Fiction

A waiting room. It’s mid-afternoon, a Monday, and the chairs are hard blue plastic. Mostly young women today, red-eyed babies on their knees, all busy rustling through their handbags for plastic containers of sultanas or carrot sticks. The babies have the expressions of goldfish, their lips pursed and cheeks bulgy, their eyes wide open and blinking dumbly. A woman sweeps through from the surgery, her child’s bare limbs dangling from her arm. Let me wrap her, the man behind her says. I just want to get her in the car, she snaps back. The patient feels dizzy again, and closes her eyes. She made it here, at least.

The sun had barely rotated out of bed by the time the bakers had begun rolling croissants, the baristas singing out orders, and the second-hand bookstore owners prudently applying dust to their first editions. It was just another morning in a suburb of restored heritage properties, and the air, having been buttered and brewed into a naturally occurring atmosphere, made the moustached men strolling around Redfern feel as though they could be anywhere at all, excluding where they actually were.

The city streets were empty except for a few homeless, an empty tram gliding by like a ghost ship and a busker working in the mall. He wailed a suitably sorrowful Hank Williams standard. I was on my way to the blood bank. Earlier that morning the prime minister had announced that “difficult times call for heroes, heroes in the spirit of the Anzacs”. I’d never been a hero and no one in my family had been to war, so my chances of stepping up for the nation were slim, although providing half a litre of blood to the Red Cross did offer an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

A new short story from the award-winning author of Ghost River, Common People and The White Girl.

A new short story from an award-winning author.

A new short story from an award-winning author of The Street Sweeper.

A new short story from award-winning Indigenous author Ellen van Neerven.

New short fiction from South Australian-born award-winning author DBC Pierre.

A new short story by Ceridwen Dovey, winner of the 2014 Queensland Literary Award for her collection Only the Animals.