The Best Australian Stories 2014 (27 page)

‘We'd still be here in those final two weeks, for any troubleshooting and to make sure you've got the hang of things, particularly in our respective workplaces, but the two of you would be captaining the ship, so to speak,' said Thomas. ‘Does that seem okay?'

‘Sounds great,' said Tonia. She had a really good feeling about this couple. There was something reassuringly familiar about them.

‘Any questions?' said Emily, in a manner that made it obvious that questions were not welcome.

‘What were your jobs again?' asked Gary, ignoring the look of annoyance that Tonia shot at him.

‘I'm an interior homewares architect and Thomas is a graphic designer. You …' Emily looked down at the application form, slightly panicked. What if they weren't up to it? They didn't really need experience; after all, by this stage both her and Thomas's jobs involved supervising others – they didn't actually do any work. But whoever took over their positions did need enough knowledge to be convincing.

‘I've studied architecture, so that's no problem. And Gary has a real eye for design. You should see the mosaic he's working on,' Tonia's words ran together in her hurry to reassure.

‘The what?' Thomas dragged his eyes back from the sky. A lone starling had lifted from its perch on the back fence and was whirling about without a care in the world. The image was unbalanced; Thomas wished the bird had a mate to frolic with. ‘Did you say mosaic?'

‘Yeah, it's a hobby of mine. You know, little tiles that make up the picture.' Gary sat up straighter. ‘It's actually quite intricate, you see.'

*

Gary had started on the mosaics when he was labouring for a landscape design company. The client wanted a water feature and all he had to work with were an old birdbath and some terracotta pots. It had only taken him one weekend to put it all together, the terracotta set in circles rising from the brown tones at the base to the warmer, more orangey ones at the top. It was quite meditative, really, Gary found. It took him away from everything frantic about the world, slowed it all down. It was the first time he'd ever felt that way, as he looked for the ways those tiles might fit together. So he could understand why Tonia wanted to do this – that she felt it would give her the same feeling of satisfaction, of no longer having to scramble up the greasy pole. She needed to feel complete.

‘Isn't mosaic a craft?' Thomas asked.

‘Well, darling, so is knitting. But it's been reappropriated quite successfully. Remember the yarn-bombing project the children did at school?' Emily's voice was soothing. She just wanted to get this over and done with.

Thomas tried to imagine thousands of tile pieces pressed into the polished concrete floor of the living room. He saw tendrils of glass tiles climbing the windows, exotic blooms of colour colonising the white plaster walls. It was not possible.

He needed to know that when they left it all behind, it would stay the same. Their minimalist oasis, the place where they had got everything just right, at least for a short time.

‘Is it ironic?' asked Thomas. Because that could be its saving grace. A hobby could be incorporated, perhaps, as long as it was not genuine.

‘I don't think so.' Gary watched the colour drain from Tonia's face. ‘I mean, it could be. But—'

He was interrupted by a loud thud against the glass door. A smear of something red had appeared there; it seemed to float, a russet-coloured cloud. And there on the slate below, the body of a single starling, its wings flung open, its chest madly vibrating.

No one said a thing until Emily rose, sticking out her hand, her bird-shaped ring immediately looking to Thomas like a death mask.

‘Well, we've got your details. We'll call you if you're successful.'

Tonia and Gary were back on the verandah within seconds. They avoided the eager glances of the other couples in the queue.

‘Well, never mind. I don't think they were quite right for us. It would have been too difficult.' Tonia walked ahead of him down the street, nodding in agreement with herself. ‘We'll find something else, something will come up soon. Something we deserve.'

*

Inside, Emily and Thomas sat opposite each other on the couch, each with their iPad in hand.

‘I think the advertisement needs to be more specific,' said Thomas.

‘Definitely,' agreed Emily. She tapped away at the screen. Thomas looked at the window, and all he could see was the bloody cloud on the glass; it seemed to grow, crowding out the grey sky, turning it sepia.

‘What about this?' said Emily.

Thomas's email pinged. He looked down at his iPad.

‘Yes, that sounds exactly right', said Thomas. Emily always managed to make things just so.

Kill Your Darlings

Publication Details

Claire Aman
's ‘What I Didn't Put in My Speech' appeared in
Cracking the Spine: Ten short stories and how they were written
(Spineless Wonders, 2014).

Claire Corbett
's ‘Snake in the Grass' appeared in
Griffith REVIEW,
no. 42, 2013.

Kate Elkington
's ‘The Interpreter' appeared in
Meanjin,
vol. 73 (3), 2014.

Lisa Jacobson
's ‘Blood and Bone' was runner-up in the
Age
Short Story Competition in 2014.

Melanie Joosten
's ‘Just Like Us' appeared in
Kill Your Darlings,
October 2013.

J.Y.L. Koh
's ‘Civility Place' appeared in
The Sleepers Almanac,
no. 9, 2014.

Angela Meyer
's ‘Too Solid Flesh' appeared in
Island,
no. 137, 2014.

Adam Narnst
's ‘Blue People' appeared in
Griffith REVIEW,
no. 45, 2014.

Ryan O'Neill
's ‘The Stories I Read as My Mother Died' appeared in
The Sleepers Almanac,
no. 9, 2014.

Anthony Panegyres
' ‘Submerging' appeared in
Overland,
no. 214, 2014.

Shaun Prescott
's ‘The Coffee Table' appeared in
Meanjin,
vol. 73 (2), 2014.

Nicola Redhouse
's ‘This is Who You Are. You'll See' appeared in
Meanjin,
vol. 73 (3), 2014.

Leah Swann
's ‘The Green Lamp' appeared in
Review of Australian Fiction,
vol. 9 (6), 2014.

Notes on Contributors

T
HE
E
DITOR

Amanda Lohrey
is the author of the novella
Vertigo
(2008) and of the short story collection
Reading Madame Bovary
(2010), which won the Fiction Prize and the Steele Rudd Short Story Award in the 2011 Queensland Literary Awards. Her most recent novel is
The Philosopher's Doll
(2004), which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is also the author of two Quarterly Essays,
Ground-swell
and
Voting for Jesus.
In 2012 she was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Her next novel,
A Short History of Richard Kline,
will be published by Black Inc. in March 2015.

T
HE
A
UTHORS

Claire Aman
lives in Grafton, New South Wales. She works as an environmental planner and writes in her spare time. She's had short stories published in
New Australian Stories 1
and
2
(Scribe),
The Best Australian Stories 2008
(Black Inc.),
Southerly, Island
and
Heat.
She has an unpublished novel that lies in her grandmother's old desk, waiting for its time.

David Brooks
is an honorary associate professor at the University of Sydney, and co-editor of
Southerly.
His latest novel is
The Conversation
(UQP, 2012). His fifth collection of poetry,
Open House,
will be published by UQP in 2015. His most recent collection of stories was
Black Sea
(Allen & unwin, 1997).

Rebekah Clarkson
's short stories have been recognised in major awards, shortlists and independent publications in Australia and overseas. Most recently, she was runner-up in the 2013
ABR
Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and winner of the Readers' Choice Award for the same prize. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Adelaide, where she also teaches.

Claire Corbett
's novel
When We Have Wings
was published in 2011 by Allen & Unwin and shortlisted for the 2012 Barbara Jefferis Award and the 2012 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. She writes for the
Monthly
and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney. Her essay ‘The Last Space Waltz?' was shortlisted for the 2012 ABR CAL essay prize. In 2014 she was awarded an international residency at Writers Omi in upstate New York.

Arabella Edge
is the author of three works of historical fiction:
The Company
(Picador, 2000),
The God of Spring
(Picador, 2006) and
Fields of Ice
(Picador, 2011).
The Company
won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the South Pacific region and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2001. She now lives on Tasmania's east coast.

Kate Elkington
is an emerging Queensland writer completing a doctorate in creative arts (creative writing) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, examining the composite novel in Australian literature. Her recent fiction has been published in
Meanjin, Westerly
,
Kill Your Darlings
and
TEXT Journal
.

Lisa Jacobson
is the author of three books of poetry:
Hair and Skin & Teeth
(Five Islands, 1995),
The Sunlit Zone
(Five Islands, 2012), which won the Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award, and
South in the World
(UWA Publishing, 2014). In 2011 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. She lives in Melbourne.

Melanie Joosten
was named a
Sydney Morning Herald
Best Young Novelist and awarded the Kathleen Mitchell Prize for Young Writers for her first novel,
Berlin Syndrome,
which is currently being made into a film. She has been published in
Kill Your Darlings
and
Meanjin,
and is currently working on her second novel.

J.Y.L. Koh
is a former corporate lawyer. Her short stories have appeared in
The Fish Anthology, The Sleepers Almanac, The Lifted Brow
and
Kyoto Journal
. She is currently writing a novel about the smartest man in the universe. ‘Civility Place' is dedicated to Jiao Chen.

Anna Krien
is the author of
Night Games: Sex, power and sport, Into the Woods: The battle for Tasmania's forests,
and
Us and Them: On the importance of animals
(Quarterly Essay 45). Anna's work has been published in the
Monthly,
the Age, the
Big Issue, The Best Australian Essays, The Best Australian Stories, Griffith REVIEW, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging
,
Colors
,
Frankie
and
Dazed & Confused
.

Julienne van Loon
's first novel,
Road Story,
won the
Australian/
Vogel Award in 2004. She lectures in creative writing at Curtin University, and her latest publication is
Harmless
(Fremantle Press, 2013). The story included in this collection was completed while participating in the University of Wollongong's 2014 CAL Writer-in-Residence program.

Angela Meyer
is the author of a collection of flash fiction,
Captives
(Inkerman & Blunt), and editor of an anthology of eerie stories,
The Great Unknown
(Spineless Wonders). Her stories have been published in
Island
,
Seizure
,
Tincture
,
The Lifted Brow
and others. She is working on a novel.

Adam Narnst
is a writer who lives between south-east Queensland and Shanghai. He has taught writing, literature and philosophy, and is currently completing a PhD thesis on writing and violence. He has been published in
Griffith REVIEW
,
Talent Implied
,
Wet Ink
and
Antique Children
, but survives on teaching, bouncing, prizefighting, handouts and the odd timely compo payment. ‘Blue People' is a chapter from
Ugly Lights
, his first unsigned manuscript.

Lucy Neave
's first novel,
Who We Were,
was published by Text in 2013. Her stories have appeared in Australian and American literary journals, and in
The Best Australian Stories 2009.
She has received a Varuna fellowship to work on her second novel, and teaches writing at the Australian National University.

Ryan O'Neill
is the author of
The Weight of a Human Heart.
He was born in Glasgow in 1975, and lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in
The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac
,
Meanjin
,
New Australian Stories
,
Wet Ink
,
Etchings
and
Westerly
. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards, and been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Steele Rudd Award and the
Age
Short Story Prize. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.

Anthony Panegyres
has had stories published in a number of genre anthologies, including
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2011
(Ticonderoga Publications, 2012). He was an Aurealis Award Finalist for Best Fantasy Short Story in 2012. He has also had several stories published in Australian literary journals, including
Overland.
He is doing a PhD in writing at UWA.

Fiona Place
is a Sydney-based writer. Her first novel,
Cardboard,
won the 1990 National Book Council Qantas Award for New Writers. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in
Meanjin
,
Southerly
and
Westerly
, and her essays on motherhood, disability and genetics appear in peer-reviewed journals. She is currently writing a memoir.

Shaun Prescott
is a Sydney-based writer from country New South Wales. He is working on a novel about disappearing towns in the central west of New South Wales.

Nicola Redhouse
is a freelance writer and book editor, and currently teaches in the creative writing department at RMIT. Her fiction has been published in
Meanjin
,
Kill Your Darlings
,
Wet Ink
and
Harvest
, and her non-fiction in the
Big Issue
,
Indigo
, and
RealTime
.

Edwina Shaw
is a Brisbane writer of fiction and memoir. Her first book,
Thrill Seekers,
was released in 2012, and was shortlisted for that year's NSW Premier's UTS/Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her stories have been published in Australian and international journals, including
Griffith REVIEW
and
Asia Literary Review.

Mark Smith
lives, writes, surfs and occasionally works on Victoria's west coast. His stories have appeared in
Visible Ink
,
Spineless Wonders, Great Ocean Quarterly, The Victorian Writer
and
Award Winning Australian Writing
, among others. He is currently working on his first novel.

Leah Swann
is the author of the story collection
Bearings
and
The Ragnor Trilogy
, a fantasy series for children. Her work has appeared in
Best Australian Short Stories, The World to Come, Review of Australian Fiction
,
Award Winning Australian Writing
,
Australian Love Stories
and
page seventeen
.

Kirsten Tranter
's first novel,
The Legacy,
was published to international critical acclaim in 2010, and selected as a
Kirkus Reviews
Best Debut Novel of the year.
The Legacy
was shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the Indie Debut Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her second novel,
A Common Loss,
was released in 2012. Kirsten's novels have been translated into Spanish, Chinese and Polish.