Hope Shines

by Brotherhood of St Laurence

  Above the blackened remains of her home, the sunken tin roof looks like it is about to collapse, but it doesn’t matter anymore. She parks her cart, scoffs the peaches and downs the juice in two gulps. She needs energy for the last stretch.

  She doesn’t bother going inside, but walks around to the back of the house. In the distance, she can see the ocean shimmering in the brutal sunlight.

  Her contraption stands proud beneath a tarp. She pulls away the cover and shakes off the dust. From her cart, she extracts the two bits of bamboo. They are just the right length to finish the bracing for the wings. She lashes them to the existing framework with rope she’s plaited from grass. She tears the curtain down the middle and attaches it to her frame to make the wings. Something pings against her leg. Normally she’d get her sieve contraption and catch it, but not this time.

  She hasn’t foraged in days. The locusts are restless. They have been building up. Thousands are jumping across the plains. This would be the ideal time to harvest as they gather together. She’d be able to trade for anything she wanted. But not this time. She knows this species. The lack of food, the huge numbers. The serotonin has accumulated. They have changed in the last few days – they have grown larger; become darker; changed from grasshoppers to locusts. They are finally ready to fly. And they always know. They always know which way to go to find food. They gather. They all turn towards the ocean.

  She slips into the sling she’s made from old shirts and holds onto the steering bar of her glider. As the locusts take to the air, she runs along the parched earth, making her glider roll on its old trolley wheels. Faster and faster. Her glider takes her weight as it soars over open ocean. Her locusts turn and she turns her glider too, travelling over the drowned cityscape. She veers right, following her locust plague over oceans savage and vast and eventually to a hopeful dot in the distance. A dot so green it hurts her eyes.

  About the author

  Melanie Crouch is a South Australian writer with a love of speculative fiction. She lives on bushland property in a straw bale house with her husband and a menagerie of animals.

  Melanie has completed an Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing at the Adelaide College for the Arts, and was recently accepted as an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Over seventy of her short stories and poems have been published in magazines and anthologies both in Australia and overseas.

  As part of this year’s Hope Prize, Melanie has been awarded one of two Women’s Writing Career Development Scholarships.

  More information on her work and upcoming publications can be found on her Twitter page, @FlexiRees, or at www.flexirees.wordpress.com.

  Run

  Vicky Daddo

  Highly Commended

  She whispers to me when I run. I hear her still in the shush of the trees. The way her breath skimmed her teeth when she was tired. But she still showed up. Stood at the far fence, and in some lights she looked like a wallaby, waiting for her mob. In others, she was colourful with her caps and hats or scarves and those dumb crocheted cardis that Nan knitted. In the darkest of evenings, when the sun was an angry burst on the horizon, she was backlit and ethereal, a ghostly beauty. Timeless.

  Dad is cooking chops. The smoke from the old pan is wafting up and he hasn’t turned on the extractor. It smells bitter. He doesn’t acknowledge me. Just stares out the window to the brown beyond. I chop the carrot and broccoli. Wonder if there’s any of those packets of pasta that you make with milk. I want something smooth and soft to eat.

  ‘Got training tomorrow,’ I say, reaching down to take two plates from the cupboard. Sometimes I catch myself taking three. Sometimes I’ve set the table for three, full on with plates and knives and forks and glasses. Once, early on, Dad yelled at me for that. But then he did it a few weeks after and he crumpled down on the chair and cried. I felt guilty washing away his tears from that plate. I wondered if there was a way to bottle them to remind me that it hurts him, too.

  ‘You said you were giving it away.’ The pan handle shakes in his grip. The chops are dried out. The windows are fogged up. I notice the cobweb across the top of the blind and think about how I’ll have to get the duster out now that the days are longer and drier.

  I don’t answer, but I strain the veggies and dole them out. The pasta has congealed in the pan but I take the cheese from the fridge and grate a pile onto a plate. The heat separates the oil in the cheddar and there’s an orange puddle on top of the noodles. I watch it swirl and think about that patchwork cardi and how it stood out against the silvered fence post the day I broke my own record.

  She was yelling, her high-pitched voice pinballing on the wild wind that gusted across the paddocks. Dust jigged around and my lungs were tight with the hot burn of that last leg. My thighs worked hard and when she held up the stopwatch I knew I could do it.

  ‘Run, Jess. Run harder.’ The orange and yellow and cream woolly squares were sewn together with chunky navy thread, scarring the garment with a pastiche of stitches.

  I ran harder and I beat my personal best. Mum pressed me to her and I can still remember the scratchy texture of the stitches tickling my arms and the smell of that musky perfume she wore.

  I wash up. I dust. I hear Dad calling for the dogs. He bangs their bowls together. I hear them scamper across the yard, panting. The old one hobbles and his rhythm is particular. He misses Mum. It’s in his sad eyes, his thickened girth, his night-time crying. Dad spends hours on the deck. He whittles sticks with his Leatherman. He chips off the wood and sometimes the largest splinters strike the flyscreen on the kitchen door. It’s like when the moths are out at the end of summer, banging against the windows in their futile bid to get to the light. There are shavings outside every morning, piled up against the leg of his chair. Sawdust. Dust. Everything just disintegrates in the end. You can be whole and upright and strong like the branches Dad chooses and then someone or something can cut you down or scrape at you until you just disappear.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I say. ‘Got to be up early for my warm up. Josh’s brother is picking me up. I’ll walk to school from the track.’

  His knife stills. The old dog struggles to his feet, huffing. I rub behind his ears. ‘You won’t be able to do this next year, Jess.’

  ‘We can make it work.’

  He looks up at me. ‘That’s what your mum used to say.’

  ‘I know.’

  I run to the end of the property where paddocks rise to meet the bitumen. The road here cuts across the earth to take people away. To the nearest town, to the doctors, to the base hospital, to the edge of despair and to the grey tatters of a life cut short. I turn my ankles and clasp my hands above my head, loosening my shoulders. I feel solid here, in the spot that marks so many journeys. Mum used to wave goodbye whenever we crossed the threshold from land to road, roll down the window and sing out, ‘Byeeeee’. Back then, the old dog wasn’t so old and he would run apace to keep up with the Ute. The young pup whipped around him, barking at the tyres. Dad would just keep his eyes on the road and drive.

  The running track is falling apart and the local shire has been promising funds for years to patch it up. The club holds working bees and fundraisers but Dad doesn’t always want to take me. It’s a fair drive. And the farm needs patching up, too. Josh’s brother comes this way for work so he doesn’t mind. I train hard. The sun is low in the sky, a soft heat for the time of year. I can make regionals. I know it. Coach knows it, too. The only barrier is Dad. I drop, pressing my knee to the track. I look down at the space between my hands. The gap is so narrow. I look at the track ahead, delineated by fading white lines. Run between the lines. Run to the finish line. It’s a sprint. It’s short. Life is short. But it shouldn’t be a sprint. Mum deserved the gentle stroll.

  A fox has ripped through the sheep paddocks and the bloodied wreckage of a dozen lambs are scattered across the grass. Dad stands with his hands on his hips, his Akubra tipped against the glare overhead. It�
��s a bright winter day and I bag up the bodies. This has happened countless times. Mum once told him to get some alpacas as herd guards but he laughed and said they were too poufy for paddocks.

  ‘They’re just sheep with long necks, Mal,’ she said, digging him with an elbow.

  ‘They spit, Suse.’

  ‘So do you and I still love you.’

  He grinned and it was one of those whole-face smiles that took years off him.

  Sometimes it’s easy to remember that smile. But other times it’s like I only see his bare-boned face, drawn and desiccated. His happiness got whittled away along with hope.

  There’s a long dry spell in spring. It hasn’t rained for months. The sheep look like scrawny cotton reels on legs, insignificant against the wide brown earth. The Van der Veldens next door have no feed for their cattle. Dad and I bundle up a few of our reserve bales on the tractor and take them round. George Van der Velden is tall, proud. But when he nods his head at Dad’s delivery it’s like he shrinks a foot and becomes this little man.

  ‘You have enough for your cows, Mal?’

  ‘We did all right last year.’

  ‘We need a gift from heaven, am I right?’ Mr Van der Velden says.

  Dad tips his hat up and looks at the hard blue above us. ‘Something like that.’

  The regionals are a week away. Coach says I’ve got the times to threaten the top three. Those kids at the bigger schools are always qualifying and he says it’ll be awesome if I got in. It’s funny when he says awesome. It’s a word he got from Mum. This gnarly old barrel-chested Vietnam vet telling me something’s awesome is such a strange joy. I can hear her say it too, her voice transposed over his, whispering to me as I’m falling asleep, shouting it to me when I beat my personal bests, jibing Dad because he hates that word, singing it like a footy chant to rev me up in the grey mornings when running is just too hard.

  I practise hard, run hard. It’s good to get the adrenaline flowing. Having a deadline, qualifying at the regionals, spurs me on. I picture myself crossing the finish line first. Imagine Mum standing there, wearing her bright clothes, her headscarves with their garish patterns, shouting for me to get there. I let her voice fill my lungs with air, power my legs until I’m ducking across the line and Coach is clicking the stopwatch and pumping his fists. I bend over, rest my hands on my knees, draw in deep breaths, steady myself. Mum is all around, she is with me whether I fail or succeed. When I run, I know this. When I run, I know she will always be with me.

  The fire starts up the back, deep in the valley, and climbs on the strength of the gusting wind, guzzling the gums and brush with its gnashing, snapping jaws. The CFA sends out tankers from around the district – but by the time most of them are galvanised into action, the air is black and white ashes spread their message across paddocks and lawns and rooftops. I watch the smoke unfurl, hear the raucous panic of the cockies, watch as wallabies bound across the horizon. Dad is on the roof, hosing it down. He’s got his phone tucked under his ear, but the bush sends its own warnings and when day turns to night, I know it’s going to be bad. He manages to push the herd to the lower end of the property, where the dam is larger. I fill wheelie bins with water, crank up the generator, grab a photo of Mum and tuck it in my pocket.

  The power goes off at 6pm, just as the wind change hits and turns the long, thin line of fury into a front that’s kilometres wide. Dad yells at me over the howling and we head for the bathroom at the back of the house. We wet towels and hop in the bath. The roar of fire is like nothing I’ve ever heard: a thousand dragon calls, a freight train crashing, a jet liner plunging into a mountainside. The fire jumps over the house, perhaps hindered by the wet roof tiles, or perhaps it’s just a random act of dumb luck.

  I shiver in its wake and sit for a moment, unable to process the speed with which the fire came and went. One of the hay sheds has gone, but it was empty so its steel frame is gnarled and twisted, and Mum’s old paddock bomb, a wreck anyway, is reduced to tyres and a bloom of molten metal. The old swing set is half-collapsed and the trampoline is upended and smouldering. Otherwise, we’ve done all right. We won’t know for days about the rest of the properties. Dad tries the neighbours, but the lines are down, and we spend hours putting out spot fires through the gardens and paddocks.

  We haven’t eaten all day and when I finally head to the kitchen to make sandwiches I realise how hungry I am. Dad swigs his tea but doesn’t speak. When he’s gone I pull out the photo of Mum and hold it between my thumb and finger, wishing she was there to talk to but glad she didn’t have to feel that moment of terror when the fire was on us and life or death hung on an arbitrary wind gust.

  Cancer doesn’t give you just a moment to decide. It’s arbitrary, but it’s a marathon to the end. Now that I understand both pathways – the long and arduous route where you fight and fight but you still lose, or the instant, indiscriminate destruction where life is snuffed out with no argument – I have no preference. I just know that it’s what you do in the lead up to those moments that counts.

  I don’t get to regionals. Coach understands – his brother lost his house, the district is paralysed and athletics is a luxury. Dad works hard mending fences, driving bales around to farms, delivering food parcels, coordinating the relief effort with the shire workers. I help where I can. And I hear her in the whistling of the wind through the leaves.

  ‘Keep running, Jess. Your time will come.’

  But I can’t leave now.

  To run is to be free. Running doesn’t mean never going back. It means getting stronger, it means having the muscles to return. If I ever do get to leave, I know I can come back. Mum will always be here. Always in the wind and the trees and the grass and the shadows, in the corners of the rooms. She left her scarves and her cardis and her spirit here and the fire let it be. Sometimes, when I’m running, I think about what would have happened if the flames had destroyed the house. Would she be less real? Would she still be in the ruins? I fly across the grass and I hear her, and I know that if I just keep running, she’ll always be nearby.

  About the author

  Vicky Daddo writes short fiction and novels. Her short stories have appeared in The Big Issue Fiction Special, Award-Winning Australian Writing, Women’s Day, That’s Life and other anthologies. She has both won and placed in many competitions, including the Scarlet Stilettos and the FAW National Literary Awards. In 2014, her manuscript Que Sera Sera was selected for the QWC Hachette Manuscript Development Program.

  Vicky is a Writers Victoria Regional Ambassador for Gippsland and is President of the Gippsland Writers Group. She teaches Introduction to Fiction at the Warragul Community House, and also programs the Latrobe City Literary Festival.

  She is married to John and has four children. The family lives on a small acreage in the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland, Victoria, with their alpacas, two dogs and a cat.

  Radiance

  Elisa Hall

  Highly Commended

  Marnie lived in a share house because that’s what young people did to be in the city. She had answered an ad at the art school: cheap room for rent, walking distance to the college, big backyard at 57 Steele Street. It was an old house with a brass doorstep and an outside toilet, made small under the boughs of a large paperbark tree. There were six people in this house, four in rooms and two in the front hallway with the front door blocked off, but no one ever came to that door anyway. She had the smallest room on the east side nearest the kitchen. She was seventeen, shy and intense in equal measure, a small changeling in her family of ordinary folk.

  It started in the bush. Always alone, she drew in the dirt with sticks and made patterns with leaves. Scribbly gums made her heart beat with joy as she ran her hands along their runes. She couldn’t remember a time of her hands being still – she was always drawing, scribbling, arranging. She used clay and stones, burnt sticks, twigs and leaves. She lay under the trees looking up, watching the trails of the insects on the branches creating moving patterns, w
atching the clouds hurrying along to where she wanted to go.

  Her family had tea at 5pm, and after that her mother did the ironing from the baskets she took in from the neighbours. Tea was simple: they had chickens, which meant there were eggs, and vegetables they had grown or swapped. She was in charge of looking after the vegetable patch, and was proud of her neat rows of lettuces and trellises of beans. Sometimes, for a treat, they would roast up a rooster after her mother cut its head off with the axe. Marnie read to her little sister and helped her with homework, then washed up and made her mother a cup of tea every night. It was just the three of them and the dog, and she had never remembered anything different. Her mother was bitter – about struggling for money, about being single, about having children to care for which meant she couldn’t have her freedom. Her mother showed no interest in Marnie’s pictures, and resentment seeped out of her as she ironed.

  Marnie didn’t miss them much except for the dog, which had slept curled into itself on the floor on top of her discarded clothes. What she did miss was the quiet and the outside space. She had quit school and run away to the city, choked by her yearning for independence and her desire to feel into the crevices of her being. Her mother had been furious with her. She needed the help at home and with the sister. The outside world pressed in and everything felt too big for the small house and the silent lives within.

  The new household took her in in a careless kind of way. She walked to the art school every day along an industrial road and got catcalled and kerb-crawled consistently, even at eight in the morning. She cut off her dark hair with the kitchen scissors and bought a big black coat from the army disposals, wrapping herself in its darkness, hoping only to disappear. Her days were her delight, black etching ink seeping into the creases in her hands. She loved the acid baths in the stinky little room with the fan. Her etchings were all dark, velvety, scratchy wild things, surprising the teachers and students alike, who marvelled that the silent girl created them. The other students were too much, too loud and too flamboyant, and she shied from them like a fearful horse. Most of them still lived at home with money doled out and cars gifted to them on eighteenth birthdays. One of them lived in a house with a ballroom. The ones like her got a paltry student allowance. It was less than the dole but to her it was a goldmine. It meant she could saturate herself in the riches of plates and stones rolled with ink. It covered the rent and pitching in for basic food, but nothing more. They all had to find ways to make money.