Short Stories
Jolley Prize 2018 (Shortlisted): 'Between the Mountain and the Sea' by Sharmini Aphrodite
It was the first thing she noticed: all the clocks had stopped. She only mentioned it when she was shown to the dining table and the woman – his grandmother – placed in front of her a glass of bandung, bright pink and sweating. Thanking her, she held the glass, the chill of it shocking the heat of her palm ...
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Before I learnt the language of map-making, the word cadastre sounded like a timbre or a cadence. It was a momentous drum, a hollow ratatat. Bone, fire, dirt, stone. Like a shout, a ring, a knock, a blow. But when I learned maps, I discovered cadastre meant the legal boundary. There was no sound to it at all, only lines ...
... (read more)You are meeting with your PhD supervisor. You’re in his office – there’s a desk, books, framed degrees, and a wife, also framed. And there’s you and your supervisor seated on opposite sides of his desk. You’ve just completed the first confirmation for your PhD. Confirmation had once made you think of young girls in white tulle dresses, of people who have faith. At university, confirmation is when the school deems whether or not your research is viable to continue. It may not be if your theory isn’t new enough, or your proposal is too ambitious or it’s half-cooked, or maybe you’ve not been working hard enough, or maybe you’re a stupid girl. There are a number of reasons why the university may not have faith in you.
... (read more)That winter it was bad and he often woke a little before midnight with his teeth aching and he would dress quickly and walk through the snow for an hour or so and later, when he came home, he saw the lights burning softly at her window. She didn’t seem to sleep much. Sometimes he stopped in the hallway and listened at her door but there was little to hear. Once he heard the squeak of a cork but there weren’t any voices and he liked the thought of her having a late night drink, alone, while the building slept.
... (read more)At the first interview, I sat in a plastic canteen chair while Berkeley lay under a towel and a woman with spiked hair dug into the cords of his thigh. He rested his chin on his forearms so he could talk, his eyes boring into my notebook, as if he could read the questions upside-down from the massage table. His blonde eyebrows faded into his skin and made his forehead look overdeveloped ...
... (read more)We met him in a park down by the derelict part of the harbour. It was just an oblong of yellow grass and some lopsided play equipment. We used to go there at night and drink cheap, fizzy wine we bought from the lady who owned the Chinese market nearby. This man was standing by the water taking photos of the bridge ...
... (read more)My neighbour has been digging a hole in his backyard for the past few days. The hole is quite large now, big enough to fit, say, a single bed, or – it’s hard not to draw the connection – a coffin ...
... (read more)[after the painting of the same name by Daniela Bradley, 2012]
Contributory Negligence n. 1 occurring in circumstances of negligent conduct on the plaintiff’s behalf that has contributed to the harm they’ve suffered.
...Meadow-Wisp was conceived on the Cerne Abbas Giant. Her Dorset hippie parents, who believed in unfiltered communication, recounted every detail: hiking up the hill through dense fog, their torches reflecting chalk outlines (foot, calf, ribs, elbow), grass slick beneath them, concentrating on an energy focal point. In the final weeks of pregnancy, her mother cross-st ...
I can’t remember when the man who is now my husband first told me he loved me. Was it when we drank cocktails at that windowless bar with the old train seats you could turn to face in either direction? We tried to go back once, but it had been replaced with a hardware store; we priced a set of outdoor furniture and bought some new wire for the clothesline to stop ...