Something Special, Something Rare

by Black Inc.

  He stopped on the boardwalk and waited for them to catch up. The three of them stood still for a moment, soaked and helpless, unable to hear each other speak against the intensity of the rainstorm. Liam’s face was pale, his teeth chattering, and Graham thought that Jenny might even be crying.

  He realised then that he still had the bluetooth around his ear. As he pulled it off and shoved it into his pocket, he knew it was ruined. He might as well have had a shower fully clothed. He wiped his hands across his face to try and see more clearly. You couldn’t bring cars into the wetlands; he would just have to guide them back to the Homemaker Centre at the pace they could manage. They moved slowly on, their arms wrapped around their own bodies, Graham in front, then Liam, then Jenny.

  Finally, they reached the sealed path. The rain pulled back as quickly as it had started and then fell again in random, singular drops. It became strangely quiet, as if the heavens were recoiling from their own outburst. Everything around them softly ticked, like a resting engine when the ignition is cut. Graham slowed his step so the others could catch up again and he reached for Jenny’s hand. With a gait so lopsided, it was hard to hold her hand while they walked and he rarely did. He reached over and put his other hand on Liam’s shivering shoulder. His thumb nestled in the groove above Liam’s collarbone, and with his other hand wrapped around Jenny’s, he could feel the racing pulses of both his wife and his son. They are alive and real, he thought. His family is alive and real. They are flesh and bone, sinew and fat. And Graham understood then that being alive meant that one day they would die, like everything else, like all these living things here. He felt a tickle in his throat and behind his eyes, and a great burden of love for them in his chest. But Jenny was right. They should have made Sophie come too. Graham realised that he missed her. He really missed her. He’d been missing her for a couple of years. He squeezed Jenny’s hand and firmed his grip on Liam’s shoulder. He wished he could think of something to say, words to explain how he really felt about his family. He wanted to put this feeling into words.

  What he did know was this: Liam’s school could get stuffed. Troy Campbell could get stuffed. The whole world could go and get stuffed. Jenny was right. They needed to do more things as a family.

  They continued walking the last stretch of the path, almost back to the Homemaker Centre. All Graham could hear now was the rasping breathlessness of his wife and son beside him, and the odd chirp of all those unknown birds as they ventured timidly back out into the open.

  PUBLICATION DETAILS

  REBEKAH CLARKSON’S ‘Something Special, Something Rare’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2014.

  TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT’S ‘J’aime Rose’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2013 and Review of Australian Fiction, vol. 6, no. 1.

  GILLIAN ESSEX’S ‘One of the Girls’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2010.

  DELIA FALCONER’S ‘The Intimacy of the Table’ appeared in Storykeepers (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001), The Best Australian Stories 2002, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Other Stories (Picador, 2006) and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection.

  KATE GRENVILLE’S ‘Bushfire’ appeared in the Bulletin, vol. 118, no. 6255, and The Best Australian Stories 2001.

  SONYA HARTNETT’S ‘Any Dog’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2003 and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection.

  KAREN HITCHCOCK’S ‘Forging Friendship’ appeared in Overland, no. 200, and The Best Australian Stories 2011.

  CATE KENNEDY’S ‘White Spirit’ appeared in the Big Issue and The Best Australian Stories 2009.

  ANNA KRIEN’S ‘Flicking the Flint’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2014.

  ISABELLE LI’S ‘A Chinese Affair’ appeared in What You Do and Don’t Want: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2007 and The Best Australian Stories 2007.

  JOAN LONDON’S ‘The New Dark Age’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2002, The New Dark Age (Picador, 2004) and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection.

  FIONA MCFARLANE’S ‘The Movie People’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2010.

  GILLIAN MEARS’S ‘La Moustiquaire’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2001 and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection. It became ‘Le Moustiquaire’ in her collection A Map of the Gardens (Picador, 2002).

  FAVEL PARRETT’S ‘Lebanon’ appeared in Island, no. 133, and The Best Australian Stories 2013.

  ALICE PUNG’S ‘Letter to A’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2007.

  PENNI RUSSON’S ‘All That We Know of Dreaming’ appeared in the Big Issue and The Best Australian Stories 2009.

  MANDY SAYER’S ‘The Meaning of Life’ appeared in Heat 19: Trappers Way (Giramondo, 2009), The Best Australian Stories 2009 and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection.

  BRENDA WALKER’S ‘That Vain Word No’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 66–7, no. 4–1, New Australian Stories (Scribe, 2009) and The Best Australian Stories 2009.

  TARA JUNE WINCH’S ‘Cloud Busting’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2005 and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection.

  CHARLOTTE WOOD’S ‘Honeymoon’ appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2005.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  REBEKAH CLARKSON’S short stories have been recognised in major awards, shortlists and independent publications in Australia and overseas. She was runner-up in the 2013 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Adelaide, where she also teaches.

  TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT is a fiction writer and critic. Her books include the novels Bombara, What Falls Away and Safety, and she is working on a collection of short stories. She lectures in creative writing in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.

  GILLIAN ESSEX has won several awards for her short stories. Her poetry has appeared in 21D and the Friendly Street Poets anthology. Her non-fiction articles have featured in the Age, Green Magazine, the Weekly Review and on Radio National. She teaches creative writing and is also a singer-songwriter.

  DELIA FALCONERS is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories and the memoir Sydney. Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely anthologised, including in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.

  KATE GRENVILLE is the author of many award-winning novels, including The Secret River (Christina Stead Prize), The Idea of Perfection (Orange Prize) and Lilian’s Story (Australian/Vogel Literary Award). The Secret River was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Man Booker.

  SONYA HARTNETT’S award-winning novels include Of a Boy (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Age Book of the Year), Thursday’s Child (Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize) and Surrender (Victorian Premier’s Literary Award). In 2008 she became the first Australian recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

  KAREN HITCHCOCK is the author of the award-winning short-story collection Little White Slips and Dear Life: On caring for the elderly (Quarterly Essay 57) and a regular contributor to the Monthly. She is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a large city public hospital, and has a PhD in English and creative writing.

  CATE KENNEDY is the author of the short-story collections Dark Roots and Like a House on Fire, and the novel The World Beneath, as well as several poetry collections and a travel memoir. Her work has appeared in many publications and anthologies, including the Harvard Review and the New Yorker. She edited The Best Australian Stories 2010 and 2011, and Australian Love Stories.

  ANNA KRIEN is the author of Night Games: Sex, power and sport, which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, Into the Woods: The battle for Tasmania’s forests and Us and Them: On the importance of animals (Quarterly Essay 45). Anna’s work has been published in the Monthly, the Age, the Big Issue, The Best Australian Essays, Griffith
REVIEW, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging, Colors, Frankie and Dazed & Confused.

  ISABELLE LI’S work has appeared in Southerly, Sleepers Almanac, UTS Writers’ Anthology, New Australian Stories, The Trouble with Flying and Cha. Her script ‘Mooncake and Crab’ was made into a short film, which premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Isabelle has translated a collection of poems, Almost Everything I Know, into Chinese. She is completing a Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney.

  JOAN LONDON is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships and Letter to Constantine (published together as The New Dark Age). Her first novel, Gilgamesh, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, won the Age Fiction Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the Dublin Impac Award. Her second, The Good Parents, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. In 2014 she published The Golden Age.

  FIONA MCFARLANE has been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Southerly and the New Yorker. The Night Guest, her debut novel, won the Voss Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2014.

  GILLIAN MEARS’S most recent novel, Foal’s Bread, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2012. Her fable The Cat with the Coloured Tail will be published by Walker Books in September 2015.

  FAVEL PARRETT’s first novel, Past the Shallows, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. She was awarded the Antarctic Arts Fellowship, allowing her to travel to Antarctica to complete research for her next novel, When the Night Comes.

  ALICE PUNG is the author of Unpolished Gem, Her Father’s Daughter and Laurinda, and the editor of the anthology Growing Up Asian in Australia. Alice’s work has appeared in the Monthly, Good Weekend, the Age and Meanjin.

  PENNI RUSSON writes, edits and teaches creative writing. She is the author of several novels for young adults, including the Undine trilogy and Only Ever Always, which won the Ethel Turner Prize, the Aurealis Award (Young Adult) and the WA Premier’s Literary Award (Young Adult).

  MANDY SAYER has published twelve books of non-fiction and fiction. Her awards include the Australian/Vogel Award (for Mood Indigo), the National Biography Award (Dreamtime Alice), the Age Non-fiction Book of the Year (Velocity) and the Davitt Award for Young Adult Fiction (The Night has a Thousand Eyes). ‘The Meaning of Life’ is excerpted from her forthcoming novel Rules for Camping.

  BRENDA WALKER has written four novels, including The Wing of the Night, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and won the Nita B. Kibble Award in 2006 and the Asher Award in 2007. She is Winthrop Professor in English and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia.

  TARA JUNE WINCH is the author of award-winning novel Swallow the Air. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including McSweeney’s and Vogue. Her body of work was awarded the Inernational Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award.

  CHARLOTTE WOOD is the author of four acclaimed novels: Animal People, The Children, The Submerged Cathedral and Pieces of a Girl, and the non-fiction collection of writings on the meaning of cooking, Love & Hunger. Her fifth novel will be published in late 2015.