Island 172 by Island Magazine

ISLAND  Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

172

featuring the winner of this year’s OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD plus more than 20 NEW ESSAYS, SHORT STORIES AND POEMS

ISLAND

This issue, I was joined by our first fiction intern, Abby Otten from UTAS, and it was a real source of richness and inquiry to work with her on selecting this round. The stories in this issue speak to each other through time, offering the suggestion of sequels and prequels and ‘meanwhile…’. They exchange strange, curling language about death and new growth, about apocalypse and what comes after. In Saraid Taylor’s The storing, the narrator claims a place in memory and space among creatures that ‘click their teeth happily’, and in Claire Aman’s Ishbel, the narrator carries her memories with her, pacing and pacing up and down her brother’s street in the company of a whippet. In Pip Jones’ False Autumn, climate apocalypse looms as rain moths die confusedly and a couple search for mushrooms among pine needles that smell like a ‘detritivore hymn’. Gilgamesh’s Oracle by Zana Fraillon presents as a possible far-distant sequel, a saga looking back over the millennia to flood warnings plastered over the public toilets. And Meghalee Bose’s Doing good stands watching, outside time, and gives its narrator an opportunity to undo some wrong, and the moral responsibility to undo it correctly – and the most perfect pair of final words. – Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor

This issue I had the great joy of working with emerging writer and editor, UTAS intern Meisha Simpson, in selecting our pieces. Thanks for your insight and care, Meisha. You’ve got an eye for exceptional writing. The pieces we have chosen are manifestly existential in content. They depict instants of loneliness, injustice, social invisibility, guilt, mortality and survival, but there are also shining moments of hope – something we need more of – and the kind of ambling pace that can act as a balm in a chaotic world. In Not choosing, Erin Riley goes on a self-imposed writing retreat and confronts some inhibiting people-pleasing tendencies. With a distinctly soothing rhythm, Riley shows us that writing retreats are very often not about writing at all. Kylie Mulcahey’s How to build a sandcastle looks at the child protection system in Tasmania via the experience of a social worker and one of her long-terms clients. Mulcahey’s deeply informed and sympathetic gaze reveals a system lacking in nuance, funding and justice for both children and parents. Bridget Webster’s The price of loneliness describes in strange and haunting prose the author’s experience as an intern in Japan. Webster depicts a larger epidemic of social isolation, even as she combats her own with overconsumption. In Memento mori, Verity Borthwick goes underground and comes face-to-face with her own mortality. And finally, we accompany Paul Collis and Paul Magee as they take us around Barkindji country/Bourke in Stories in paintings and letters. Their walking dialogue, accompanied by stunning photography, offers an in-situ narrative of place and history built as a collaboration with locals they talk to along the way. Throughout, the ongoing significance of art and storytelling to cultural survival is made clear. – Keely Jobe, Nonfiction Editor

A simple phrase (as when Derek Wright notes ‘the dither of the aged care home’ or when Simeon Kronenberg states ‘My eyes itch / sleeping’s difficult’) allows the reader to enter the delicate space of the poem – a space built on Brendan Ryan’s ‘cobweb thread of trust’. Upon entry, the senses come fully to life: we see Jo Langdon perceives ‘the spider, the linden / flowers & the tentative light’, Helga Jermy shows us ‘bird tracks in the sky’ and Yasmin Smith hangs sweetsops ‘by the / window’. We smell Suzi Mezei’s ‘scent / of mealy earth rises up’ and hear Verity Oswin’s ‘mud ditty / silt jetties / fish flip’ as language unfolds the world before us. What inflects our language can be humour – it can be Toby Fitch’s ‘Cookie / Monster geode of seeing things on another / plain’ or Troy Wong’s wry observation of what happens ‘When two roads diverge in a dystopian police state’. And what the poem allows us to see can ache with strangeness, as we watch William Fox’s dental surgeon figure ‘how best to trace a maze / of mouth’ and feel the loss of our own milk teeth again, still, as Gurmeet Kaur suggests, ‘tender with noun-memory’. – Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

FICTION

OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD

Ishbel Claire Aman

here was a body in the park one afternoon, back when we were kids. Martin and I sprinted home to tell Dad, our schoolbags bumping against our backs. I could hear my blood pounding in my eardrums like footsteps. Dad walked back with us, but there was nothing. Martin and I took turns to lie down in the man’s cold imprint on the grass. It’s a long time since we grew up and left the tablelands. Sydney’s home for me now. My brother Martin lives in Grafton, near the river. I’m in his house looking after his whippet and his cat for three weeks while he’s in Italy. I’ve made a work space in a sunny spot in his dining room with my laptop and tea mug. I’m a cartographer; I make maps for a living. It’s something I can do anywhere, as long as there’s good internet. I’m making a series of land-use maps for one of the south coast councils. I thought about the body in the park this week, on Monday morning, when I saw the ambulance on the corner of Martin’s street. Its back doors were flung open and they were in the yard bending over something in the long grass. A blue crumple. I held the whippet’s leash tight and kept walking, looking straight ahead. I’ve been here for ten days now and I know all the houses in Tallow Street. Grafton has wide streets with fig trees and camphor laurels and jacarandas. People walk on the road, even if there’s a footpath. Martin says it’s a friendly town, but the only person I’ve talked to so far is Cheryl from next door. This morning when I wheel Martin’s bicycle out, I nearly run into her. She’s bending over a plastic spray bottle near the front gate. She puts the bottle down when she sees me, straightens up and steps around in front of the bike. She grips my handlebars with both hands and leans forwards with a special smile.

‘The ginger cat.’ Martin’s cat. ‘Dirty thing did its business in my garden.’ ‘He’s back now,’ I say. I point to where the cat stares from behind the geraniums. She shakes her head. I try moving my handlebars but she’s locked on. ‘The thing is, cats have to be inside,’ she says. ‘It’s the rules.’ ‘I tried to catch him.’ I push my sleeve up so the fine red scratches show. ‘Gotta show it who’s boss,’ says Cheryl. ‘They’re like kids. You had kids?’ I twist the handlebars sideways in answer. ‘That house on the corner you were telling me about,’ I say. ‘There was an ambulance there.’ Her face snaps to attention. ‘When?’ ‘Monday.’ ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t have time to look out the window all day. I’m a doer.’ The cat walks over to us and sits licking its feet. Cheryl gives a hiss. ‘I’m not a cat person either,’ I say. ‘I wonder what happened to the old man.’ ‘Disgusting animal,’ she says. I’m sweating under my arms now. ‘I’m a bit of a worrier, that’s all. Ambulances.’ And I seek her face. I swear she’s about to make eye contact. Then the cat runs at me. ‘Cat’s got the better of you, Isabel,’ she says. ‘Ishbel,’ I say, but she’s gone back to her spray bottle. I pedal along the footpath, feeling the blood trickle down into my sock.

Cyclic Suzi Mezei Late in August, the winter sun’s a social poultice; draws the neighbours out and they spy the beginnings of a new world through dappled light on treelined streets. A woman from an apartment block stops to rub her thumb over a bud on an ornamental weeping cherry that will weep pink petals for her joy in spring and slowly the scent of mealy earth rises up, loam un-clumps, wrestles free of its hiemal sleeves, even small dogs on lit footpaths discard tartan jackets, their humans just a few lithe paces behind them on slack leads, re-learning the ground after it’s emerged from sodden, dun hardness. The Bronzewings, eager to find soulmates flash iridescent wings, build unruly nests low inside golden wattle skirts. Mister Briars who locked himself in, hibernal since his wife left last Halloween, has set a bucket of Eureka lemons on his lawn; goodwill citrus, free to a modest local home, the shabby jacket he wore on long walks with Missus Briars, freshly washed, hung out to dry on the low bough of the Cinnamon Myrtle.

Suzi Mezei was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Naarm on lands traditionally owned by the Boonwurrung People. Her work is published in Australia and overseas in journals and anthologies, in print and online. It has been performed on stage and in podcast. Suzi is currently working on a fiction collection.

There’s no such thing as a Singapore noodle Troy Wong You are my most permanent girlfriend, for now. Pilgrims in the ex-colony, we zip between shadespots in a race against the equatorial sun. I pepper you with family lore: my father’s father was the first on his street to own a TV; my gong gong nearly drowned my uncle teaching him to swim, sweet and sour pork for the western palate. You keep yourself open like a nice white person. Maybe I’ll compare sunbirds on a wire to a string of firecrackers or my ji poh to a withered mangosteen. In Hokkien she asks her trilingual daughter how she and I are related and in English I wonder if I’ll always be blackmarked as my mother’s son, as my country’s man. When two roads diverge in a dystopian police state I am caught like a durian in plastic mesh. You remain untouched except for a spot of heat rash that will clear within the fortnight. How clearly do you see me if you aren’t also being cast from this garden, changed irrevocably, having partook of the fruit? Later, in my other nation’s capital, all your tribe will descend on us like a fleet of white sails. A rupture; then, as always, we will perform our steps tersely as dancers returning from injury to rehearsal. Another slow sundown. Soon there will be a name for the distance between us, though I still won’t speak a word of Hokkien.

Troy Wong is an Australian poet born to Singaporean parents. His work, written on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land, has been published in Cordite, Island, Australian Poetry Journal and Solid Air, an anthology of spoken word from Australia and New Zealand. He has performed at the Opera House, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and internationally. He is an Australian Poetry Slam National Finalist and the founder, host and creative director of Bread & Butter Poetry Slam.

THE PRICE OF LONELINESS

Bridget Webster

he Minister for Loneliness has run out of a thing or two at home and must go to the shops. The Minister lives alone in an apartment at the bottom of a deep well. Luckily for the Minister, the government has just installed a new subterranean railway line with a station hewn into the side of the well. The Minister can go to the city, shop in a department store attached to the station, and go back home, all without climbing up to see the sun. The station is fluorescent and very clean. There are speakers that ceaselessly play the electronic sound of chirping birds. Everybody queues up in orderly lines for the train door. Hot, limp bodies press up against the Minister, but the carriage is silent. Avoiding eye contact on a train as packed as this one is a constant task. The Minister studies his shopping list, written on the back of a receipt. It reads as follows:

There is an old man sitting down on the train who appears to have fallen asleep. Everybody is trying to be respectful of his space. The Minister recalls seeing the same old man asleep in the same seat yesterday and feels extra hot. But better not to bother him. The Minister will wait and see if he is on the train tomorrow. ; Newspaper In October 2020, Japan recorded more suicides in a month than they had deaths by COVID-19 over the entire year to date1. Lobbied by mental health advocates and motivated by a rapidly declining birth rate, in 2021 the Japanese Prime Minister created a cabinet post to tackle these issues. The appointed politician’s lengthy title translates roughly to The Minister for Promoting Dynamic Engagement of All Citizens, but everybody calls him The Minister for Loneliness. He is in charge of combating the country’s escalating social isolation and suicide rates. He has two demons that sit on his shoulders at all times. On the left shoulder, hikikomori, The Hermit. He squats, hump-necked, with two bright spots of blue light burning in his eyes. Hikikomori are a generation of social outcasts withdrawing almost entirely into online realms. Some have not left their house in years. It is estimated that 2% of the Japanese working population are now hikikomori. On the right shoulder, kodokushi, The Lonely Death. He slumps, gently rotting, a vacant smile stretched like a skullcap across his face. He is part of the growing and highly publicised phenomenon of elderly Japanese dying alone and lying undiscovered for weeks, months, years. Living alone in Japan used to be a rarity but is fast becoming the norm, with 40% of households now predicted to be solo dwellings by 20402. In an ageing society with social hierarchies that venerate the elderly, these increasingly reported stories of kodokushi occupy a particularly malevolent place in Japanese cultural consciousness. Anthropologist Jason Danely writes that to the Japanese, kodokushi is symptomatic of the breakdown of long-held values around kinship ties and generational continuity. ‘The (family) house has collapsed. Or, it has become a coffin.’3 The old man on the train is dead. He died in 1977, one of the first publicised instances of kodokushi.4 His corpse went unnoticed by passengers for hours, shuttling back and forth between stations in a municipal purgatory. He has been haunting the trains ever since.

; Newspaper ; Tablets ; Cigarettes ; Fried Chicken ; Hot Chocolate ; New Jeans ; Needle and Thread

His corpse went unnoticed by passengers for hours, shuttling back and forth between stations in a municipal purgatory. He has been haunting the trains ever since.

False autumn

PINE NEEDLES

Pine needles, right now, smell not like freshly detailed car but a detritivore hymn, sung low. It wraps around our feet and climbs our chests. It is spore-bursts and fungus that winks of bleached coral, fruiting bodies that push through the damp underfoot like a dry tongue. Once, running your nose along my inner thigh, you described me as ‘roadkilly’, and I lost my decomposure, wrenched my leg away before you could set upon it with carrion-tearing teeth. Today, though, I wear the scent like a silk scarf, wrapped twice around my neck and shimmying down my back, my fine flagella. Is it a good year? I ask your back as it weaves between pines, though you don’t answer, and I see you swivelling, eyes peregrinating between and through and over. They do not land. It’s harder to take flight again if they do, in weather like this, so instead they hover. I ask again with a panicky whine that hauls the end of the last word up and out of earshot (yee-ee-ee-ee-ee). Maybe. I’ve seen it worse. And your eyes turn the clods and thatched needles methodically. And it has been dry, but last week’s gentle rainfall sent the windows into a sweat and mildew mobbed the walls, so we took the hint and pulled the ute up where the pines hunch against the low cloud.

Pip Jones

FICTION

LOOK

We’re on the way out, I’d thought the month before, as we skirted the curve of the river and autumn glared into the car. Our words’d whistle past each other, not settling into that easy lilt we’d known before. Instead, I’d see them tip timorously out of my mouth like a tourist’s phrases in a foreign country – knowing, generally, what the sounds were meant to achieve, but their delivery a pre-written postcard. When the summer still felt new we’d tried to make a go of it, though I’d stopped counting the days since rain and so had the white gums that the year’d seared orange. All summer they’d turned their palms up and offered their water back to the sky, which held it like a new gift from an old lover, a delicate and strained thing to be tossed at the first opportunity. The white gums’ death grip on those high dolerite cliffs meant we’d see their ghosts for years. Already their stiff and brittle wraiths raise their heads above the sheoak, looking like bushfire fatalities, but there’d been no burn. You took a hand off the wheel to keep on my thigh and its heat was briefly cauterising.

MOTHS

I was on the couch while you watched the water come to a boil. The lid on the pot had begun to clatter. It cut into the quiet air and I was grateful for this easy reason to stay taciturn and curled up like a houseplant dead-set on dying back to one powdery leaf. A thud outside interrupted the pot’s chattering, followed by an insistent knocking, staccato. Another thud, urgent now, with more rapid hammering, like fat raindrops. I followed the sound to the windows, where I saw them, hurling their mottled little bodies against the glass. The rain moths’d come in their dozens, frantic, diffracting the light through dusty wings. Moon’s in here, I shouted over my shoulder, and you squint, fan your hand around your ear. The light, I said, and you turned off the pot and sat beside me as the moths continued their percussion concerto. Some clung to the flyscreen and rested a beat, catatonic, while yet more threw themselves into the glass over and over with a monomania I’d never known. In the morning, we saw them jittering across the concrete, half dead with exhaustion, or hanging off the brick and flickering like a distant torch, their one night on the wing wasted on a hoax. We ate in the dark for a week.

ISLAND

The Same as Ever George Kennedy I grew up on the eastern shore of Hobart with a handful of bush reserves in the backyard to muck around in. I spent my younger years climbing trees and sculpting piles of scrap metal in the abandoned quarry. I never really grew out of it. The landscape has changed a lot over the course of my life here, but I’ve always found an escape up in the bush. My familiar trees and pathways are mostly still there. Nowadays it’s not unusual to come across a crude sheetmetal shelter with an old mattress and a classic garden-hose Gatorade bong, and once, I stumbled into a clearing and a single tree was on fire. I stood for a while taking it in. Kids on trail bikes nod to me, sitting on the bonnet of a rusty car, drawing, as they tear down the fire trails, and friendly couples in Mountain Designs jackets let me pat their hypoallergenic dogs. There are new highways, and even new suburbs. The plains are filling in and the bushlands are receding. Wallabies and pademelons now graze the side of the highway at night. – George Kennedy

Opposite: Mabel Court 2024, oil on canvas 183 × 122 cm

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ISLAND Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

172

VOL.172 11/2024 AUD $19.95

Cover image: Rex Greeno Moonbird connection mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist

CONTRIBUTORS CLAIRE AMAN WAYNE APPLEBEE VERITY BORTHWICK MEGHALEE BOSE JO CHEW PAUL COLLIS JEN CRAWFORD JENNIFER EVANS TOBY FITCH WILLIAM FOX ZANA FRAILLON ROD GARDNER REX GREENO KATE GROSS HELGA JERMY PIP JONES GURMEET KAUR GEORGE KENNEDY SIMEON KRONENBERG JO LANGDON PAUL MAGEE CLARA MARTIN SUZI MEZEI KYLIE MULCAHY ROBERT O’CONNOR VERITY OSWIN SARAH RHODES ERIN RILEY TROY RUFFELS BRENDAN RYAN BRIAN SMITH YASMIN SMITH ANDI STAPP-GAUNT SARAID TAYLOR BIANCA TEMPLAR BRIDGET WEBSTER EMILY-ROSE WILLS TROY WONG ASTRID WOOTTON DEREK WRIGHT CHEE YONG