UNSWeetened acknowledges the traditional owners of the land. We acknowledge the Bedegal people, the Darug people, the Gandagara people, the Ngunnuwal people, the Gadigal people and the Wangal people of the Eora Nation.
We pay our respects to Elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. This is, was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
Archive is a loaded word. We live short, sweet lives and over generations build a History, a long past of joy, horror, and wonder that we inherit. Archives are how we choose to remember this history. The words and symbols we use to record all that came before us and made us who we are now. Archives are not only dusty bookshelves and file cabinets managed by librarians and archivists. They exist in many forms; internet histories, family photos, medical records, and any place where the human experience finds it necessary to mark itself down.
Literature has long been one of the best ways to archive the human experience. While court documents, accounting ledgers, and historians’ notes are all ways of catching the details, the nitty gritty reality of lives long past, it is literature that tells us what it was like to live. How people loved, laughed, cried. Though the centuries and miles between may separate us, literature shows that however things may change, we remain the same. Literature teaches us, it moves us, and in its finest moments, it makes time fold in on itself and briefly two lives separated by centuries recognise something eternal and human in each other. A reminder that we are never as alone as we think.
UNSWeetened inclined itself easily to the Archive theme this year. It is a publication that has been running for over 25 years, powered by student voices for so long that it is becoming an archival document itself. Has become a record of the wonderful student creativity that has passed through UNSW throughout the years. University in particular is a time in which we begin to not only look forward toward the life and legacy we wish to build, but what has come before us. I wanted this to be a moment in which students could honour their past, their families, and their experiences here and now, before it all fades into the continuum of sweet insubstantial memory, leaving nothing but records that can only try to recreate the wonder of having lived here and now.
I hope that you will all look back on these years and this experience with sweet nostalgia. I am eternally grateful that for this brief moment our lives touched, and we were able to make something incredible together.
To whoever is finding this in a grandmother’s attic, I hope this stands up as a relic of a long-ago time, and all the wonders of being alive in 2025.
Until then, turn the page and check out some of the amazing work my brilliant team has done this year. Revel in the beauty of the UNSWeetened 2025 Literary Magazine and join me in celebrating the amazing student work being made right now.
Inayat Juno Mander UNSWeetened Coordinator
Simmering Serenity
Josephine Kurnia JadeGorgonFalzon
LarissaCandyApples
At the End of the World Even Friends Will Partake in MikhaelaCannibalismOdayan
Men and Their RyanMonologues Huynh The softest things don t survive the archive
Yashaswani Gupta The first time I spelt my name was the first time I wrote a Annabellapoem
What I Don t Share When They Ask for My RecordsMedical Joy Paola The Lost Art of Forgetting and the Bastardised Craft ofSumayaRemembrance Sultana Selling an Organ Tully AM
by Josie Kurnia
i. Star
I close my eyes as my arms and legs take themselves into a familiar motion, my white cotton skirt twirling as I move around. Behind the darkness of my eyelids, there is only myself, so I let myself sing:
‘O Lady Luna, let your brilliance fall upon the stars,
Grace us with your presence,
Take us to where you are,
Kiss my tears as they fall, one by one, and make me shine bright.’
I don’t dare to shine like the sun. How could I, when I am just one of many? But don’t I glow just as bright as Lady Luna? Lady Luna, forever tethered to the earth, will never find her own footing. She has no pull – what use is her shine? Keep on shining bright, Lady Luna, but where is your audience? I twirl around, my skirt flowing around the quiet serenity of the darkness.
My eyes flutter open and continue to gaze at the moon.
ii. Luna
It was only for a moment.
Hands held tight onto a piece of string, palms bright red, knuckles white. Like a lifeline, the words I had always wanted to hear were beautifully etched onto the threads, weaving and waving through each other and landing into my arms. There were enough to throw them towards the moon, to tether me onto the melancholic glow of her beauty. She is loved; the lady of the moon is adored. Lady Luna, tell me your secret. O Lady Luna, did you know that when everyone gazes at you their eyes reflect off your serene glow? Have you noticed how their heads bow in your direction, how their hands twitch as they restrain themselves from your otherworldly beauty, how their minds think of you and only you?
The string falls short.
How can a star not be loved too?
How can a star not be loved too?
iii. Meteor
I have woven threads far beyond the possibilities, if they reach to the sky, then I hope to be able to pull on them
Suppose they can carry my weight, then my trembling hand might be able to touch the moon.
But I know that every thread I hang Eventually comes back to me
Cleanly cut, elegantly falling
For a single hope I proclaim, this same hope will cease to exist.
The filament bleeds red
Every hue of my forlorn heart
All over the ground it spreads.
My hands have woven threads far beyond my reality, to forgo the possibilities of having someone Here by my side.
As I continue to throw my threads towards the twinkling moon in the hopes that your hand will hold onto mine and that you will look into my eyes, tender and glassy, there is nothing here beside me and the moon. my thread becomes her adornment hung up against her glimmer leave it be, for it, too, will come floating down.
A star fades away from the cosmos of the galaxy when it has nothing else to give.
Wind rushes through my hair, sending strands flying into my face, as I let myself fall. My eyes focus on the twinkling glints scattered around this vacuum of nothing, the moon’s soft glare shining past through the darkness. Shoooo… the whistle of the wind screeches. The closer I get to the bottom, the more my heart clenches in anticipation, thrumming with the adrenaline of unknowns, waiting for what comes after death. Death for the brightest shining star, the one who can never turn her light off, the one who attracts every passerby and patron, every supporter and stranger, every acquaintance and antagonist
‘Ah, there it is,’ I think. ‘Everything is coming to an end.’
Specks of stardust fall onto my toes, faintly glimmering as they adorn my body. A line of them gracefully make room on my head, forming a little crown as I lie amid nothing, the unsettling darkness enveloping me into its secure arms. Here there are no wandering glances, no stage to twirl around, no applause to fill my ears. Here there is nothing, and yet it feels like everything as I let myself sink into the allure of the darkness and its seductive promises. An eternal moment here in the abyss of where fallen stars lay to rest, the graveyard of every longing gaze. My hands, which had always been reaching out, finally close around nothing.
O Lady Luna, may your light shine in the ever-perpetual darkness.
by Jade Falzon
There had been rain the night before, and the biting cold hung in the air like a plague.
I sat on the limestone ground, staring into the bronze mirror that sprouted from the stone beneath. It towered over me, carved with the details of a lush olive tree on either side. Owls emerged from the branches, not tiny ones that stalked worms and disappeared in modest shrubs. No, these were hunters, with talons reaching and wings broad, preying on vicious, horned vipers.
I had stared into the mirror long enough to know what I had become. My skin was sallow after being locked away from the sun, and my eyes swelled as I thought of the amber shine that used to embrace my dark hair. Now, my crown of curls was a laurel-green maze twisting with scaled flesh, each decorated with pulsating yellow eyes. The snakes twirled and coiled amongst each other, retreating from the cold of their blood and the air. At the top of the mirror was a large, single head moulded in the brass – eyes wide, tongue protruding, and snakes sprawling from its scalp.
The Gorgon.
That was what they had begun to call me. The slithering fury who lured men to their doom, and left the world without a body to mourn.
The mirror was not always here. After many days of waking in darkness, I had found the menacing gift waiting for me, secured in the ground as if it were growing from the damp rock. At first, my reflection was difficult to see, but overtime my sight had adjusted to the cave’s immortal thickness of night. Every day I gazed upon vengeance incarnate, and into the only eyes that would never turn to stone.
Like the mirror, I too was not always here. There were days when I would lie in lush fields beneath the sunlight and an infinite sky, my priestess sisters and I nurturing the sacred flame of my goddess in her grand temple. I did not think to savor the sensation of my warm skin against those marble floors until after that day.
I have never forgotten the smell of his breath. Like rancid fish and dried up seaweed on neglected shores.
I was suffocated in darkness, as the candlelight around the temple had been suddenly blown away by a chilling wind. With the absence of glowing flame, the thicket of stars and bulging full moon had illuminated my surroundings.
That was when I saw him.
His presence was not sudden. It lingered. The same way one waits
for the crack of thunder. His eyes were dark, and the deathly black of his hair curled over his face like an assassin’s veil. His devious smile was not etched on his lips, but behind his eyes.
That unwavering stare.
I was what he wanted and he knew he could take me.
His face was coarse compared to the defined features of bronze statues reverently scattered along the coasts of Sarpedon. He wore a chlamys of a deep blue linen, and his olive skin beneath it somehow made the fabric seem bright beneath the limited light. Soon enough I was smothered in the thickness of his beard, scratched by the barnacles that clung to him like a hull lost to the depths of the sea. He had pressed my head hard against the ground, his huge hand covering my face. I called for my goddess — any who would answer my call.
But my gods never came.
What had I done to displease her? Had I not devoted my waking hours to her worship? Tended to her temple once the sun went down? I had kept my vow.
He had taken it from me.
I lay on the floor even after he had left. My body ached, no longer warm, as if life had already abandoned me. I felt broken as I tried to get to my feet. That was when the fathomless pain pulsated through my head.
You defy me! You defile yourself!
That is when I awoke, forgetting when I had succumbed to sleep. The brightness of a purple dawn had started to peer into the temple, onto the enormous marble likeness of my patron. Despite all the days and nights I had watched over her holy space, I felt for the first time as if the statue was staring at me.
You have defied me!
I then recalled the pain in my head, and lifted my trembling and apprehensive hands to the crown of my head, before screeching at the sensation under my fingertips. Cold and writhing.
Then I heard their hisses. Snakes. They are snakes.
As my wailing echoed throughout the revered chamber, I wrapped myself in my arms, constricting tightly in an attempt at solace. I rocked back and forth, choking on my short, panicked breaths. My face was wet with salty tears.
Suddenly, I heard a familiar voice.
“Medusa?” It had called out, “Is that you?”
It was one of my priestess sisters – her name I could no longer remember. I scurried like a beaten dog and hid behind one of the temple columns, away from the priestess’ and statue’s sight.
“Don’t come closer!” During those brief moments I thought only of the horror of my transformation, not yet knowing what would follow. Kindness led her like a guiding hand.
She was the first person I had ever turned to stone.
I fled without a goodbye and without an explanation. I had already tasted the wrath of the gods, and did not wish to wait for the wrath of man. I ran to where there were no bustling villages. For a time I hid by an abandoned hearth near Cisthene, but the agony in my mind was unrelenting. And the stare of shame burned constantly into my skin. My stomach swelled with dread when open skies and blue coasts were in my sights, for so too were those pitless, black eyes.
My goddess’ voice still boomed between my ears.
You defy me! You defile yourself!
It was only until I had walked into darkness did her words relent. The cave had a tall, yet narrow opening, the rock clawing my torso as I squeezed through. The sunlight was weak against the depth of the cave, and soon the chariots of night and day were hollow. I could not tell how much time had passed, although I could feel the weight of it. The ever growing number of petrified relics were my personal timepiece. I had surrounded myself with my own temple of random, terrifying design.
My stone statues were not of gloried Olympians or their fearsome creations; they were eager soldiers, the sons of fishermen desperate to secure their place amongst the Elysium Fields. There were those forced to bear the consequence of my sight that cowards would not. With no one to burn their bodies or place golden coins on their eyes, I always wondered whether they were able to reach Elysium. Or, if they were left to wander on shores of the abyss, watching Charon deliver all other souls that would come, but abandon theirs to rot endlessly by the riverside. The thought twisted the invisible knife in my chest —another ache of my punishment.
My place of desertion, my prison, my punishment. No, it was not enough to quench the fury of the gods by making me what I am, my fate was to never again know love or friendship. The desperation to gaze upon a monstrous prize had turned all my visitors to stone. No matter how much I begged them to turn back, tell them I mean no harm, plead — not with my life, but theirs — the call to glory was too great.
And the hopeful heroes of men suffered for it.
When walking amongst my victims, studying the details of their faces, I had to stop myself from creating stories about them; who they were, where they had travelled from. I could not get attached. What their families were like…
My father had been stern at times, but our short begrudging of it faded quickly. At night, when warm flames lit up our home, he would form odd shapes with his hands and cast shadows onto our stone walls. He would tell us of the nymph, Daphne, and her transformation into the laurel tree, or of Semele, who dared to look upon Zeus in his Olympian splendor. He told comedies too; I recalled one about a dog who was transformed into a man and sniffed the behinds of the townsfolk. My mother’s laugh had a snort that made the story even more amusing. My sisters and I had the same laugh.
I hadn’t laughed in a long time.
I missed my sisters. I could no longer remember their faces, only that I longed for their company again. Sometimes I had to remind myself of their names. SthenoEuryaleSthenoEuryale. By now they had handed themselves over to the cradle of old age, laid to rest in their funeral pyres, coinage atop their gaze, ferrying to the Underworld. At least that is what I like to think. I couldn’t bear the thought that they suffered a fate such as mine. I thought of my family every day, the shadow theatre, my mother’s laugh, the company of my sisters.
It filled me with boiling rage. Not simply because I had forgotten their likeness, but because of all the faces I remembered, his still followed me.
The son of Argos. He is coming.
I was thrown from my nightmare and pulled into another — back to my reflection in the bronze mirror. I leaned into the hisses of my serpents. They started to twist with irritation. They had become my very own Fates, the haunting voice of the goddess now replaced by serpentine whispers in my ears. With no oracle to seek, all my fears, doubts, and questions were voices outside of my head. And I listened.
He carries the favour of the gods.
He is called to flight like a hawk.
He is sightless as air.
With a bronze eye he wishes to claim your head.
The son of Zeus. Perseus is coming.
I would be asleep when he would come, that is what my Fates had told me. That, with his harpē sword, the youth would strike me when I am turned away, and take my head as his trophy.
So, I waited for him. And as true as our most reverend oracle, the day came when the great Perseus came into my domain.
He may have evaded my sight, but he was not soundless. After what felt like an eternity in my
limestone prison, I knew every sound it could possibly offer; a small swallow, a squeaking rodent, even the drip of moisture left over from heavy rain. His steps were like the banging of a tympanon.
I had not been ravaged and cast into darkness to become a trophy. I listened for the exact moment that I lay under the guise of sleep, and although death was close approaching, I had never felt so alive. I could hear his arrogance as he dragged his blade along his feet. I could imagine the smirk on his face as he crept towards me, sneering at the ease of his hunt. Louder his steps and the drag of his sword grew, and then, silence.
He was behind me.
Beneath shut eyes I envisioned myself rising with the perfume of his blood, its redness sprayed across my face like a mosaic. The demi-god’s sword in my hand — and his severed head in the other.
If they would have me be a monster, then I would show them just how monstrous I could be.
t the end of the world, even friends will partake in cannibalism
by Mikhaela Odayan
The future was not supposed to look like this
But these poisoned lands and soulless homes
Are the only things left so, there is no use in asking why
Death and pain do not discriminate, we are not so special
Already hunger haunts us, it is now a matter of how long
But I do not want us to turn on one another
I do not want us to rip each other to shreds
Let us not turn love and hate into an ouroboros snake
We will make this our choice, treat carnage as a warm embrace
And so, if you must pick up the knife
Do not hesitate to point the tip of the blade at my heart
I will lean into its touch; we will call this embrace “mercy”
I will tell death that it was a necessity
My final breath will be a wish: “Do not let me go to waste.”
You will close my eyes and lay a kiss to each lid
Dearly beloved, sorely missed, never forgot
I know that the best way to commemorate a body is to consume it,
So pick up the blade again
When you skin me alive, let your tears salt my flesh
With the bittersweet joy of a well-prepared meal
In every life where we meet, I will ensure that you eat well
This is a guiltless act, pre-ordained so make haste as you chop me up
And set aside the parts of me you wish to eat
Light the flame, get the pot ready and sprinkle in the soup of my body,
The secrets that I have shared with you as if they are delectable spices
I want my flesh to be soaked with the love that comes from being known
While the food is cooking, won’t you lay the table with our fondest memories,
Fill your glasses with my sacrificial blood
And make a toast, as if we are immune to misery
The end of days will not ruin our friendship
Instead of grace, say a poem — amen to the muses that imbue power in words
Pick up the bones, suck the marrow out,
I hope your tongues melt from the silky texture of my transcendental joy
If you can, take from what’s leftover and fashion yourself some tools or weapons
All I have ever wanted is to be of use
In life, there is not much need for skin and tears
So let me in death extend my helping hand
I want to be the happy moment you always look back to,
The inside joke that ties you all together,
The comfort found in good company,
The ache in your belly from laughing too hard
You are all my best memories, so please, let me feed you.
by Larissa Bowen-Williams
Sarah washes apples in an old ricotta fashella, curls of wax falling into the blue bowl. On the windowsill sits a radio. An old song shakes through the speakers like a bourn of winter wind, punctuated by intermittent static and voices that were at once familiar and distant: an ad for junior paracetamol; the homeless rate for war veterans; an interview with a romance novelist. She sings along briefly, oh, I could hear the dull buzz of the bee, before resigning to a melodious hum. The apples, deep red with rings of yellow around the stems, and slightly oblong, are sold in netted bags labelled ‘imperfect’ at a discounted price. Sarah found the unearthing of these sale-stickered items from the bottom of crudely packed shelves strangely indulgent, like gaining entertainment from a true crime documentary.
Once they are clean, no residual wax shining on their skin, Sarah spears the apples with thick wooden skewers through their calyxes, dipping them, one at a time, into a pot of melted sugar. Thick bands of afternoon light enter through the window, illuminating tiny fragments of sugar, like the disembodied hairs of a fair child. The air is warm and sticky. The apples, after resting for an hour to cool, are carefully piled into a glistening pyramid. Sarah admires her work and then wraps the board in baking paper, followed by a deep blue cellophane, twisting the whole thing into something resembling a bouquet.
Outside, her husband pulls into the driveway. His tanned arm rests on the lowered window of an old blue Ford. The roller door of the garage retracts with a great hiss. The sun descends further into the house, draping like sheer, gold fabric over the long hall extending from the kitchen, and into the
He walks into the house and does not comment on the smell, though it reminds him of birthdays past, a hot apple pie adorning the dining table, a sphere of French vanilla ice cream melting into the pastry. He passes silently by Sarah, who fusses about the kitchen, moving large mixing bowls from countertop to sink to cupboard. She turns the tap on and boils the kettle and begins scrubbing away at the silver utensils in the sink. It is as though work followed him home, the kitchen as loud as the inside of a factory. Sighing, he staggers into the hallway, back bent, clothes soiled with grease. Walking, as lamely and spasmodically as he does, creates a click-clack accompaniment to the metallic orchestra coming from the kitchen. He eyes a scrap of red yarn clinging to the skirting board, among clumps of dust, and wonders how many years these collections of minutiae took to become visible accumulations. Which of the hundreds of specks of debris were carried by the tread of his work boots? Which were particles of sand or splinters of hair? Which were grains of sugar, having migrated from the kitchen in the bristles of brooms like swallows in the spring?
The sun recedes beyond the windowsill, drawing back its light from the hallway. With the noise of the kitchen spent, the kettle boiled and the silverware shining in their drawers, Sarah’s husband finds a sort of half-sleep. And with nothing else left to prepare, clean, or organise, she stands in the middle of the kitchen, inspecting a patch of psoriasis on her hand. A tiny island of red skin with a flaky, pale periphery, like the sandy edges of a beach.
Night comes quickly. Sarah sits in the loungeroom, the radio playing. She half-listens to its grainy audio. A woman asks the channel host for advice: What am I doing wrong? Is it my appearance? Have I gotten old? An effusion of moonlight blanches the living room wall as the audio wavers. Sarah glances down, examining the script-filled pages splayed across her lap. A cup of pens sits on the coffee table, cheap and plastic, the one she had been using identifiable from the bubble of ink growing on its ball point. No, it is nothing you have done. Rather, it is the natural progression of a deep corners of the house. It travels to the end of the hall, until the furthermost bedroom and nursery are illumined, slatted wood of a white crib glowing, the thin mattress warm, as though it had not long ago contained a living thing.
relationship. Blue smudges extend up the side of her hand like a bruise. Suddenly tired of writing, a dull headache metastasising across her temple, she slips the pages into an envelope, letting the radio rattle on, and wanders into the kitchen, grabbing the crinkling platter of apples before receding into the hallway. Glancing at the walls, she notes dimples in the paint, flecks of dirt, and tiny holes where nails had once been. The present wall, as plain and blemished as it was, is easier to look at than the photographs and rudimentary portraits made of oil pastels, pencil and watercolour that once hung there.
Heading toward her bedroom, she peers briefly into the old nursery. There is no baby in the cot. No toys spread broadly across the floor. No apple red in the rounded cheeks of her smiling daughter. No droplets of blood from a scraped knee. No accompanying cries. No softly sung melody to mediate those tears, as loud and vivid as they are. On the far side of the cot a woollen blanket hangs, crimson. Sarah had knitted it after the birth of her daughter. Hunched over the needles, a wasted face washed in cool lamplight. The girl had loved it, leaving for pre-school with tiny tufts of wool through her plaits. With a languish exhale, Sarah turns from the nursery and, resting the board of apples upon her hip, nudges open the adjacent door, the one to her bedroom, with her foot. Inside, the room is dim. Her husband still. The only motion in the room is the swell of air moving through the curtains. She walks across the floor and gently places the package of apples by his side of the bed, the scent of sugar permeating the air. Next to them she lays down an envelope, thick with pages.
Tomorrow morning, he will wake, long before she does, and find his package of candied apples. He will spot the envelope and open it immediately, fingers absentmindedly tracing the first few words. The letter will detail the painstaking process of making candied apples, how unforgiving burnt sugar is, the horrible smell it creates, bitter and suffocating, and how hard it is to scrub from pots, hard as cement. I mean seriously, why is it you love candy apples so much?
The letter will be stored in a lockbox in the wardrobe, by his old pair of work boots, inside a whole archive of letters. Letters of pain. Letters of longing. Letters of pedestrian conversation and dreaming. Sarah suspects he will savour the apples, leaving all but one in the tray, the rest individually packaged and stored in the fridge. Before work, he will stand quietly in the kitchen, strands of pale morning light passing over his face like the vibrating strings of a cello, the sugarcoating of the last apple melting into his tongue. He will leave for work with a shard of it caught in his molars, sucking it all day to extract the distinct sweetness. Sarah will wake to an empty house,
sweep up the needles of sugar hidden among the tufts of carpet, and retire to the kitchen. The radio will murmur a tinny song, and she will hum along:
The oriole with joy was sweetly singing,
The little brook was babbling its tune,
The village bells at noon were gaily ringing, The world seemed brighter than a harvest moon.
For there within my arms I gently pressed you,
And blushing red, you slowly turned away, I can’t forget the way I once caressed you.
I’ll only pray we’ll meet another day.
In the shade of the old apple tree.
Antoinette Luu
Before age seven, all the boats you knew barrelled through a technicolour sea, a Barbie swinging from the rope or a pirate of the Caribbean with that fantastic plastic glow, that airbrushed sea spray. Then history said refugees smuggled gold in their rectums, made banks of their bodies only to have them robbed by a barrelling pirate, an insurmountable swell. Then poetry said your parents smuggled their language in their guts, a hands-free place that was never capsized, airbrushed, thrown overboard. How quickly it drowned—the fairy under the cautionary tale.
In the sequel, your only migration is from soft to solids, boneless to bony cá kho and ‘to parent’ then becomes ‘to warn’. All they ever say from the gut is
coi chừng xương watch out for the fish bones
coi chừng xe watch out for cars
coi chừng nóng watch out, it’s hot; even a cup of tea can scald your tongue Every warning makes you wonder what exactly went wrong. How much of the textbook is just family history? Maybe this is why you wade through girlhood waiting for
the worst. No matter how many times Mẹ tells you coi chừng a girl in your class comes to school in a cast she was hit on the way to meet a fairytale man that bade her J-walk across the ages of thirteen and thirty you get scalded by a friend you thought was warm and, having failed to sift the sharp from the soft, the fish bone gets caught in your throat. Even as you wait for it all to pass through your oesophagus, you marvel at how your mother survived it all —the crash, the capsize, the robbery— long enough to deliver the warning to her daughter in a bedtime story
My dead ancestors are screaming at me to come home
Z. Cedar
I want to mute the screaming spirits with the dial of Jiddo’s old box TV to quieten my fraying mind; perhaps tune into his radio and listen to Dabke music, not the sound of bombs on the news, out my window.
I want fresh za’atar and olive oil to drip down my fingers — my God, a miracle if you will,
I want to realise His speech and our language to be home on my tongue (please before Jiddo dies). I want to write poetry that tethers me to my past, and I never want my ancestors or my land to let me go.
Root me to the soil like the trees for which I named myself, but let my mind be mine.
I need peace everlasting and history acknowledged but in doing so, please give me a decent existence.
Am I asking for too much when I plea for safe passage to my ancestors’ home, just to see … I turn off Jiddo’s radio and the old box TV. My ancestors resume their screaming.
Jhaanavi Karunapalan
Preemie.
I do not exit the utero-void screeching and flailing like the generic newborns do. Rather, I come out blue. With the umbilical cord twisted ‘round my neck and gripped in place by my own slimy hands.
“And it took three nurses to get her loose from the umbilical noose!” My grandmother proclaims to visiting relatives like it’s holy writ. She points to the flickering white light in the hospital ceiling in place of heaven. “Divine intervention. Everything that’s meant to be, will be.” As fate would have it, I killed my mother in childbirth.
My prematurity causes me to have low nutrient absorption. I’m skin and bones. Grandma relentlessly pumps me with food for the next few years of my life. Cookies follow every dinner. Ice cream follows cookies.
5.
I don’t have siblings or any friends in the neighbourhood. My mother is dead and my grandmother is tired. She buys me a console to pass the time. The holy glow of the TV at night might just save me.
I snack and key-smash, magnetised to the gratuitous corporeal violence of Call of Duty and Halo. Like clockwork, my avatar is annihilated and regenerated. I live and die by the screen, and there is not a scratch on me. It’s confined, predictable. Protective.
9.
Grandma enrols me in ballet to reverse the slouch and pouch that have begun to ‘misshape’ me –her word. I’m not sure what it means.
The girls in my class are bigger than me in age but not size. They’re lithe and long, gliding over the vinyl floor like it’s the enchanted lake and they, the swans.
They’re courteous, too. They invite me to join them in the back room during break, along with some of the other younger girls. The swan in charge explains that we’re playing a game called ‘pig’, where the older girls switch off the lights and search for the younger ones in the dark. If they find any of us, they either squeeze our bottoms or prod our stomachs. And as per the rules of the game, they do it hard enough that it makes us squeal. Then, they shout in unison, “pig!”
When I get home after that first lesson, I glide a knife down my thigh with prayers of draining the fat. I want to be a swan, not a swine.
It burns, but I figure I’ll regenerate.
14.
I notice my first grey strand and tweeze it out before combing through my hair for more. I can’t imagine a life beyond sixteen.
At ballet, one swan pretends to stumble and grabs my chest in ‘steadying’ herself, before turning to the others to squawk, “there really is nothing there!” It’s not fair; I’m a slimmer pig now, yet still for their slaughter. I suppose they need something to sink their teeth into, in lieu of actual food.
17.
I have a boyfriend who I can’t stand but that’s fine since we don’t stand much together.
Five weeks into the relationship, I wake up nauseous. And this time, it’s not because I’ve rammed my fingers through my throat. This concerns a different appendage in a different orifice, and creates a small bump on my stomach rather than an acidic, concave pit. I quit ballet on a whim because I can’t bear for them to see me stretch out my leotard.
Thirteen days later, I stare into a red toilet bowl. The doctor did say that malnutrition impacts foetal development. Grandma tells me that my mother knew she was pregnant immediately after
sex. That she said she could feel my life enter hers. I flush the toilet.
The boyfriend won’t stop asking if I’m alright and guards my side like a loyal mutt. He messages and hovers and reaches for my hand instead of my ass. Eventually, I call him an ass, and he stops calling at all.
20.
I think about pounding my head into a wall until one of the two cracks.
I angry-run now, every dusk. The sun slides down the sky as I barrel down the road. I delight in the rush of cold air and orangey-cobalt sky.
I don’t always get the burn I crave from running, so I occasionally unsheathe a kitchen knife. The body keeps score and it’s carved into my skin. I might crave punishment.
21.
I got this support dog, by recommendation of my therapist. He’s almost as furry as I am. I’m not sure that he’s a qualified support dog – I got him cheap. But he does the job, which makes him more employed than I am. When he jumps on me and slobbers, his saliva pours like wet concrete into cracks I wasn’t aware I had, cauterizing the broken flesh. Like kintsugi, but gross.
At grandma’s house, my throat and chest still tense like pressurised valves when I flick through her photo albums. There’s one from when I was eleven at a dance recital. My stomach spilling over my waistband. The hideous canary fairy costume whose halter neckline allowed little room for air to enter my throat. God, my deoxygenated face in this picture. How long have I been blue?
I can’t place why, but on the way back to my rental I stop at Coles to buy cable ties and low-fat ice cream. I finish the tub in my car. When I get home, I swallow a load of painkillers and secure the ties around my neck. I lie in my bed. Please, I think. Let it happen. My consciousness is coasting from the physical plane. Pigs can’t fly yet I feel wings wrapping around me. Please.
I jolt awake to the dog licking my face. The ties are cutting into my skin. Disappointed, I heave myself out of bed, snip them off with a pair of janky scissors, and pour myself a black coffee.
In its steam plumes, I envisage success with more merciless ligatures.
The splotches of bruising around my neck remind me that I need to buy a collar for the dog. Commemoration for the fact that I am technically his master. He heels, sits, and barks whenever I command. Am I any different, really? My master is a disease, but I am mastered all the same.
Still 21.
I’m alternating between morbid ideation and general readjustment to humanness.
I name my dog Angel, though he’s not particularly religious. He worships only the bone, as I did. But I used to pray for the bone to show through my skin. He buries them in the backyard instead. He buries a lot of my old things. Not to be forgotten, but shepherded. The yard has become a trove of my personal relics. I notice a leotard, 32-inch girth. A controller. I notice as slowly, a layer of fat begins to bury my collarbone back into my chest, and my body begins to feel like treasure. My bones, like pillars of a monument instead of sticks propping up a dehydrated sack of blood.
I choked on a piece of food the other day and it was funny; the bland chicken I needed to eat in order for my body to not kill itself was trying to kill me. And in the same asphyxiating way I’d tried to kill myself, all while I was in rehabilitation for trying to kill myself. Everything is a circle. At one what point does it become a cycle? At what point is it muscle memory to collapse?
My memory falters but my body remembers.
23.
I constantly need to repeat this is now. I am here. Otherwise, my feet leave the ground instinctively.
I’m everything I was before, just with the effects of time, which changes everything. Grey wisps are swirled into the hair at the crown of my head. Grandma remarks that my face has some colour back. I respond that I met someone in my classes, but really, I met them in the mirror. I stare at the steadily thickening hair on my scalp, reclaimed from my arms and legs where the hair is thin again. I stare, full with indifference to the flabs and pouches. I think look what my body has
amassed.
Grandma’s terminally sick. I can do little more than watch her deteriorate. The dementia has made her tender. I’m crying at her side one night when she pats my head and speaks through a wheeze, “I’ve lived well, and I will live through you. You are all I will be soon.” My memory falters, but my body remembers even that which came before me. I brush through my grey hairs with surety of what I will become. I imagine myself at my mother’s age. At my grandma’s.
Sometimes, I trace that first scar I knifed on my thigh. The deepest one. I picture a future one from an organ transplant or C-section.
Angel is well; he loves running with me. He erupts in effortless sautés, springing from his hind legs to the sound of my trainers squeaking down the hall. Some days, we run leashless and I watch him bound across the trail, unencumbered.
He’s gained some muscle.
As have I.
Maryam Shublaq
It is 2017 and you’re resting blankly on the living room sofa.
You hear your mother rambling on about how beautiful this sunny day is. About how perfect it would be for a spring clean. How unhelpful her teenage daughters are. She’ll inform you that every action, every sacrifice, is solely for your benefit and not hers. That everything, and I mean everything, is done for you and your sister and the future ahead of the two of you. She’ll claim she’s dedicating her life to you; giving you the future she never had; replacing her losses with your aspirations.
But for some unknown reason you won’t believe her.
Unconvinced and unbothered, you leave her presence and walk towards your bedroom. You wish to get away from the nonsense that escapes her mouth. Not for her benefit, but rather yours. You make it your personal goal to clean your room in a way that fits her standards. “¡Qué pocilga tienes por cuarto!” she tells you, knowing damn well her childhood home was far worse than your “pigsty” of a room. At times you think about what it would be like sharing a house with four boys and two girls. You quiver at each thought.
She gives you glimpses of her past life. She tells you about her handsome lover she pulled during the days of her youth living in Mexico. The one who left her when he discovered she was embarazada with his child. She lets it be known on all occasions that her life diminished once she had you. That your birth marked the end of her life and not the start of yours. Only indirectly does she do this.
You start by clearing out what’s under the bed: a claw clip, mismatched socks, used tissues. A cardboard box. You stare at it with unfamiliarity. Your curiosity widens as you shove your body well underneath your bed, hoping to fit yourself in the small gap to secure the box that is clearly not within arm’s reach.
You ask your mother what this box is and why it sits under your bed. She’ll hesitate and attempt to avoid your questions by commenting on the state of your room before shamefully admitting that the box belongs to her. That it is an archive of a period in her life that no longer exists. She’ll tell you that she no longer wanted it in her presence, but didn’t have the heart to throw it away. S
So she hid it well under your bed, hoping it would remain unnoticed.
You carry on cleaning the rest of the room. And when it is past your mother’s bedtime, you take a glance at the box. Almost as if it glanced at you first.
The box is labeled “1995-1996”. Inside is a photo album, followed by a few letters and a CD mix-tape with the faded words “our songs” written in marker.
You begin with the photo album. The album is thick and contains photos of your parents, together and in love. You sit on the soft bedroom carpet with your back resting against your bed, preparing yourself for what lies ahead. As you glide through the pages you immerse yourself in a reality where your mother was never forced to carry the burden of her children. In every smile and every gently rested hand you are reminded of a period in which two young lovers were truly inseparable.
A specific photo of your mother sitting on your father’s lap reminds you of the moment she informed you of her teenage years. She was a daddy’s girl; living like a princess and spoiled rotten by the men in her family. She loved the attention and affection she was given. Although she cherished his attention, her father worked tirelessly and would only ever see his family late at night and on weekends when he had time off. This led to her turning to her lover, who is now your father, for fulfilment.
The two met in one of the aisles of a corner store in her hometown. He had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a carton of milk in the other. He was alone and she was with her mother and a few of her siblings. Her mother was a few aisles down, and so she was limited in her interactions, but found a way to divert his attention to her. He was what many call a mujeriego – a womaniser, and his influence was strong. He had the characteristics of the hombre her father had always warned her of.
He would wait outside her house late at night until her parents were in a deep enough sleep for her to sneak out. His parents weren’t actively involved in his life the way hers were. He drove a black Mustang that would take the pair on hour-long road trips while the whole of Mexico was asleep, but made sure she was back before her sisters suspected her missing from her bed.
He treated her like she was the only girl in the world. They laughed together and showered together and did all the things that young couples do together until she fell pregnant with you.
Your mother tells you that they fought constantly after spilling the news to him. He wanted an abortion but it wasn’t in her culture to do so. At least that’s what her mother told her once she discovered her daughter was pregnant. Her mother cried Bloody Mary and feared for what the
townspeople would perceive her as, while her father and brothers threatened to kill the bastard that impregnated her.
By this time she was barely nineteen and had lost almost all the men most important to her, until your father’s unexpected visit left her impregnated once again.
Though this time, he left for good.
And now, every once in a while, your mother will be reminded of him and the horrific past he left behind. She’ll yell “¡Maldice a ese hijo de puta!” at the top of her lungs, and you’ll feel a sense of pity for her for each time. You know him now as your absent father, but she’ll forever remember him as the man she once loved.
You continue to flip through the album, yet you pause as one photo slips from between the pages and makes its way onto your lap. One that was never a part of the album, capturing your mother holding a much smaller version of your sister by her left hip while you cling to her right leg.
Uncertain of who may have captured this moment, you recall your mother informing you of your first few years of life. She tells you that they were spent living under the roof of your abuelos, although their influence on both your lives was minimal. She tells you that once she fell pregnant with your sister she did everything that she could to find a better home for the three of you. That she fed you and clothed you and cared for the two of you. And she did this with little money and almost no support.
Now, after years of resentment, something inside you begins to soften. You think of the gentle traces your mother left behind; the love and happiness she once felt; the family that couldn’t be there for her when she needed them most. You begin to empathise with her experiences and the life she sacrificed for the betterment of her children. Her expression, marked by sorrow and struggle, carries the burden of her unspoken pain as she holds you and your sister by her side in the photograph. Her weathered face, crippled by the pain she has endured, tells a story better than words ever could. It was not reckless love that failed her, but rather the poor support system she had.
You close the album and gaze at the wall across from you as you begin to feel a quiet ache for the love the two of you once shared.
Niki Almira
busy was the witch’s outstretched arm playing the cards, flipped on its head becoming decks that cascade; pages flitting to resurrect figures dead gently the witch tucked her body in and raised her mind
from mum —from grandmum gone this morning down the line of ancestors with sewn lesions that hum hours that laid in silence gave space for lair of the silenced to speak, through the end of a lineage recounting vignettes faded from age
her jaw opened wider than those before her ever could. the witch retched a tale of defiance— —the marching suits came back lathered sticky red
I. Ten of Cups welcome to the world of the living
you came down knowing how it unfurled the grooves on your palm fit snugly; your lips latch to safety welcome, you would love our children that we spun to be fitted as you grew playmates bridesmaids family you never knew— lovers mothers —one size only misfit few //
II. Queen of Coins Reversed something wanted in to your enclose your mother was one room away and there she silently weaved lullabies you grew out of the world went on another day taking another one that is yours
gold on your neck glistening unexercised cords marking the night a criminal stole from a knowing host //
III. The High Priestess i was born on a grassy knoll in the mould of their hands folding mine
burnt rosemary sprigs crackling silence unearthed incantations of a language out of use brought to this plane in a generational ritual the land where I was born called out to me the goddess of beauty bestowed magic cards that scry petty past-present-future obstructing ancestral cries geodes eavesdropping calls that echo my witch tongue tasting the voice of lost mother’s cacophony
the duality the whims of humanity or— the chance to do the ritual right once more
Ryan Huynh
A conversation between two men. Told in monologues, because all they want to do is talk.
STAGE:
A stage divided into thirds.
CENTRE STAGE: A shrine. Decorated with red paper and fruit platters. Unlit until scene three.
STAGE LEFT: An empty alley road. Decorated with broken glass and empty bottles. A bench. Lit by cosmopolitan streetlights.
STAGE RIGHT: An isolated kitchen island. On it, a bowl of mandarins. Behind it, a single standing fridge. Lit by a hanging light fixture.
CHARACTERS:
LEE; the young man. A university student. Drinks often and heavily. The son of an Asian family; he reckons daily with the impulse of memory and history.
ANH; the older man. Goes by the anglicised “ANDREW”. The name he gave himself immigrating to Australia because diaspora strips you of your own history.
STAGE LEFT: LEE is calling from inside the alley with a bottle caught between his feet.
I had this dream yesterday; it was sometime in the future, because everything looked the same. I was in a house. I’m older. I was married. Or it felt like it, because I was doing dishes and folding laundry.
[He takes the bottle to his mouth.]
I’ll admit this now, because I’m drunk and if I don’t say it, then I don’t think I ever will: I had a child.
He was beautiful. Around 5 or 6. Small enough to be held, old enough to know he was being held. He ran into the room laughing and jumped onto me. He called me ‘Dad’. I kissed his forehead with an instinct that told me I was meant to do this all along. I don’t even remember his name. I just remember smiling, because that is all I could do, and him smiling back, because that is all he could do too.
[Lee rises and leans on the bench.]
I woke up the next morning looking for him. [Beat.] But he wasn’t there, so I went into the kitchen and peeled myself a mandarin. You used to like those, right?
[Beat.]
You know, later on the train to campus, I saw a woman with a pram. She was peeling a mandarin and feeding each slice to her baby. I felt something then, right here in my chest [gesturing towards himself], that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain.
[He finishes his drink.]
I don’t remember you ever doing the same with me. The best memory I have of you is not a laugh or a birthday. It’s a morning. I was about 8. I think I did something to piss you off because you refused to take me to school. I sat in the passenger seat of the car, panicking because I didn’t know what to do. I remember screaming for you to come, but you never did.
[Beat.]
Do you think I’d be a good dad?
[He looks around, as if expecting to find him there.] Dad?
[Lee ends the phone call.] BLACKOUT.
STAGE RIGHT: ANH is calling from the kitchen island, eyes drifting on the bowl of fruit.
Hey son. Hearing you drunk is something they don’t prepare you for.
[Inhales.] I think the first time you ran to me, or the one I remember best, was on a drunk night home. You were around 5 or 6. Hugging my legs. Crying. I picked you up and tried to calm you down. But it didn’t work, so I went into the kitchen [he looks at where the fridge is now] and opened a mandarin. You always liked those. [Beat.] But it was rotten. I tried with another. [Beat.] That was rotten, too. The third was ripe. I peeled it and gave you a slice. Only then did you stop. I wiped your tears with my hands; I wiped my hands on my pants.
[He circles the island in slow, uneven steps.]
I looked around then, with the room spinning, realising that this house was too small and that I was too old to be drunk.
I can say now that you were the worst thing that ever happened to me because you made me want to be a better man.
[He leans on the island, head in his hands.]
Everyone is an accidental parent. No one is prepared for it, and those who tell you otherwise are lying. [Beat.] I don’t think I could have known how deeply you would change my life. How many hours of sleep I’d lose. All the money I’d spend. [Beat.] How easily I could smile just by looking at you.
You know, you’re right. [Beat.] Marriage is about doing dishes and folding laundry. I moved continents. I didn’t know what I was doing. I married the first woman who felt like an anchor. I thought I’d never get the chance again. It was mostly timing. Trying to confront that feeling right here in my chest [he gestures towards himself]. You know the one. [Beat.] You’ll realise that love is the last thing we bring to the table.
[He opens the fridge door, standing in its light.]
And when it came time to have children, I didn’t know the answer. [Beat.] If I waited for it, I think I would have waited my whole life.
So, I said yes. I said yes to history because your grandfather wanted a grandson. Your aunts and uncles had nephews. And every family I saw in public had a baby in their arms, peeling fruit.
[He reaches forward for a mandarin.]
I think I spent all your childhood years dealing with the grief of lost time. It kept me up late because I kept forgetting your name. I called you ‘baby’ in Cantonese instead because I think we men get away with things better than anyone else.
[He closes the fridge door and abruptly ends the phone call.]
CENTRE STAGE: LIGHTS ON. It is the anniversary of a passing. Inside the shrine is a photo shrouded by incense smoke.
ENTER LEE from STAGE LEFT. ENTER ANH from STAGE RIGHT. They meet.
LEE
ANDREW
LEE
ANDREW
LEE
ANDREW
LEE ANDREW
LEE
You never answered my question.
[Pointing to the photo above them.]
He looks like you.
And you look like him. I was his son.
And I’m yours.
He was my father.
And you're mine.
[He reaches for something in his bag.]
If he were alive, what would he tell you?
Nothing. We didn’t talk.
Then pretend I am you. And you are him.
Ok.
Any advice for your son?
ANH LEE
ANH
LEE
ANH
Change your name. Have a child.
What I do know is that in this life, you’ll open a door just to leave the same way you came. ANH LEE ANH LEE ANH
What if I’m not ready?
Do it anyway. You never will be.
That makes you a rotten man.
[Scoffs.] You drink every weekend.
You married a woman you didn’t love.
So calling your parents once a year is okay?
And leaving your son in a car is?
It wasn’t my choice.
Who else could it be?
Ours, Lee. When will you realise that good men die too?
At least I die knowing I was one.
I’m not sure you get to decide that.
Then who the fuck does?!
I don’t know.
You’re my son, and that makes you rotten. [Beat.] You remind me of the part of myself I considered irreconcilable long ago. [Beat.] But you think about others. You worry about how you might want to leave this world.
From the way you speak about the son you don’t even have, I think you’ll never leave him alone in a car because your wife left you that same morning.
[Beat.]
I think you’ll peel him fruit. You’ll take him places even though he won’t remember. You’ll talk to him, the way I never could with you.
[His hand reaches for LEE’s shoulder.]
I can’t apologise for what I did because I don’t know how. And it frustrates me. But somehow, all on your own, you’ve managed to become someone I look up to. I can’t explain it, [beat] but you make me proud.
You are good, [beat] you are better.
They are quiet for a while, hearing the whispered prayers of mourners.
Lee places a mandarin under the photo of his grandfather.
Anh places a mandarin under the same photo of his father.
Lee reaches forward, picking up his mandarin. He opens it. It’s ripe.
Anh does the same. It’s rotten.
ANH
LEE ANH
Here. [He hands him another mandarin from his bag.] This is what I bring to the table.
Thanks. [He places it under the shrine.]
Open it, to check?
No. I trust that yours is good.
They’re just men leaving fruit at an altar. Disobeying history. All they want to be is heard.
BLACKOUT.
The first time I spelt my name was the first time I wrote a poem
Annabella Luu
An acrostic fitted me into a name I wasn’t fit for: B-E-L-L-A. beautiful for French princesses and Italian actresses, but not a girl from The Area whose teacher suggests Bashful for ‘B.’ I mistake the word for violence. Bash-ful: a word trying to fill itself after having its past beat from it. some days, that’s what I think it means to be Australian, but the teachers just say I’m shy. my silence is cute! they don’t know how much I distrust my own voice. how my Last Name has drowned so far down that I fold this name poem into a lifeboat, myself into a Sallow saviour, searching from a stern that splits and flakes like ash that forgets where it came from. what died for this White Christmas? I can’t remember how I got here. I just follow the old-fashioned call onwards, onwards, onwards! there’s no looking back, only stepping back, far enough to make this mnemonic lesson clear: let’s focus on the big picture here. I sweat off the details, ignoring
How this exodus ends exactly where it began: sailing under an Imperial ceiling where the open sky should be. there is no water, only carpet. we can’t move. there’s a school-table shading us. chewed gum and blu-tack clouding our world. insoluble. synthetic. outlasting the kids who throw wet tissues upwards anyway because nothing else will stick to an upside-down hierarchy. I dream of a poem name that looks ugly in cursive, that gets lodged in colonisers’ throats. xin lỗi , I’m so sorry— this name poem is not an Etymological tree, but a defunct map, a rote-learned route that forgets the Destruction, the prologue to its creation.
Yashaswani Gupta
I don’t remember the first time I learned to keep quiet— only the silence that followed. The hush of a room when my voice didn’t fit, like shoes a size too loud.
They say archives hold truth, history, proof of who we were— but I wonder, do they hold the versions of us we never became?
The jokes we almost told before we swallowed the punchlines. The glances we turned away from, afraid of being seen in our whole, unpolished form.
My archive is not a museum— no plaques, no glass cases.
It’s a drawer full of drafts, half-written apologies, pages torn from journals where I tried to write who I was before someone told me who to be.
maybe that’s what memory is— not fact, but feeling. A scent, a sound, a skipped heartbeat in the middle of an ordinary day that says: you were here, you felt this.
My archive is quiet. not because it has nothing to say, but because it was never allowed to speak.
but still— it waits faithful.
Like an old friend, holding all the versions of me I was too afraid to love.
Joy Paola
They tell me I need to trust my hands and arms if I can’t trust you, but I never have. You were weak. When I was born, you tilted to one side like a planet slightly off its axis. I couldn’t balance. I couldn’t turn upside down without seeing the universe on its head and that scared me. So I avoided all possible inversions of my world, freezing at shopping mall escalators and choosing safe staircases instead. I shrank sideways into somersaults because if I trusted you headfirst, you would burst and shatter like a collapsing star (is that how that works? I understand space just as well as I understand you). Years of incisions and alterations led me here: no more teachers asking me to straighten my head to the right. No more eyes drifting out of orbit. The doctors sliced over my collarbone, then released the muscles in my misaligned eyes, snipping and truncating my sphere. The condition always sounded like it could be the name of a cloud. I took matters into my own hands to lift it. I fought through chronic synchronicities until I realised you needed something simpler than ribcage raises and intricate desk setups. I didn’t know you were more than the aching stretch of skin keeping my head on my shoulders. You were the tether between mind and body, threading together parts I didn’t realise were entwined. I used to think my heart was neutral ground, detached from your wilting. But learning to live with you in my own body again was like coming off the plane home, a little too warm, tired near sunlit windows and lemongrass tiles. I looked into an apartment window and saw a welcome home sign, the words backwards through the glass, letters sliced by rolling blinds. Mum made the strawberry chiffon cake I asked for, the layers more steady than my walk into the living room. So, I don’t know if I can trust you again, you with your thirty tight muscles and seven stacked vertebrae, but everyone cared about you enough to bake a cake and write well-wishing notes. To seal us back together and wheel us out of the hospital rooms in First Hill and Westmead, body reinvented. I don’t know if I can trust you again, but my arms are here, my hands do the work, and my heart won’t cease its dedication to you.
Sumaya Sultana
When I visit other people’s homes, I often see pictures on their walls. These are little peeks into their lives that I savour with a foreign curiosity. I have so many questions. They are often left unanswered; I simply tuck away the image in some crevice of my mind, moulding my mental image of this individual.
My home doesn't have photos on the walls. My family is Muslim, and it is considered idolatry; photography goes against the belief that only God can create living form. Regardless, my mother keeps a photo album of a select few images from the past, perhaps as a little favour from God. One photo is of my nana, who passed
before I was born, drinking a cup of tea. Different images of famous Bengali actresses are pinned up on the wall behind him. Another is of my mother and her two sisters sitting by the lake behind her ancestral home. My ancestral home. The images slowly become more purposeful, as photos of a baby me replace others and tall palm trees and lush fields are replaced with icons of Sydney. This day, we visited the Opera House. On another, we visited the Harbour Bridge. These photographs, they stake a claim, they say we are—finally—here.
My friends archive their lives differently. I notice thousands of images on their phones; ‘funny’ screenshots, a night out at the club, enjoying ourselves at the beach. It speaks more to me. We are—with an excusable, youthful narcissism—eager to see ourselves, with our ‘one-picture-a-day’ albums and endless videos and grappling for that one friend’s digicam. It is a medium that speaks to us the most, one that we have been spoon-fed from birth.
I used to be quite sad and almost angry that I didn’t have so many pictures of my past. How dare my mother not capture each and every moment! The few images I have feel like sand falling through my fingers. I must desperately paw at the ground, trying to conjure up some understanding of the unarchived
past. Reclaim some shallow understanding of who my family was, before these memories and truths, like so many others, join the rest of the sand.
I think I realised the nonsensical reverence for photography when my dadi passed. I don’t have a single photo of her. She exists in my bittersweet memory, first as a headstrong yet kind woman, then in her bedridden years and finally in my father’s recollections as he gains a hazy look in his eyes. I no longer find it very depressing. I think it is normal to forget the little parts that one may not have had the privilege to store; nonetheless, they build up into a greater being that we commemorate in our words, silent thoughts, and prayers to God. I remember her smiling at me, smoothing balls of dough into roti. I remember the cold of the floor, and I remember it not mattering anymore, even if I have forgotten so much more.
I remember through my mother’s words. She tells me stories about who we are, allowing me to splice her reminiscences with my common sense and concoct her life within the boundaries of my mind. She tells me about the funeral of her great-grandmother, and although she tells me very little about who she was,
her words, as they drip with solemnity and she stops and starts, are enough. I nose around about past wives and distant deaths, and she tells me off, but even in that jibe, I understand so much more about what I am meant to remember and what I should forget.
This reliance on oral tradition, even in the modern age, is not limited to my small village on the banks of the Padma. We children linger on it, and are prone to its condemnation in an age where everything else is recorded so meticulously. So instead, we attempt to memorialise these stories in our own ways, ways that often mangle these cherished experiences into a malformed version that fits not only who we want to be but that glossy, Oriental view of who we are. Nam Le puts it well in Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, where he reflects:
‘I was told about a friend of a friend, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had posed in traditional Nigerian garb for his book-jacket photo. I pictured myself standing in a rice paddy, wearing a straw conical hat. Then I pictured my father in the same field, wearing his threadbare fatigues, young and hard-eyed.’
It is itself a performance, a puppetry, perhaps even a minstrelsy, the way we attempt to almost butcher these stories onto paper and try to contain them with paint and photos when they will forever have a life of their own, rampant in our minds, one that we can never do justice to. I struggle to continue our oral traditions in this White society.
A few years ago, I volunteered at a radio station in a predominantly White area of Sydney. I mainly took calls and did some admin things around the station. I remember getting a call from a young man, and while I do not remember why he was calling, I remember him asking where I was from.
‘I’m Bengali,’ I had nervously responded, unsure of where exactly this call was going to go and exactly how differently I would emerge out of it.
He went on a tangent, describing bamboo huts and simple living as though he were the host and I was the guest.
You try quite hard not to live in bamboo. You try to live in clay, or cement, or brick. Then, tin, but you worry about the monsoon season and how it will hold up. Bamboo is nothing to the rain; I know because my father remembers.
Others try to tell me my story, although it has been recounted to me over and over again. They don’t do it well either; in this digital age, the art of speaking life into the past is fading. We rely on our eyes to do all the work. Yet I cannot help but fall into line; I told this man he was right; I failed to tell him his impression was nothing in comparison to the people and culture he had flattened into tropes.
Bastardisation in the study of linguistics refers to the idea that language change constitutes a degradation in its quality; that altering language takes it further and further away from its original meaning. Remembrance, specifically through oral tradition, has been bastardised, degraded, and debased by our attempts to memorialise experiences that deserve the privacy of our minds and nothing less. Most remembrance is a twisted corruption of the self to gratify—paradoxically—ourselves.
Why am I so desperate to remember, to the point where I will entertain stereotypes and sit in sadness, when forgetting can be one of our greatest assets? When remembrance in this world is not my thought, it is the product of fantasy and exoticism?
I think the diaspora’s desire to archive and hold onto these memories, transform them into something consumable, is flawed but forgivable. It is understandable. I want, I deserve, an identity in a world so adamant on stripping mine. I unfortunately come with no solutions.
A few months ago, before I had come across my mother’s photo album, I had pored over several magazines in a midnight frenzy, tearing out pages I thought would look nice. I Blu Tacked Keira Knightley, Bella and Gigi Hadid, Anok Yai, Lily Rose-Depp; quintessential models of the 2020s all over my walls. Seeing that very first picture in that photo album of my grandfather, surrounded by similar posters of the women of his times, was this warm coincidence, a comforting reminder of the kind of essence that I had miraculously managed to carry over into my life.
You are allowed to forget and don’t have to remember. Often, these things will come to you no matter what.
I was one of the earliest ones to arrive. Taking a seat close to the exit, I tucked my coat between my knees and waited. People trickled in. Couples, a family with twins, and others like me. Alone.
There was still a while until the show started. I folded one leg over the other and listened to shards of conversations as others found their seats.
“…she and Patrick have called off the wedding…” “…need to book Mexico…”
I leaned forward in my seat, turning an ear towards the voices. It wouldn’t be hard to ask them about it, though perhaps it was a little intrusive. I could never bring myself to ask anyway.
played with the thinning hair around my crown. My fingers raked over more bald skin than I remembered. Loose strands started pulling up from the scalp, as if I was aging years in mere moments.
My watch suggested only four minutes had passed. Desperate, I studied the ceiling. The show was inside a heritage building in the city centre. It had impossibly high ceilings with tessellating patterns and intricate carvings of cherubs triumphing over demons. The sandstone creatures looked like they might flutter down into the crowd at any moment, if not for the thick marble pillars that pinned them up there. The carvings drew my eyes to the stage. Behind it stood upright brass pipes of various diameters, a row of soldiers at the helm of the cavernous room. A set of black and ivory white keys clung between them.
“Gorgeous, don’t you think?”
I flinched as a woman appeared in the seat next to me. Her coat was already in her lap, like mine. She was frail-looking with short wispy hair, so white it could have been made from strands of cloud. A singular orange hair-roller was tangled up behind her ear.
“Do you think it works?”
We both studied the shiny organ for a moment. “It has to, right?” I replied. “The city’s got the money, and it would seem like a bit of a waste otherwise.”
Without the rest of the conversation, I could only speculate on the scraps and lost interest quickly. I
The corner of her mouth wrinkled into a smile and her shoulders relaxed.
“Have you been here before?”
“Well, to be honest dear, I’m not entirely sure.”
I studied her wrinkled face in the long silence that followed.
Eventually seeing me waiting, she went on with a sigh, “Many years ago, I was in a bit of a tight spot and decided to get this surgery done.”
A pale finger traced a curved line down the side of her abdomen. I shuddered.
“Was it serious?”
“It could have been,” she wheezed, as if the thought alone exhausted her.
“I’ve been on this medication for it ever since.” Her face drooped into a tired frown, “The stuff’s fine, but it does have one side effect.”
“What is it?” The intrusiveness of the question struck me as it left my mouth, but the old woman didn’t hesitate.
“I think the pills are ruining my memory.”
I said nothing.
“Every day more of me goes down the drain. Things are…slipping, for lack of a better word. But now and then, something comes through crystal clear.”
She could have been attending that same hall for years, always met with regular faces and that enchanting ceiling that would never become familiar.
“That sounds hard,” I offered, trying my best to sound sympathetic.
“Hard?” She laughed, “Dear, how many people do you think get to look at this place even once?”
She gestured to the ceiling and the pillars of swirling marble. There was a clarity in her twinkling eyes that I hadn’t noticed before, like a polished cosmos over the desert.
“Things are always more beautiful the first time you see them.”
The seats were filling, and the ambient chatter swelled as another wave of bodies shuffled in out of the cold.
We went back to admiring the great instrument.
“I’ll tell you what though, dear, it does remind me of something.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“See, I was watching this show a while ago, one of those house renovation ones.”
I knew the shows she was talking about. Sometimes I’d put them on for background noise.
“In this episode, a couple were turning a small town church into their home. But the problem was, the old building had an enormous organ that was taking up a great deal of room. Knowing nothing about them, the couple eventually found this German man, an organ expert I suppose, who was going to fly over and buy it from them.”
“Buy it from them?” I imagined an entire church organ sitting on the curb, awaiting collection, “I didn’t know you could sell only the organ part of a church. I always
thought they were built into the walls or something.”
“That’s what I thought too.” The old woman chuckled for a moment before it morphed into a hoarse cough. She clutched the spot on her torso and regained her breath. I offered a tissue from my coat pocket, and she wiped her mouth, smudging lipstick onto her chin.
“Thank you, dear. Where was I?”
I sat up straighter. “You were talking about the German.”
She explained how the German flew over and decided that he would buy it. Apparently, the little church was quite well known around this town. The townsfolk had grown up with it, many even worshipped there before it was sold. The couple decided they wanted to do something nice for them before it got rebuilt, so they asked the German for a favour. He was a good man, the old woman said, and with his specialised
tools he spent an entire extra day fixing the organ. The townsfolk gathered in the church, filling every pew as he played for them all afternoon.
“Many of them hadn’t heard those bellowing pipes work in years.”
She pondered something far away with that contented smile.
“But then the couple sold it.” The pessimism in my voice damaged the air between us, slicing it like a scalpel against a uniform surface.
“Yes. Then they sold it,”I hated myself for saying that.
I’d mutilated a rare moment of lucidity from this woman who entrusted me with something so fragile. Her nostrils trembled a little, but her eyes stared ahead.
“The German took it apart, piece by piece, removing it from the body of the church. But then he still had to get it back to Germany with him.”
“How did he do it?”
She turned back to me. Her kind, squinted gaze had returned.
“The way he did it was rather funny, actually. What he did was carefully measure out each individual piece of the organ, and then he bought padded suitcases that had the same dimensions. Once he had carefully packed away every pipe and key, all he had to do was check in the airport with his fleet of suitcases and fly home!”
We shared a childish giggle. The idea was astonishing. One man trying to coax a mess of bulging suitcases through the narrow line towards the service desk. There was something undoubtedly comedic about it. Yet a strange sadness overcame me at the thought of the church, left gutted like a market fish.
“Seems like a shame though, doesn’t it?”
The woman nodded solemnly as if I had beat her to saying it. It was funny how a part that seemed so integral to the place could be ripped out like that and sold off to the highest bidder.
“But it still had to be done.”
Her saddened face reFINALturned to the gleaming pipes behind the stage while she thumbed the spot on her abdomen again. There was something she was withholding, perhaps involuntarily. I was missing something. It was as if I was looking at her through the narrow end of one of those tubular organ pipes, only fragments of her memory were spotlighted for me while the rest lay hidden in the dark, forgotten corners of her mind. And yet something gave me the sense that her story was coming to a painful, inevitable close.
“The German was a good guy though, right? I mean, he fixed the thing and played it for the townspeople. There’s something to that.”
“Yes, dear. He was a good man. But, I suppose, the thing that bothered me,” Her lips twitched carefully on the precipice of each word before speaking it aloud,
“Was the way that something so grand could so easily be turned into…luggage.”
I pictured the empty building, a skeleton. It was still a church by definition, but it no longer took the same form for those it belonged to. Without the organ, it wasn’t the townspeople’s church anymore, it was something else entirely.
I felt responsible for the heavy air that blanketed us.
I found myself turning to her, my lips beginning to part. There had to be more to say to her, it all felt too incomplete.
But the words had escaped me.
My gaze retreated to my lap as the lights dimmed. A hushed applause washed over the crowd as a figure took the stage.
Megha Ghosh
The Library had no clocks. Here, time slipped by like dust—silently, invisibly, settling over the shelves with a weight that only the oldest books could sense. A ten-year-old boy wandered between aisles taller than trees in the faint light of lanterns fuelled by memory oil. He was born here, or so the Head Archivist claimed— though none ever told him which shelf he belonged to. Only that he was found at dawn, asleep beside a broken music box in the Archive’s east wing. A tangle of faded silk cloth wrapped around him like a lullaby. The music’s last note humming in the silence. And one word, written in faint red ink on the music box:
Anuraag.
Some thought it was the song’s title. Some claimed it was his as they had to catalogue everything.
The other orphans got adopted. Anuraag had stayed, dusting scrolls, copying titles, following the rules, until he discovered a shelf concealed behind a sliding wall one evening while tidying up a prohibited hallway. It
was covered in cobwebs. A crooked sign hung above with old script:
“DO NOT ARCHIVE.”
Everything started to change that night. Anuraag didn’t mean to touch the shelf but couldn’t suppress the thrill of finding something forbidden, such as the time he discovered a wax-sealed ink bottle or the rusted drawer that held letters written in a language no one else could understand. But this… this was different. It lingered in him like the silence just before a raga begins.
The air here was colder, like memory held too long. His fingers touched the only book there, leather-bound with no title. He opened it.
The pages were blank—except for one name written in fading ink at the top of the first page: Anuraag.
Suddenly, the Archive stirred. The lantern next to him flickered, as if blinking in recognition. Pages rustled somewhere above, whispering secrets only they knew. Down the corridor came a faint, melancholy melody, quivering through the walls. It wasn’t a music box. It came from the Archive itself, awake and listening, eager to be heard.
The book shook in his hand and snapped shut. His hand pricked. Beneath his skin glowed a faint mark, a seal, round and complex, like a forgotten notation.
There was a whisper, as dry as parchment: “You weren’t supposed to discover this.”
feared it more than rifles."
Behind him stood an elderly woman wearing a light blue sari, an Archivist, Mrs. Sen. “This section is sealed,” she said silently, “to those we chose not to remember.”
Mrs. Sen had worked there for over twenty-years. She knew the smell of every single corner – mildew from the land tax rolls of 1824, sandalwood oil from the 19th century ledgers, even the faint iron tang from the police records kept in a tin box.
Anuraag took a step back. "What makes my name appear in a book of forgotten things?" Her eyes softened. “Because you were removed.” Then she continued, “You were not born into this Archive. You were born out of a song—one not allowed to be sung…”
Anuraag froze. “I was… born out of a song?”
Mrs. Sen nodded and said, "Long ago, before this Archive stood, there was a forest. And within it lived a group of people who sang to earth, to memory, to quiet. They were called the Raayok, though no remnant exists."
"They did not write their wisdom—they sang it. Healing, stories, time… all passed through voice. It was said their singing would move stone, calm storms, recall things never spoken aloud. They composed a song during the bad years. It was said the British
Mrs. Sen leaned closer to the dusty book, her fingers brushing the faded cover. “They came for her one rainy evening,” she whispered. “Your mother. The British officers said that she belonged to a ‘criminal tribe’. They didn’t care that she was carrying a child. All night long, she hid in the bamboo grove as the rifles silenced her people’s drums.”
The book shivered under her touch, as if recalling what it had witnessed. “The Criminal Tribes Act of late 1800s,” she said quietly, “was just words on paper. But for her and her people, it was the weight of the world. Everything related to them got banned. And when you were born—sung into life—they also silenced you."
Anuraag’s fingers hovered over the book. His breath caught. Shadows danced across his face, and his eyes were wide with disbelief. “If I was removed,” he murmured, tracing the inked letters, “then how can my name appear in this book even today?”
“Nothing can be destroyed completely,” she replied. “Something is always left behind… like a hum beneath the silence.”
That night, Anuraag returned to his room but couldn't sleep.
He still had the hum. Not a song. Not yet. But a vibration. Something was awaiting. He snuck out, back to the forbidden shelf.
This time the book opened with ease. Page after page, pictures came back—etched in ghostly lines: a group of people beating drums and singing, circling a fire, a single note carved into the air like a thread, a child born of song, and the seal—his seal— marked above them all. Then came the shouting. Soldiers in red coats burst into the gathering with rifles, shoving men aside. The drums stopped midbeat. At the centre lay a bundle – a newborn, wrapped in faded cloth, crying against the cold. The infant lay on the earth; the officers would not look, as if it had never been.
He was not forgotten.
He was forbidden.
The last page had two lines:
“When the echo sings again, the Archive will weep.”
The ink was faded, but he could make out the curves of the second line:
“Nodi bhange, pakhi chute, raat phire ashe.”
(The river breaks, the bird escapes, the night returns.)
He didn't know what it meant completely. But he knew what he had to do.
He stood in the centre of the Hall of Records at sunrise. The largest room in the Archive. Where all the Archivists gathered at solstice.
He had the book in one hand. The old music box in the other.
He opened them both.
The book opened to the first page—his name. The music box ticked once, twice, then played.
Not a broken hum.
A tune.
The tune.
Notes spilled into the air like petals back onto the branch. The room trembled. Scrolls lifted softly in the wind. The seal on his palm flared, growing brighter, until the Archivists, meeting in alarm, saw it. They didn't interfere. They listened.
And Anuraag began to hum.
In the depths of the Archive, the restricted manuscripts shelf collapsed. A door behind a wall swung open. Pages closed for centuries burst open like blossoms in spring.
But when the echoes faded, silence pressed close again. He was left in the lamplight as the Archivists drifted away. Outside, the city bells tolled, indifferent, the world carrying on without him.
Anuraag rested his hand on the book, eyes heavy with the weight of what he had uncovered. He had awakened the Archive, but the road before him was endless, unwritten.
So, he began the laborious task of rewriting history, by himself, amidst the murmuring shelves.
Riya Garg
Prologue:
My repository of Saved Instagram posts is no mere vault of idle pleasures. It is an archive of the selves I have once been, the ideals I have long pursued and the delusions I continue to nourish. When I scroll, I do so as though before a mirror: my own face, dimly lit by the glow of the phone, hovers above the endless procession of other faces and other lives. It is my museum and my confessional. It is my circulating library devoted to the endless curation of my becoming. I first acquired the application when I was a girl of thirteen years. This was an age at which one is apt to mistake novelty for wisdom. I recall that it was a languid summer’s afternoon, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. With trembling fingers, I navigated the labyrinthine corridors of my wireless contraption, whispering to myself that such an endeavour was, if not wholly proper, at least necessary for the cultivation of character. Indeed, I confess that the gentle urgings of my acquaintances, insisting that one could hardly call oneself properly informed without it, hastened my decision most grievously. After a series of anxious clicks, each accompanied by a fluttering in my bosom, I arrived at the fateful “Download” button. One decisive press, and the deed was done: the application nestled itself within the confines of my device, innocent in appearance yet teeming with the promise of both inspiration and perdition. Impressionable, impassioned, and convinced that one’s character might be elevated by a steady diet of Hamilton clips and “study motivation” montages set to melancholic piano music, I gazed upon the mirror of my screen. It whispered assurances that I could indeed be a scholar, a heroine, a girl of distinguished promise, if only I exerted myself with sufficient diligence and, naturally, I remained utterly faithful to this most modern exemplar. Permit me now, to guide you through the winding corridors of my Instagram folders, a mirror not merely of my taste, but of my aspirations.
Here lies a category both sacred and deranged. Vials, serums, elixirs, all promising salvation not of the spirit, but of the T-zone. Here I have preserved, with monastic diligence, dozens of reels narrated in hushed reverence: “How I cured my acne after ten years,” and “The truth about slugging.”
It is a world of contradictions. I am told to oil-cleanse, then warned that oil is the devil. I am instructed to exfoliate, but only on a Tuesday during a full moon lest I perish. One woman swears by retinol, another by chlorophyll, a third by a product not available on this continent.
In an era past, ladies mixed ointments of nitric oxide, mercury and lard to restore lost eyelashes. Now we apply glycolic acid and hope for a similar catharsis.
As the late afternoon sun slants through my chamber window, I lift the small bottles of acids and begin to smear them upon my cheeks. The faint, acrid tang of potions mingles with the lingering perfume of the wilting roses that adorn my dressing table, creating a curious and unsettling bouquet.
I catch my reflection in the looking glass of my screen protector, shiny, raw, ridiculous, and could scarce believe the resemblance to those very influencers whose airs and vanities I had steadfastly professed to disdain. How absurd it seemed that my own hands should betray me so thoroughly, transforming me into a mimicry of the fashionable follies I had once observed from a distance. The mirror, merciless in its honesty, reflects a creature of whim, buffeted by the caprices of trend and desire.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a brain must be in want of a perfect examination score.
My digital almanac brimmed with students pinching 0.3mm pens, ink as fine as a curl of smoke, lamplight falling like honey, while a faint string melody drifted through the air, as though self-education were a kind of paradise. I stored these short films as the moral equivalent of laying a textbook on one’s chest and praying for osmosis.
“Pomodoro method,” they command, as if Time itself might be seduced into
productivity. “Romanticise your life,” whispers the pastel-coloured Notion dashboard, while the oat milk latte admonishes me for not complying. And so, I gaze into the mirror of my screen: there they are, serene and studious, and there am I, slack-jawed and squinting, hoping the magic transfers by proximity.
Now, we shift into a darker corridor. Here, disguised as wellness, is a theatre of hunger. Young women, each with the body of a Victorian waif who has been politely dying of tuberculosis for several months, inform me what they eat in a day: a smoothie (unsweetened, unjoyful), a rice cake, a green thing of indeterminate origin, and the occasional almond for “healthy fats.”
They speak in angelic tones of “discipline” and “balance,” which in this context appear to mean deny yourself every pleasure and photograph it.
I, too, have saved these. Not because I wish to emulate, but because a small, mean part of me, trained in obedience by governesses both real and algorithmic, believes suffering earns you moral superiority, or at the very least, a smaller waist. And when I glance at the black glass between reels, I see my own reflection, lips pursed in disgust, and wonder: do I hate them, or do I despise myself for aspiring to act in their image?
Reader, I must confess, I do not open my Instagram to learn, nor to change, nor to improve. I open it to ache. To ache at the vision of myself that once longed for serums, for perfect pens, for hollow stomachs. I open them to ache at the influencers I scorn and secretly worship, the saints and martyrs of productivity, beauty, starvation.
The reflection of my phone screen shows me twice over: once in the posts I save, and once in the face that saves them. Both earnests, both inadequate, both absurdly human.
And then I save more.
Amelie Ritchie
Dorothy died just on time. Norah received the call days before it happened. “Nor,” her mother had said. “It looks like Nanna’s going to die.”
A week later, Norah was on the bus to the nursing home to sort through Dot’s things. The air on the bus had a damp feel, a humidity about it that burrowed deep into Norah’s pores. It was no help in drying her hair, still wet from the half-hour-long shower she had the night before, most of which was spent on the floor tracing the grout between the tiles. Now Norah sat staring at her hands, picking at a hangnail on her ring finger.
The skin peeled in a thin straight line before growing thicker as it traced down her hand. Pinpricks of blood formed under her skin and she stopped. She would save it for later.
Norah imagined what she would find when she entered Dot’s room. She would open the door and see her belongings in situ. She imagined that each item she
picked up would grow a pair of lips and speak to her, recounting the story of how they came to be in Dot’s possession. They would share what they observed of Dot as they sat on her shelf and the words they heard her mutter in her sleep as they collected dust. The bus wheezed to a stop. Norah got up from her seat, brushed past other passengers and exited onto the sunlit street. She turned the corner and walked towards the nursing home. When Norah entered the sliding door minutes later, she found the corridors empty except for a nurse pushing a trolley of medication. She was met with the smell of antiseptic and must, a blanket over the mild stench of incontinence that wafted through the halls. Norah made her way through the maze of the nursing home, up and down vinyl ramps, passing courtyards and nurses stations before reaching the hallway leading to Dorothy’s room. She tugged at her hangnail and it began to bleed. She turned the corner. It was a long and empty stretch to Dot’s room. With each step Norah took, it was as if Dorothy’s door moved further away. She continued, one foot after the other, until the stretch of hallway appeared to cave in on her, and Dot’s room was right in front of her. Norah opened the door with her peeling fingertips and scanned the room. Dot’s belongings stood still on their shelves, in their drawers and cupboards, as though nothing had changed. It was a strange feeling to Norah, a familiar place looking but no longer feeling the same. Like visiting a model replica of your house—a façade of a home. Her eyes wandered to the end of the room, to the back corner. Where Dot stood.
She knew it was Dot from the swirl of fluffy white hair at the back of her skull. She knew it from the way her gingham pyjamas hung over her frail figure. She knew it from the gold necklace that sat on an area of exposed collarbone when Dot turned to face her.
Norah should have been frightened. She should have slammed the door shut, ran through the winding hallways, left the nursing home, gotten on the bus and gone home. Instead, she entered the room and closed the door behind her. Dot’s pale, rheumy eyes stared back at Norah. Her wrinkled skin sagged over her cheekbones down to a hollow spot in her jaw, and her glasses sat crookedly on her partially decayed nose. Despite the horror before her, Norah noticed only the familiar: the soft perm of Dot’s hair; the neat manicure of her nails; the warm smile that welcomed Norah into the room.
“Nanna?”
Dot was silent and smiling, hands held timidly at her knees.
“Are you real?”
Dot ignored her, moved from her corner and fiddled with her belongings. She brushed the dust off her ornaments, straightened her photo frames and tidied her bed linen. Norah watched as she pottered about before stepping further into the room. She followed behind Dot, finally getting a closer look at her things. Norah had tried before, when Dot was alive and whole, to peek into her Nanna’s cupboards. She hoped to find a clue to her past—what Dot was like before Norah was born. She longed for the day she’d find a souvenir from a trip long forgotten or a fading photograph of one of
Dot’s lovers.
“Stop fussing,” Dot would say when she spotted Norah, pulling out a packet of clinkers from her bedside table. “Come sit with me.” They’d sit and watch the television with their clinkers, hoping that, when they bit inside, they’d be pink.
Now, Dot said nothing as Norah picked up papers, flicked through photos and touched her ornaments. Norah opened an aged album. Inside were sepia-toned photos of the oceanside, the shoreline peppered with seashells. A still image of a child stomping the shells into the ground as she ran towards the sea. A photo of Dot, as a young woman, sheltering beneath a wide brimmed hat. Norah took one of the pictures and held it to Dot’s face.
“Where was this, Nanna?”
Dot continued to wander the room contently, silently.
“Were you on a holiday?”
Dot sat in her old armchair. She looked to Norah and raised her arm. The sleeve of her pyjama shirt draped loosely over her bones and her index finger extended like a twig on the verge of snapping. She pointed to the bedside table. Norah hesitated before moving towards it. Dot smiled. Norah picked at her hangnail. The skin of her finger came away like a zipper opening a pouch. She opened the bedside table; inside was a crumpled tissue, a tin of hand cream and a packet of opened clinkers, sealed shut with a worn peg. Norah turned at the sound of Dot turning on her small television. Norah took the hand cream and clinkers from the drawer and brought them to Dot, laying them on her hollowed lap. Norah flicked through the channels
until she found a daytime drama and sat on the floor next to Dot. Dorothy used her twig fingers to remove the peg from the packet, pick out a clinker and place it in her mouth. Norah could see her pearly white teeth through the hole in her cheek. Dot clamped down on the clinkers, and bits of chocolate and chalky green fell from the hole. While she chewed, Norah opened the tin of hand cream and rubbed it over Dot’s hands. They were marked with skin tears and her knuckles were exposed like the seashells in the photograph peeking out of sand. She replaced the lid on the tin, sat next to her grandmother and they watched the television together.
Norah looked back periodically and saw Dot slowly coming away. First, her skin started to flake. Then it was as if she was melting. At each turn of Norah’s head, Dot became smaller and smaller. After the third episode, Norah turned to find the space behind her empty. On the fabric of the chair sat a small pile of bones, white and chalky, nestled under the clinkers. Norah sat there for a while. She brushed the side of the pile with her fingertips, and it fell like sand through an hourglass. Norah fetched a dustpan from the cupboard then carefully swept the ashes from the chair, walked across the room and brushed them into the open bedside drawer. She collected the clinkers and hand cream and placed them with the ashes and closed the drawer. She lingered by the doorway. With one final tug of her hangnail, it flaked onto the floor as she walked out and shut the door behind her.
Kaity Lawrenson
how do ghosts keep warm/ do they lie next to the humming heater/ in a darkness that doesn’t notice/ do they coil into hotel pillows/ stuffed with feathers that cling to some sickly perfume/ do they press themselves into the creases/ hoping for a thread of warmth left by someone else/ only to find a damp fog/ a fabricated breath/ a cold/ haunting dream
how do ghosts keep warm/ do they go to start dinner/ light the stove/ but there isn’t one/ just a shitty mini fridge/ full of someone else’s leftovers and a kettle pretending to be/ useful/ do they like the glow of the kitchen lit at dawn/ watch as the sink bathes in a rectangle of sun/ do they try to catch
it/ only for blank hands to/ whisper through the rays
do they linger/ forget how to leave/ almost look at themselves in the mirror/ but with no buttons to undo/ just a hollowed coat of a body/ floating/ neither absent nor present but/ some cold in-between/ blushing with regret/ for a past life/ if you could call it that do they wish for dust to land on them/ instead of rotting paintings and velvet ottomans/ do they watch birds at the window/ a soft smile landing/ a weekend getaway/ when the bell boy passes/ do they run toward the door/ fleeing/ freeing/ only to
cower at the/ peephole/ a confessional/ a retreat how do ghosts keep warm/ do they stand under a boiling shower/ to see if they’d feel/ just to never get clean/ do they cry as they do it/ do they thrash/ in silence/ trying to replicate the pain of nails digging in skinfolds/ only to be imitating something/ they can never recall
do they reshape their fogged masses into something loveable/ even slightly visible/ do they crawl out on the hotel balcony/ threatening to jump/ waiting/ hoping for a witness/ eyes dramatic/ desperate and wide/ but the search futile/ who else will return tonight to watch the ceiling mould
do they touch themselves/ to remember where they end/ fingers drifting through vaporous valleys/ palms slipping/ like silk off a cracked mannequin/ a borrowed shape/ a sting of fiction
do they wait for the phone to ring/ perched on the edge of the king mattress/ antagonising how to say their name/ as if someone might call/ ask, “how was your stay?”/ do they clutch the receiver/ attempting to curse/ at nothing but air
conditioning/ do they ever escape/ this self-made puppet show/ this vicious ventriloquy
how do ghosts keep warm/ is it with small violences/ watching the lamp flicker into its own end/ standing near the television to harbour/ the vibrations of murderous news/ only to be followed by thirty minutes of commercial/ do their eyes ever unglue/ as the saturated static/ fades into a mass of grey/ like a slow blinding/ does it pick at them/ does it consume them/ does it eat away
do they fix the do-not-disturb sign/ just in case/ so someone passing might think of newlyweds/ sleeping late/ or a party that ended too well/ that the room is warm/ with someone else’s joy/ that it’s filled with champagne flutes/ half full and laughter/ muffled in the duvet/ that this hotel isn’t haunted/ just vacant
Jordan Mullins
It’ll be a game to them, guessing what was always make-believe and what is make-believe now.
Yes, dolphins, really. Grey bodies that slipped through the water like skipping stones. Not unicorns. No. No, you’re thinking of rhinos. Not yetis. Yes surprisingly, giraffes.
The longer the game goes on, the wider their eyes get, the less I can meet them. This game is a penance of mine, a stocktake of sins. Each extinct animal, a bead in the rosary.
One day, they will learn through a friend’s older brother, or through a classmate trying to be worldly, of hard drives, and same-day-shipping, and satellites, of skiing and wildflowers and coral reefs.
And they will come to me for answers and I will have none. And they will go looking for hard truths and all they will get is us, this last generation, soft copy of everything we’ve lost.
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I am lucky to have an endless list of people to thank . Bear with me as I try to get them all in .
To my brilliant team who worked on making this an amazing edition My authors , for creating these wonderful works , my editors for their work and their kindness , and my designers for creating a beautiful magazine for all our hard work to rest in None of this happens without you all . I ve been blessed to work with you and will forever be proud of this thing we have created together
To the girls at our fellow publication Blitz , without Maddie and Ineke I would ’ ve lost my mind months ago .
To my friends from all places My day one ’ s from high school , my lovely friends from the MCA and all the brilliant friends I ve made at university
Finally , to my family . My sister for always being by my side . Mom and Dad for everything . All I do and all I am , it is all for and because of you
These are the years we will always remember
With Love , Inayat Juno Mander
Coordinator :
Inayat Juno Mander
Senior Editors :
Jaye Cranny
Antoinette Luu
Annabella Luu
Summer Rosewall
Honor Veals
Editors :
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Manhishtha Bucktowar
Juliana Di - Cola
Molly Jones
Stephy Lung
Amelie Ritchie
Kamya Seervi
Eli Wang
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Russell Gonzales
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UNSWeetened 2025
ISSN: 1441-1415
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