Grandma’s father nailed up the windows.
“It’s for yer own good,” my grandma heard him say to her mother and then sighed like he was tired. “Dingoes are a menace to a farmer’s life.”
“How long are you going to take in there?” He banged on the bathroom door and knocked me out of my remembering.
“Hold your horses,” I said and toweled myself off. I wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror and stared at my reflection. At seventeen, I was changing. My nose was getting longer and the hair on head was becoming such a sandy colour. Just like my grandmother’s.
When she became a woman, Grandma knew to hide her dingo ways. She tied herself to her bed at the time the dingo within came calling on her. She didn’t want to be shot by a strange man’s bullets, let alone her own father’s. She wore long skirts and long sleeved tops to cover the hair that grew at that time of the month. She worked hard on the farm and soon met a man related to the crows. There was a tree she’d climb to get away and one day she found a man sitting in her branch plucking feathers from his shoulders. He understood the need to shed skin and they loved each other’s fur and feather from the minute they met each other. My Grandma used to say dingoes and crows are good together.
But that was a long time ago. Now, all that is left of Grandma is that story. I’m glad she told it to me so many times. At seventeen, with not much more than a pissy apprentice pay packet and a bed-sit rental at the back of the salon where I work, that story is pretty much the most valuable thing I have.
Squeezing at this ingrown hair hurts. It resists. It is stubborn, building a cocoon of pus that now lives on my inner thigh.
I come out of the bathroom and he’s lying on my bed, legs crossed, exhaling smoke rings and texting on his second mobile he uses for the business that he never discusses with me.
“Give us a flash.”
When I don’t respond, he gets up, tucks his shirt into his jeans, cigarette dangling from his mouth and ash falls onto my carpet. “Fuck, you’re a bore. I’m off.”
He tries to give me a wet kiss on the lips and when I move my head away he grabs at the back of my neck and forces my face towards his so that my jaw clenches.
“Don’t do that,” he says, his eyes goring a hole through mine. “Ever.” He lets go, pushing me back, the flat of his hands on my sternum. I want to get the courage to tell him I’m leaving but the words don’t come out.
I collapse onto the bed and watch him pull out my last $20 from my jeans pocket before he leaves. I don’t react. My heart has gone to sleep just like a foot or leg that has been immobile for too long. To compensate, my inner thigh throbs from the pain of my attempts to draw the hair out.
* * *
The waxing salon where I work is in a crumbling one-storey terrace on Sydenham Road with cement instead of lawn in the front and two plastic palms on either side of the fuchsia pink front door. I rent the bed-sit at the back. It is nestled between the 24-hour kebab shop and the “Rub and Tug” massage parlour that doesn’t bother to camouflage its entrance. Instead, the brothel adorns its front door with flashing fairy lights and the windows radiate a red hue even at 9 am in the morning. Each day on my break I sit out the front and hope I’ll get a glimpse of her again. That girl. TJ. Her name is TJ. I heard one of the girls calling for her out the back the other night asking her for a cigarette.
This morning the salon smells like a combination of cheap potpourri and wet dog. The appointment book is full of girls booked in for body waxes. If a girl waits too long between waxes, she is forced to wear long skirts and pants just like the wild dog women in my Gran’s story, like I did this month. They’ll get looks of disdain if their skirt flashes a hairy leg; the city is such a judgmental place.
“You need to do something about that hair on your legs!” A rude woman said to me on the bus this afternoon when I lifted my leg up from under my skirt to scratch at my hairy skin. Why do I have to remove it, if it just keeps growing back?
Sometimes our boss Li Li writes up on her special’s board: “Get your Booty! Only $25,” and then we’re inundated with customers. Not the women that want to rip the wild dog out of the private parts but the men that think that we are the massage parlour. They think the booty is some kind of special rub and tug session instead of pouring hot wax between bum cheeks and lips, ripping the wild hair out. They leave after we point them next door, slightly embarrassed and looking confused.
But they’re not dingo. They’re the hunters, the men with the 10-80 bait, the bullets. They remind me of grandma’s tales of her father with the rifle, locks and chains, and make my legs tremble so I have to clench my knees to keep them still.
And I work here six days a week to earn some money to live and get my apprenticeship in all aspects of beauty and hair removal. I have learnt to use hot wax strips to spread over legs and rip it off. It’s amazing what women need to get waxed to keep the dingo within: legs, labia, upper lips, chin, eyebrows, arms and even the tops of the toes. Now I can wax my own. Each time, it’s like ripping a part of me away.
But it keeps growing back. The dingo within is stubborn.
And as I scratch at my inner thigh furiously, apply antiseptic cream to this sore large ingrown hair that has reached the size of a cherry, I know that the dingo within is trying to tell me something. But her voice, the planes overhead, the Hindi radio and the car horns and him have made me hard of hearing for her howl in the distance.
* * *
I’ve worked out the days TJ works at the Rub and Tug next door. I try and make sure I’m around the window to get a glimpse of her each time she comes into work always hoping she doesn’t notice my attentions. She looks the same age as me but her eyes are older. Unlike my blue ones, they are dark. Almost charcoal. I’ve noticed her and sometimes, the image of her pulling her iPod out of her ears as she walks under the fairy lights into the fuchsia front door of the brothel is the image I see in my mind before I go to sleep.
She has an appointment today to get a full Brazilian. The wind chimes tingle as she enters the salon and I run my finger down the list of names, pretending I don’t know who she is, even though I know it’s the girl I saw from the shower. “TJ? 11 a.m.?” I ask, trying to look like I’m reading the list so that I don’t look at her, and she doesn’t see the heat rising in my cheeks. “Full leg and Brazilian?”
She nods and smiles. My heart beats quicker and feels like it’s lowered an inch in my chest cavity and my breath shortens. I smile back at her and beckon her to follow me.
“This way.”
I go to prep the room while she changes into her gown. When I walk in, she is lying on the waxing bench, with the gown covering her legs. Without her coat on, I see her arm is in a sling. Her dark eyes speak of wild things and freedom. “What happened?” I ask her. But she shakes her head and cries silently.
“Is it broken?”
“Nah, it’s not broken. I am,” she says.
I push her gown up above her knees, revealing her shins to begin waxing. There are feathers sprouting, through little black bumps of what look like sore ingrown hairs. You are the other half of me, I want to say to her but a girl can be silent in the face of true beauty even though the dingo wants to howl it out to the moon.
Beautiful crow girl.
TJ lies down on the bed and lifts her gown up over her belly button for me to wax the feathers off but I put the spatula down. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
I put my hand on her shins and stroke the new feathers. They are soft and downy. She lets me. She doesn’t flinch.
“I can’t work next door anymore until my arm gets better.” “I know,” I say. “Tell him—you need a couple of days off.” And there is silence between us.
In her eyes, I see the reflection of the crow. In mine she sees the reflection of the dingo. She does not look away but smiles.
But I say nothing. Not yet. My hair has not yet fully grown back. And I know, that if her pimp has not hurt her arm when they fought, that once she k
nows the strength of being a crow girl, she will heal her arm, sprout feathers on them, too, spread her wings and fly.
Come with me.
* * *
“You need a wax,” he says to me. “I’ve never had a girlfriend so hairy.”
I walk to the kitchen to put the kettle on and he follows me. “Jen, you gotta keep this package here, all right? But hidden.”
“What is it?”
“Ask no questions, babe, and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“I’m not keeping anything here illegal. I’m renting the bedsit from Li Li. If cops came here, I’d lose my job and home.”
He drops the parcel on the bench, grabs both my arms and squeezes tight. “I need it here for a little while. Maybe you’re not the girl I thought you were. Maybe I can’t trust you. You know the rule—wife for life, keep silence or violence.”
“I’m not your wife and I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore.” He squeezes my arms so tightly I wince from the pain.
“You didn’t mean that.” His pupils are large and his grip unrelenting. He goes to my handbag and grabs my keys and wallet. “What are you doing?”
“I’m taking them,” he says and walks out, locking the door behind him.
My boyfriend. He smells different to me now, like milk gone rancid. I start to cry and the skin on my legs gets hot and itchy, making me scratch furiously at my shins. The hair breaks through the skin and as each follicle opens, the hot itch starts to subside and my senses heighten. He smells differently and I see him differently. He is the hunter, the enemy.
And I’m scared he has locked me up. This man that came from neither fur nor feathers. Just raw skin.
I didn’t inherit the feathers from my grandfather, only the fur from the women in my family. If I had, I would have had the power to fly away. Instead, like a dingo, my travels always bring me back to my home. To the same place.
I am grounded, trapped and fenced in.
But tonight I will remember Gran’s tale and believe it like I should have. I will let the hair grow and return to where I’ve never been.
He has locked the doors but not the windows. I climb onto the toilet seat and propel myself up to the bathroom window and scramble through. The bricks on the outside scratch my palms and my ribs feel bruised from pressing against the sill but I make it to the floor. I’m in the yard of Li Li’s waxing salon now and make my way through the backdoor and into the reception area. I hear the sound of Li Li ripping wax and creep to the register.
“Who’s there? Jen? Is that you?”
“It’s me,” I call out, trying to sound casual and I grab $50 from the register and shove it in my pocket. “Jen, you work tomorrow? Early shift?”
“I’m sorry, Li Li,” I say, “I’ll pay you back.”
“Eh?” The sound of the wax stops and I hear her hurried footsteps down the corridor.
I push my hoodie over my head and push through the front door of the salon, leaving the wind chimes clanging, and break into a sprint. It is quiet at night in this city of tar and brick, of highways, playgrounds and garbage. A light rain has made the asphalt on Sydenham Road glisten; there is the strong smell of tar and petrol but I can smell wet grass and rotting leaves underneath. I run to the rhythm of my heartbeat and then I’m on all fours. An even saunter and I’m faster than the Emo kid pedaling his bike with the imitation shrunken head on his handlebars.
Freedom.
Grandma said one day it would be time for me to find my own way.
She’d say that when she was gone and I was grown her spirit would know where to find me. It’s not in the city. A dingo doesn’t like the routine of working under fluorescent lights ripping out the soul of other wild dog women, doesn’t like the sound of the buses and the trucks. A dingo can’t walk fast enough in high heels. And now, I am running barefoot.
* * *
As I run, the rest of the ingrown hairs disappear and in their place, my short-coated yellow dust pelt protects my skin. There is a rush of relief that floods my body as the itch has vanished with the cherry sized pustule; the last of its blood and pus now running down my leg. My ears are tuned to the background noise of footsteps and cicadas, of distant cars and wind through branches that rustle leaves.
I smell her.
TJ is in the park behind the tire factory sitting on a kid’s swing, swaying back and forth. Her shins are covered in black feathers and her long curls are wings of ebony that flutter about her bare shoulders.
She is crying but the presence of a dingo in the park does not scare her; when she looks into my eyes, she sees the reflection of me, the woman.
“I knew you’d come,” she says.
I rip at the bandage and lick her arm to heal it. And the feathers grow. She spreads her arms wide and the wind lifts her. She hovers above me.
I can run fast but she can fly far above me.
We travel all night. Down the motorway to O’Dell’s Ferry and then I swim as she soars across the water on the night wind to cross the Ranges River to Northeast National Park.
Where my grandma’s stories came from; where my grandma lived. Where wild dog women suckled dingo pups, because their mothers had been poisoned or killed by farmers.
I crouch down, pick up a twig and scrawl into the dirt with its pointy edge: Dingo and Crow Sanctuary. I look up and smile at TJ. My crow girl reads the message in the soil then laughs softly, tossing her head so that ebony feathers flitter to the floor.
We will settle here. Return to where we’ve never been. To freedom.
About The Contributors
Alan Baxter writes dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. He lives among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website www.warriorscribe.com or find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook.
James Bradley is an award-winning writer and critic. His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. He blogs at cityoftongues.com.
Imogen Cassidy is a mother of two from Sydney’s inner west, currently juggling parenting, dog ownership and writing. Imogen’s fiction has appeared in Devilfish Review, The Colored Lens, Aurealis and Toasted Cake. Other writings can be found at her website imogenwrites.tumblr.com or on patreon.com/imogenwrites.
David Conyers is a science fiction and horror author and editor from Adelaide, South Australia. His Harrison Peel series is collected in The Shoggoth Conspiracy with more stories to follow. Anthologies he has edited include Extreme Planets, Cthulhu Unbound 3, Cthulhu Detective, Cthulhu’s Dark Cults and Undead & Unbound. The Nightmare Dimension is his collection of horror fiction while Nanofabrica, a collection of best science fiction stories will be released by Aeon Press in 2016. david-conyers.com
terry dowling is one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy and horror, and author of the multi-award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its 21-year run than by any other writer. Terry’s horror collections are Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award), Aurealis Award-winning An Intimate Knowledge of the Night and the World Fantasy Award nominated Blackwater Days. His most recent books are Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and debut novel, Clowns at Midnight. Terry’s new collection The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours is due from Cemetery Dance Publications in 2016. terrydowling.com.
Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning, Sydney-based science fiction and fantasy writer. Her short story collection, Asymmetry, and time-travel pirate novella The Company Articles of Edward Teach are available from Twelfth Planet Press, while the first book in her Titan’s Forest fantasy trilogy is forthcoming from Tor. Thoraiya is an archer and a lapsed veterinarian. Follow
@ThoraiyaDyer or peruse thoraiy
adyer.com.
Jason Franks is the author of the occult rock’n’roll novel Bloody Waters and the writer of the Sixsmiths and Left Hand Path comicbook series. His short fiction has been published in Aurealis, Midnight Echo, After the World, SQ Mag, and other places. Franks’s work has twice been short-listed for an Aurealis Award.
Michelle Goldsmith resides in Melbourne, Australia, where she works as a writer and editor and is completing a Masters degree in publishing. She also has a degree in Zoology/Evolutionary Biology, which she mainly uses for story inspiration. After selling her first story at the age of 21, her short fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies and been translated. She was shortlisted for a Ditmar Award for Best New Talent in 2014 and 2015. She can be found online at vilutheril.com, or on Twitter as @vilutheril.
Michael Grey was born and grew up in Yorkshire and now lives in Melbourne with his wife and two boys. His work has been featured in print and online. He is currently taking applications for the role of ‘Writer’s Cat’. Candidates can contact him at
michaelgrey.com.au or on Twitter @Mikes005.
Stephanie Gunn is a Ditmar-nominated writer of speculative fiction. In another life, she was a (mad) scientist, but now spends her time writing and reviewing. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Bloodstones, Epilogue, Grant’s Pass and Kisses by Clockwork. She is currently at work on several contemporary fantasy novels and too many shorter works for her own good. She lives in Perth with her son and husband and requisite fluffy cat (and too many books). You can find her online at stephaniegunn.com.
Lisa L. Hannett has had over 60 short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published by CZP in 2015. You can find her online at lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5) Page 50
