grassy parakeet snatch an icy pole from a baby’s sausage fingers. Koalas coming in, perching in the public gardens and starving in suburban backyards. Housewives towing their kids to garden centres and pet stores, asking for eucalypt leaves when they have only just put to bed the annual swan plant shortage.
In the orange rafters of the rollercoaster, the mother koala and the baby koala are a fuzzy football, tailless and divine. The crazy lady is trembling as she inches forward beneath them, a jute-strong bag wedged under her reusable shoulder. She is hoping that when the koalas come unstuck, she can catch them.
The crowd below is baking restless, letting off swearwords into the summer-blue sky. All its white faces boiling red, blonde hair in a halo of putrid smoke. The crowd points its arms all up, up, a hundred skewers, It’s her, she’s stopping us riding the coaster! She’s taking away our human rights!
The baby koala really wants to cling to its mother’s back. It’s at that age. Okay then, says the mother koala, drowsily, letting the baby koala tunnel under her arm and up and onto her back. The baby koala arrives safely on its mother’s back, scrunches its perfect black claws into her rabbity fur and gives out a small dry sigh, and it’s safe there clinging to the hill of her back. Except it doesn’t and it isn’t and it never could, except thirst has left it weak and plummeting, a teddy bear dropped from a pram, headfirst and gone. The crazy lady moves to catch it, the bag snags on the stud of her jeans and she struggles to work it free. The mother koala feels the baby koala’s weight drop away from her and opens her eyes, only to see the shadows of the rollercoaster rafters crossing, double-crossing, double, double. Her nose, a spoon of molasses, she buries into her own soft body. The crazy lady knows it is too late then, and she knows that there is still time.
January 25, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Šime Knežević was born in 1985 and lives in Sydney. His debut poetry chapbook, The Hostage, was published by Subbed In. His poetry has appeared in Ambit (UK), Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Magma (UK), SAND (Germany), Signal House Edition, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere.
Šime was a recipient of the Subbed In Chapbook Prize, an Australia Council grant, and shortlisted for the Philip Parsons Playwright Award. He studied playwriting at the NIDA Playwrights Studio, completed a Master of Arts in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney, and in 2019 attended the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Summer School in Belfast.
Blue Sky
I hear a helicopter. I hear the motor, the rotating hum, of a helicopter, a helicopter motoring across the sky. I am alone on a white rug and I hear a helicopter. I am alone on a white rug in the quiet room. The helicopter is outside, motoring across the sky. I am alone on a white rug, orienting myself toward a blue sky I say, inside orienting myself toward a blue sky, a blue sky I say. Outside a helicopter motors yet I hear it from inside the quiet room. I am alone on a white rug in the quiet room orienting myself toward the phrase blue sky. I try to orient myself toward the phrase blue sky. I say blue sky. I say blue sky to try to orient myself toward the phrase as I say it. I am orienting myself toward the phrase blue sky with the high-hope it being said out-loud will somehow provoke something soothing inside me. In the quite room on the white rug I hear a helicopter in the distance, flying away. I hear how feint the helicopter’s motor has grown. No, I hear how feint the helicopter’s motor has diminished. No, wait. I orient myself toward the phrase blue sky with the high hope it will provoke a soothing reaction, even provoke a memory of a sky the colour blue. I am alone. I am alone on a white rug in the quiet room. The door is closed. I face the white-wall of the quiet room. On the white rug. The helicopter has since flown. I no longer hear the helicopter. I say ‘helicopter’. I say ‘helicopter’. No, I no longer hear the helicopter. Of a sky the colour blue, I say the phrase ‘blue-sky’, I orient myself toward the phrase. I want to connect to this phrase. I am alone on a white rug in the quiet room. Say blue sky. I say blue sky on the white rug in the quiet room. The phrase calms me, it must. Say blue sky. I say it twice. I say it to make it a hymn. Blue sky. Blue sky. On the white rug, I am alone in the quiet room. The door is closed and I face the white-wall. There must be breathing. Why am I not breathing? I breathe. I breathe and orient myself toward the blue sky I say on a white rug to the white-wall. I make it a hymn. Lean toward the phrase. Say it. To my surprise, it’s impossible to visualise a blue skyin my mind. Even though I say those words clearly, as clear as a whole blue sky, I can’t seem to visualise a blue sky. Is there something wrong with me? What exactly did a blue sky look like on its own? In my mind, I could see clouds of different shapes. Suddenly a moon. Some unidentifiable flying birds. I hear piano music, as if played from a Casio keyboard. None of these drew me closer to visualise a blue sky in my mind. There it is. A background element. Is there something wrong with me? It seemed, to my mind, to visualise a blue sky without clouds or moon or birds or piano music, proved impossible. Yes, inaccessible. Just like the whole blue sky itself, it eluded me, I feel unclear. I can’t seem to visualise one thing without another thing. I can’t seem to visualise a blue sky without piano music. One thing must be paired to another thing. Birds must fly in the foreground and the blue sky must be somewhere in the background. On the white rug I face the white-wall, I inhale and exhale. To re-orient myself to the present moment. Yes, to re-orient myself. This is why I’m here. Why am I here in the quiet room? To orient myself, to re-orient myself. I am alone in the quiet room. Why am I here alone in the quiet room? I inhale and exhale, unable to visualise a simple blue sky, orienting, re-orienting myself on the white rug in the quiet room. I got myself to the quiet room to breathe, to understand breathing. To visualise a blue sky and I struggled to do so. I got myself, to gather myself. And its sudden burst into splinters, I gathered myself and I got myself to the quiet room. This is why I’m here.
November 15, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
JZ Ting is an Asian-Australian geek, lawyer, and writer. She has lived on four continents but stays for Sydney’s beaches where she pretends to be a mermaid. Her fiction has appeared in Pencilled In literary magazine and been performed at Subbed In events, and she tweets online @ting_jz.
Transplant
Grandma dies in the best way possible: peacefully, in her garden chair, under sunny Sydney skies. She fell asleep, the nurses say, first to my father who arrives from work, then my mother, then me. She fell asleep and didn’t wake up. The best way to go.
They don’t tell us that she was alone, but we know anyway. She was alone each time we visited, a tiny, white-haired Malaysian-Chinese lady with broken English surrounded by white-haired, white Australians who drink English with their breakfast teas. The landscapes are English too, all roses and neatly trimmed hedges politely perplexed by the papaya my father planted, a poor substitute for the majestic rambutans Grandma left behind. The retirement village website trumpeted gardening as a resident perk. It didn’t mention multicultural staff.
She died in her sleep, my parents say, reaching across oceans to aunts and uncles, cousins and classmates, Grandma’s friends from church. They spin the message into Mandarin and Foochow like silver into gold I cannot touch, though my parents spill enough of it in fights. The coins I scavenged were never enough to spend with Grandma, so instead I bartered: smiles, school marks, my stomach for the fruits and soups she prepared just for me. A few hours every month to pay off my guilt. The funeral will be in Sydney. We hope you can make it, but understand if it’s too far.
Planes converge while Grandma waits in a local morgue. To me her loss is soft and nebulous, an abstraction I try to map out in Sydney streets. They send me home where arguments are silenced, bankrupted by my father’s grief, while my mother rations out affection in rice and steaming bak kuh teh. She tells me how when her grandfather died, the entire family ate fresh durians beside his open coffin which took pride of place in the living room for the village to pay respects. That night, I dream of Grandma’s ghost lost alone in the dark.
Thank you for coming, we say to people filing past. It’s sad but not unexpected, and she was cared for to the end.
Grandma lies beneath a bouquet of banksias and winter skies. The small congregation sings in English and Mandarin as photos flash, and only now do I begin to know her: family portraits, a bride to the grandfather I never met, a church group sweating in the tropic heat. There’s a photo of her posing with my father, startlingly young, in a tiny Malaysian airport, and another holding infant me. One black-and-white picture of a tall young woman in a floral qipao, her smile proud and bright, hands full of furry rambutans plucked from her trees.
Did she know? When she gave her son a one-way ticket and suitcase of books, did she realise what she was sacrificing? Would it have been kinder for my father to leave her in her village, alone but at home, with family reunions once a year? What is it like to migrate when you’re so old, and die in a foreign land?
I don’t know. I couldn’t afford to ask.
Grandma dies and we say farewell. I hold my father’s shaking hand telling myself that Sydney’s earth is as dark as Malaysia’s earth, that the one sun shines on both, and rain falls all the same. Yet the wind that blows between us is cold, scented with eucalypts fresh as a wound, and sour like regret.
May 30, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Xiaoshuai Gou was born and raised in China. He has been working as a teacher of English and Mandarin as a second language and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of South Australia.
The Cup
The cup itself wouldn’t amount to much significance to any stranger: crude ceramic, plain design, with a kid happily pursuing dragonflies under the summer sun. It was randomly picked up at a reject shop by the pregnant mother. The joy flowing on the kid’s face perhaps had something to do with it.
A skinny boy was born at the end of March. It was the first time the pregnant mother became a real mother, and many things had to be learned from the start and properly handled. The difficulty caused by the absence of a father was aggravated by the fact that the new mother soon turned out to be milkless. All manner of baby formulas were then brought to her, from various countries, and via the hands of all kinds of people. The cup was useful for the first time, and the mother diligently washed it after each time the formula was fed to her baby.
Two months later, the content of the cup began to change. At first, formulas were still the staple of it, with occasional pills crushed into them to add extra nutrients for the proper growth of the newborn. Then things changed to almost the complete opposite. Pill powders of all brands and colors started to take hold of the cup, while non-stop coughs of the baby boy rendered the formula feeding increasingly pointless. With the same diligence, and with growing amounts of quiet tears, the mother continued to wash the cup. But a stubborn dark stain was still irreversibly engraved into its interior wall of once milky smoothness.
Then came the summer. The coughing finally subjected the infant boy to the 24/7 protection of the hospital ICU and the vigilance of its nurses. Pills stopped being crushed. Full tins of formula were stashed away without the prospect of ever being opened again in the future. Suddenly all things ceased to be of any meaning. The mother’s distress grew more and more visible every time she watched her baby son through the ICU windows, until eventually she was declared as suffering from severe postnatal depression, and was subsequently hospitalised in the same hospital as that of her infant son. The cup washing was abandoned.
The next summer differed from those preceding it with its excessive rainfall. This posed a serious problem for the old grandma who had a flower garden at her back yard. For the bulk of the summer, she had to juggle constantly between visiting the hospital where her depressed daughter was showing clear signs of recovery, and salvaging the small garden frequently in danger of being washed away by the heavy rain. Luckily her efforts paid off in the end. Both her daughter and the garden survived the rainfall spell at the end of summer. And as did her late grandson’s tiny grave at the north corner of the garden, with a solitary ceramic cup placed in front and mounted with dirt and rain water.
May 30, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Wanling Liu (born 1989, China) completed her MA in Translation and Transcultural Communication at the University of Adelaide. She is a literary translator and teaches translating and interpreting in Adelaide. She has developed a passion for performance poetry and storytelling events and has won spoken word prizes with her poetry published in local anthologies.
Childhood Surprise
It was nine o’clock at night. I was five and feeling bored at home, scribbling away with colourful pencils in my colouring book. There were never enough colours to choose from. I yelled out to Mum that I wanted to go to Mrs. Han’s to play with Huahua.
Mum glanced at the clock on the wall, “It’s already nine, and you still want to go out? And I don’t know the way to Mrs. Han’s.”
“I know the way! I know how to get there. I know how to get to Mrs. Han’s! You can come with me!” I persisted.
Mum sighed, “Fine, if you must go, let’s go.”
We took the No. 9 bus and after a few stops, I could see that we were almost on Zhongshan Road. “There, there, next stop is Triangle Garden!” I started yelling, “Triangle Garden is where Mrs. Han lives!”
Mum and I got off the bus and walked through the garden paths and a few dim-lit alleys until we reached Unit Block 3. “I remember she’s on Level 3, 303.” I said. Mum and I walked up the stairwell in darkness as the light was not working. When we reached level 3, I couldn’t wait to knock on the door.
The light from the gap between the door and the floor flickered. Someone was coming to get the door. The inner wooden door opened, glaring white light leaking out from inside. Mrs. Han appeared, with only her silhouette visible against the dazzling light. I dashed forward and banged on the door, “Mrs. Han, I am here to visit! Is Huahua home?”
Mrs. Han opened the door fully, and unlocked the screen door from inside. She smiled at me and didn’t seem very surprised. She called out, “Huahua, Dandan is here to visit you.” Mum nodded and smiled apologetically. Mrs. Han, still smiling, said “Hello.”
We walked into the living room. I sat right next to Huahua. On TV a group of kids were singing my favourite tune, “Not as sweet as flowers, not as tall as trees, I’m just a little blade of grass that no one ever sees….” We sat in front of the TV and watched attentively. Mum sat down, and Mrs. Han was busy making tea for us.
Half an hour had passed; I started to feel tired and bored. The songs started to grate on my ears. Mum and Mrs. Han were chatting away. My eyes started to wander: The fluorescent light was still dazzling, but everything in front of me seemed a bit dull.
Huahua offered to show me her picture collection, but realized there were a few pages missing. We started searching in drawers and chests. As we were looking for the missing ones, I noticed a yellow wooden door beside me with a silver door knob on it.
The doorknob lured me. The temptation was simply too great. I put my hand on the door knob and it turned effortlessly. Realizing I could open the door, I walked in. I could see a giant bed, with its edge high up and with a white sheet and a white quilt spread over it. Someone was lying under the quilt.
“Who is that?” I turned to Huahua, whispering, with my eyes still fixated on the person. Suddenly the black hair looked somewhat familiar. I hollered, “Daddy! What is Daddy doing here?” Huahua was silent. Mrs. Han did not utter a sound. My mum did not utter a sound.
After a few seconds, the head turned toward me, looking a bit purplish red, and with squinting eyes on it. The person mumbled, “I’ve drunk a little, I need rest.” Something felt wrong to me. I closed the door, went back to the living room, sat back on the lounge, and did not dare to speak.
Huahua, Mrs. Han, Mum and I just sat in the living room and watched TV for another half an hour. What was on TV did not make sense to me anymore. I felt like I had done something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what.
Dad came out with his coat later and said, “Let’s go home.” I could not understand how the night got spoiled like this, and I was not ready to put up with this. I quietly whimpered, “I want to play with Huahua a bit longer”. Mum answered, “Then you stay and play with Huahua. I am going home. Your father can take you.”
Dad said, “It’s late, let’s go home.” On the way back, I felt sleepy and upset. No one spoke a word on the way back. Their faces showed no expression.
I thought Mum would be furious. I thought Mum would teach Dad a lesson. I waited in silence in my bedroom, with my ear to the wall.
After a long while, all that could be heard was the faintest, almost inaudible sound of weeping.
May 30, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
HC Hsu is author of the short story collection Love Is Sweeter (Lethe) and essay collection Middle of the Night (Deerbrook), which has been nominated for the Housatonic Award, CALA Award and Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Memoir competition winner and The Best American Essays nominee, he has written for Pif, Big Bridge, Iodine, nthposition, 100 Word Story, China Daily News, Epoch Times, Words Without Borders, and many others. He has served as interpreter for the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and his translation of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo’s biography Steel Gate to Freedom was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2015.
Motive
When she arrived, he was already sitting at the table.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I got held up at work.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said, and smiled. It was their usual table, and on it her favorite wine had already been poured, the candle lit, and everything was so familiar and wonderful.
He handed her his napkin, smiling.
She noticed her hair dripping water onto the table, making small wet spots on the white tablecloth.
She took the napkin and patted her hair with it. The waitress already arrived with another napkin.
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
He looked gently and lovingly into her eyes. He was always so considerate and forgiving.
She excused herself to go to the restroom. The waitress cast her a glance.
She checked herself in front of the mirror.
Did he know? All of a sudden she became scared.
How could he not know? The constant lateness, the flimsy excuses, the hair still wet from a shower…everything was just as she had planned.
She thought about coming clean, but she had done that already before. He said he appreciated her even more for her honesty, and that he should work to try to rekindle the romance between them, and so they began having weekly dates. How could she leave someone so considerate and forgiving?
She walked back to the table. Her wine was still sitting there, the candle still soft-lit, and he, still smiling.
She took a sip of the wine; for some reason the astringency made her wince this time, as if she were enduring some kind of punishment.
‘I took the liberty of ordering for you this time,’ he said, his smile overflowing exuberantly from his eyes. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
She began to suspect his motive.
March 31, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brianna Bullen is a Deakin University PhD student writing a creative thesis on memory in science fiction. She has had work published in journals including LiNQ, Aurealis, Verandah, Voiceworks, and Buzzcuts. She won the 2017 Apollo Bay short story competition and placed second in the 2017 Newcastle Short Story competition.
The Last Giant Panda
Every morning, the worker put on her panda suit to work with the cubs. They did not want human intervention, and yet they asked this of her. The cubs needed to be taught how to be pandas. Every night, she would clock off work at six and shed herself, before getting into a different suit. Her panda body would be a corpse on the floor, before it was strung up on a coat hanger and put away for the next day. Her large head would sit on the upper shelves, staring down at her with large felt eyes, which obscured how small the eye holes and field of vision actually were.
She had the job for two years when talks began for automation; a robot panda would not bare the scent of humans, and would not make them reliant on human contact. She argued a robot would deprive them of spontaneity, the ability to respond to their personalities and play, and would not give them the genuine love and experience that came with touching another living biological organism. There was connection there a machine could not emulate, as much as they would be able to model the appropriate moves and be . The zoo found her list ‘ridiculous, and frankly anthropomorphizing.’
The only problem they foresaw was cost: it was a large immediate investment for long-term gain. Her wages were much less in the short-term. They made a metal bear, and tried it out. It had patches of fur crudely glued on. The cubs ran away as the noise of moving gears was too loud for them. Her co-worker joked they some people ran from cars and construction machines when they were first introduced. It would take time.
The engineers worked to decrease the sound and artificial movements of the machine. They observed footage of pandas moving, coding their rolling lumber into circuitry. Advanced artificial intelligence was programmed in, enabling them to respond to the environment and actions of the cubs to an individual degree. They claimed by the end, none of them could tell the difference between beast and machine. Some even spoke of ending the breeding program all together; it was a waste of time and resources. Pandas could be replaced by machines, and the public would not know the difference.
She told them they were not watching the pandas closely enough.
They decommissioned the program shortly after the zoo’s management overheard these plans. The head engineer was later found hanging in her apartment. These events may or may not have been related.
She got her job back, and her suit.
She saw the bi-color babies through her limited lens. Inside this body, they were her own. She let them crawl on her chest, their heavy fat and muscle compressing down, but she did not complain. They chewed on her fake face. Bat with claws. She’d push them over when they got too rough, and sometimes just for fun, and watch them roll over like giant pom-poms. They were as serene as little Buddha, with tragic black eyes. In their simulated natural environment, bamboo shot up in stratified straight lines. Plush green glass took up all the color of her city, the panda’s black and white making her feel peppermint-flavored peace. She had raised six before the automaton, watched them grow up into sulkier teens, their eye markings taking on the brand of teenage Gothic rebellion. Then she’d get reassigned when they no longer needed her. Her latest two were already starting to grow, nearly matching her sixty kilograms. She was grateful for their remaining time. With any luck, they would not be the last pandas. Her supervisors, however, thought there was something changed about them. Something wrong. They were more curious and adventurous than they should have been. In the wild, this would have been a problem. Thankfully, they were safe inside their glass, little living biology specimens.
The last panda in the wild died on a Saturday. She continued with her work until the Thursday, but something integral and unnamable had been lost. She resigned the following Monday, citing irreconcilable differences with the world.
Three days later, her first cub was introduced to the breeding program. Given a diet of bamboo shoots and panda porn, the zoo was hopeful for success.
December 19, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michael Adams is a writer and academic living near Wollongong. His work has been published in Meanjin, The Guardian, and Australian Book Review, as well as numerous academic journals and book chapters. His essay on freediving, loss and mortality, ‘Salt Blood’ won the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize.
Flood
He has driven down in tears in the car from the conversations with the psychologist, and the way they run the retreat lays bare his emotions even more (a woman he doesn’t know next to him on the mats is also sobbing). By Sunday first thing he is a mess, and after the early morning meditation session feels shaky and vulnerable. He cannot bear to be with other people, so walks across fields to the river. It has been raining for days, everything is sodden, green, muddy.
But the river is a vision: huge, swollen, patterned, powerfully moving, the great sweep of current surging down. It has swelled over the banks, completely fills the low valley. The sky is unbroken white, rain is hammering down, a percussion of sound – water on leaves, on wood, on mud, on water. The river itself makes no sound, the enormous powerful surge of current totally silent. It is a great block of muted colour with a mobile, patterned, articulated surface.
A bird flies heavily away from low branches, dark in the clouded morning. There is no one here. He strips on the flooded ledge, piles his clothes in the wet fork of a tree, steps naked into the water. The air is warm and humid, the rain cold on his shoulders, his feet grip the sliding mud. He takes another step and dives, swims hard into the middle of the river, strokes strong and precise. The river is cold but he feels encased in his warm body, the cold just flowing over his skin, not reaching his core. When he pauses to orient, the far bank looks like the Amazon, a dense wall of wet green forest coming down to the water’s edge.
In the middle of the swollen current he feels good, his body reliable. The joy and wild beauty of the swim have recalibrated him. The current is pushing fast and he turns upstream to gain some distance. Eyes open, the light glows through brown silty water, eyes closed he is back inside his warm body. Swimming hard and gracefully, there is a sudden massive shock – a split second of realisation, the broken tree trunk swirls past, blood in his eyes, blood in the brown water. He feels his slackening body roll in the dark flood.
December 19, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cecily Niumeitolu is a PhD candidate researching Beckett’s archives at present. She has had three excursions in Philament, her writing has appeared in Voiceworks, Eclectica, Australian Reader, and she received the Henry Lawson Prize for Prose.
The Red Bucket
Hatching, in a red bucket, all the silence.
At the front of a California bungalow the bucket sat. The bucket was plastic and red. Accounting for the lawn, the lawn is concrete, beaten from within, its decay is visible in the cracks, symptomatic of its weakening aggregates. Beaten from without, fifty years fade white to grey. This could only be aggravated by the position of the house at the bottom of a slope. There is scant irrigation, due to the concrete, due to the brick, so debris has nowhere to go but stain.
The old man built the concrete lawn when his hands were young and tough with muscle. Steel reinforcement, gravel, cement, water. What beauty in the process, a form invisible until the mixing, stirring, pouring, folding the cream, letting it set, slapping his kids over the head when they tried to jump into it, meddle about with their curious paws. He paved a paradise. In the afternoon he would sit with his wife on the front porch and they would watch their children play in his paradise, his concrete paradise. The woman, the wife, approved. She was also Greek. They became an item, the man requested this item sending letters, many letters, to relatives back in Athens, she was a distant cousin, she came by boat and he collected her at the wharf. They went to church for union.
Then the babies came, four, including the loss. The man had his back to the pram getting the boys out of the station wagon. Gravity rode the pram down the slope of road. The car had nowhere to go but forward. The woman, the wife, lost her drive. When he touched her she saw her daughter’s hands.
His boys rarely visited. He didn’t hold it against them. He had constant arthritic trouble in the back, upper, middle, lower. Pain was full-time, scant time between finding ways to position one’s behind and opening cans of dolmades to think of such lapses.
Should have had another daughter. Sons would leave you. So would a wife. It was his own cross. He woke up, and his wife had turned stone. He prodded hard, prodded her right in the middle of the back. Said her name. He loved to watch her pendulous breasts when she had her way with a broom. She made dinner every night at six so they could sit and stare into space in quiet abandon.
The mattress keeps her body’s inlay, a white cave sleeping beside him. Now it was as if he had constantly forgotten something — he would return to a room only to leave again knowing. At times he was too reckless with her. He knew that. Her heart had grown stone of him and then in time, it weakened, then out of habit a kind of garden. Perhaps, now, a paradise in his absence.
The lawn’s entrance swells with succulents, some jutting, some hanging, some snapping atop two white necks of cement cast Corinthian columns. Medusas guarding their yard of stone. The woman tended the succulents as a way to travel to Athens. Now, ten years on there are skeleton weeds that revel in the cracked lawn. The old man cannot bend to tend the concrete. He can give a hand job to her medusas. Their heads at pelvic level. He often forgets, scares him, this. As if she were a different life, husband.
Six months, and the man does not know how the red bucket got there. It was there one day, had been there. It sat on his lawn, plastic and red.
He thinks of the red bucket.
It can take the man five minutes to walk ten metres but with a third leg, a cane donned Constantin, mobility is less vulgar. He tries to think where he went wrong. They are Greek kids, he should live with them, they should visit, that is how it should be. Then his spine delivers a hit to his parietal lobe, and he is back again, back in the present. It was as if it was another life, father.
When it is still dark and the birds crook in song, so the walk begins to morning prayer three blocks south. And then he walks homeward, slow and hooked with the Greek newspaper in one hand, Constantin in the other. In the afternoon he will unfold his homeland, flipping in the Morris chair that forever sentinels the porch, overlooking the concrete lawn. The bucket sat, plastic and red.
There is less certainty, he feels.
It was a member of the Greek congregation that notified the eldest son, telling him the silence was warning. The son found his old man in a room packed as if someone was moving house, wearing a stiff grin that said no and meant yes on the far end of a lumpy double bed. He had starved himself over a period of two or so weeks, the doc said to the son it was will power to cast one’s life that way.
The bedroom remained a high pitch dart of screams, it was, to the son’s great annoyance, mozzies suckling to make room for their young. Nobody understood why the bucket was beside the bed, and the sons could not say what the significance of the red bucket was. It just sat beside the bed, plastic and red.
December 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maris Depers is a Psychologist from Wollongong, NSW. His poetry and short stories have appeared in Kindling III and One Page Literary Magazine.
Settling
“Look at that crack!” my wife says with surprise, pointing at a jagged line where the wall once met the cornice.
“Yeah, I know,” I mutter and then, in an exasperated tone I hope she doesn’t pick up, add that it’s been there for months.
I just couldn’t help myself.
At the moment I’m trying. I’m trying in the way my father always told me I can be, so I’m trying to keep my mouth shut at times like this. I’m also trying to understand how she hasn’t noticed the yawning cracks that are appearing everywhere of late. But mostly I’m just trying to keep things together.
Anyone who has dealt with subsidence knows that once those cracks appear the uncertainty and sleepless nights start. And once the process starts its progress is difficult to stop.
I look up at the crack resembling a tear through the crisp white paint we chose five years ago wondering if it was always under there and we just overlooked it when we rubbed the walls back, excited to be in our own home. Whether it had been hiding deep in the walls all along, waiting with the patience of cancer.
“I just don’t come in here that often,” she says, a new found concern painted across her expression.
“It’s because it’s been so dry,” I attempt to explain “Everything’s shifting and moving. It might close up again if it rains”
If.
But who knows when that might be? It’s getting harder and harder to predict the weather these days. Some fragile balance seems to be tipping and nothing seems the same as it was before. Summers are longer, winters drier and the bad storms are more frequent and damaging than ever.
“Is our house falling down?” she asks slowly, her tone moving from concern to fear, causing me to look up from the washing pile.
“I don’t know,” I answer genuinely, “I don’t know”.
April 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Roland Leach has three collections of poetry, the latest My Father’s Pigs published by Picaro Press. He is the proprietor of Sunline Press, which has published nineteen collections of poetry by Australian poets. His latest venture is Cuttlefish, a new magazine that includes art, poetry, flash fiction and short fiction.
On the Roof
The three sons are on the roof mending the ridge-caps, mortaring the cracks, cleaning the gutters. It is a mother’s day gift. They would like to say it is an act of love long overdue, but they want her to sell.
I have never really noticed the garden till I am on the roof. My mother has a bird bath, a little bird-house for them to rest. It hangs from a hook in the tree like a square uterus, its dark whale eye staring around the yard. She tells me the doves live in the sheoak, she comes out at dawn and feeds them. There are magpies that walk up the backsteps, crows whose whoosh of wings she hears from the kitchen, the occasional kookaburra and lorikeet, where would she go if she couldn’t feed the birds?
On the roof I stare into the jacaranda and see her life of busying herself: years cooking pots of soup or roast dinners, even the shank broths made for her dogs, are no longer needed. It must be lonely at night, till she hears the birds crazy with morning.
We all agree she is getting worse with age, She is half-mad and stubborn. She had been good with small children and animals, things that were helpless and loyal, but now all the grandchildren have grown up, her dogs died years ago and are buried side by side in the backyard. There is nothing left but these stupid birds.
From the roof I look across the hibiscus, the morning glory engulfing the fence, I hear the birds in the old jarrah tree, the doves are speckled along the ground, my mother must have just fed them.
Perhaps the roof will hold, I tell my brothers, as I fill in the cracks, rip out the loose concrete and tuck the mortar, using my fingers for the first time, at last ready to dirty my hands.
January 8, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD studied at Maritime Campus, University of Greenwich, less than two minutes’ walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian. A computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing, Eugen has published over 100 short stories and creative articles, and has recently completed a creative non-fiction book and a literary speculative novel. Her creative work has appeared in Meniscus, TEXT Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Antic Journal, Australasian Review of African Studies (ARAS) and through Routledge in New Writing, The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.
Aptitude
Five days after Ma yielded to whooping cough, your adolescent self inherited the plough, the yoke, the axe and the winnower. You were cut to be a farmer. You and the soft black earth that crumbled through your fingers and smelled of stone, peat and swamp were one.
Then one dusk Baba tapped you on the elbow. He was wearing his wide-brimmed hat, the high-crowned one, his favourite for travelling. He led you to his beaten up truck, offered no hand to guide your scramble up.
The engine roared.
Headlights came on, and your world lit up like a shooting star.
Baba reversed, rolled the truck to an empty paddock. He showed you to shift the clutch, the gear, pointed at the brakes. He cut the engine, climbed out the truck. Your fingers on the passenger door—
‘Take the wheel.’ Gravel in his voice.
You listened fiercely to your instinct to run, but took the wheel.
He climbed beside you, watched as you turned the ignition.
The engine started and the truck jumped. It trundled forward, juddered, trolled and shuddered. It took your stomach away, but you clung to the steering. And then a clean roll forward. As the truck picked up speed along the dirt, across the grass and over cow poop, Baba pulled his seat and leaned back. He drew the hat over his face and began to snore.
The hush of a turned off engine roused him. He tipped back the hat, looked around. The truck was back in the barn.
‘Cracken hell,’ he said.
Now you drive as though you and the truck are one. It understands your intentions, flows with them. You have only to look in a direction, and the truck trails. You will it to halt and its wheels slowly reel until they lock to the ground, Ma whistling in the wind.
September 7, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alice Melike Ülgezer is an Australian/Turkish writer. She draws creatively on her mixed cultural heritage. Her first novel The Memory of Salt was published by Giramondo in 2012. Her work has been published in Meanjin, New Internationalist, One World Two, PEN Quarterly, The Review of Australian Fiction, Cordite, Etchings, HEAT, Mozzie, Taralla, Going Down Swinging & Kalimat.
Gun in the Garden
The sky was bruised with autumn. A brusque wind scored as the pigeons whistle-dart and fluted above. The neighbour, a Syrian refugee, had brought them with him across the border when he’d fled. And they cartwheeled now, dipping, diving and gliding, smears of grey, mauve and silver across the mottled Anatolian sky.
Ayșe leant on her hoe a moment where she was working in the garden next door to peer up at the birds when she heard the banging at the door. The street dogs had taken to living in her yard that winter and the barren earth was a mess of coal dust, vegetable scraps and dog shit. She’d found a hoe in the coal store and was trying steadily to clear the yard. But there was that banging on the door again. It startled her as no one knocked like that save for the police or the Jendarma and then only if they wanted someone or something. So she chose to ignore it and hoped that whoever it was would go away. What could she possibly need to know about the world outside anyway? They would tire of knocking and leave and she would continue hoeing the garden and by dinnertime she would have forgotten all about it and the garden would be restored to its tidy, serene state. And if it was something important perhaps, the news would make its way to her husband and she would find out from him when he came home.
But a little voice called as the knocking came thundering again, “Mamma.” She rolled her eyes, her heartbeat slowing all of a sudden with relief.
The refugee children she told herself as she wiped her hands on her apron and picked her way through the garden to the door. She opened it a foot or so and the bell that hung above banged noisily. Three children stood before her and all at once tried to elbow and push their way through the gap in the door.
“Hey, hey!” she startled.
“Silah, silah,” the older boy exclaimed. “Gun Gun. Our gun is in your garden!”
“Your what!?” she tried to push the door closed against their little heaving bodies. But the littlest one Husam was stuck trying to crawl between her legs. The middle of the three, a little girl, stood by smirking like a dangerous cat.
Ayșe spat to the side and began to recite the Sura of the Dawn. She knew it was wrong but she didn’t like these children. If she gave to one surely that meant she had to give to all. And she couldn’t possibly do that. Besides, she didn’t like the way they threw stones at the local dogs or hung puppies out of windows from pieces of packing tape tied round their necks or the way they shrieked and sniggered and reprimanded her for eating bread during Ramazan.
“Our gun is in your garden Mamma,” Husam was clawing at her thigh. His head peered jerkily out from between her knees at the garden, his shoulders yet to break through.
“We just want to go and look for it,” enjoined the older boy who was more mature and friendly than the other two and by smiling seemed to apologise for their behaviour. The little girl studied Ayșe’s face as she swung her hips back and forth with one finger planted firmly in her nose, simpering softly. Husam tried to burrow further between her knees but this time she gave a strong shove.
“I will have a look,” she said sharply and gathering all her strength, heaved the child out from between her legs and slammed the door, sliding the wooden bolt across to lock it.
Turning back to the garden she glanced quickly at the freshly turned earth. “Those children,” she said aloud “and their fucking guns, telling me I am haram. I’ll show them haram.”
But before she knew it the three of them were scrambling though the grapevine over the back wall.
“Mamma, Mamma!” yelped Husam as he fell into the dirt and dog shit. The little girl slid slyly under the plastic matting that Ayșe and her husband had secured against the wall for privacy and the bigger boy leapt over the stones. Together they tore across the garden under the bare autumn trees looking for their gun.
“I told you I would look for it you little pimps!” she shrieked.
And just then the bigger one picked up a piece of wood that had been nailed crudely with another small bit for a trigger and tied with a piece of string. Utterly unaffected by her cursing, he smiled triumphantly, “This is our gun! This is our gun!” And with that he slung it over his shoulder and began shooting imaginary rounds of machine gun fire round the garden, laughing and shouting, Allahu Akbar! The little girl and Husam both jumped wildly around in the dirt shrieking their pleasure.
Ayșe stood on in horrified silence. If those bullets were real she would most certainly be dead. She shuddered in a sort of shocked confusion a moment before gathering her senses and shouting. “Get out of here you sons of donkeys! Get out of my garden!” Her limbs suddenly coursing with adrenalin she lunged at them with the garden hoe as they leapt jubilantly over the vegetable scraps and coal dust. The little girl managed to dart across to the wooden door and slide the bolt open. The other two scrambled after her and with a bang-clash and clamour of the bell they tore onto the street shrieking and firing as they went.
Ayșe threw the hoe down on the concrete and rushed at the door to bolt it again in case they should return. With trembling hands she slid it across once more and feeling utterly humiliated, yet out of view of the garden wall, sank against the door and wept for the children she would never have.
June 26, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carly Nugent is an Australian short story author and novelist. Carly’s short fiction has featured in numerous print and online publications, including The Bellevue Literary Review and the sixth edition of Award Winning Australian Writing (Melbourne Books). Carly currently lives in Phnom Penh, where she coordinates a bi-weekly writing workshop.
Pause
She had told Aunt Susan she had a summer book report to finish. But the truth was the assignment was already typed and sitting in her school bag. Mae had been at the table for half an hour, holding the novel in front of her like a shield, like a last line of defence between her and what lay in the kitchen.
She was fifteen, and could count the things she had killed on one hand. A cockroach in fourth grade because she wanted to prove to Tom Kelly that she wasn’t scared; a snail one morning on the footpath after a night of heavy rain; and a bee, though it had really killed itself when it stung her by the rosebush at Nana’s house last spring. And now here she was, a week before her sixteenth birthday, about to slit a chicken’s throat.
‘If you’re going to be here all summer you’re going to learn,’ Aunt Susan had said, pulling a knife from the block. It was the largest knife Mae had ever seen. It glinted up at her like a wicked white-toothed smile.
‘Finish your homework. I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re done.’
Mae had sat in the dining room with the book open, reading nothing, listening to the sounds her aunt made. First the backdoor slammed, and Mae pictured Aunt Susan walking out onto the farm. Her boots would be sinking a little in the mud. Mae imagined her entering the chicken coop, the birds scattering at first, then coming back expecting food. Aunt Susan would pluck one from the bunch – the brown and white one; the one Mae thought looked like marble chocolate. She heard the back door open and close again. A cluck. Mae pictured it in the kitchen, in a basket on the bench. For almost half an hour Mae imagined it sitting there – silently – staring out the window at the early dark. She imagined her aunt peeling potatoes, letting the still-dirty skins drop onto the floor like worms. They fell in slow motion.
Mae wished she could freeze time right here. Even if it meant she would never turn eighteen, never drive a car, never sleep with someone. Even if it meant she would spend the rest of her life at this table, with this book. The moment in the kitchen stood before her like a roadblock, like a hurdle she would have to jump over if she wanted to keep running this race. It seemed easier just to stop running.
When Mae finally walked into the kitchen things didn’t look at all the way she had imagined. Her aunt was rolling pastry on the counter, her entire body moving. There was no mud on her boots. Light was still filtering through the back window; it played across her face and she was beautiful. And the chicken – orange and black – was fluttering in the basket. It was pecking at things, clucking like it knew. Mae was surprised, staring at the chicken’s bobbing head, to see things moving at such a normal speed.
‘Alright,’ Aunt Susan said. The knife was in Mae’s hand. ‘You’ve seen me do this a dozen times. Off you go.’
There was a blue bucket on the floor. Aunt Susan lifted the chicken by its legs and held it upside down. Then finally, like she was hitting the play button on a remote control, Mae leaned forward to cut the bird’s throat.
October 4, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Welsh-born Olivia Ru
shin lives in Brisbane and is currently studying a Bachelor of Science (Psychology) and Arts (Writing) at the University of Queensland. She’s been a bakery assistant for more years than anyone should, but did spend her gap year traveling and working in Germany, so it’s not all bread.
The Undertow
There’s something about the river. Peg wades out of its grip and runs home.
She runs because she has to, because the sky is turning and the gaslights on this side of the city are few and far between. The rows of terraced houses hum like a hive. Numb old men with leaden tongues are having a pissing contest in the gutter, and a one-armed child squats and strains on the cobblestones nearby. Peg sidesteps sleeping bodies and ducks the cords of neglected clotheslines. She pelts from one lamppost to the next, below factory chimneys that pipe scud into the clouds.
Home is in the west, detached from the city, where the dark gaps between streetlights hide only trellises of jessamines and honey-suckle, and the husks of sleeping carriages. Peg scrabbles onto the slate roof outside her sister’s room, and her wet hands squeal on the sash window as she slips in through the gap. The west wind streams in after her, swills around the walls like freshwater, spits the stale air out onto the street.
“Amy?”
There’s movement from the four-poster inside, and Amy’s head lifts into view.
“What?”
“I’m dripping all over,” says Peg. “Need a blanket.”
She catches the flying bundle with one hand and sops up the puddle at her feet; wrings out her sodden dress.
“You went to the river again,” says Amy.
The river, the river. Her milky little grin floats in the darkness.
“Might have.”
“What was it like?”
Peg’s stomach shifts; she can’t stand that awed look.
“Tell me,” says Amy.
The crescents of Peg’s nails are packed stiff with silt the colour of boiled tealeaves, but it tastes like coal and grease and riverweed when she bites it out. The grit crunches between her teeth.
“It’s beautiful,” she says eventually, spitting into her sleeve. “Really.”
“But beautiful how?”
“Beautiful same as last time. You know I can’t describe it how you like.”
“Try.”
“In the morning, maybe,” says Peg. She helps Amy shift onto her side, so the bedsores won’t scab onto the sheets. “You should be asleep. But I have something for you first. For your collection.”
She tips a faceted gem of river-glass, scarlet and glinting, onto her sister’s palm.
Amy is breathless. “Is it a real ruby?”
“Looks that way,” says Peg. “And it was only a shard of old bottle when I threw it in.”
Amy finishes inspecting the thing and solemnly hands it over.
“Put it with the others.”
Peg crosses the room, sets the glass ruby on the shelf. It rolls on its axis and settles beside a whittled coil of wood that hadn’t started out that way at all; the first thing Peg ever fished out of the river’s hungry tongue.
She’d thrown it in up by the overgrown thicket near Cotchett’s old mill, for no reason, really. It was a crude hunk of oak she’d hacked out of a trunk with a sharpened butter knife, and throwing it into the river had just been something to do. She’d chased after it along the bank, past the steep slant of the weir, and fished it out where it surfaced in that eddy down by the millstream, right in the tailrace of Lombe’s silk mill. By then, something about the river had changed the simple thing – found it, drowned it, chewed it up and spat it out – and it was a perfect spiral, carved of oak.
Further along the shelf is what used to be the jawbone of a cow, until the river decided it should be a fine-toothed comb. Beside that is a goatskin pouch that went in empty and resurfaced full of glass marbles, and a broken tile of red brick that came back monogrammed with the letter ‘A’ in cursive. Peg feeds things to the river, they come out better. Changed.
“I want to see it,” says Amy behind her. “Peggy? The river. You have to take me with you.”
The air suddenly seems stale again, stagnant. For a moment, Peg seethes, heaves at the unfairness of all these pretty things destined to die here on the shelf. Better if they’d sunk and stayed like they were supposed to, or been swept all those miles and dumped out at sea. The ruby glares back at her. Peg calms, and turns.
She carries Amy downstairs, outside, and slowly back east. Amy hugs onto her neck at first but falls asleep before they reach the slums. Hollow eyes blink awake, tracking them through the streets, and the fetid air hangs heavy in their wake. Peg’s glad Amy misses it. Her little head is still limp against her chest when they emerge from the thicket by the mill and step out onto the slippery rocks.
The cracked glaze of Amy’s prosthetic gleams pearlescent in the moonlight. Their father used to boast that it was made from Derby’s finest porcelain. A fired composite of ground glass, eggshell, and human ash, he’d said, and Amelia should be proud to have such a pretty thing for a leg. She’ll never be confused for one of those mutilated urchins again.
He might have mentioned how she’d never be able to walk again either, for fear of shattering. How the socket joint of her porcelain knee would shriek and scrape whenever she tried to stand, grinding away at itself like a mortar and pestle. How Peg would have to watch her sister grow smaller and paler with every passing day, living only off second-hand stories about the magic of a black river and a promise that one day she’d see it for herself.
The rapids roar as they take Amy away. Peg pounds along the bank; races them downstream as they surge over the weir and into the eddy by the millstream. She squats there and waits – at the foot of the great waterwheel, always turning, churning – but all that washes up is white porcelain dust that sifts through her fingers and is gone.
October 1, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shannon Burns is an Adelaide-based writer, reviewer/critic and sometimes-academic. He is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, and has written for Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Music & Literature. He won the 2009 Adelaide Review Prize for Short Fiction and the 2015 Salisbury Writers’ Festival Short Fiction Prize. He’s had fiction published in various magazines and journals, most recently in Overland and Verity La.
Blue
He was sleeping when I slipped away – I could bear it no longer – he seems to have gone blind – his eyes are grey – they were once like mine – it’s as though they’ve grown younger – perhaps he has too – his body turned inward – an overpowering desire – he will not speak of it – there’s nothing to be done – he sees nothing – he’s deaf as well – I was not quiet when I left – I thought to give him one last chance – if he’d called to me I’d still be there
there’s nothing about – all have gone quiet – I once heard mowers in the distance – every weekend they would hum – that was long ago – there are no weekends – the journey will be long – my only wish is for water – to see it at last will be the last thing – I once visited the sea – it whispered gently – my feet followed it out – when it came in I howled – it marked me out – it seemed to yearn for something – I chased it yelling – for hours we did this – they took me away – I refused drink for days – no thirst could quench my fear of it – it went out and returned, went out and returned – I still see it in my mind – it smiles whitely – it draws close and whispers – I tremble to listen
the road is flat – I picture small inclinations – they spring to life – when I left it was grey – the gate was unlatched – the garden wild – branches torn by something – perhaps the wind – there is no wind – I recall days driven by weather – to go outside or stay in? – today it is grey – yesterday I was inside – perhaps it hasn’t changed – the days are alike – it may be night – the world has spun on its axis – we are at bottom – I am alone – he is too – we may meet again – it won’t be here – someone may walk me back – but they won’t know the way –
my voice is hoarse – perhaps it will vanish – I won’t argue – there’s nothing else for it – I have no say – the weather is fine – I’ll bear it easily – my feet are cold – they never freeze – they’re soft on the soles – when I walk they burn – the road is harsh – there’s no one to clear it – the vehicles are still – they are shells of vehicles – I’ll take cover when it rains – it will not rain – the sky is clear – but there is no blue – I haven’t seen blue for years – perhaps blue is gone– it may have risen further – beyond the grey – I was never fond of it – the word is thick – my mouth won’t shape it – my lips blubber – it is their way – I don’t require them – there is no blue
I seek out the water – once it was green – it seems black in my dreams – it will devour me – I am for the most part water already – this I know – it’s getting worse – I overfill with it – there’s none there – our supply stopped – I left him dry – it felt like a verdict – the taps have deserted us – they do not approve – I cannot blame them – no simpler message – the water is gone – we are to follow – if that then this
the path is monotonous – why so flat? – do I walk on the spot? – how to tell the difference between here and there? – perhaps there is none – I’ve never considered it – my thoughts are clouded – there are no clouds – my thoughts are empty – but emptiness abounds – my thoughts are grey – but grey is the world
there’s something ahead – a large ragged dog – its hair thick and grey – I walk his way – he sniffs the air – I turn back – there’s nothing to be said for it – perhaps the dog is the sea, come to greet me from afar – nothing is friendly – hunger universal – nothing lost nothing gained – I go on bleating – I breathe – I walk – to what? – the devouring sea – opening its wide mouth – inviting – welcoming – it’s made a bed for me – that is where the others are – asleep on the sea-bed – I’ll nuzzle them soon – so long since I touched one
I follow the dog down the road – it lifts its leg on a signpost – nothing comes – an empty pizzle – we are as though one thing – I hang back until he disappears – I cannot watch the performance – he’s dwindling to nothing – everything does – he’ll reach the beachhead before me – I’ll follow his pawprints to the water – lie down by his stinking corpse – smell the sea on his putrid fur – breathe the moisture – close my eyes – hold him
September 21, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aaron Peysack is a Melbourne writer who has lived and worked in Japan. His fiction has appeared in Antipodes journal and will be featured in upcoming editions of Page Seventeen and Filling Station. He is currently working on a collection of short fiction.
Coats
It was July, the coldest month of the year, and I had no winter overcoat. I sat in my room for an hour thinking about the cold, trembling with indignation. I’ve always been sensitive: the slightest change in temperature or pressure upsets me. In that tiny room I longed for the tropics, for the heat of Angola or Brazil, some burnt-out island where life is slow and undemanding.
When the hour was up I left my room and headed downstairs. On the second floor I met a tall, lean man with lovely blue eyes.
‘Give me your winter overcoat,’ I said to him. He refused, so I grabbed him. For several minutes we struggled, right there in the stairwell, a silent, deadly struggle that could only end in defeat for someone of his slender build.
But he was one of those people who are stronger than they look and he used his long arms to advantage. It was like wrestling an orang-utan. Halfway through the struggle I knew I was going to lose—I felt like a chess player who has lost his queen—but I wouldn’t concede. Keep fighting, I told myself, at least you’re warm. Eventually he threw me down and fled into one of the apartments. It wasn’t meant to be, I thought, dusting myself off.
Outside, I dragged myself along the street, past law clerks and meat packers and men in half-price suits purchased in pairs … All the wreckage of humanity washed around me … An hour later I was near the sea and the wind was cutting me open. A boy of twelve or thirteen was standing on the sand looking out at the water. A philosopher, I thought, one of those unpleasant children who are old before their time, not quite human. I was one myself so I know what I’m talking about. I walked over and stood beside him.
‘Why are the crests of the waves white?’ he asked dreamily.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, watching them fall, thinking of horses in old movies. ‘Give me your winter overcoat.’
He looked at me curiously then shook his head.
‘It was a gift from my grandmother.’
‘I won’t tell her.’
He smiled and shook his head again.
Children are not as weak as they seem, plus they fight a lot, which makes them dangerous opponents. The boy landed a few punches but was helpless against my knee. As I pulled the coat over his head, he grabbed at it violently, tearing it along the seams.
‘Look what you’ve done,’ I said, ‘you’ve torn your winter overcoat. Now neither of us can have it.’
‘It’s better that way,’ he answered with eyes full of sadness.
I left him there and made my way across the river. It was almost dusk by the time I found the warehouse. The place was filled with coats, hundreds of them, in every size and style. I entered the room where people change and stood in front of the mirror, entranced by my own reflection. He has the face of a tsar, I thought, looking at the man in the glass.
Outside, the sun went down and evening came on, tugging at night’s shoulder. The owner locked up and went home and the sound of the city faded like snow falling on a frozen river. All night I stayed in that winter palace, surrounded by coats, and by morning I felt almost human.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chloe Wilson’s first poetry collection, The Mermaid Problem, was commended in the Anne Elder Award and Highly Commended in the Mary Gilmore Award. She won the 2014 Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry and was Highly Commended in the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize.
Pronunciation
It would be wrong to say he bought me. It’s never like that. He chose my photo, my description; I received a call from the agency; then we met at a dimly lit restaurant with black banquette seats. He ordered champagne and a platter of sushi and sashimi, the slivers of fish pink and glossy, like tongues.
‘You’ll have to teach me how to use chopsticks like that,’ he said.
‘You’re very good,’ I said. ‘Very natural.’
‘I hired a tutor,’ he said, slurping up a piece of eel, ‘last time I was in Japan.’
We negotiated terms. Of course, it’s not as businesslike as that. He talked about what he wanted – companionship, someone to take to dinners and parties, maybe with a view to the long term, depending on how things progressed – and when I didn’t object, he relaxed, ordered another bottle of wine.
He said he loved the way I had trouble with certain phrases – fifth floor, not at all.
After a few weeks, I had my own credit card.
After a year, he said he wanted to marry me.
I took his last name. But at night, in our futon with the koi-patterned sheets, he would whisper Mitsuki Tanaka, Mitsuki Tanaka. Even then, he was always trying to get his accent right.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark Brandi was born in Italy and then spent most of his childhood in a remote country Victorian pub. He now lives in Melbourne, where he writes fiction. He was the grateful recipient of a 2015 Varuna Residential Fellowship and was runner up for the 2014 NSW Writers’ Centre Varuna Fellowship. He was the 2014 winner of the City of Rockingham Short Fiction Awards and shortlisted for the 2015 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize. He was also longlisted for the 2015 International Caledonia Novel Award. His shorter work has appeared in literary journals and been broadcast on ABC Radio National. www.markbrandi.com
Like Ice
It stinks of shit. Heavy and sweet. Like the chow mein Mum cooked for the punters. Fried mince, cabbage and curry powder.
Dad’s lying in bed, the blankets pulled up to his neck.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
Mum’s eyes. Cheap liqueur chocolates. Her mouth twitches a broken beat. Closes the window. Opens it. Looks at me. Says it with her eyes.
I didn’t know who to call.
“Dad,’ I say. Too loud. ‘Is your head okay?”
“No.”
“Are you feeling sick?”
“I’m not sure.”
Mum’s candy-brittle smile. Crosses her arms. Shakes her head. “He’s just embarrassed.”
I help him sit up. Pull the blankets back – the shit is there. It’s on the mattress. It’s on the floor. There’s shit everywhere.
Mum dry retches.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed. Stands up shaky. Faded cotton undies and short-sleeve Aldi shirt. Chicken legs with hairless skin. His belly is much too big for chicken legs.
His thin, white hair is standing on end. Like a bush cockatoo.
Dad’s outside a country pub.
He just bought it.
He’s with Mum.
A gold-rush pub.
Empty for years.
Full of rats.
But there’s gold too.
Behind the fireplace.
They’ll find that later.
I tell him to put his arm around me.
“We’re gonna walk to the shower. You feel okay to walk?”
“I think so.”
We walk there. His hand on my arm. Soft fingers. Thin skin. Not like it used to be. Dried up leather. Old Blundstones in the sun.
It’s a nice bathroom. It’s better than mine. Dark-grey tiles. A special shower.
I show him how to use the mixer tap.
“I know,” he says.
“Make sure you clean your backside.”
Dad watches me mime the action of washing my arse with imaginary soap. The soap is clean and green in its little chrome tray. It doesn’t know what it’s in for.
Mum doesn’t know what she’s in for.
She doesn’t speak English.
Dad taught himself on the boat.
They’re gonna run it, he reckons.
He’s never run a pub.
He’s a train driver.
Diesel engines and punch-ups.
Aussies with big mouths.
Dad hurt his back.
Mum’s gonna be the cook.
Dad’s family are all insane.
Just ask anyone.
Mum is in the bedroom. She’s in the bedroom on her knees.
“Bloody dis-gusting.” She’s scrubbing the floor. “Filthy bastard.”
I hear the shower go on. “How did he … ?”
“Who knows? I’ll never get these stains out.”
Dad is in a brown suit.
He looks like Bob De Niro.
The judge is Lionel Murphy.
The judge says Dad made history.
A precedent, he said.
It’s about his back.
Mike Willesee wants to talk on telly.
Mike Willessee is all the rage.
But Dad won’t talk.
And Bob De Niro’s not a lawyer.
The shower goes off. So I listen at the door. The dead whirr of the fan.
“Finished?”
“Yeah.”
“Cleaned yourself properly?”
“Yeah.”
Swish and rustle. Starched towel on flesh. I hope he cleaned himself. I hope he got all the shit off. I hope he doesn’t stink.
It’s three weeks til his birthday.
It’s my friend’s birthday.
His mum drives me home.
Double-storey brick house.
Dad is building it himself.
Spanish arches.
No need for a roof.
We’ll live downstairs.
This isn’t my house.
So drive me somewhere else.
That’s exactly what I said.
In the kitchen, we dance around it. Like the last ones no-one picked. When no-one else is left.
“Well eventually …”
“He won’t go. It will kill him.”
“What’s gonna happen when—”
“I’ll do it as long as I can.”
Steps on the stairs.
Act casual.
He won’t know anyway.
He comes through the door. Pants pulled up high. Jumper tucked right in. Jacket on. Smiling.
All ready to go.
Schoolbag in the back.
Windscreen frozen over.
Ice, he says.
Get the hose.
From safe inside, I watch the cascade.
The crystal flow.
It floods.
I watch.
And wait.
Until he’s there again.
Through the glass and frost.
Just a shimmer in the morning sun.
As the ice begins to melt.
A thick woollen jumper.
His hair turning grey.
The smile won’t leave his eyes.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rebecca Jessen lives in Toowoomba with her two cacti. She is the winner of the 2013 Queensland Literary Award for Best Emerging Author for her verse novel Gap. In 2012 Rebecca won the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award. Rebecca’s writing has been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Stilts, Scum Mag and Verity La. Rebecca’s verse novel Gap is out now through University of Queensland Press. She is the recipient of an AMP Tomorrow Maker grant.
The Late September Dogs
low mist hanging off a high mountain. driving cars worth more than your self esteem. a twenty-nine dollar tax return that feels both like a gift and a joke. waiting two hours for five minutes. leaving with your fifth K10 questionnaire in as many years. hopelessness is always high. nervousness is mostly circumstantial. lying face down in your IKEA furnished study. listening to a Melissa Etheridge LP as old as you. feeling both like an old soul and too young to know what life really is. scoring yourself thirty-five out of fifty on the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale. half listening to your caseworker who is not a psychologist. almost believing when she says you eat and sleep too regularly to qualify as depressed. what you have is chronic low mood. there’s not much help or hope for people like you. sorry kid. not everyone can be happy. here take some vitamins. ignoring text messages from the government. asking your opinion on a safe night out. crying for no reason. listening to the same Melissa Etheridge song on repeat for two hours. crying for no reason. sorry kid. there’s not much help for people like you.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ella Jeffery was born in northern New South Wales and currently lives in Shanghai, China. She writes poetry and short fiction, some of which has appeared in Best Australian Poems 2013, Cordite, Voiceworks and elsewhere. She will commence her PhD in creative writing at Queensland University of Technology in mid-2015.
Moths
It’s always late when I come here. It’s always cold outside. I can see her through the glass-panelled door. She thinks she’s keeping me waiting but I’m watching the patterns of the moths around the glass. Sometimes there’s so many of them I can barely see through it. They probably stay there all night, moving around and around the same ring of light.
She always opens the door with a lit cigarette in her mouth. But this part has happened only since I told her I was quitting. She lets me in without looking at me. The chatter of bats in the mango trees is snapped off when she pulls the door closed.
Here she is: bare feet and white legs. Black underwear and a white singlet with a red bra underneath, showing through like a blush on a pale cheek.
“You didn’t call,” she says, drifting back to the couch. “I might’ve been out.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“So?”
“So where would you go on a Tuesday?”
She laughs. She’s watching one of her crazy subtitled films. The directors are European, the women all have faces like crumpled paper and go insane about halfway through. The men are psychologists. The children die early on. Usually that’s the way it goes. She watches to the end.
I make myself a coffee while the psychologist wrestles with his screaming wife. The fluorescent in the kitchen buzzes with moths. More are on the windows, or skittering up in the corners of the high ceilings. There are always so many in here, though the only window I’ve ever seen her open is the one over her bed. Their movement is soundless, sightless. They’re not aiming for anything, except perhaps a higher part of the moulding wall. They just keep switching places and switching back, flickering around quietly, leap-frogging over each other with their chalky wings. I wonder if this is their home. A cramped space; the cupboards like tall men squished in an elevator, stretching up. The moths settle on the tops of them for a moment, and leave again. Hundreds of them bang against the light fitting. They must do this every night.
*
She lives just off the highway. I listen to the cars while I move over her. She never makes much sound but it didn’t take long to learn what she likes. She’s not a talker. She doesn’t get on top. I use my stubble against her, raking over her neck and cheeks. I hold her hands down. The only noises are the jolting of the bed, and under that is her quiet breathing, and under that is the sound of the moths, which gather in her bedroom more than anywhere else in the house.
I’ve never known a house to be more full of them than hers is tonight. The cars roar by. Where do people go on Tuesday nights?
A moth brushes over my hair as I finish and replace myself on the other side of the bed. She lights a cigarette, smokes from the flat of her back. She doesn’t offer me one, but I’d have taken it. The burning end shows her face in shaking light. When it’s done she ducks off to the shower and flicks on the light as she goes. Her room is never dark enough.
As she leaves I look up at the ceiling from the same place she laid a moment ago and see so many moths up there, more than I could count, and there is so much movement I feel almost dizzy. And more moths come in, and more and still more, so many moths that the light is now dimming, now blacked out, except the colour’s not black, it’s dusty brown and grey. Soon the room is filled with moths. They’re covering my skin and hair, and my mouth is shut as tight as it can go and I’m worrying about my ears and my nose, whether they’ll try to nudge their way inside me with their bulging alien faces and chalky wings. There’s only the sound of dull ruffling wings. Their antennae move noiselessly, listening or tasting, I can’t remember which. They’re on my face. I can see their tiny mouths, the tiniest mouths I have ever seen. And more are coming, stuffing themselves in through the door, and I can see them pressing their little furred bodies up against the windows, skittering over the walls.
I close my eyes. Moths land on the lids. The imprints of their feet. They don’t go anywhere. They don’t have anywhere to go.
“Hey,” I call out to her. “Come in here.” I keep my eyes closed and press my lips shut again and keep perfectly still under the movement of so many moths.
A second later she’s back and there are moths on the towel around her neck, landing in her wet hair. She shrugs and says “They’re just moths. They won’t hurt you.”
I get up anyway, shake them from my clothes and walk out of the door where they’re still crowded like mystics around the circle of light spilling out. I walk down to the highway and hope the last bus is running late. I look at the bone-coloured moon and I don’t imagine her in that old house, sleeping under blankets of moths.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Blake Curran is currently studying a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Creative Writing) and a Bachelor of Arts (English Literatures) at the Univeristy of Wollongong. He is in his third year. He lives somewhere around Campbelltown, and finds inspiration for his stories in the suburban and natural world around him. He hopes to one day be a published novelist, but also enjoys writing shorter pieces very much.
Empty
The uniform houses lie like squares in a patchwork quilt, flung over the undulations of the earth as far as she can see. She sits on a hard, wooden bench on the front verandah, cigarette warm in her hand. She knocks it against a small ceramic dish before it ashes. It is evening. It’s always evening, by the time she gets a chance to come out here and have a quiet smoke by herself, churn things over, cast a meandering glance over the observable world.
Last night, the air was warm and it felt like a summery dusk from her childhood: you could stretch in its luxuriance, and the world went on forever in perfect golden tones. But tonight, the air is sharp and everything looks monochrome. Crickets chirp, and grass glistens like glass darkly caught in the shine of the moon. She hurries to finish her smoke so she can go back inside.
It is a new suburb. Many of the houses have only just been built; some are not even finished. She is lucky, in a way, to be able to live in one so soon. Her previous house, which she had been renting by herself for years, had been demolished at the landlord’s bequest, forcing her to pack her few things and leave. It pays to have a cousin in contracting. What was it her father used to say? It’s not what you know, but who. And blood is thicker than water. Apparently.
How can she believe that when everyone she’s ever loved has left her, one way or another. At the occasion of death, blood turns to water. At least here she doesn’t have to think about it. She can pretend not to, anyway.
She has forgotten about the cigarette, and it has gone out a couple of centimetres from her fingertips, a small heap of ash beneath. What a waste. She considers lighting another, but does not bother. The once-lit cylinder hangs limp from her calloused fingers. There is no point in lighting another. It is cool outside and she can feel the threat of rain close by. She could go inside right now and run herself a hot bath, pour a glass of heady red wine and relax into one more early night, ready for another day of work tomorrow. But she does not move. She remains motionless, except for her eyes. They rove over what used to be rippling bushland, seeing none of it. She is thinking about how she is the only one living on this street, on the whole block, and how this grey light makes her ache in some unexplainable, non-physical way. Not even a car has passed by all evening, and now it is night, and she has not seen another person since she got home. She has been sitting here since the streetlights clicked on down the road, but this block belongs to another transformer, and has not been wired up properly yet. So she sits in dim moonshine, alone on the outskirts of artificial light.
She lets the cigarette drop into her ashtray on the arm of the wooden bench, picking up the carton from the empty space beside her. Inside rattles her last cigarette and a cheap, silver lighter. She holds the cigarette between her lips and flicks it alight between cupped hands. The sky begins to drip. She inhales a hollow breath and thinks empty thoughts that loop endlessly.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Daniel Young is a Sydney-based writer whose short fiction has appeared in Seizure, Verity La, Hello Mr. Magazine, Cuttings Journal, Bukker Tillibul and Mascara Literary Review. He’s developing a novel manuscript as part of an MA (Writing), is the founder of Tincture Journal, and is writing about all the novellas at allthenovellas.com.
Chá Yè Dàn
The buildings on this street were old, blackened by age and pollution, and of widely disparate heights. Billy came to a food stall, the vendor selling home-cooked food alongside a few pre-packaged items: bottles of tea, rice crackers, biscuits.
“Hello,” shouted the lady, engaging Billy with kind eyes. On his last visit to Shanghai, ten years earlier, the locals had treated him like a bizarre novelty. They chased him, shouting hello, laughing and even wanting to touch his light blonde hair and stare into his round brown eyes; all in a generous spirit of friendship. This time around, the younger generation were more confident, aloof to foreigners, keeping a casual distance.
Billy smiled, but didn’t answer her, suddenly ashamed of his poor mandarin skills. He spotted a shiny metallic bowl on the table beside a mound of dark green bamboo-leaf parcels. Sticky rice, which he had never enjoyed. It was the bowl that grabbed his attention, filled with tea eggs.
They used to make tea eggs together, in Brisbane. When they lived together like love-birds, for that one short year. In their two-bedroom apartment on the banks of the murky Brisbane river, where the jacarandas bloomed purple as spring raged into summer and final-year exams approached. Brisbane and Shanghai were linked, both bisected down the middle by these turgid brown snakes, rivers twisting through the landscape, disorienting to the uninitiated, and with the occasional bridge providing a means to get around the city.
Qiang held Billy tight, calling him a good boy. Billy mixed the tea, spice mix, star anise and soy sauce, placing the eggs onto the heat. Qiang delivered instructions in his quiet, yet firm and confident voice, and Billy followed along, eager to please, happy to be learning these cooking secrets. When the eggs were half-done, he smashed the shells with a spoon, allowing the rich dark liquid to seep into the gaps, forming brown marbling patterns on the cooked egg white.
Billy blinked and bought two tea eggs from the lady with an awkward combination of pointing, holding up fingers and fishing around for the smallest coins he could find. He knew the words: chá yè dàn. Cha for tea, dan for eggs. Dan-dan for testicles, Qiang had reminded him with a laugh, grabbing Billy’s hand and forcing it towards his crotch.
Although he recalled the mandarin words, his mouth remained fixed in silence, unable to even try and pronounce them. He stood at the stall, peeling one of the eggs and eating without taste, paralysed by memory.
April 3, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Natalie Chin lives in London. Her writing has been published in The Quietus, Ellipsis Journal and Living In The Future. 
‘Low-hanging fruit’, he says
6pm, the sun disappears in another poem. The surrounding buildings are emptied like the day is ending. Everywhere we look people are swarming towards the train station like it is the hive. There is a heaviness to the air, to the movement. It all seems to slow down in one direction. I pause on the corner, turn to Alex — Alex, who I only met earlier that day, and now he’s here with me. We light another cigarette and look through the crowds. Let’s play a game, I say to Alex, let’s see who can spot her first.
A minute later, I see her: At the train station, the only stationary figure in an unrelenting stream. There is no one else there waiting. I don’t say anything, begin walking in her direction until she is only a crossroads away. Though we move with the river it feels like I am sleep-walking. She looks exactly the way I thought she might. Funny how that works: like I should always trust my instincts after all.
The way she re-arranges her face from one of anxiety to casual excitement is the same way I would re-arrange my body language when I wait for him: she waits, too. Already, the ache overrides every other feeling. Alex looks at me, he is holding my luggage. He says, Maybe we should just go to the airport. I say, Yeah, maybe. We cross the roads, and she is still in sight, and then we are with the crowd passing her.
As I turn, I see her take out her phone, presumably to ring him. There is a dry ache that seems to drop from the back of my throat, that signals to me that I am losing my voice. Somewhere else up the road, his phone is ringing, but I no longer care: this isn’t about wanting to understand.
I close my eyes, take a final drag of my cigarette, drop it and stamp it out under my foot. I walk up to her, this girl who would shrivel up and die without the male gaze. I punch her in the stomach. She screams as her eyes focus on me. I laugh as I do it again, and then she grabs my hair. The whole crowd splits wide open, like a mango hitting the ground. Someone calls for the police. My flight leaves in five hours. There are whole worlds that none of us know anything about.
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
