by Jack Dann
‘Maybe,’ Isaac whistled. ‘But I think we defeated them because we survived, and kept on surviving no matter what happened. It wasn’t the singing and the acting and the jokes, or Cochrane and the Empire, although all of that helped. It’s simply that we hung on and hung on, and in the end it was the Martians who let go first.’
Isaac and Leonard were looking out the window of their tiny room.
‘I can still see Mars,’ Leonard said.
‘You thought it would go away, did you?’ Isaac jibed.
‘Kind of, I guess. Will they come back?’
Isaac shrugged.
‘If they do,’ Leonard piped up, ‘we’ll just build another Empire.’
‘We’ll sing them away.’
‘We’ll joke them away.’
‘Mama will scare them away.’
They almost laughed at that, but it sounded forced even to their ears. They turned away from the window.
‘What do we do now?’ Leonard asked, almost forlornly.
‘Get our names up in lights,’ Isaac said. ‘We’ll start here, in London. Then Paris, maybe, and Manchester, when they build it again. Edinburgh, too. Maybe even New York one day. I can see it now, little brother. Zac and Lenny Feelgood conquer the world.’
AFTERWORD
‘Empire’ came from an interest in Gilbert & Sullivan and H. G. Wells that collided in that part of my brain reserved for the most bizarre story ideas. The glue that held the two themes together is the idea of survival, that it isn’t the heroes who make a victory, but the great masses of people who just hang on and keep working and dreaming no matter what.
— Simon Brown
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LAKESIDE
CHRISTOPHER GREEN
CHRISTOPHER GREEN migrated to Melbourne in 1997 and has been writing for fifteen years. In 2007 he attended Clarion South where he wrote ‘Lakeside’, which also happens to be the first story he ever submitted for publication. This haunting story is a visceral journey through rejection and abuse to the cleansing waters of life… or perhaps death.
Molly isn’t supposed to go to the lake, so she does. She finds the body on her first trip. It is small. Its little arms are outstretched and it floats on its back in the reeds. She can tell it is a boy. He is more colours than she can count, but all of them are black. The body shines like an oil slick.
Molly wades in before she realises what she has done. She is hip-deep in the water, her dress growing heavy as the wool absorbs it. The wetness climbs past the water line, over her stomach and up to her chest. Her mother will be angry.
She tries to retrieve the body, gently coasting it closer by throwing rocks into the water behind it. When she can reach it she stops, but the baby does not. It kicks its swollen legs and opens its sunken eyes and reaches its hand out to her.
Molly runs, but not very far. The baby rolls onto its tummy and slides beneath the water. It does not resurface. She holds the sodden hem of her dress high against her thighs and sprints back across the field that separates her house from the lake.
Now and then she stops and glances over her shoulder, hands on hips as she sucks in air. No dark shape moves in the high brown grass. The field is empty, save for the path in it she’s made herself.
When Molly gets home she doesn’t recognise the car in front of her house. She sits on the edge of the dirt road, pulls the wet folds of her dress in around her ankles, and waits. After a few minutes she turns a little, so she can watch both the field and the house.
There are no other houses in sight. The road doesn’t go anywhere worth going, which mother says is perfect. The quiet lets her mother and her visitors be loud, and they are loud now.
Molly shreds a flower between her fingers and waits. Her hands smell like the reeds by the lake.
When her mother and the man finish, he leaves. He watches Molly for a moment, keys in hand, and smiles. She doesn’t smile back. He gets in the car and drives away. Molly stands and walks through the dust he has left behind, and into the house. She gets herself a glass of water, drinks it, and carefully puts the glass away.
Her mother’s bedroom is closed. Molly sits at the middle of the stairs and watches the door through the slats of the banister.
She hears her mother turn on the radio and music drifts under the door. The house grows slowly dark.
She wakes in a patch of moonlight. The windows rattle in the wind. The noise that woke her comes again, the drawn out rasp of gravel on the garden path. She holds her breath and listens but the noise is not repeated.
Her mother’s bedroom door is still closed.
Molly’s dress is stiff and scratchy and still damp in the places she is sitting on. She tugs it half-off over her head and enjoys the sensation of being trapped, then wiggles her shoulders and bursts out of the dampness. Her skin is pale. The moonlight hits her and makes her bright, like the underbelly of a fish.
Molly opens the front door. Mother is always adamant that if she musses her dress, she’ll have to go without. The wind wraps around her and her skin goes numb. She steps outside.
The road is rough beneath her feet, and she hurries across it to the grass of the field. It is dry and clean, as she imagines a horse’s bed would be. She can smell the lake on the wind, and soon it is just ahead, spread out and reflecting the moon.
The wind moves along the surface. Shapes like dark eels stir the water from within. Bubbles rise in long streamers from the lake bed. Molly forgets her nakedness and sits on a rock, knees tucked up hard against her chin. She scratches at the ground with a stick as she waits, and when she grows too cold she leaves the stick behind and crosses the field again.
The smell of broken reeds and the rustle of brittle grass follow her home.
When the morning sun hits her, she sits up in bed and then runs naked to the stairway. Her dress is gone.
Her mother swishes in behind her. ‘Molly?’
‘Yes Mother?’
‘I found your dress this morning, on the stairs. It stank of the lake. You know I told you not to go there.’
Molly opens her mouth to say something, which makes the slap reverberate even more. Her head snaps back against the wall. The next blow cuffs her to the floor. Molly holds her hand to her head and it comes away wet.
‘You could drown there, Molly. You could go down into that lake and never come back up. Is that what you want?’
A car pulls up outside.
‘Go and get your dress, you stupid girl. It’s out in the front yard, on the line.’ Her mother tries to smack her again, but Molly backs away.
‘And don’t bother the man. He and I’ll be busy all day. I don’t want to see you again until he leaves.’
Molly gets to her feet and goes to the front door. A man, different man than yesterday, pulls it open before she can get there. She holds her hands in front of her nakedness and her cheeks burn with shame.
‘Hello, sweetie.’
Molly tries to slide past, but the man blocks her.
‘Don’t run away just yet. Where are your clothes?’
She points at the clothesline outside, at her lone black dress as it twists in the breeze.
His hand is rough on Molly’s shoulder. ‘Helen. You look nice. I’d heard I should expect to see more of you, this time,’ he says.
‘Hush. The Lord let slip that burden. Molly, go outside and play.’
The man laughs. ‘I brought us some candy, Helen. The imported kind. Would your little girl like some candy, too?’
The man slides his hand along Molly’s bare back. She tries her best to stand still, like her mother would, but when the hand dips below her shoulderblades she pushes past him and runs outside.
Her mother’s voice follows her. ‘No sense in wasting such things on her.’
Molly hurries to the line and pulls her dress on over her head. Her mother and the man are not loud yet, but she knows they will be soon.
The lake is wide, pressed flat by the sky like a bug under glass. The reeds
rub against each other. The baby is there, on the rock she sat on the night before. He sits with his hands on his puffy knees, head hung low, bent forward like a toy. She approaches. The pale sand crunches beneath her feet, but the baby does not move.
Molly is careful when she sits beside him. He seems delicate, now that she is so close. She sees the tangle of flesh at his stomach and a smaller twist between his legs. The baby’s skin is flaking now, like the rubber she finds on the side of the road. The skin is tight on his body.
She picks up the stick from yesterday and breaks it in half. His dead eyes turn to her at the sound, and one hand reaches out, fist pumping open and closed. Molly places the stick in his hand, and he makes a watery sound that bubbles in his chest. She reaches past him and pulls a fistful of daisies from the ground. One by one she links them, and then drapes the chain over his head. Her hand brushes his skin. It is clammy, and she wipes an oily film off onto the grass.
They sit beside the lake for a long time. Molly plays with him gently, as best she can. He crawls into her lap and she runs her hand along the sprinkle of hair that crowns his head. He twists, and holds his arms out. Molly hugs him close, like one of her dolls, and he closes his eyes.
She closes hers as well.
They play all morning. Molly walks along the lake with the baby in her arms. She gives him pebbles to skim along the water, but he is too small and drops them after putting them in his mouth. She moves away from the lake and into the shade once the sun is at its height, and sets him in the grass beside her. He sits on his bottom and watches her. She had been told a brother was on the way, once. Molly smiles at the thought, and falls asleep.
He is sitting at the edge of the field when she wakes. She can see her house from here, the car in front of it already gone. The baby wipes dark drool from its chin and crawls to her. He is making the noises babies make when they are ready to wail.
Molly stands, picks him up, and turns toward home.
The house is quiet. Upstairs, the radio plays, another song for another day. Molly cradles the baby in her arms and takes the stairs one by one, and turns toward her mother’s bedroom.
The door is closed.
She shivers, but reaches out and twists the knob. The door swings open.
Her mother is sleeping naked, the sheet tucked in around her waist. The room is crowded with a thick, burnt-candy miasma. A tray beside her bed holds a few of the little brown candies the man must have brought. Her mother’s mouth is dusted with them. The window is open, and dusk stirs the room with the scent of open water.
The baby kicks in Molly’s arms and wails. The noise is a thin one.
Molly turns the body in her arms and lines the fatness of his lips up with her mother’s nipple. She presses him against it. He turns his head away and cries again, louder. Her mother does not stir and her breathing is slow. Molly tries again, pressing his mouth to her mother’s breast, but the baby squeals and flails its limbs.
Molly shivers again in the cold, and pulls the linen from her mother’s body to drape over herself. The baby squirms, and she sits with him at the foot of the bed. Her mother is still damp, at the spot where her legs come together.
The blackened body is restless in Molly’s arms. She drapes the sheet over her shoulders like a shawl.
She moves to the window and looks out, across the field, to the lake. The water there is more colours than she can count. All of them are black.
Her mother’s eyes slide open, awash in moonlight. Her mouth works but does not. Molly has seen fish do the same thing. She undoes the top three buttons of her dress and wiggles her arm out of the sleeve and up through the collar.
Molly presses the baby’s head to her thin chest and smiles as he closes his lips on her. She sings him lullabies that she makes up as she goes. He sucks happily, uselessly, at her nipple. She feels his teeth brush her skin, now and then, and she coos to him and strokes his dark head.
She cradles the baby in her arms and walks out of the room. The sheet trails her like the train of a gown, like a white, white wake.
AFTERWORD
‘Lakeside’ was written during the week Kelly Link tutored at Clarion South 2007. Somewhere along the way, amidst Brisbane’s heat, humidity, and nights full to bursting with three whole hours of sleep, I found a lake in my mind, and fished something out.
— Christopher Green
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TROLLS’ NIGHT OUT
JENNY BLACKFORD
JENNY BLACKFORD’S university degree was in Classics (Greek and Latin), but an advertisement in the paper led to an unexpected twenty year career in large computer networks. Since she gave up her day job, Jenny has been writing fantasy, science fiction, and ghost stories. A story set in ancient Delphi appeared in the Hadley Rille anthology Ruins Terra in 2007, and various stories for children have been published in the NSW School Magazine and other markets. As well, a YA story has appeared in Paul Collins’ anthology Trust Me!
During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a principal in the small press publisher Ebony Books and a member of the Editorial Collective of Australian Science Fiction Review: Second Series, an award-winning journal. She was fantasy reviewer for The Age in the early 1990s, and one of the judges for the Fantasy division of the Aurealis Awards in 1998 and 1999. In 2001, she co-edited (with Russell Blackford) Foundation 78, the special Australian issue.
She also writes and reviews for the Australian science magazine Cosmos, the ecological magazine 6, and the New York Review of Science Fiction.
In this sweet, stinging, and funny predatory tale, Blackford shows us what other, er, people do on their night out…
There was a lot of shrieking and laughing going on at the table behind ours.
‘Girls’ night out,’ I said, and took a good swig of my glass of red.
David barked out, ‘What did you say, woman?’
I shouted this time, hoping to penetrate the restaurant sound barrier: ‘Girls’ night out.’
David snorted. With his impressive snout, that was something.
‘Trolls’ night out, more like it,’ he said. He bared his long white canines in a toothy grin.
The comment was typical of the David I’d known and hated, before I ran away to Scandinavia. Unfortunately, it’s not considered good form to scream at one’s ex in a good Melbourne restaurant. Instead, I cut off a piece of my salmon cutlet and stuck it in my mouth, fast. The aroma of David’s steak was tormenting me.
‘That’s not very nice,’ I said, at last, when I could speak without screaming at him. ‘Even for an old wolf like you.’
‘So what?’ he said. ‘I’m not a very nice person.’
I swallowed my list of pent-up grievances, and sighed. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you were going to become a warmer and nicer person.’
David sneered. His dark unibrow made the expression even nastier. ‘Maybe you agreed that I was going to be warmer and nicer. I don’t remember any such agreement. This would have been before you so heartlessly left me and went jaunting off to Sweden?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Heartlessly. Unaccountably. No good reason at all.’ Ha! After all the fights, he knew my reasons well enough. I drank half a glass of red wine in one gulp. At least it was a sturdy South Australian shiraz, not a watery pinot noir.
Without conscious warning, the hairs on the back of my neck lifted, and I could feel my cheek muscles trying to bare my teeth in a snarl.
David patted my hand and said, ‘Settle down, sweetie. It’s okay — it’s just two Samoyeds and an Alsatian on the footpath. Nothing to get agitated about. They haven’t been washed for a month, by the smell of them.’
He was handling his involuntary physical reactions far better than I was, the bastard. Showing no signs of stress, he said, ‘So, this agreement that I was going to become a warmer and nicer person. Was I listening at the time?’ Another fistful of chips disappeared into his maw. The coarse dark hair on the back of his arms poked irrepressibly out of the wrists of his da
rk grey shirt. Not so long ago, that sight could have made me feel all tender and squishy inside.
‘Well, you seemed to be listening,’ I said. ‘You were nodding now and then, saying “yes”, and occasionally “no”, making eye contact, all that. You mean you can do that and not listen?’ It had been during the last of our many rapprochements. I’d been feeling strangely emotional, sentimental, hopeful. Hormonal.
He grinned irritatingly. ‘Of course, my dear. It’s just a simple, autonomous subroutine. My mind could have been anywhere. Contemplating dinner, thinking about my tax bill, plotting my next play.’
‘You travesty of an ex-lover,’ I said. ‘So much for the meeting of minds.’ Clearly, our relationship had been more about the meeting of bodies.
‘Let that be a lesson to you of the perfidy of man,’ he said. He looked at me shrewdly as he cut a bleeding piece from the almost-raw centre of his enormous steak.
‘You want this, don’t you?’ he said, waving it under my nose.
I’d cheerfully have killed for it. ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m a vegetarian now. I told you that when I rang.’ I put a huge piece of salmon into my mouth and chewed like mad. It didn’t help much. Eventually, I swallowed. ‘A lot can happen in a year.’
He looked down his long snout at me. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Talia, but salmon don’t grow on trees.’
It was time to change the subject. ‘That girls’ night out behind me —’
‘Trolls’,’ he said firmly.
My blood was starting to boil, despite the cooling influence of the fish. ‘You really are such a bastard, David. You’re always so judgmental about people — especially women —’
He smirked. ‘Well, turn around and take a look at them.’
‘Don’t be rude. They’re just a pack of high-spirited young girls.’ But I’d seen them as they’d walked in past our table, in their ones and twos; they were more than just young girls. I was only arguing with him from long habit.