Fiction

One by one the yellow ducks found their way ashore, coughing and gasping. Inland the survivors discovered some potable water. The night skies were temperate and clear. They collected coconut palm fronds with which to build nests and later – homes – and later – municipal chambers – and later again – flood mitigation strategies. If the island sank into the waves, where would they go? Your place? Mine? A faction among the ducks consisting of the strongest swimmers wanted to catch a current in the shipping lanes and make for some more sophisticated civilisation. Australia, perhaps…

I see the back of his head at the other end of the carriage. I realise I am hot, sweating, and strangely, I am smiling. All the years of double-checking my locks, and now it is me, hunting him.

People write this city to ensure it exists and they existed within it. But not you. You are on the edges, in spaces that lack definition. Even locals don’t give them a name.

There have been times when I’ve forgotten myself, as if I’d become someone else. I didn’t know this person I’d become. I had no memories. In hallways my footsteps made no sound, in mirrors I had no face, no matter how hard I looked the faces of others were hidden from me, on the train, on the street and in the park beneath the leaves.

This place is killing her. She has to get out, but how? Robert won’t listen. Too enamoured with his important war task, he accepts all restrictions. She’s stuck.

My co-workers are alright, not just because they deal drugs on the side or email me free tickets to a show tonight so I can ‘forget about everything for a couple of hours xoxo’

Growing up on a farm meant hours spent in solitude, so Jillian never quite knew what to do at these gatherings. Adults formed forests of legs while gangs of whirligig kids ran between them, raiding buffet tables and knocking over everything. Jillian roamed the limitless grounds alone, wishing everyone would go home.

Myrto sits on Moura’s motorcycle and listens a long time to the clamour of birds, vendors, traffic, yapping street dogs, feeling calm as she looks down side streets … sparkling bright moving black of dead-ends, of time running out of space, in the shade of an eye, then it opens again as an aperture dilating – cones of light into cones of light. She returns to her room around midnight and shadow-boxes until she collapses in a heap on her foam mattress.

The prime minister called a presser to address these urgent issues, at the end of which he took off his jacket, pulled off his pants to reveal legs as slender as two threads of yarn and beat his wings hard. Papers flew, journos covered their faces with clipboards, iPads, notebooks, and he shot out the window, followed by the naked head of ASIO and a dozen prominent journalists whose journalism had long ago folded from interrogation into pure raging spite.

All those houses in the ’burbs were built like they were ships made for each family to survive some flood. Not a literal flood. Another kind of flood. But it turns out they’re not seaworthy. They can’t save anyone. And they’re all drowning out there. I don’t know if you’ve stood in an empty house in the suburbs, but I’ll tell you for a fact they do creak that way.