We'll Stand In That Place and other stories
First published in Australia by Margaret River Press in 2019
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Witchcliffe
Western Australia 6286
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Copyright © individual contributors, 2019
Compilation and Introduction copyright © Michelle Cahill 2019
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
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Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the National Library of Australia
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
ISBN: 978-0-6484850-2-5
Cover design by Susan Miller
Typset in Adobe Garamond
Edited by Michelle Cahill
Printed in Australia by Scott Print, Australia
Published by Margaret River Press, Western Australia
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We'll Stand In That Place and other stories
Edited by Michelle Cahill
Table of Contents
We’ll Stand In That Place Kit Scriven
Thylacine Catherine Noske
The Day The Rain Stopped Dancing Rachel McEleney
Cinta Ku Mirandi Riwoe
A Concreter’s Heart Mark Smith
The Do Anthony Panegyres (Phillips)
Three Dog Night K. W. George
Mycorrhizal Networks Lynette Washington
A Tough Little Bird Darryl R. Dymock
Emotional Support Justine Hyde
Thirty Sacks Audrey Molloy
A Moveable Farce Emily Paull
The Children Andrew Sutherland
The Monster in The Lake Jem Tyley-Miller
Butterscotch K. A. Rees
Aftertaste Claire Corbett
Somebody’s Baby Jenni Mazaraki
A Twist Of Smoke Emily Brewin
Still Life Kathy Prokhovnik
Biographies
Introduction
As a reader and a writer of the short story, I am non-binary, perhaps with half the appreciation, or perhaps with twice. I bring a little first-hand knowledge of the craft required to make from the loose sentences, images and paragraphs something that is structurally more coherent than a flash fiction, a cameo or a prose poem. The short story is both seed and flowering tree; it is concise but with the capacity of a novella or a play to launch fully fleshed characters, conflicts and denouements. Each story-embryo matures within the contours of its own cast. In the short story form, a writer commits to a vivid and entire world; a world in which voice and dialogue matter exceedingly, sometimes tangentially, and every sentence is measured to carry structural and thematic weight. Chronological elements in fiction compress and distort time. While textual intimacy is also presupposed from the novelist, the particular kind of precision I’m talking about here is spared the longer form.
Hemingway described this knife-edge art of short-story writing and revising, in which editing plays so vital a part:
If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit.1
As an editor, my selective filters amount to personal taste as well as to consideration for the writerly aspects. I have a tendency to ask myself, ‘How did this writer set about planting, hybridising, growing, and pruning? Is there the right amount of sunlight, water and shade? Are there fringes of compost layered in the soil?’ After all, stories may be innovative or political; they may engage with difference, but still may not quite work.
There were many appealing stories on the carefully winnowed longlist, for which I am indebted to the expertise of Luke Johnson, Donna Mazza, and Camha Pham. The forty-seven stories I read were richly varied in style, themes and cultural engagements. There was a strong sense that many were informed by contemporary anxieties about the environment, about cultural difference, about the need to specifically voice and make affirming space for queerness. Others were recuperative; they impressed me, by succeeding in realising complex emotions that we sometimes fail to honour in our daily lives, and in our close relationships. The restorative potential of language to recover possibilities, memories, transitions and images lost to us through the passing of time are, in the best of hands, rendered eloquently, if variously, by the form.
Narrowing down to winner and runner-up stories took several reads but ultimately I chose what had been striking from the outset. ‘We’ll Stand In That Place’ is tactful and sculptural; a courageous narrative of addiction and queerness set in St Kilda. Kit Scriven forces the reader to confront difference by skewing the conventions of subject, object and place. The spatial relations between clothes, accessories and body parts, notably feet, are intentionally disturbing and radically idiosyncratic from the opening paragraph: ‘The pants of Andy’s best suit tighten at Baby’s knees and crotch. Baby settles onto his haunches, stretching Andy over him.’ One needs to read attentively to learn that Andy has overdosed; that Baby’s grief is ritualised. Scriven knows how to withhold and rearrange details; his craft producing something disturbing and unique. He marries the beautiful with the sordid. Abject associations are tessellated with shavings of dialogue to create a portmanteau of needles and magnolias; a cowboy’s lariat and scalloped lines in the sand. Through gaps and repetitions the story builds intensity towards an ending that is technically challenging to accomplish: conceptual and transcendent. How beautiful that it celebrates community hope and pride amidst stigma and grief!
The runner-up story, ‘Thylacine’, by Catherine Noske, works very differently, but no less intensely. It enters the interior world of a nameless couple: a stay-at-home wife’s early pregnancy contrasts her geologist husband’s field-trips after he discovers a rare fossil. Composed of numbered sections, each a possible prose poem, the story riffs on the gaps between myth and history, language and meaning, extinction and erasure. The enigmatic fossil can never be fully imagined. ‘Wefounda breathe thylacinefossil Perfectlypreserved. Furthernorththananyothereverbefore,’ the woman’s husband gasps, over the phone. Noske uses the thylacine as metonymy. It becomes a narrative framework to evoke other absences and breaches: the ‘collective dream-world’ of the past, the violence of white settlement, the exploitation of mining and industry on Aboriginal land, the boundaries that separate husband and wife. The subtlety and precision of her language shows great sensitivity to the issues of violent possession. Equally, her restrained tone construes domestic forbearance and colonial silences as paired forms of gendered and racial violence.
The winner of the South West prize, emerging writer Rachel McEleney, shows exceptional flair in her story, ‘The Day The Rain Stopped Dancing’. This futuristic dystopia evokes great atmosphere and suspense. McEleney creates a world genetically modified by a US grain that is blended with contraceptive chemicals during an African drought. But GentaCorp’s GM 21 cross-pollinates with other crops to mutate human cells. While the narrative begins with some familiarity, strangeness and discomfort are signalled early by the extinction of animals and climate changes. The scientific logic of malfunction is progressed with impressive
control; the dialogue and focalisation figuratively enriches the story, so that the boundaries of non-fiction elements and fiction are seamless.
Genre works as an organising tool but also an umbrella for the short stories in this collection. Interestingly, the eighteenth- century Francophile derivative of the word genre means ‘type’ or ‘style.’ An earlier, twelfth-century French source, however, is the word gendre, meaning ‘species’, a prototype word for ‘gender’ in English. As a literary framework, genre is malleable, and in our times of technological and generational change it has become supple, diverse and generative. Though the short story is notoriously harder to package and market than the novel, the cutting edge of magazine and book publishing trends has endorsed a flourishing of genre fluidity. Poetic language, speculative, historical or fantasy elements, and even literary criticism have been crossed with more conventional short story tropes to produce exciting books such as Heat and Light by Ellen Van Neerven, Pond by Claire-Louise Bennet, and Look Whose Morphing by Tom Cho.
Readers and writers alike, it seems, have found pleasing variety in genre hybridity. But whether conventional or innovative, each writer in this collection successfully explores and renews the navigable territory that the short story has claimed in recent years.
Not surprisingly, my task of judging this year’s Margaret River Short Story Prize has been a joy and a privilege, simply for the reading. I have been able to renew my reflections on the art of the short story, its currency in contemporary Australian writing and what this chiselled, exceptional and varied form can do. Now, I invite you to do the same.
— Michelle Cahill
* * *
1 Hemingway, Ernest. ‘The Art of the Short Story’ , The Paris Review, Issue 79, 1981.
We’ll Stand In That Place
Kit Scriven
T he pants of Andy’s best suit tighten at Baby’s knees and crotch. Baby settles onto his haunches, stretching Andy over him.
Rubbish floats on the fringe of the tide that smudges the beach. Baby studies a cigarette filter that has unravelled into a tangle-winged butterfly. A thin film covers the surface of the water in which it floats. Oil, Baby decides, perhaps from one of the tankers he can see on the bay, an accident, or maybe a deliberate release from one of the ships stacked with containers, the captain impatient for his berth and the brothel and needing to punish something, even this water, which licks his stain into the beach.
Baby dips his hand into the smudge and scoops up the remnants of the cigarette. The water is tinged with a thickness that blurs its translucence and shines pink, green and yellow and every colour Baby knows. If Andy was here, Baby would demonstrate how the unravelled filter of a cigarette is a butterfly with wings of impossible colour.
Baby’s contemplation is disturbed by a dog splashing in the shallows, a tall hound with legs soaked to the shoulder. An Afghan, Baby decides. The dog poses in front of him, a catwalk model of a dog, strong-jawed and high cheek-boned, alert to her beauty.
‘Out. Out,’ a voice to his right says.
Baby jumps. The dog points her head at the voice, decides not to listen, and walk-wades south, towards the marina.
Got a boat of her own, Baby thinks. Dog like that.
‘Damn dog.’
The speaker is too close. She is bare-legged, and her feet are unclothed, toes scrunching the sand. Adjacent to her knees is a lead, fancy leather with studs of silver. Baby envisions a shopping expedition, the smile stretched on the lips of the assistant as she calculates the time it will take to rehang the leads of fine leather discarded across the high backs of chairs. But there is a lot to consider, how best to complement the elegance of the Afghan, the shade of tan on the hands and forearms of the holder of the lead, whether the colour of the leather will clash with the seats of the BMW, whether they’ll look too much of a pair when the owner wears that leather thing around her neck.
Baby doesn’t lift his head. He doesn’t want to talk. He keeps his head down and his eyes on the woman’s feet, which are narrow and long-toed and seem a good fit with her ankles, calves and knees. Since Baby returned to St Kilda he has persevered with his study of feet. He could provide a detailed description of the woman to the police if required: height, weight, a good stab at hairstyle and colour, whether she is loud or like him, and even if he hadn’t seen the Afghan, the breed of dog with which the beach walker might accessorise her life.
A moment later all that’s left are the footprints of the woman and the stink of wet dog, which Baby knows he has imagined. Because smell is a handy way to endow a daydream. Baby conjures the deck of a boat at the marina, then the hound, and a warm towel with which he rubs away the wet carpet stink of her. Then they parade along Acland Street, the Afghan haughty in her stride, Baby trying to look humble, but failing, because everyone remarks her. They stop for a coffee and one of those cakes made of glazed fruit and custard, the Afghan standing alongside as Baby glistens at a table outside the cake shop. The Afghan’s stance is regal, her face is level with his. In Baby’s daydream, the front right paw of the dog presses down on his left shoe so that later, when he finds somewhere to sit and think, he can rest his right foot on his left and be reminded of love.
Andy’s dress shoes aren’t suited to sand. Baby labours his way to the steps and mounts the wooden walkway the council has constructed, a path along the beach which is part sculpture and part footpath and all St Kilda. Baby maintains his back to the bay. He crosses the grass and the lanes of bitumen.
Ahead, and well before Shakespeare Grove intersects with Acland Street, a man dressed as a cowboy is dangling a lariat. He is busking in the shadow of Luna Park, adjacent to the blunt southern wall, the blank foil to the big-toothed, open-mouthed entrance on the northern side. The cowboy’s hat is on his head. And there isn’t another hat for the money. Sometimes buskers use a scarf coiled in the shape of a small dam, somewhere to pool the coins and the occasional note.
Baby’s lips bend as he remembers that little dog, one of those sweet-faced customised things, bred for the people who on Sunday mornings stalk the stalls along the esplanade. And the dog—Baby grins up the memory—the dog thought the scarf of the busker was a basket, and curled itself in the sun-warmed fabric and coins. And they’d laughed, stall owners, the parents of the sweet-faced dog, the walkers of other dogs, everyone, including the busker who fingered a guitar he couldn’t play very well.
Everyone laughed, even Andy.
Andy was off the stuff again and had driven down from Maryborough in his clapped-out Kingswood. He wore the suit and the shoes that worked for Baby, but Andy hadn’t yet worked up the guts to ask Baby if he was coming back. As they’d strolled away from the little dog and the laughter, Baby could have pushed two fingers into the side pocket of Andy’s suit, because that was the moment, but he didn’t, and they’d walked back to the Kingswood and Andy had driven away.
Afterwards, Baby had watched the water for a long time, the sea yielding waves to the beach, the beach surrendering sand to the water, the mutuality of infiltrator and infiltrated. Where the sea met the land was a place of love, and never a threshold that was forever one thing on one side and a different thing on the other. Love was the water gifting and the sand accepting. As he watched the waves and the sand, Baby concluded that love was as relentless as the tide testing the shore; love was for keeps.
The cowboy is for keeps and is not a busker. He is a threshold Baby has to negotiate, because the lariat he’d sighted from the end of Shakespeare Grove is not a lariat, it’s a belt, noosed and dangling from the left fist of the cowboy.
‘Whoa,’ Baby says, and then wishes he hadn’t spoken. Whoa is a cowboy word and might not be a suitable opening for a conversation with a real cowboy, let alone someone in Shakespeare Grove wearing a plastic cowboy hat and designer jeans. But the boots look like real cowboy boots. And the spurs attached to the boots jut the required cruelty.
The back of the fist that holds the belt wears the tendrils of a tattoo that disappe
ars under the cowboy’s shirt and reappears on his neck. Ink has infiltrated his jaw and the left side of his face. Something white and pink flowers in the hollow of the cowboy’s cheek.
The cowboy’s hand bobs once or twice. The noose sways and turns.
‘Whoa,’ Baby says again. He lifts his hand in a gesture he hopes the cowboy will interpret as a start to negotiations.
That crazy ride that circumnavigates Luna Park starts up. Baby hears the grinding of the car on the rails, a few preparatory squeals from the passengers and then a chaos of sound is above them, one shriek indistinguishable from another, then a hiatus as the car tunnels and surfaces at a crest, then a girl’s voice screaming clear and perfect, ‘Do him, Cowboy. Do him.’
The cowboy lifts his lariat. The noose sways.
Baby’s hand is still grasping air. He can’t lower it because he needs something between him and the cowboy, whose hand, the one holding the belt, is level with Baby’s hand and swaying forward and back, an ebb and push that is all St Kilda.
The tattoo on the back of the cowboy’s hand is crisp and inked in black and shades of grey with distinctions of pink and mesmerising white. Baby apprehends the startling beauty of the magnolias that adorn the skin of the cowboy, whose shirt interrupts the display, cheap flannel in a green-and-white check that will never contain the reckless flowering that obliges the cowboy to stand in Shakespeare Grove and cull the maverick from the herd.
Andy had loved magnolias. ‘They flaunt it, magnolias. All stick and flower, like me.’
Baby wonders if he’s dreaming again. Perhaps he’s hallucinated the cowboy. Sometimes he’s not sure where he is, and he’s almost certain that he’s never seen a tattoo with slivers of white ink, and a tattoo of a magnolia without white was impossible, because Andy was forever pointing out magnolias, and all the magnolias that Andy ever pointed out to Baby were white and pink.
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