Anisha Bhaduri

July 29, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anisha Bhaduri is a writer from Kolkata, who lives and works in Hong Kong. A Konrad Adenauer Fellow, her journalism has been published across Asia. She has won a British Council prize, has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for Best of the Net 2023 for her first short story published in North America and for Best of the Net 2024 for her first work published in the UK. Her literary fiction appeared in She Writes, Random House India. Her debut crime novella Murders in Kolkata 26 was published by Juggernaut Books. Bhaduri’s short stories have appeared or forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, Tampa Review, Harpur Palate, Touchstone Literary Magazine, The Hopper, Sonder Magazine, the other side of hope and Kitaab.

Tokelau

On the third day of the Lunar New Year, I noticed Mr Cheong’s eyes were blue. He was sitting with his back to the wall, on a hard chair, his elbows on a collapsible plank of laminated wood that hemmed in a little square patch of the ground floor landing. The glare from the strip of neon overhead lent a hardness to his face. Then the main door to our building opened, and closed, and the lemony light that it brought in and also expelled, cut the neon’s hardness like lightning. And, in that quiet island of colors nudging winter smells, Mr Cheong’s irises had acquired an unmistakable blue.

“Kung he fat Choy!” my son greeted him. 

Ah Cheong grinned, his dentures shone. A muscle quivered on his chin as he wished my son well too. 

“He speaks Chinese?” 

“Reads and writes, too,” I said proudly, ruffling my son’s hair. Drawing an impossible breath that mothers do when it is suggested that their children have it in them to test limits. 

“My grandchildren speak French, only French, they read everything in French. Write in French,” Ah Cheong said deliberately, taking time, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. 

“Here, in Hong Kong?” my son piped up. 

“Oh no, they are in Quebec. They all speak French there, nothing but French.” 

“But Quebec’s in Canada, am I right, Mamma?” 

Drawing another deep breath, I nodded. “Certainly.” 

“Do you speak French, Mr Cheong,” I wanted to know. 

“Oh no, not at all. Maybe I’ll learn when I visit them.” 

The lift arrived and we said our goodbyes.
When we had moved in to this building on a Saturday in May, Mr Cheong was on duty. We had asked our landlady to make introductions. 

“Are you from India?” he wanted to know in fluent English. 

My husband and I exchanged a glance, a fleeting but concrete swell of relief of foreigners at a linguistic loss. 

We nodded happily. 

“From which part?” 

“Calcutta.” 

“Calcutta? You are from Calcutta? I’ve been to Calcutta so many times.” 

I felt a contraction in my chest, a sudden stillness that comes when faced with the very unexpected. Only then I was properly aware of Mr Cheong. In his sky blue uniform shirt, sitting in the corner of a slight elevation from which stairs rose, an overhead fan stirring his white hair, his knuckles swollen and a smile that hid his eyes, almost. 

I regarded this elderly Hongkonger and wondered what had taken him to Calcutta, again and again. What had made this man from an orderly metropolis disregard my city’s sagging heat and general filth? Did he see what I could clearly, that Hong Kong shared Calcutta’s template of conurbation – an unmistakable colonial legacy? 

“I’ve been to Chennai too,” Mr Cheong declared. 

“How so?” now my husband was curious too. 

“I’ve worked on ships. The charters took me around the world. Calcutta, Chennai lovely cities. Great people. Liked it every time.”
There was a bland sincerity that told us Mr Cheong saw no need for curated emphasis. We became friends. 

Mr Cheong was on duty only on Saturdays when he spelled our usual caretaker, also a septuagenarian. Waiting for the lift, I would chat sometimes. He would tell me about his usual place of work, closer home. How he would be rotated sometimes among the buildings that his company was contracted to manage. 

“Good the government now allows more elderly people to work as janitors, security guards and caretakers.” 

I would agree, remembering the piece of news clearly. How reading it had instantly brought to mind Mr Cheong. 

“Hong Kong is so expensive,” he would say, bringing his hands together and rubbing the wrists. “The weather is not good for old people.” 

That January, we had a cold spell. The winds brought tears and humidity hurt our bones. Rooms were fetid with colds on the mend and damp woolens bit into the body like snakes. One Saturday, he waved me over. 

“I read Hong Kong had snow last Sunday. Is it true?” 

“You tell me, Mr Cheong, this is your city,” I smiled, taking a while.  “It was probably frost, nothing more. But it was certainly the coldest day in decades.” 

“What do you think it would happen if it snowed here in Hong Kong?” 

“You tell me, Mr Cheong.”

 “If it snowed and there were icecaps on the sea, and if it all turned white, maybe I could take a picture and send it to my grandchildren.” 

“To Quebec?” 

“Yes, you remembered?” the blue in eyes glittered. 

“But don’t they have enough snow there?” 

“They do, they do, they have plenty. But if I had proof it snowed here in Hong Kong too, maybe they would visit.” 

The lift keened in the pocket of silence. 

I was suddenly seized by an image of Cindy Harlacher from years ago, in blue linen shorts and a dirty white vest, standing still in the shaded part of a terrace on the top floor of a newspaper office in Calcutta I had briefly worked in. In the newsroom, the air-conditioner was spreading a lukewarm apology and it was growing stuffier. I had to step out. 

Cindy’s face was red, her alabaster arms and legs shiny with sweat and mottling slowly. Her blue eyes glittered in disbelief as heat rose from the cracked, weathered cement. It was 42ְ degrees Celsius in the sun. The slight Manitoban with a reddish mop of hair and a shy smile had told us quietly, just the day before, with the contrition of someone who was ready to be doubted in a land where the sun shone year around, that winters in her native Canada could push temperatures down to -30 degrees Celsius, even lower. We had smiled politely. In the height of an Indian summer, when an unrelenting yellow haze settled on the plains and dust spiralled like a madman’s rant, a terrain completely frozen over seemed as improbable as unseasonal rains carried over by damp winds from the Bay of Bengal.   

On the terrace, as someone had called out her name, Cindy had turned around; a sweating bottle of water pressed to the side of her throat. The smile that rippled on her lips arrived moments late, and I recognized the relief of an itinerant. She pressed the cold bottle into the hands of the colleague who had turned up by her side, chatting easily, her manner animated as if she was already crossing into the realm of endless snow and silent nights, the end of her working holiday just a matter of time now.  

I hadn’t thought of Cindy Harlacher since moving to Hong Kong.    

Sometimes, on my way out on errands on Saturdays, I would notice Mr Cheong’s lunch sitting inside a white polythene packet – standard restaurant issue. Two flat, rectangular polystyrene boxes stacked one upon another, nudged by a lidded plastic beaker and disposable chopsticks, the shapes distinct through their polythene shroud; a disposable meal that leaves no aftertaste. 

I saw men and women, even schoolchildren hurrying home at the end of the day, similar polythene bags dangling from their hands. But rarely at lunchtime. At that time of the day, fellow-feeling is greater. Co-workers tend to eat together, creating instant, ersatz families – a curious bond that is defined by the hour of the day and not the people who may have shaped it. 

“Don’t you cook for Mrs Cheong?” I pointed at the takeaway, arms laden with shopping. 

“When’s the time?” 

“Why not? You get off at six, you can shop on your way home. Cook dinner. Don’t know how you can stand takeaway every day,” I rolled my eyes. 

“Well, this is Hong Kong.”
So it is, one restaurant for every 600 people it seemed. He surprised me a few weeks later. “What happened to char siu?” I exclaimed, pointing to a bagel sitting inside a deli carton, ringed by little containers of different hue, rocket leaves peeping out like shy elves. 

“That’s your lunch, Mr Cheong?” 

The smile melted his eyes, and Mr Cheong nodded shyly. “Wanted to try one. The cream cheese tastes good.” 

“But is it filling?” I said, moving my hands vaguely to indicate his usual fare.

 “I once had cheese in Holland, brought some home too. Excellent. But it spoiled in the heat here, the children were very disappointed,” Mr Cheong said with his eyes on a paper napkin he was using to wipe off cream cheese from his chin. 

“You children like cheese?” 

“Oh, yes, they do. But my grandchildren love bagels with cheese. They really do.” 

Between noon and one, the front door of the building would remain shut. With Mr Cheong taking a break, it was up to residents to buzz visitors in. Sometimes, a deliveryman would be at a loss, lingering apologetically. Mr Cheong would materialise, asking his business. And if satisfied, would admit him. 

I asked him once, how did he know it was all right to let in a stranger. He said he didn’t, couldn’t possibly and that it was a gamble, anyway; one just hoped the bad guys would keep away. I laughed with him till nudged by an image of my little son playing on the foyer carpet, all by himself, in the shadow of our closed main door. 

The fragility of it all was splinter sharp and I admonished the elderly caretaker, “You must take it seriously, Mr Cheong. You must.” 

Neel had just started in a new kindergarten and wasn’t settling well. He would cling to me when I went to drop him off and I could hear him wailing long after the class nanny had collected him. There were a few, not unexpected debacles but Ms Lee, his playgroup teacher, was patient. 

She told me it was remarkable that Neel insisted on starting conversations despite having little Chinese and what was even more remarkable that his little classmates seemed willing to absorb familiar words and phrases in foreign tones. Sometimes, Ms Lee said, a few words would even be exchanged. Was that progress? “Oh yes, sure la,” giggled Ms Lee. 

That day, with my son’s little fingers clutching mine, as we walked back home, I asked Neel to point out in Chinese the things that he found interesting. He shook his head, lifting his arms to show he wanted to be carried. 

“What? A five year old? Shame…” I intoned as I picked him up, looked into his dark eyes, smelled the fragrance that flowed only from him and breathed in deeply. 

I regarded our building from the opposite pavement, waiting for the lights to change. The wind was rising and carried the smell of dried seafood along the tramlines. Chinese sausages hung from the rafters and dried fish wrapped in white paper showed their tinsel tails in the shops that lined the road. There was a stink that told you the sea was not far. 

Our 14-storey building with peeling paint and protruding washing rails wouldn’t have been out of place in my native Calcutta where dilapidated block of flats stood confidently in serpentine lanes, braving open sewers and the stench of rubbish. During rains, each building was like an island with water standing irresolute around them. 

There, tenants still paid pre-War rent agreed to by grandfathers long dead and landlords did little or nothing to maintain property they had inherited on paper. It was a tyranny of thrift practised generation after generation, refined, brandished – sometimes in courts – till smart developers took over, if they could. Urban renewal in that city was at the discretion of market forces and musclemen, not municipal officials. No surprise then this ungentrified strip of Hong Kong suited us. 

A visitor from the fancier Mid-levels had once raised an eyebrow as a stevedore stripped down to waist had emerged from the lift pushing crates of dried sea cucumber from the warehouse a floor up. 

“No cargo entrance?” 

“Same lift for all.” 

“Oh, I see,” she said as she lifted the pleats of her saree and wrapped the end around herself tightly. 

Mr Cheong hadn’t impressed her either. 

“You know, people in suits take care of our block of flats,” she said eventually, munching on onion fritters I had prepared Calcutta style, served with piping hot milk tea. 

Our regular watchman, Mr Wong, was an acerbic individual with a long face who relished quarrels with elderly matrons who seemed to be in a majority in our building. 

“That’s why the building is still standing,” one of them once declared angrily in lisping English. “Left to our children, the flats would have been sold off ages ago and we would be forced to live in nursing homes and shoe-box public housing units. I tell them, space matters, shininess doesn’t. But who listens? You tell me, you have a small child, isn’t it better to have more space and pay low rent?” 

I couldn’t disagree but then, she was probably a rent-controlled tenant, with her spacious unit needing repairs and her kitchen and plumbing not upgraded since the 70s. Mr Cheong, who was listening, told us he lived in a public housing estate after languishing on the waitlist for five years and that he paid subsidised rent. 

The graying lady with the fruit shop at the foot of our building probably paid controlled rent too. She regularly harangued buyers, had a reputation for overcharging and selling spotty fruits going soft. But a corner shop had its advantages so she seemed to get by. Sometimes, she would spare a smile which faded the instant she spotted her husband across the street smoking midmorning, without a care. He was the neighbourhood thinker. 

A middle-aged man, dressed in blue jeans complemented alternately by plaid shirts and golf uppers, tails tucked neatly, the creases on his jeans faithfully meeting the laces of his pristine sports shoes; an inevitable cigarette dangling from his fingers, burning bright with every drag. 

He liked to smoke in the company of Mr Cheong when the old man was on duty, both inhaling seriously, unsmiling, their eyes fixed on matters of interest they would shortly begin to comment on. 

Sometimes, I was tempted to gift them packs of cigarettes for the sheer pleasure of watching the two blow perfect, leisurely rings on a Monday morning. But Mr Cheong only worked Saturdays. 

When humidity climbed with the cloying heat, Mr Wong would undo all buttons of his uniform shirt and with fists bunched into pant pockets would walk up and down the lobby with his singlet showing, his sinewy arms curving out of rolled sleeves. He couldn’t stand the thinker and was rumoured to share uncharitable observations with the harmless man’s wife within his earshot. 

Mr Choeng’s mariner mien was manifest in the neatness of his uniform and his blue shirt would always remain buttoned.

“How old are you Mr Cheong?” 

“Guess,” he said and left it at that. 

Sometimes, I thought a Chinese saint would look just like him – a head full of white hair and a face so serene it seemed the sea had sucked all tempest out of him. 

One Saturday, as he handed me a letter from my parents, he wanted to know how frequently I wrote to them or called. He already knew we flew to Calcutta twice a year to visit family. 

“I write to my grandparents in Bangla,” my son said as he snatched the letter from my hands and started to tear the flap open. 

“It’s for him,” I told Mr Cheong. 

“Stamps, stamps!” Neel screamed, jumping up and down in the lobby. 

“Stickers too,” he squealed as treasures tumbled out. He held the letter close to his eyes, inhaling deeply. 

“Nani, Nani,” he pointed at the handwriting of my mother. 

“Dadu, Dadu,” he rubbed a finger on my father’s. 

“He knows?” 

“Oh yes, Mr Cheong,” I laughed, enjoying his incredulity. “He can read and write in Bangla – the language we speak.” 

Mr Cheong leaned back a little and we said our goodbyes.
The Chinese New Year came and went in January and the customary red envelope we had prepared with Mr Cheong’s year-end bonus inside stayed in my handbag. 

“Have you seen Mr Cheong lately?” I asked my husband on a Saturday as I was cleaning out my tote. 

“Not for sometime.” 

“I still have his lai see here,” I dug out the small red envelope and waved it. 

“Still not back from his New Year break?” 

“Let me find out,” I said, pulling on a coat. 

Mr Cheong’s replacement smiled a lot. He had little English. 

“Mr Cheong?” I pointed at the seat the elderly man had just vacated and moved my right hand in a gesture that splayed the fingers and brought the palm upwards. 

“Is… he… still… on… leave?” I took my time with each word. 

“Canada. He go Canada.” 

“To visit?” 

“He go, he go,” the smiling caretaker said. The aged lift screeched behind me as it winched itself up. 

As I walked up the stairs, I thought of Mr Cheong. I saw him in my mind hemmed in by snow in distant Quebec, his grandchildren calling out to him in French, nothing but French; his saint’s face crumbling as the language he spoke to his children was meaningless to theirs. 

And, I thought how he must be missing the sea, its saltiness. 

That evening, I looked up from the newspaper I was reading and called to my son to come to me. Then, with his little hands in mine, I told him about the tiny island nation of Tokelau, a dot in the blue of the Pacific, whose population of 1,403 can only be reached by sea.

Wajeehah Aayeshah

May 30, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Wajeehah Aayeshah is a Muslim, female, brown, academic geek who loves collecting stories. She is interested in combining history, personal experiences, and contemporary socio-cultural context to create empathetic narratives.  She is a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, designing curriculum and investigating kindness in higher education. She likes writing short stories, creative essays, bad poetry, and developing games with a dark sense of humour.

The girl who sat in a corner and sneezed

‘Buzz, buzz.’ I wake up due to the buzzing of my phone. It’s a text from Fatemah. She wants to know if I am still up for her Garden sculpture exhibition at the Heide.

‘It’s not even 7.00 Fati.’ I groan. 

Ignoring her message, I try to get back to sleep. It is useless. My mind knows I am up and wants me to clear up the nasal passage. I try to find FES saline nasal spray. It ought to be somewhere on my bed. I can’t find it. Grumbling, I get out of my bed and go to lounge to grab another bottle from meds drawer. I have only done one nostril when my phone starts to ring. Keeping the spray in my hand, I rush to receive it. It’s my Kiwi partner calling from a different time-zone. He wants to know how bad the bleeding was. 

‘What bleeding?’ I ask in a groggy voice. 

Turns out that at some point at night, I had sent him a picture of my nosebleed. I have no memory of this action.  Putting him on speaker phone, I check my WhatsApp. The picture shows a considerably higher amount of blood on three tissue papers. I try to look for the tissues for physical evidence. I find two with dried blood on them. Half listening to his concerned voice, I try to locate the third one. 

‘Yeowwww!’ I find the FES nasal spray. It is right under my foot.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Riz can hear the pain in my voice. 

‘Is your head hurting? Should I call someone to get you an ambulance?’ he is frantic.   

‘No, no. I just stepped on something.’ Trying to calm him down, I pick up the bottle.

‘What about the nosebleed? How bad is it?’ 

‘It’s okay. Relax. I don’t even remember sending you this bloody picture.’ I take a pause to congratulate myself on my brilliant display of wit.

‘Did you see what I just did there? Bloody picture…’ I put the spray in my other nostril.

‘Zoya, would you stop being carefree about it?’  I can hear a distinct ‘beep beep’ tone of someone else calling me.

‘It’s just a nosebleed. Due to dry nose.’ 

‘Just go see your GP. Please. Just do it,’ he is literally pleading.

‘OK. OK. I will.’ 

The next 5 minutes are spent me convincing him I will get an appointment, while blowing my nose. He is still unconvinced, but we end the conversation and hang up. 

‘Buzz buzz’. It’s Fatemah again. 

‘Zoya, pick up.’ 

I call her back. She wants to make slight modification to our plans. She has added my name to the list of volunteers who would give visitors a tour of the exhibition.  I am to reach the Heide Museum of Modern Art a couple of hours earlier to get a debrief. I am the ‘bestest’ person in the whole world. I say ‘OK’.  Hanging up on her, I blow on my nose again. There is blood.

—

The doctor wants me to get another biopsy done. I tell her I had one done 3 months ago. This isn’t my regular doctor. After an hour of heavy nosebleed, I have Uber-ed into an emergency ward. My neck has started to cramp. I have been stretching it for too long now, holding a tissue trying to stop the blood flow.  The doctor has already ordered an emergency MRI. I had an MRI 5 months ago. When I tell her this, she looks at me in a way only emergency doctors look at you. It is a mixture of exasperated, kind, bored, and overworked look. She asks the name of my GP and tells the nurse to get my records transferred as a priority. She doesn’t use these words. I have been into hospitals far too many times now to decode them. 

‘Buzz buzz.’ It’s Fatemah. She wants to know where I am. All of sudden, I feel very tired and groggy. I tell her I am at Royal Melbourne Hospital emergency ward due to heavy nosebleed. I am fine and very sorry about not being at her exhibition. The nurse’s shadow is looming over me now. She wants to take me to MRI room. I tell Fatemeh this, put my phone on silent, chuck it in my bag, not wanting to deal with more phone calls, and follow the nurse. 

She gives me a gown to change and tells me to lie down on the table. I have to remove my ring. It gets chucked in my bag as well. I think of Riz. He doesn’t know where I am, but I am too sleepy now to tell him. I doze off before the MRI starts. 

—

I wake up in a room filled in a dim white light. I try to recall what it is called. It is the colour of my dad’s beard. Is Dad’s beard a good name for a colour? It can be a good name for a race horse. But I am against racing.  Why would I think of a race horse name?  I can’t move my body or my mouth. I try really hard. I can barely keep my eyes open. Is this how race horses feel when they are drugged? Someone is next to me. They are saying something, but I don’t understand. I doze off again.

—

I wake up again. This time, I can move my head. Fatemah is sitting on a chair next to me. Her head is covered, and she is reading a book. No, I correct myself. She is reciting a holy book. She senses my movement, looks up and smiles, finishing the line she was reading, closes the book. She says something to me, but I can’t hear her. I tell her that. But I can’t hear myself. I say it out loud. And again, and again. Nothing. It is super quiet. I can’t hear the ambience; light, air-conditioning unit, building, anything. My heart is starting to race. I am getting palpitations. I can feel my throat aching. I know I am yelling but I can’t hear it. A nurse rushes in. Fatemah is trying to calm me down. But she is making me more anxious. The nurse picks up a note pad, writes something on it with big letters shoves it into my face.

                                          TEMPORARY HEARING LOSS. 

I stop yelling. My throat a bit hoarse now. I look at the words for a few moments. Then look at the nurse. He is smiling at me. I look at the notepad again and look at Fatemah. She is staring at me with a smile as well, but her eyes have an alarmed look. As if, she is worried I might scream again. I point at ‘TEMPORARY’ and look at the nurse. He nods quickly, assuredly. He is very good looking. I feel my body slumping down. Something is trickling down my right cheek. I touch it. It’s a tear, I have been crying. Fatemah holds my right arm and shoulder tenderly, then gives me a soft, lop-sided hug. I hold on to her right arm, still unsure why I am crying. 

—

‘So avoid wool, carpet and plants as much as possible, FES spray needs to be taken before the NASONEX one. Clean your nose after FES and keep the NASONEX liquid inside, every morning and at night. You can use FES during the day as well.’ It is the same emergency doctor. 

All of my tests are clear. Just as before. There is nothing wrong with me. I only have allergies. I am told I can do Allergen immunotherapy or desensitisation test if I like. It is a bit expensive, but it lasts for 10 years. What about after 10 years? Will it get worse? I want to know. The doctor isn’t sure. It can’t really be predicted. One of those things. 

I have had my share of one of those things. I leave the hospital with Fatemah, thanking Medicare and BUPA for covering my bills. I can no longer visit or be forcibly recruited as a volunteer for her Sculpture Gardens exhibition. Too soon to be around so many plants. She waves it off as if it isn’t a big deal. I know it is. She has been designing her exhibition for the past two years. She drops me home, fills my fridge with stuff that I might need for the next ten days and lets me be. 

I make myself some tea, pick up a book and sit in my reading nook but fall asleep. 

 ‘Buzz buzz.’ It’s Riz. His plane has landed. He’ll be at the house in a couple of hours. I read the message, smile, and blow my nose. There is blood. 

Ana Duffy

April 25, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ana Duffy is an Argentinean-born writer. She teaches in Communications and Creating Writing units at QUT; her work has been published in Island, Coffin Bell, Swamp and has been shortlisted in QWC Flash Fiction Competition and long-listed for Fish Anthology (Ireland). Ana holds a PhD in the field of Latin American literature from UQ and, in between teaching semesters, she is working on a novel.

Language spoken at home: Spanish

A mess of application forms are scattered on Josefina’s table. I see one with a green stain that will need to be reprinted.

If not for the rain, it would be a more pleasant day.

If not for the day being a Sunday, it would be a less gloomy day.

I pour a bit of water that is no longer hot into the mate that no longer tastes of anything. The quintessence of Argentinean infusions disgracefully vandalised somewhere 12000 km away from home. I sip. It is washed-out and cold: lavado and frío, as expected. I was never pedantic enough about the whole ritual: the slow pouring of the water on the Yerba Mate, methodically set in bevel into the gourd; the right temperature of the water, never boiling hot, unless you can live with the unsupervised sticks of Yerba Mate floating as in a shipwreck. As for the mate-drinking ritual, I know of my bad habits:  a widely accepted legacy from the uni years, when the same mate could go on for as far as to a full chapter (with inevitable green stains), or as far as to the first half of a deconstructed two-hour lecture; when the end of a full mate round was determined by our concentration span, and not water temperature or taste.

I sip again. Josefina jumps at the sucking sound. I pass it back to her.

She mumbles something and keeps on filling in the application form.

‘No me va a gustar’, Josefina says, and rolls her eyes when she sees the green stain at the centre of page 2.

(I agree that she will not like this job either. But she will push on, and keep doing the work that architects from UQ or Melbourne uni will take credit for, while her own UBA degree coils in a black tube along with five years of study and green mate stains in a stationary vortex of defeats).

I put the kettle on and refill the mate: an old gourd with Josefina’s initials carved clumsily with a pocketknife. I have the same gourd. We bought it together at the markets, in San Telmo, at a time when having it meant nothing of what it now means: a whole ocean, and decades away from there and then. The gourd feels so loaded now, so heavy with every past tense plastered to it. 

Josefina fills in her third application. Nothing out of the ordinary. A name that anyone could say, and a surname that no one could: Rodriguez. An un-rollable ‘r’. An ‘o’ that was not meant to be turned onto an /oʊ/ and an impossible ‘d’, if you try to sound it with your tongue behind the teeth, instead of squeezed between them. The carnage done to the poor ‘gue’ sound is by now such a given, that she’s stopped trying to fix it altogether.

She says she would, if she could, add subtitles to everything around her. Subtitles or a voiceover. And everyone would be happy. The reader and the writer. The speaker and the listener. Maybe, she says, a full-time hologram: a three-dimensional translation under everything said, written and done. And everyone would be happy.

Spanish. Brief description: 27 grafemas. 24 fonemas. If you care to listen closely, it sounds as if you could dance it. Closed embrace. Walk. Figure. At the right time of the day (that can be any time of the day), it tastes like asado, slow-cooked, on an open fire, medium-rare. The signature sound of the “y” and the “ll”, the same fonema: as if we were pissing on the language to own it, to make it Argentinean, to sound it our way.

Spanish. Ancestral tongue, all flat-packed and put away during business hours.

Josefina asks me if I would like to hear about her dream last night.  

I say yes, because no one would want to leave an untold dream festering under Josefina’s vindictive skin. Or maybe because it’s a rainy Sunday, and rainy Sundays make me mellow and a little conforming.

She tells me about an eulogy she was giving in Argentina. An eulogy for a friend. En Puerto Blanco. In a white church. I think of Nuestra Señora de Lourdes because that’s the only church I remember. In any case, you can whitewash the walls of a church that lives, roughly sketched, in your memory. 

(No one really does eulogies in Argentina, Josefina, I know you know it too). No eulogies: we rather cry ourselves dry and exchange hugs and kisses and flowers and tissues and donate to Pétalos de Vida if playing the local philanthropist is your thing. It almost feels as if when dead people die over there, they are a tad dead-er than here in Australia, or we are a tad sad-er because we are all a tad inoculated with tango lyrics, and we are able to sip mate for hours on end in a profoundly depressing, ceremonial silence. Endemic things that give us a kind of death that is thicker, more substantial.

It’s her turn with the mate now and her hands are soft around the gourd. Her fingernails are splitting under a badly applied, inexcusable blue nail polish. She purses her lips and takes a long sip, “el agua de Brisbane no es lo mismo” she says frowning. I do not feel the difference; hot water tastes the same here than in Puerto Blanco, but agreeing with her, today, takes no effort. I nod.

And then she goes on; she describes how she was reading the whole eulogy in English, ‘in fucking English’ (she has been using fucking lately, and it pains me to see that it’s starting to sound almost natural); she says that yes, that she is sure that it was her speaking, when I ask; by now her voice has that pitch voices have when the images run too fast and the narration starts to feel out of sync. A vortex of dead and alive, known, and unknown, friends and foes, in a white church, listening to Josefina’s eulogy.

I can picture the general confusion of a non-English-speaking congregation when Josefina goes “we are gathered here today to bid farewell (a bit overdone, I’d say) to the amazing (she cannot remember who had died) whose goodness was beyond measure, a beacon of light (really? Is that what you said? Did you ChatGPT it, or what?). 

She tells me how she was hyperventilating when the alarm went off, and when she sat on her bed, she was toda chivada: all drenched in sweat. She brushes her fingers up and down her body, with a contorted face.  Now she’s all big-eyed as she brings the kettle back.

The dream story goes on and on and on. About how she had tried hard to stop and go back to Spanish. But again, and again she would revert to English, as if her own words were gone, as if they were trapped in the coffin with the beacon of light. And then, as you would expect of her, she Googled. She told me all about an article from the BBC on multilingual dreams, and how hers could have been a ‘linguistic anxiety dream’. She is sipping her mate slowly, holding on to it, watching the hollow gourd as if trying to find deep answers by dowsing in the yerba. 

“Porque es como vivir con un pie en cada cachete del culo” Josefina says, the metaphor of an expat life, quite un-Borgesian indeed, of living as if she were standing on a giant butt: one foot on each butt cheek, makes me chuckle. The living not here, not there, and with a looming fear of falling into the crack. Her metaphor lingers heavily between us.

(At times, I know how much I hate speaking. When my LOTE language cannot be tamed, nor hidden. When it bobs up, unrequested as a Spanish-sounding-English. Because it is always there. At home. In songs I sing along. On a t-shirt. In books and books and books I cannot share. In instructions for the blue Anilina Colibri that was never used to dye a tattered shirt into its senses. Over the years I have fought it; pushed it in, scratched it out, painted it over, flattened it down. Nothing worked. Languages can be some stubborn creatures.)

‘Y si un día lo perdemos del todo?’ she says, half a spewed thought, and half a rhetorical question.

And the truth is that I do not know what would happen if suddenly, we could not find ourselves in Spanish anymore. If one day we wake up and we see pieces of rolled ‘Rs’ spread out like starfishes on the ground; or if we see an ñ (please, pronounce eh-nyeh, like you do for Enya, the Irish singer) clearly determined to get rid of its wormy hat in a way never seen before in anything with no arms, only because it wants to fit in. What if, the mourners in a sad, Argentinean funeral start to sway uncomfortably because of an English eulogy without subtitles, and we feel nothing at all.

(Is anyone able to un-dream a dream, Josefina? Can you at least, edit an alien eulogy out of it?) 

The mate is cold now. And maybe tasteless, again. The biggest and lightest Yerba Mate sticks are floating up and I am butchering the most basic mate etiquette turning the bombilla around and around, stirring thoughts and sticks together like a narcotic cocktail.

‘Tengo Pilates a las 5’, Josefina checks her phone. Broken screen; battered cover; battery almost flat. She walks while slipping into a pair of black leggings. Her Pilates mat is next to the door (it lives there, but she forgets it again and again). 

“Te llevo?” she asks me as she frantically searches for her car keys in one of the many miscellaneous, poli-rubro, drawers.

I say no, that I rather walk. I always rather do.

I hum a Seru Giran song that lands me on the 80s (our 80s) and I forget Josefina’s dream. No one died recently, at least no one that I know of. No one I care for. Or maybe someone did die. And maybe in Argentina, they do eulogies now. I don’t know. I will Google it when I get home. 

Not a clue how to say eulogy in Spanish, though. 

A pity, really.

Sevana Ohandjanian

February 27, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Sevana Ohandjanian is a writer, translator and film programmer of Armenian descent, living and writing on Wallumedegal land. Her work can be found in Meanjin, Chogwa, The Suburban Review, Shabby Doll House, The Wrong Quarterly, Tincture, SBS and more. Her unpublished manuscript Black Grass was shortlisted for the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Prize. Find her online @ichbinsev.

DRIP

The drip started when I came back. Or maybe it had always been there and I just hadn’t seen it. Felt it. You’re always leaking, faulty, dispensing parts of yourself unknowingly. The drip begins and you simply continue. There’s no before or after timestamp. A faucet with the slightest leak, a midnight droplet that gathers on the showerhead and plops down with its weight, a drop in the ocean. But the ocean is a sponge and it soaks everything in. My drip is expelled from what it feeds on.

I wanted her to have become ugly. But she looks the same. Maybe I can’t see her any other way. Standing at the back of an Armenian Saturday school classroom, I watch the children clamouring to get her attention. Miss Lily! Miss Lily! Every child is a remodelling of prepubescent me, enamoured.

When Lily sees me, blood flushes my face, my breath caught. Caught like a 10-year-old being told for the first time, “You’re my best friend”; caught like a girl found out. She smiles, approaches.

She stands beside me during the principal’s announcements. Leans towards me to speak softly.

“It’s been a long time, Eva. Are you married yet?”

“No? I’m sorry. What?”

“I’m engaged.”

“Congratulations?”

“Thanks.” Her bunny rabbit teeth briefly appear when she smiles at me. “I haven’t seen you around here in a long time.”

“I was living in London for a while.”

“I know, I saw the photos on Insta. How come you’re here though? I didn’t think you kept in touch with anyone from school.”

“I’m just doing a favour for one of mum’s friends. They said they needed another teacher.”

“Yeah, Ani had to quit. Her baby’s due in a couple of months.”

“Sure. Right. Then I’m here to replace Ani.”

“Are you back in the suburbs then? With your mum?”

“Yeah. You know, trying to take care of her.”

“And you’re not engaged?”

“No.”

“In a relationship?”

“Nope.”

“Dating any boys?”

“That’s also a no.”

I had arrived airtight, the excommunicated package returned to sender, not a leak to stain the exterior of me. But questions kick my sides into dents. I’m devoid of meaning in this place. Yet I can’t resist the urge to ask.

“So, who are you marrying?”

“You know him actually! He was a year above us–”

The principal calls to me: “Eva, we’re ready to start, let me show you where your classroom is.”

I’m tasked with overlooking the work of three pre-teen girls in the back of a classroom, minimal responsibility while an experienced teacher manages older students emanating static exam preparation energy. The room coils with summer heat, brick-encased sweat, blinding yellow sun glow. The girls kick their feet and rapid-fire questions. We’ve never seen you before Miss, where are you from Miss, how come we don’t know you Miss, did you come to this school too when you were learning Armenian, Miss?

The heat brings the warm sweat drip. Frizzed ends of hair damp at the nape, elbow crease droplet a wet snake. Soles melting into asphalt, fire hits hot, until it swallows feet and turns into statue grey stone. I’m pebble-footed, fog-headed, standing in front of these children, teaching them words I’d forgotten.

Afterwards in the parking lot, my car idles as I avoid the touch of molten metal fixtures against bare flesh. An atomic sizzle between my fingertips and steering wheel, my skin branding and moulding itself to machine. Gathering itself back together, water to jelly to rock. Baby hairs dance around in air conditioning vent choreography, and I see her, striding gracefully towards an electric blue car. Nissan Skyline, Fast & The Furious fantasy for the high school dream boys with fade cuts and bubbling aggression.

The car pulls out, drives by me.

—

There’s nothing to do here besides walk through grass smoked into hay, and stare into people’s backyards. Jumping back when a dog comes barking up a driveway, its snout snarling through the gate. Hearing trucks barrelling down the main highway. Driving for the sake of hearing an album through car speakers, to give it motion. Other peoples’ houses and time-haunted shops, the only places to go.

Western Sydney suburban ennui cushioning my red skin, my squinting eyes, dripping into my vision when shut, all squiggly flashing lines. I can’t leave it. I’ve taken it with me to every city I’ve lived in. An empty street is home even if it’s hollow.

The shopping village that still holds the dirty yellow glow of too-low lighting and too-dark corners. Butcher meat stink pulses, bakery loaves expand in their racks, the newsagency ceiling fan whirrs dust over untouched magazine covers.

In the unnaturally bright grocers, I’m slumped over a shopping trolley in the produce section, eyeing off the fruit, willing light to disperse me amongst the blood red apples.

A hand on my shoulder brings me back, collecting and rearranging me. Of course she’s here. Actualised from my mind where she’s found residence since I saw her in the classroom a week ago.

Carrying a shopping basket like a handbag in the crook of her elbow, she is what activewear ads convince me I could be: slimmer, fitter, happier, wearing leggings to the shops after the gym session. She exudes a glow that highlights my dullness.

She’s talking to me but I’m still the pillow crease from the morning, blue light shining in my face. My finger surfing over my phone screen at speed with a tender touch, cautious voyeurism. She is amalgamating before my eyes: crucifixes, gold and silver, shiny helium anniversary balloons, lace and chiffon. His pink nose filtered to snowy white, tight shining faces dripped together and melted, pushed in so close as if to pull apart would tear the conjoined sinew.

She’s inviting me to a party in her backyard. As I agree, I’m thinking of excuses not to go.

—

I have been here before or I haven’t. Down cul de sacs lined with palms, into townhouse driveways signposted with identical beige postboxes. Two years of sucking in smog and suffocating sound is compacted into the back of my mind, an already othered memory.

The backyard grips me by the neck, thrusts me face-first into nostalgia. Plastic white chair-seated men, hookah pipe passes, women in constant motion to buckle a trestle table with food.

This is every backyard from high school house parties when we’d stand around, flip phones grasped like prizes, being fed alcohol by parents who didn’t care for local laws. The so-small world looking remarkably wide in a fenced-in, half-concrete yard.

He’s not beside Lily, he’s amongst the white chair men. Legs spread, possessive eyes, shisha in hand. Déjà vu so strong I’m convinced he hasn’t moved an inch since 2004. His nose the same ruddy pink as that hot humid day, when I had squirted my water bottle at him while we waited to climb into the school bus. The second last day of school. Giggling to coax male fury off the ledge when he said, “I’ll get you for that”.

My skin pink the next day walking down the highway home, water dripping from hair and hem timed with shivers. Truck drivers honking at my now transparent cotton sports uniform. My ears echoing the smack of litre on litre pouring over my head. Ice cold shivers from frozen water bottles, then lukewarm waterfalls from orange juice-stained canisters. His deep laugh slicing through the cascade.

Now, a bead of sweat tickles down my back. I plant myself in a corner, let my sandaled feet brush grass. Sinking myself in deep, deep enough to become a nutrient for the soil, enough that I might fertilise and dissolve. As I watch him watch her, I know when she is watching me.

There’s small talk and a barbecue, drinks and cigarettes, heels poking holes into garden grass. My eye can’t leave the white chair corner, even while three ex-classmates come to interrogate me. They’re trying to strike gossip gold to take home tonight. Lily joins and stands across from me, that beaming warmth enveloping.

“Having fun?” she interrupts the conversation to ask me.

“Yeah, thanks for inviting me”.

“Of course. You should come to the wedding too, maybe you can meet a nice Armenian guy, make your mum proud.”
She laughs, a delicate thing. How is it so intimate yet the furthest thing from close. A reminder that the space is so vast between us, it is practically solid.

I move closer to Lily as someone takes a drum out, slapping a rhythm that draws people into hand-held circles. An unrushed dance, hands grasped with strangers, two steps forward and one back. A movement that should be in my feet already, a genetic predetermination. She’s the centre point of it, like a fountain timed to music, her hair splaying out, her body spinning, her arms elegantly shaping in the air. When our eyes meet briefly, my smile is second nature. I feel stripped down, heart stuck in throat. Melted as if to expose the centre of myself.

She is the person they sing about in the song, and I’m the person who dances to it.

—

Heat has a personality of its own. It demands. Craves the attention of all your senses. Heat sticks in your throat, it inflates humid into the lungs, it sinks into pores and forces your insides out.

I stand under the lazy ceiling fan in the classroom, in another lesson that has blurred into the weeks preceding it. Saturday mornings of burning sunlight and irritable children desperate to be elsewhere. Lily in the morning gathering, hearing her voice ring out an octave higher than the students during the national anthem. Afternoons of parking lot small talk, disappearing into cars and separate worlds.

The fabric on my skin is becoming one with me. Cotton tendrils sneak into microscopic pores, latching onto cells and choke-holding them until shirt is body and body is shirt. I want to flatpack myself. Ship myself back across oceans, until all that falls on me are snowflakes turning water, until my hair is drenched and my breath is tangible fog.

Once the bell has rung, I turn off the lights and stand in empty midday darkness. The stale air, the flecks of dust, the beige brownness of it all. I was never afforded silence in this space. Even now, I can feel the squeeze of time against me. Siren songing me into the past, into a safety that regresses and reidentifies.

Lily is sitting on a bench outside the school gates when I approach her. A backpack sat at her feet, she types speedily on her phone and doesn’t look up until I’m sat beside her.

“Did you have a good day today?” she asks, looking up from her phone, eyes directly on me.

“Same same really. I don’t know if I’m actually helping these kids learn anything.”

“I’m sure you are. They’re good kids.”

“Do you need a ride?”

“No, Sako will be here soon. We’re going to get a late lunch.”

The sun is bearing down on my unprotected face, marking its spot red. The drip is puddling around me, forming a lake on which I’m drifting. When was the last time we sat so close.

Back when she was ankle socks and me regular-length folded and pushed down. Back of the school bus giggles, we’d gotten lucky that the older kids let us sit there. We felt older than our 12 years with the privilege of hiding in the corner, huddled close. Grease of morning margarine sandwiches still on our lips, discarded foil crunching beneath our feet. She told me her underwear was black. Everything I wore underneath was a virginal white. Show don’t tell, we lifted skirts, reached across and under as if to confirm that the differences between us ended at the colour of our underwear. A Year 10 girl turned around to look at us and we knew somehow this wasn’t allowed.

We’re in a cone of cool silence now. The heat is away, the drip has stopped. Like an ice cube down the back of the shirt, there is something kinetic here. Something that wants to burst out of my pores and slide over the seat. Where are the lines drawn on our bodies now, that didn’t exist then.

“Do you remember those bus rides we’d have to take here every day?” My voice is not my own. It’s liquid turned sound, moved its way from stomach to trachea and out.

“They took so long! How did we even do it. They were so boring.”

“I liked them.” Me and you. Shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, leg to leg, knee to knee. Gossip and giggles, a level playing field.

“Sako used to ride on that bus too, you know? He said he had a crush on me even back then”. Glimmering eyes, bunny teeth, the child peeking out of the adult. “But he never did anything about it.”

A car honks and the sun hits my eyes, firing down my face. She walks away, a gentle wave, a slide in and shut door.

I drip away in a sun melt. Until I can fall from the bench in droplets, slink my way down the gutter, foist myself into the drains. Let myself be carried to the dam, rushed alongside the drips of others, funnelled into drains mapping our suburban yellow underground. Until I slip down her tap, into her glass, and am entirely consumed.

A.D. John

January 26, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

A. D. John is a Wiradjuri writer residing on Gadigal land. He is a recipient of the 2023 Penguin Random House “Write It” Fellowship and the 2023 Writing NSW Diverse Writers Mentorship with World Fantasy Award finalist Eugen Bacon. He is currently studying for an MA in creative writing at the University of Sydney.

My Blood, Your Blood

Beyond the distant scrub on a strangled ridge, rhythmic rifle fire snapped and cracked – the powder smoke lifting like a delicate veil and dispersing as it cleared a dense regiment of parched saplings. Jimmy heaved the saddle onto the officer’s horse as another volley of shots pierced the damp evening air. He watched as the men around him flinched. 

“Jimmy,” a white officer called from his seat near a smouldering fire. “You see them boy?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Nah boss, can’t see a thing in this light.”

The officer scratched at his shabby beard, nodded and went back to stoking his piteous heap of embers. 

It was a lie. Jimmy could see the soldiers perfectly but was in no mood to play “spot the white fullah.” He secured the saddle and started with the bridling. 

They called him Jimmy Jackson. That’s how he introduced himself around camp and to his troop, even though he hated the name. It was a white fullah’s name, and it didn’t fit. Whenever he got the chance, he would introduce himself with the name his mother gave him – Mugi. The night before her son was born, she dreamed of birthing an eaglehawk and took that as a sign, dubbing him accordingly. Like the formidable raptor of his name’s sake, Mugi had the gift of sight. Put a jag-spear, knife, or rifle in his hand and he’d find his mark – sometimes from hundreds of metres away. 

His sight wasn’t limited to hunting. 

Mugi could cast visions of the abstract and slip into a place most other folk couldn’t. He’d soar above the hushed paddocks and the dense, suffocating scrub bordering their perimeters, rushing high over the magnificence of gumtrees. From up yonder, he took in everything. His mind’s eye traversed the expansive, sapphire skies tangled with wisps of cloud and surveyed the ravaged landscape below. 

He was all at once untethered up there in the eternal blue, but a slave chained mercilessly to the earth. Mugi would never mention the Dreaming to the white fullahs. He could only imagine they’d hack off his head or burn him alive. These men only believed in the Bible and that was that. 

Every so often, Lieutenant Wilson would be full of the spirit, rum or a mixture, and he’d limp up onto a discarded supply crate and begin spitting verses from his tattered St James Bible. There he’d be, unsteady in his boots, swaying and gabbling, fighting to keep his eyes from rolling back into his skull, as spittle caught in the nest of hair around his mouth. He’d speak of the end of days and Mugi wondered if those times had already come for his lot.

“Watcha doing?” A voice called from behind him.

Mugi turned to see Paul standing next to an open tent, its flaps whipping and snapping in the wind.

Paul was Koori as well, but no one knew his real name. He was tall, lanky yet strong. His skin stretched taut across his face and betrayed a menacing intent when he smiled – like he was now.

“I’m saddling the horse for the Lieutenant.”

“Which?” Paul’s eyes squinted into slits. He spat a peach seed that landed not far from Mugi’s boots.

“Daniels.”

“Uh huh, goin’ get it done then.” 

Paul buttoned his jacket and marched into the open tent. 

*

Mugi had noticed Paul striding through the camp from time to time as if he owned the place – like he was one of the white fullahs. This was his first interaction with the man, and it went as well as he imagined. The other Kooris nicknamed Paul “the White Dog”. Stories about him spread through the troop quicker than any cold or flu. These weren’t the type of tales Mugi would have recounted to his nephew back home. Rumours were that Paul played his part in desecrating a whole mob close by. The mob were charged with stealing cattle – so the settlers said. 

Other Kooris told Mugi that Paul had unsheathed his sabre during the battle and hacked at limbs and sheared off heads, all the while grinning that maniac grin of his. Mugi had seen enough bloodshed to last him an eternity. He could feel the malevolence of the mission weigh damp and heavy on his spirit. 

Mugi and his unit were sent to arrest the warrior Dawarang, whose mob was accused of disturbing the day-to-day lives of the nearby settlement. Mugi knew what it meant when white fullahs said “arrest.” Dawarang and his mob’s so-called crimes were miniscule to start with. Snatching a few chickens here, some pigs there. When cattle began to vanish, the settlers called in a local regiment of soldiers. 

Then there was the clash and the mob speared a few of the soldiers, one fatally. This was the story that the white fullahs drilled into their heads along the dusty trails all the way from Wagga Wagga. A young Koori officer named Dirru spread rumours that the real reason they (the white men) wanted Dawarang and his mob gone had less to do with protecting settlers and more to do with panning for gold. 

*

Mugi had spotted unfamiliar faces mulling around the creek beds with all sorts of equipment – he’d never had the chance to stand still long enough to gander at what they were up to. He also noticed they were clearing the forests slowly, two or three trees at a time. Mugi was beginning to agree with Dirru. There was foulness in the air, and he wanted to know which direction it was blowing in from. 

Mugi didn’t want to fight anymore. He wanted to go home. He wanted to hunt, cook damper and brew billy tea with his nephew. This wasn’t his nation. This was some other mob’s and now he was here trying to pry it away on behalf of these white bastards. 

He hated the way the white fullahs strode around like they had a right to it all – like they were some kind of gods. The only thing godlike about them was their opinion of themselves. He’d seen them bleed just like his mob. They weren’t anything ethereal. Just blood and bone like anyone else. Mugi wasn’t sure what he despised most: the white dog’s greed or their ignorance. They wanted to take, conquer and rape the land. Like it was a prize to be won. They had their heads so far up their own arses they didn’t realise how deluded they truly were. The land wouldn’t allow itself to be conquered. It wasn’t some fruit that sat heavy and plump on the lowest limbs of a tree. It was as harsh as it was beautiful, and it could show you who was really in charge if you were stupid enough to give it a good hard poke. 

Mugi closed his eyes so he could recalibrate. He was doing this for his sister and her boy back home.  That’s why he was here, no other reason he could think of. 

After they came in and stole the land from his people, they sold it back to them. They called it civilisation, but Mugi couldn’t find the civility in anything they were doing. The only white folk he gave a good goddamn about were the Irish. They were the only ones that seemed to cop it as sweet as the Kooris did. Poor bastards – all of them – poor, poor bastards. His lot and theirs. 

Mugi stood there with his eyes closed. The breeze lapped sweat from his cheeks. He imagined peeking through the kitchen window of his sister’s house. Her and the boy would be making damper or soda bread and laughing and gently elbowing each other. A fire blazed somewhere and it cast a long shadow that moved back and forth like someone pacing. He saw her, in his mind’s eye, the woman from the creek. 

Then he remembered he did have other reasons for being out here.

*

At night Mugi would sneak away. He crept past the tents and the officers snoring like smokestacks of old locomotives. He stayed low to the ground and waded through waist-high grass. He dove into the deep, cool shadows of the towering gum trees. He sprinted, hard, into the heart of the bush. His legs burning and his chest heaving until he reached the creek.

Until he reached her.

*

Mugi rounded a clump of tents. As he crept past the last one, he heard Captain Miller conversing with Lieutenant Daniels. The night had truly settled over the camp now and he crouched down behind a stack of logs, assured that the darkness would shroud him from the camp’s collection of paranoid eyes. 

“I don’t know how they know we’re coming. It’s like someone is giving us up.” Captain Miller’s voice was distinct—rough and deep like a rockslide in a quarry.

“Yes sir. It is quite perplexing,” Daniels said.

“I’m glad to hear you’re perplexed, Lieutenant. It shows you care. I was beginning to think you wanted to tend the land and raise cattle here.”
“Sir?”

“We should have dispatched this Dawarang fellow weeks ago and been back home with our wives and children. I was beginning to think you liked it out here so much, you wanted to stay.”

Mugi listened as Daniel’s cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, sir, I am not following.”

“If you truly hated the heat and the stink and the general sense of melancholy this place imposes on one, really felt it on a day-to-day basis, I’d have thought you’d do everything in your power to achieve your objective?”

“Yes, sir I –”

“I don’t want to hear any more words from you Daniels. I want action. You hear me? Action.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said again.

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags bloody full, sir. Just find the bastard, understood?”

There was the loud sharp click as Daniel’s snapped the heels of his boots together and then – silence.

Mugi waited in the shadows, waited for the tent flaps to open and the light to spill out and a dejected Daniels to slink past. A few seconds and nothing. Mugi froze as he heard hurrying boots clomping towards him. He turned to see Daniels striding for him, the weight of his footsteps kicking up plumes of dust. He must have exited Miller’s tent from the rear.

“You, there. What the hell are you up to?” 

Daniels stood over Mugi – a looming storm cloud.

Mugi began to gather logs from the pile and bundle them into his arms. He stood so he was face-to-face with the lieutenant.

“Sorry, sir, I’m just collecting wood for the fire.”
Daniels looked him up and down, his thin lips curling into a sneer.

“Well bloody hurry up then will you. Get back to your tent officer. I’m imposing a curfew tonight.”

Mugi saluted, almost dropping some of the logs. Daniels didn’t break eye contact until he’d stomped off behind one of the tents. 

*

Mugi knew that when a curfew was imposed, the white fullahs employed an extra level of vigilance. They’d have sentries strewn all around camp. Most officers who had the pleasure of a night shift were already exhausted and it was inevitable that they’d nod off – it was just a matter of time. Then there was the lackies, like Paul, who loved to catch a dissenter just so his white masters would pat his head and say “good boy.”

*

The horse Mugi had saddled earlier was still tied to the log where he’d left him. No officer had bothered to investigate why one of the horses wasn’t back in the stable with the rest, or why it was still wearing a saddle.

Mugi stalked his way toward the animal. The horse dug at the dirt with its hoof and whinnied when it saw him approach. 

“Shhh, ya dumb bugger,” Mugi said.

The horse flicked it’s head up and down and started pulling at the rope clipped to its bridal. Mugi reached the animal and stroked its mane, until it stopped jerking.

A calm fell over beast. 

Mugi spotted one of the sentries standing in the paddock only a few meters away. Yawning, the officer gazed up at the luminous stars that exploded across the canvas of the night sky.

Mugi searched around in the dust. He stood once he found it, a small round stone. He ran his fingers over the rock’s smooth edges and then lined up his target. 

 “Sorry, Brother,” he said. He wound back his arm and snapped it forward in a fast whip. 

The stone cut through the cool night air and struck the distracted sentry on the back of the skull. He didn’t want to cave the man’s head in – just blow out his lights. 

Mugi watched the man’s knees buckle and his whole body seemed to crumple in on itself and the tall grass swallowed him.

The sentry now asleep—probably the deepest he’d had since being deployed—Mugi didn’t waste any time. He knew there’d be more sentries milling about and didn’t think there’d be enough rocks for all of them. 

He led the horse through the long grass, making sure to crouch down and stay out of sight. He appreciated the symphony of insects. Crickets and frogs and the slow buzz of cicadas. He reached the middle of the clearing when a bat screeched and swooped overhead. 

Mugi felt his heart slide into his throat and stood frozen until he was able to regain his composure and push on. As he reached the deep, elongated shadows of the tree line, he glanced up at the sky. He could see why the sentry had been so enraptured. Thousands of jewels burned through the blackness, their sharp trails of light reaching down toward him. 

Mugi sunk into the darkness of the thick bushland, and he and the horse clambered over the dense scrub and fallen branches. They crept carefully through the brush until he could no longer smell the whispers of the campfire. He then mounted the horse and charged towards the creek.

He heard the creek before he saw it. The burbling of tannin-stained water trickling over the pock ridden stones that cut the bed of water in two. Mugi jumped from the horse and tied it to a nearby tree branch. He went on foot until he reached the creek bed, lit by the radiance of the full moon. 

She was there. 

The woman knelt by the bank, her hands cutting circles in the water, humming an unfamiliar tune. She turned ever so slowly, and her onyx eyes caught his in their rapture. Mugi felt his heart soar. No matter how many times he saw her, he swore she was the most beautiful vision. She was the ethereal shimmer of the moonlight.  Her name was Alinta, a name that meant fire or flame, he couldn’t remember which. The woman rose and floated towards him.

Mugi didn’t move – couldn’t move. 

Alinta threw her slender arms around his neck. Mugi felt the chill of her flesh, which soothed him. He slipped one arm around the small of her back and pulled her body tightly against his. Eyes shut, two white hot mouths heat seeking, soft wet lips melting together. It took everything Mugi had to breakaway away from the ache of her want.  

“We don’t have much time,” Mugi said. “Those dogs mean business this time. You must warn Dawarang. You must tell him to leave this place.”

Alinta smiled, and she let go of Mugi.

“He can’t leave this place. It’s not that easy. This place owns him. Needs him.”

“I’ve seen what these bastards are capable of. They’ll burn this place. They’ll take it all.” Mugi stood closer to Alinta and took a handful of her soft curls, spinning them around his fingers.

“It’s getting harder to leave,” he said. “What if I can’t tell you when they’re coming for yas?

Alinta swatted away his hand and smiled again. 

“Let them come, let them see what happens.”

There was a sharp crack as a heavy footstep splintered a branch, then a metallic click. Mugi and Alinta turned to see Paul, the White Dog, who had thumbed back the hammer of his rifle.

“We’re already ’ere.” He smiled that sadistic grin of his and levelled the weapon at Mugi’s chest and pulled the trigger. 

Mugi felt the impact snatch the breath from his lungs and the creeping heat of the wound slowly enveloped his entire body. He fell backwards onto the soft wet earth of the creek and tried to cough up the torrent of blood lurching through his windpipe. He waited to die, waited for Alinta to scream but instead thought he saw her laughing. 

“What are you smiling at ya daft bitch,” Paul said as he began to slide the rifle’s trigger back.

What happened next, Mugi thought was conjured from the dying embers of his imagination. 

The trees seemed to move. Not like they did in the wind. They appeared to take steps. Their roots tore free from the ground dredging up dirt and dead leaves. They circled Paul like a pack of ravenous dingos. Their skeletal branches tore at his clothes, grabbed at his arms and he dropped the rifle. 

He screamed as angry limbs hoisted him high into the air and, as if they’d practiced it a thousand times before, they wrenched his arms and legs from their sockets simultaneously. His body broke and shuddered violently. Paul’s eyes were wide and Mugi thought they’d burst but they grew dim and closed. His mouth went slack and hung open in a frozen twisted howl.

Alinta kneeled and ran her hand over Mugi’s chest, slick with blood. Her soft caress stole his mind from thoughts of death that swarmed like flies.

Those eyes locked onto his and she grinned.

“See,” she said. “Let them come.”

Natasha Rai

November 20, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Natasha Rai, an Indian-Australian woman, was born in India, migrating to Australia with her parents at the age of ten. She lived in the UK for several years as an adult, and the influence of three homes features in her writing. Her work has appeared in Australia’s first #MeToo anthology, Enough anthology about gender violence, Overland, Verity La, StylusLit, and New-York based Adelaide magazine. Her first novel, AN ONSLAUGHT OF LIGHT, longlisted for the 2017 Richell Prize, 2018 KYD Unpublished Manuscript award, and highly commended for the Ultimo Press/Westwords 2020 Prize, will be published by Pantera Press in 2025.

 
 
Pairing Off

The first pair are thongs. She almost misses them, running past the yellow house on the pretty street with overhanging trees. For a moment, she considers stopping, but doesn’t want to break the rhythm of her run. The image of the thongs glues itself onto her brain. She deliberately loops back on the way home. They’re still there, undisturbed.

‘They looked so weird. On the street, one in front of the other facing the house, as though the person wearing them evaporated and left their thongs behind,’ she says to her husband, at home, after a cool shower.

He grunts, staring at his phone.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ She wants to rip the phone from his hand and smash it on the kitchen tiles.

‘Flip flops,’ says her husband, smiling at his phone.

She leaves the room, knowing he hasn’t noticed she’s gone.

Her Friday run is by the water’s edge on a street where a straggly row of houses looms silently. Trees with triumphant roots bursting out of the tarmac, watch impassively as she dodges the bumps. This time she stops. A pair of women’s black flats. Like the thongs, they are placed in the style of someone who has stepped out of them mid stride. Should she take a photo? She looks up and down the street, empty apart from her and the shoes, the promise of day showing in the gold and pink edging of clouds.

She takes a photo and runs up the hill, irritated at herself for stopping for something that is so obviously a joke. Or a prank? Is she going to stumble across a Tik Tok of her staring dumbly at shoes while the world laughs at her? At home, she shows the photo to her husband, who glances at it and away as though she’s shown him hardcore porn. Looking at the photo anew, she sees the banality of the shoes. One click, and it’s deleted.

Her best friend, Chloe, comes over. They stroll down to the shops – coffee, shopping, maybe a cheeky afternoon wine.

‘There’s a house I saw online for sale,’ says Chloe. ‘Wanna see?’

They head down one of the steep streets towards the glinting water. A trickle of sweat runs down her back, and her face is awash with it. They go past the pub, a blast of aircon through the open door beckoning to her.

‘Let’s go in here. It’s so hot,’ she says, wishing she could tug Chloe’s hand and pull her into the cold interior of the pub; the promise of oblivion in every bottle, winking at her behind the bar.

‘We’re nearly there,’ says Chloe. ‘C’mon.’

The house is gorgeous – two storeys, recently painted, a miniscule rectangle of waving plants lining the short path to the front door.

‘It’s nice,’ she says to Chloe, knowing her friend’s penchant for looking and not buying.

‘It’s just big enough. But as the girls get older, they won’t want to share a room, so there’s that issue. It’s only two bedrooms.’ Chloe’s brow furrows as though she is serious about this house.

‘Hmm,’ she says, calculating the quickest route back to the pub. She turns and her heart hammers unsteadily.

At the base of the large tree on the edge of the pavement, is a pair of red, strappy heels. Like the other pairs, they are not side by side, but mimic the stance of a walk.

‘Do you see them?’ she asks, pointing.

Chloe looks at them and laughs. ‘Do you need a pair of shoes?’

A nervous giggle rises unsteadily from her throat into her mouth. ‘I’ve been seeing different shoes everywhere. Placed like these. All of them are women’s shoes. Do you think it’s a joke?’

‘If it is, it’s not very funny.’ Chloe turns her back on the shoes. ‘I’ll talk to Adam about the house. C’mon, let’s get a drink.’

She turns back several times to look at the shoes as they walk away. Why are they getting to her so much? What do the shoes mean? In the pub, they order a bottle of sparkling wine. Amid their conversation, the shoes flash in and out of her thoughts like a lighthouse beacon, luring her closer. Did the women intentionally leave their shoes on the street? Were they stolen and arranged like that? Perhaps it’s the same woman. She realises she never checked the sizes of the shoes.

‘I’ll be back.’ Chloe heads to the toilet.

She checks her phone – no messages. A woman sitting at a nearby table is staring at her. Her brown hair is trimmed and shaped like a halo around her face. The woman’s dark eyes lock onto hers, and she’s embarrassed by the slow flush of arousal that starts in her groin and moves up into her belly, shooting up into her chest and face.

Chloe returns to the table, and she wrenches her gaze away from the woman, forcing herself not to check if she’s still looking at her.

‘Should we have another bottle?’ Chloe asks.

‘Let me check what Matt’s doing.’ She sends the message. Seconds later her husband replies telling her to stay out and have fun – he isn’t home.

She goes to the bar, clutching her card. The haloed hottie materialises by her side.

‘You saw the shoes,’ she whispers into her ear. The haloed woman is so close, her lips graze the top of her ear, sending waves of desire through her.

She’s misheard. ‘What?’ She tilts her head to look up into the woman’s eyes.

‘The shoes. You know about them.’

She’s drunk. That’s what it is. Her drunk mind is weaving the stupid shoes and this sexy woman together.

‘It’s not a joke.’ Her tone is insistent. ‘You choose. You choose to leave them behind.’

‘And then what? Buy a new pair?’ She giggles. What would happen if she leant into her to smell her neck? Tell her she’s hot and that she wants to feel her naked chest against her own.

‘You’ll see. You’ll know your moment when it arrives.’

The bartender interrupts and when she turns to resume the conversation after ordering, the woman is gone. Back at the table, she’s disappointed at the sight of the empty glass where she was sitting earlier.

‘Did you see that woman?’ she asks Chloe, pouring prosecco into their glasses.

‘Which one?’

‘The one with the short dark hair. She spoke to me at the bar.’

Chloe’s eyes light up with mischief. ‘What did she say? Where is she?’ She looks around the pub.

‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter. I think I’m pissed.’

‘Me too!’ They clink glasses.

Once home, her head buzzing with prosecco, she thinks about the woman and the shoes. She can choose to leave them behind. What does that mean?

Her phone pings. It’s her husband texting to say he’ll stay at a mate’s place. She sighs. There was a time when he hated being away from her. She messages a couple of friends, suddenly wanting to be out in the world, seen by others. No one replies. Is this her life now? Flinging crumbs of longing into the world that are met with indifference and silence. When did she become invisible?

Her routine shudders along, the connection to her husband growing fainter. They now spend entire evenings in silence on their devices, sitting together, separated by a continent of unsaid things. Netflix is always on, actors playing out lives vibrant and brighter than her own.

She sees the shoes everywhere, during her runs, buying groceries, out for a coffee. Each pair different, worn. She checks on the ones she’s seen before. Some are still there, others have gone. She no longer wonders why their owners left them; she wonders where they are. Do those women miss their lost shoes? Increasingly, she thinks about that woman in the pub. About what she said. She can just choose to leave them. Where will she go if she chooses? Can she return and reclaim them?

One night without a word of explanation, her husband sleeps in the spare room. In the morning, when she asks, he says he didn’t want to disturb her as she went to bed hours before him. Without any further discussion, he sleeps in the spare room most nights returning to their bedroom, occasionally, wearing an expression of distaste when she asks him. Summoning her courage, she strokes his arm, leaning in for a kiss.

He recoils like he’s been bitten. ‘I’m tired,’ he says, his gaze already returning to his phone. ‘Ask me tomorrow.’

Summer sharpens to winter, and back to spring. The shoes multiply, becoming more visible even as her life disappears before her own eyes. She brings a brown pair of sandals home, cleans them, gets them repaired by the local shoe place, and stares at them at night as her husband laughs in another room. Nothing happens. The shoes are inanimate, lifeless next to the other pairs she owns. Cleaning and mending them feels like a desecration.

She doesn’t tell Chloe or any other of her friends about her decaying marriage. She knows she needs to talk to Matt, but she’s so scared. What if he says things she doesn’t want to hear? She’s taken to weeping silently in bed, hating herself for being so weak, but finding solace in the wet pillow. Perhaps, tomorrow she will be stronger. Perhaps, tomorrow the words trapped in her throat will fly out of her mouth like birds released.

On Saturday, Matt puts on his suit and knots a blue silk tie.

‘Where are you going?’ she asks.

‘I told you. Dave’s invited me to Randwick. He’s a member.’

She stares at his back; absolutely certain he never said a word. Do you still love me? The question hovers in the space between them, but she snatches it out of the air unable to bear the look that might settle on his face if she utters it aloud.

After he leaves, restlessness urges her into the car. She drives down to the bay, deciding on a different, longer run. She’ll reward herself at the bay side café with breakfast afterwards. The usual loop of thoughts jog through her mind in rhythm with her feet. She realises as she sweeps up the path, there are no shoes here. She stops, looks up and down the empty track. It’s time. She decides. Today, she’ll leave her shoes here. Make a mark in an untouched place. Another woman will run by and wonder about her shoes. Someone will wonder about her; someone will want to know more about her. First, she’ll finish her run. Then, she will offer her shoes.

She rounds a bend, the golden sun dancing on the lapping water, when she glances behind. Her running shoes are behind her. When she looks down at her feet, she still wears them, yet they are also behind her, left in the same position as all the other pairs. Slowing down, she walks back to the shoes on the path. Yes, they are hers. And yet, not. There are two pairs, the ones on the path and the ones on her feet. She can choose.

She feels no curiosity about this contradiction. For the first time, in a long time, a space opens in her chest. She breathes a lungful of sweet air, noticing the loveliness of the water, the bright pink flowers of the trees lining the path. She feels free. She resumes her run. Nearing the café, she is unsurprised to see the halo-haired woman from the pub nearly a year ago who told her she could choose. Well, she’s chosen. She comes to a halt in front of her, for once breathing easily after such a long run.

She takes her outstretched hand. Her shoes are forgotten, as is everything else. The world brims with possibilities.