Stories of Hope

by Aussie Speculative Fiction

  That night there was a feast to welcome his return and Tia sat beside him and pinched his knee. She looked about her and Atetaru knew that certain things had just been settled, whatever he thought about them. In a village of three hundred people, there are no secrets.

  But though he held Tia again before he went to his whare, he told her he had mourning to do, and that for now he must do it alone. Tia raised and lowered her brows in acknowledgement. She hugged him hard before she crept away. That night he slept alone. Without Ikaru, without Tia.

  He wanted to weep for Ikaru and to smile at the thought of Tia. The mix of emotions and desires was too complicated and where he’d expected a night of misery he was only numb. That, he decided, was better. He remembered—it was that very same day, though so much had happened—he’d thought hard about plunging into Tongoriro’s crater after Ikaru. His son was still a great raw wound in his side, and even now fate had not yet tired of him: there was a man who smirked but seldom laughed, leading other men to kill him. But he couldn’t pretend to himself that he was anything but glad he still lived.

  He would stay and build Tia’s bridge and then, he knew, he would want to make a new whare for them both. He would remember Ikaru, but life does not always wait to let one grieve properly before pushing, rushing onwards. And still, Ahemoko would come for him.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ALAN Whelan is a novelist and story-writer living in the Blue Mountains. His recent burst of short-story-writing has kept him away from his current novel, leaving its cast stranded on a mountainside in Persia in 1879, pacing about and checking their watches. He’ll be back with them by the time you read this.

  His website is under construction at http://alanwhelan.org

  He tweets occasionally as @AlanNWhelan

  Lesson by Ishmael A Soledad

  JAKE YANCY’S PARENTS were like all parents, happy and scared when their small bundle of joy popped out. They did their best as best they could to squeeze him into their busy lives between work, sleep, friends and Netflix. Like most they won some and lost some, like us all they didn’t know which was which.

  WHEN JAKE WAS FOUR he sat at the old oak table; he swung his feet from his chair as his parents smiled at him from the other side. His father held out his fist.

  “Would you like a present?”

  “Yes please, Daddy.”

  His father opened his fist to show a small yellow disc. It glistened and winked at Jake.

  “Thank you, Daddy. What is it?”

  “It’s money, Jakey. If you’re good, we’ll give you more each week.”

  “I have a present for you too,” his mother said.

  Jake’s eyes lit up.

  She put a blue pig in front of him. It had a cute nose, big smile and a hole on top.

  “What is it, Mummy?”

  “It’s a piggy bank.”

  “Oh. What’s that?”

  She tapped the pig on the hole. “It takes care of your money. If you want you can put it in here to keep for later.”

  Jake eyed the pig cautiously. He dropped the yellow disc into the pig, the pig squealed and its eyes lit up. Jake giggled and clapped his hands.

  WHEN JAKE WAS FIVE he sat at the old oak table; his toes just touched the ground, his parents smiled at him from the other side. His father held his mother’s hand.

  “Jakey, we have some news.”

  “Uh huh, Daddy.”

  “Mummy’s pregnant, soon you will have a sister.”

  “Why?”

  “We wanted you to have someone to play with at home.”

  “Oh. Thank you Mummy.”

  “We will have to be extra good Jakey, Mummy will be tired for a long while. We need to save time to do extra things.”

  “How?”

  “You do things quicker. Like your toys. When you put them away don’t play with them, just put them away. That way you save a little bit of time to do other things.”

  “Like my piggy bank?”

  “Yes, like that.”

  WHEN JAKE WAS NINE he sat at the old oak table, hands in his lap; his four year old sister sat to attention opposite him.

  “I have a present for you, squirt.”

  Jake put a purple ceramic pig with green flowers in front of her.

  Penny smiled. “Ooh cute! Thank you, Jakey.”

  “It’s a piggy bank. Do you know what it does?”

  She shook her head.

  “It keeps your pocket money safe for later.”

  Jenny tickled the pig behind its ears, tried to uncurl its tail.

  “You’ve got gazillions!”

  “Yes, but I’ve been saving longer. Watch this.”

  Jake took out a silver coin, stuck it in the pig’s mouth. Its eyes glowed, the pig grunted and slobbered then swallowed the coin. Jenny giggled, hands over her mouth.

  “Want me to teach you how to save money?”

  “Yes please!”

  “Later I’ll show you how to save time.”

  WHEN JAKE WAS TWELVE he sat safely strapped into the Alfa Romeo’s race harness. His grandfather wrestled the car around the track once then pulled into the pits.

  “I hope you enjoyed it, I’m sorry I haven’t more time.”

  “It’s ok gramps, I’ve had a blast.”

  “Perhaps a rain check?”

  “Sounds like a deal.”

  “You’re used to it?”

  Jake laughed. “Totally. Mum and dad are the worst, but I understand. I’m just saving IOUs.”

  “With the relations you’ve got you must have a few lifetimes worth.”

  WHEN JAKE WAS SIXTEEN, his sister sat him down on his bed as she tried to straighten his tie. He fidgeted, all nerves and anxiety.

  “Sit still or I’ll mess this up!”

  “Sorry sis.”

  She stepped back, regarded her handiwork.

  “That’s better. She’s really cute isn’t she?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Cute ones need more money, I’ll get it.”

  She turned, the bedroom walls covered in shelves, the shelves covered in blue and white ceramic pigs. She reached for the nearest white one.

  “No, not that one, the last blue one.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem, just saving them for a rainy day.”

  WHEN JAKE WAS EIGHTEEN, he sat with his parents on the leather couch; his mother quietly cried, his father held his hand in a vice-like grip. The specialist sat in the armchair opposite, impassive.

  “I’m sorry. We’ve done all we can, all anyone can. There’s no cure.”

  “How long?” his father whispered, suddenly old, frail.

  “Six weeks, two months.”

  “What will it be like?”

  “No pain, just growing weariness until one night she falls asleep then doesn’t wake up.”

  “Oh. It’s not fair, she’s only twelve.”

  “I know Mister Yancy, I know. Take her home. There’s nothing we can do that you can’t.”

  JAKE WAS FIVE WEEKS older as he sat on the edge of her bed. Penny stared at him, propped up on her pillows. The house was quiet, their parents out.

  “Well squirt, two weeks left.”

  “Maybe, maybe a bit less. It’s the right time.”

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  She looked around her room. Her walls were full of shelves, the shelves full of ceramic pigs, some purple with green flowers, others yellow with stars. At the foot of her bed one white pig sat patiently.

  “One of yours and one of mine?”

  “That feels right.”

  Jake picked up a yellow pig with one hand and the white one in his other. He held the pigs above Penny.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Jake tapped the pigs together; the porcelain cracked then disappeared. Lime green light cascaded into Penny’s open mouth as the hours, days and weeks of promises never kept infused into her, renewed her until her life was no longer measured in days but in decades. />
  Jenny swung her legs around, sprung out of bed to the sound of crunching gravel from the driveway below.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ISH hails from Brisbane and mainly writes short story science fiction. He is currently working on his first novel due out late this year.

  Other Gods than Ours by Fallacious Rose

  I WENT BACK TO THE old place the other day, Georgie.

  Do you remember when we first left?

  Those weeks, months, before it happened—just holding on, waiting for the fire to come. The sky ash-grey, sagging with smoke, so thick sometimes that we might as well have been living in a bomb crater for all the view we got. Watching the creep of the front on the fire app, days away at first, then hours, then . . .

  You prayed. I said, “No use praying, we’re all pagans here,” and you said, “Then maybe the old gods can save us.” You meant the old gods of Europe—but hey, they didn’t save Troy, did they?—and there are gods here far older than that. Whose side are they on? I thought. Not ours.

  Well, like I said, I went back to the old place just the other week. No, no, you can’t drive there now darling, I had to take a share-pod down to Eden, and then a bubble . . . they won’t let you set foot on the land, they treat us as if we’re all carrying foot and mouth. Not that anyone knows what that is these days, that was when we had stock, and meat. No such thing now, it’s all manufactured protein. Miss my steak . . . but maybe it’s all for the best.

  Oh—here’s Derryn, come to feed the magpies. They’re real enough, little buggers.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” he says, while he fixes your continence pad, quick and gentle.

  Derryn’s nice, isn’t he? One of the new generation, who’ve never seen a cleared paddock, don’t know what a coal mine is for, never been on a hike in the bush. But then, it’s funny, there’s bush all around us—a wattle tree hanging over your bed (lucky it’s only virtual, otherwise it’d make you sneeze, you were always allergic), king parrots on the verandah rail. They try to make us feel at home, like how they used to put gum tree sprigs in the koala enclosure at the zoo, and ice blocks for the polar bears.

  “How’s your uncle?” I ask Derryn.

  He shrugs. He’s got a fine set of shoulders on him, and those lean, honey-dark good looks that came out of the mix, white and black. “Fine. Haven’t heard from him in months.” But he’s not worried, really. The ones who chose to go back, they fend for themselves, and keep the rest of us out. They say it’s not safe any more. Only they’re not keeping us safe from the bush—they’re keeping the bush safe from us. Ten years of flame and they worked it out—where the white man goes, fire follows. No fire on a concrete footpath, said that politician, can’t remember his name, let’s pave the bloody lot of it over.

  “Died of drinking poisoned bore water in ‘27, didn’t he, Derryn?”

  “Who?” says Derryn.

  Oh, that’s right, they’re all dead and forgotten now.

  The paths here in our compressed, coastal cities look like rainforest trails, but they burn like asbestos, which is to say, they don’t.

  I looked out through the plex, Georgie, and you know, I could still see the outline of our front deck, where we used to sit and drink coffee, watching the dawn, and feed the wallabies—oh, they’re thriving, by the way, you should see. They’re not afraid any more, they don’t even know you’re there. Remember old Elsie with the fur scraped off at the base of her tail, who used to take carrots from your hand? Long gone now, but the place is full of her descendants—where the shed was is just a bunch of wombat burrows and bandicoot tracks, and as for koalas, you never used to be able to spot a single one, but now there’s hundreds of the little bastards staring down at you with their little beady eyes . . .

  Overgrown, you bet. The old forest has come back, all that stuff we cleared, it’s just big old trees now, scribblies and paperbark and the ghosts marching all the way up the hill—it made me tear up, thinking of all the work we put into it, and the money . . .

  There’s still grass. Growing through the tiles where the kitchen used to be.

  You’d never guess what happened there, not unless you knew where to look. Remember that day, that stupid day, when we decided to stay. We thought we’d ‘defend’. They warned us, but we loved that place, built it ourselves, wonky walls and all, we couldn’t bear to abandon ship—not to mention sheep. So there we were, peering out through the blankets we’d hung on the windows, watching the sky grow red, then black as pitch, and the ground underneath our feet, it shook for Christ’s sake, and you said, “Are those helicopters, Dave?”

  And I said, “No, love, they can’t fly in this weather,” and we looked out over the valley and saw the glow on the ridges—like the armies of Hell. First there was the sound of explosions—that was the eucalypts—then a roaring, crackling noise, so loud we thought the hills would collapse in upon us, it was like the end of days. It was dark, so dark that we couldn’t see each other from three feet away, and of course the power was out, and you said, “Dave, I don’t think I can do this,” and to tell the truth, babe, at that moment I knew I couldn’t face it either. So I told myself we were leaving for you—but I was leaving because I was so scared I nearly pissed myself. Sorry, love, I should’ve told you that long ago, when you could still understand me.

  We felt our way to the back door—I barked my shin on that frigging useless side table you just had to buy—and scrambled into the ute, and I drove up that long, long driveway as fast as I dared, with the fire behind us—would’ve been a crap time to get a flat tyre. Wished I’d dozed those trees along the carriageway—too late now.

  We were lucky. We got away that night—some didn’t. I always thought we’d go back when it all settled down, build again if we had to—we were young then, in our thirties. But the fires went on and on, and the rains never really came, and the insurance told us premiums would be triple the price from then on, even if we rebuilt in fucking concrete . . .

  You don’t remember any of it now, do you, sweetheart?

  “It’s so green here. Why’s it so green?” you ask Derryn, as he fixes your pillows and pops the tablets on your tongue that keep you alive.

  It’s green because the virtual space they’ve created around you doesn’t need water, honey. Those parrots, they’re not real, any more than the wattle by your bed or even the verandah you think you’re on, gazing out over the blue-hazed mountains of home. It’s green because there are so few of us now, clinging on in the cities, our world a seamless blend of reality and imagination. I miss our home, of course I do—but I guess it’s all for the best, really. After all, imagination was what we were really good at, wasn’t it?

  Home. It’s beautiful now, honey, it really is. We thought that beauty could only exist while we were there to see it—like they say, it’s in the eye of the beholder, but we weren’t the only beholders, were we? Bet the potoroos have their own ideas about what’s pretty . . .

  We thought we could live in the lap of nature, but she threw us out like overgrown nestlings, and we learned to fly. We thought that the forest needed us, but it didn’t: it needed us gone. I don’t mourn, darling—well, maybe a little.

  “Thanks, Derryn,” I say, taking the cup of milky hot water that passes for tea in here. “Is there any sugar?”

  Those first years, they were the worst. The cramped apartment living, the endless bloody summers, the fire and the drought, the deaths—the sheer fucking despair of it all. I thought that was probably it for us humans.

  But you know, the old place, all that country, it hasn’t seen a big fire now for thirty years. Why? Because we’re not there. We thought we were the cure—turns out we were the disease. Oh well, you live and learn.

  And we’re happy here, happier than I’d ever have thought, with our sky-grown crops, our reticulated, recycled water, our virtual parks and our rooftop orchards—and our few, cherished children. Our footfall is so much softer now, Georgie, they can barely hear it out there, in the bush. Yo
u don’t realise how much noise we used to make, till you see how quiet it can be.

  Derryn says he’ll take you down to the chapel now—you don’t understand the words any more, but it calms you down, helps you sleep for the afternoon. The pastor tells you that God loves us still, and that’s nice . . . but you know what I think?

  I think, now, that Australia belongs to other gods than ours. The gods of fur and feather, of things that wriggle and things that crawl, things that glide and flitter and dig and pounce—oh and the gods of Derryn’s uncle, of the few mobs that wandered back, after we’d trashed the place. And now they’ve taken back what’s theirs, and here we are, camping out on their doorstep. All mod cons.

  I always liked camping, anyway.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I live on a rural property on the south-east coast of Australia, and although—at the time of writing—the encircling fires haven’t reached my home, many of my neighbours have lost everything. Although the human loss is terrible, the millions of dead creatures (both ‘domestic’ and ‘wild’) is worse still: we perhaps don’t pause enough to consider what havoc we wreak. But this story is set in a future time when we’ve learned to live more gently in the world. Anyways—I divide my time between writing, singing and repairing fences. My genre is ‘everything’, my brand is ‘eccentric’, and you can find out more about what I do at www.fallaciousrose.com. I also blog at https://butimbeautiful.wordpress.com.

  Light in the Dark by L R Johnson

  TWO GREEN DOTS OF LIGHT peered across the dark rocky desert and lit upon a tiny, repeating shower of sparks. The dots approached, a rhythmic hissing moving closer through the dark.