These BonesPublished in Australian Love Stories, 2014. Edited by Cate Kennedy. And also in Bold, 2015. Edited by David Hardy.
Enzo dreams of suplphur-crested cockatoos and red roseallas but it wasn't always this way. Before he arrived in this country the smell of the Mediterranean tinged the edges
of his dreams. His twilight imaginings were punctuated by the call of market vendors
peddling their produce and by the whiff of the over-ripe tomatoes they’d be selling off
at a bargain price on Saturdays. They were the old-familiar sounds of his boyhood. Now
it’s the screeching birds and the scent of freshly mown lawn.
On dreamless nights when Enzo stirs he becomes unsure of where he is and
stretches out his arm for the glass of water his mother will have left him, but there’s no
glass. In the morning when he reaches the bathroom he is often affronted by the man in
the mirror—the hair that has vanished in the night, the tone of his skin that is no longer
the deep, rich olive it once was, more sallow than golden.
The dark can play tricks of time, but Enzo’s dreams carry him through the night
like the ship that brought him to Australia many years before and at dawn, as those
dreams linger fug-like, thick and heavy behind his eyes, they remind him of where he
lives now. The birds don’t let him down. The rosellas and cockatoos place him back
here in his bedroom in Carlton North. Because of them Enzo knows that he is a man,
not a boy. He knows that the earth here is not as good for growing, knows the sun
warms the heart, yet dries the skin. It is the Australian birds of his sleepy imaginings with their squawks, caws and tough beaks, that remind him that he is here on Amess Street and that the body beside him is Nev’s.
Read more in Bold or Australian Love Stories.
Published in Overland issue 242. Shortlisted for the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize.
‘Are you able to sit up now?’ The voice on the other end of the phone is calm and easy like music.
The ground against her back, Leila has her eyes on the sky. Not long ago it was watercolour blue, milky and pale and full of cotton-ball clouds; now blue is draining from it and the air is cooler. Her fingertips feel icy. She reaches an arm towards her backpack, still there on the dry leaves.
‘Leila,’ the voice says, ‘are you with me?’
The warmth of her exhalation drifts from her mouth and meets the chilled air beyond in a slight haze. ‘I need to take some more.’ She fumbles one-handed with the backpack zipper, finds one of the blister packs and then lays herself flat on the ground again, arms stretched out. She is a butterfly, unfettered. Here, her arms are her own. No-one to pin them down. The ground is a bed, a safe one. It’s her place today. The shrubs encircling her and the trees above are a cubby house, her own private patch of the parkland. With no walls, no doors, she can leave whenever she wants and here no-one could stop her.
‘Can you tell me what you’re taking, Leila?’
‘To sleep, so I can sleep.’ Leila’s mouth is chalky and dry. Water would be good but there are only the dregs of warm Coke left in the can. Leila reaches for it, rolling onto her side, her woollen jumper catching debris—twigs, earth, dried leaves—with each movement.
‘Leila, can we just press pause on you doing that right now? Can we wait a bit more before you decide to take the meds?’
Her thoughts are ocean currents pulling in one direction and then changing. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘because I have them all here in my bag.’ She brings the pills to her mouth and gulps a little Coke, flat and sugary. ‘I didn’t forget them so it’s all good.’ She can hear her own cadence slacken, molasses-thick. While slower now, Leila’s voice still catches, she hears it stumble over the phlegm at the back of her throat, hears it hook on the nicotine gravel.
The ground against her back, Leila has her eyes on the sky. Not long ago it was watercolour blue, milky and pale and full of cotton-ball clouds; now blue is draining from it and the air is cooler. Her fingertips feel icy. She reaches an arm towards her backpack, still there on the dry leaves.
‘Leila,’ the voice says, ‘are you with me?’
The warmth of her exhalation drifts from her mouth and meets the chilled air beyond in a slight haze. ‘I need to take some more.’ She fumbles one-handed with the backpack zipper, finds one of the blister packs and then lays herself flat on the ground again, arms stretched out. She is a butterfly, unfettered. Here, her arms are her own. No-one to pin them down. The ground is a bed, a safe one. It’s her place today. The shrubs encircling her and the trees above are a cubby house, her own private patch of the parkland. With no walls, no doors, she can leave whenever she wants and here no-one could stop her.
‘Can you tell me what you’re taking, Leila?’
‘To sleep, so I can sleep.’ Leila’s mouth is chalky and dry. Water would be good but there are only the dregs of warm Coke left in the can. Leila reaches for it, rolling onto her side, her woollen jumper catching debris—twigs, earth, dried leaves—with each movement.
‘Leila, can we just press pause on you doing that right now? Can we wait a bit more before you decide to take the meds?’
Her thoughts are ocean currents pulling in one direction and then changing. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘because I have them all here in my bag.’ She brings the pills to her mouth and gulps a little Coke, flat and sugary. ‘I didn’t forget them so it’s all good.’ She can hear her own cadence slacken, molasses-thick. While slower now, Leila’s voice still catches, she hears it stumble over the phlegm at the back of her throat, hears it hook on the nicotine gravel.
Home
Published in Escape: An Anthology of Australian Stories, 2011. Edited by Bronwyn Mehan.
Home was shortlisted for the Carmel Bird Short Story Award.
Published in Escape: An Anthology of Australian Stories, 2011. Edited by Bronwyn Mehan.
Home was shortlisted for the Carmel Bird Short Story Award.
Those wolves — no, they were foxes. I kept calling them wolves because I could never seem to get the name right. I was scared the first time I heard them howl. They sounded like crying children. But you explained they were only going through the dustbins searching for scraps. Before long the noises became familiar and I didn’t hear them any more.
Your toilet flushed differently. I would marvel at the lever. The thing was loose, didn’t really work properly, but it didn’t bother me, it was new. For the first two weeks I’d press the top of the cistern in the night forgetting where I was — blindly fumbling for a button to push, knocking over your shampoo, toothbrush and random objects gathered on top, a convenient shelf in a small space. In my sleepy fug I was somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere where bathrooms were without levers and oil heaters and such. In the dark, if it were not for that lever, I might have been at home: your townhouse heated, warm like any Australian summer night, I might have crawled back into your bed thinking myself home, none the wiser. If it were not for the lever I might have padded back to your room though unfamiliar doorways, a map of my own in my mind. But there was the lever: the constant fumbling for the familiar. In the dark was the smell of your shampoo — paw-paw and coconut. That tropical scent seemed so far removed from the cold bathroom tiles and your musty feather duvet. Far from home. In your mismatched bedding there was the scent of your coconut head. Coconut wrapped in cheap haberdashery.
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