October 6, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
The internet has a beating heart and it goes to the rhythm of –
When you don’t open an app for a while it will gain sentience. I tried taking a week off of social media and got to five days (also a working week for the unemployed) and each day my phone came more alive talking that internet language:
Redacted and 64 other accounts you follow have posted on Instagram. Redacted uploaded a story on Facebook. Redacted recently shared a new reel. Do you know redacted? Do you want to sync redacted from your contacts? Do you want to follow redacted? Do you want to hold redacted’s hand and tell them your secrets and braid each other’s hair?
It reminds me of when I was 12 and had my first blow of agoraphobia, though I didn’t know then that’s what it was, an event made up of no understanding and all experience. The suddenly inability to go to school, to sleep alone, to exist as a human how I had before. It was all very dramatic. My parents were forced to worry about me in a way they’d never needed to and it didn’t suit any of us well.
I had to go see the school counsellor who sat me down and said much of the same as my apps; that my friends were making new friends, and things were changing, and I was being left behind. At 12 you can’t know what that all means. The passage of time, the concept of things moving on without you. It just sounds like being dead. And what’s a 12 year old supposed to do with that? What’s the threat of time passing when you can only perceive forever?
The counsellor was too old and too mean to change me anyway. So far removed from the quietness of a child’s defiance to understand it was only made of fear, all the way through.
Is that what you want? For all your friends to forget about you? She’d asked.
Oh brother, I’d thought, my stomach hurts.
In abstinence from the apps my hands grew idle and my mind quiet from the voices of others and I felt again in an old way what it meant to be singular. At the centre of your own world but on the periphery of that great other, where everything was happening and where you were not. It made me think of Bane and his monologue in the Dark Knight Rises – him telling Batman how he was born in a pit, and that made him one with the darkness on a level that
Batman never could be; he who chose it. I couldn’t decide which one I was, Bane or Batman – the chosen or the chooser of the deep dark.
The apps pierced through: are you sure you don’t know redacted?
I didn’t know redacted. I knew my whispering girl on YouTube, the only app I decided to keep using, staying away from the comments and the shorts. I have a premium account on it that I worked real hard for, downloading a proxy to connect to Turkey where I could get it cheaper so someone could whisper-read me a book and tap on its cover as I fell asleep without an ad interrupting.
[I do often consider what my ancestors must think of me, the rotten fruit of their labours. All those soldiers and mothers and otherwise wounded warriors looking down at all this (I’m pointing, round and round, at my many comforts) and seeing someone crouching beneath a tall ceiling, collapsing under the weight of nothing. It’s fine though, really, and if it’s not I can bring the ceilings down lower, and if my ancestors hate that too – well, what can any of us do for the aches of the dead?]
My whispering girl only chooses books I’m pretentious enough to think are stupid, lending themselves so easily to boredom and the eyes closing. She’s younger than me but/ and pregnant and has started inviting everyone to take a deep breath with her at the beginning of her videos. Naturally, I comply. Thinking, nothing is happening and maybe that’s it.
I started wondering though if anyone from my apps missed me. If anyone had even noticed I’d been gone. What was the weight of one person’s absence? What was the sound withheld from the collective of voices? I knew what I was asking was much bigger, the tiniest babushka doll in the set of worries I was too defiant to open.
For those who’ve seen it, you know Bane’s monologue ends on this, a note of defiance. But maybe you hear the fear also, all the way through, when he says: I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
When I log into my apps again it’s to see the photos my friends had posted of us – the friends the counsellor had long ago threatened I’d lose. They picked the ugliest ones but it’s fine because I’m in them, because I was there. Because I wasn’t born here; not in this darkness, not in this pit, not even in this country. I was brought here by a patchwork of choices, made by and for me, and that’s the least important part actually. The darkness doesn’t belong to me, or to you. It holds no loyalties, it promises no victories. It denounces itself with its own emptiness. It falters with what it means to use as a threat; some substance of the very end.
That’s only for the dead though, for us alive and itching and and online and pleading, it is still redacted.
June 22, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zoe Karpin is a short story writer and has been a teacher for many years. Her short stories are published in Mascara, Sudo, FemZine, Going Down Swinging, Dot Lit, Hecate, and forthcoming in Kalliope X.
How it Happens
Her first permanent appointment and a regular income; she could pay her way with her lover. Her new faculty room; her face turned to sunlight streaming through the north-facing window, needing to be here, needing to be somewhere – why not here? As events had worked out and oh to belong eventually – part of this scenery like the great eucalyptus, its limbs raised over the building and girth so wide -three people could rest against it.
At morning break. She was slim wearing a tight grey pencil skirt plus black pumps but weary. Up late at night preparing work for students, no way around this, the early days.
In the centre of the room dolmades and cheese were set out on the large table; her inaugural group morning tea. Food graciously displayed on hand for consuming. Winding strands of long dark hair out of her face, I must join the eating.
Her fellow instructors gobbled the dolmades. The vine leaves used in these dolmades, ‘freshly prepared following an old Greek recipe off the internet,’ the cook said.
‘Go on Olivia’, take two.’ They were watching. You have not eaten our food before. Smiling, liking dolmades and expecting to want more, a dolmades hovered near her lips. However, so disappointing- not enough lemon, too greasy and the rice so gluggy. Swallowing though, bit after bit. Dissimulation – she had to do work for the next instruction, sunk into her seat at her desk. Olivia, not fussy, not unhealthy, not obsessed about her weight, was just demanding of quality when there was no real obstacle to acquiring it. No war or famine, poverty nor any other cataclysmic event stood in anyone’s among the staff and so many sources of information about good cooking; books, internet, tv etc. No excuses. The rest of the faculty were still gobbling the dolmades- a whole heaped plate of them and still praising them. Suzy unloaded cheese and cucumber sandwiches from a large plastic container onto emptying plates. ‘Wonderful, yummy.’ many said.
But she kept her head on her work; not so nice-processed cheese and vanilla pasty bread.
But everyone, even Jasmine in the desk next to her, who ate tuna salad every lunchtime, praised the sandwiches.
The bell rang. I am released to teach.
After 4:00 pm there, alone- working back, gazing at five dolmades wearing tutus of oil and crumpled sandwiches, the leftovers on the enormous table in the heart of the room, abandoned like her to get stale. The cleaner was not fancying them but muttering, ‘What a wasteful lot you are.’
Her face aflame with shame. She prepared and cooked exact amounts of food for her purposes.
If she forced all the food down together however- the excess greasy oil in the dolmades would counterattack the staleish, insipid bread of the cheese and cucumber sandwiches. And more -even though the cheese was a processed mildest cheddar, synthetic like, and the cucumber was sliced in unforgivable thick slices she might slosh it all down with a hot cup of milky tea.
She was there working; swallowing and chewing away, the cleaner vacuuming around her. But regret hit her hard. Later. As if there had been a military assault on her taste buds. She insulted them, too; her mother and grandmother who passed on to her appreciation of good cooking.
Then Jasmine made cannolis. She was not Italian, but she was so proud of them, a special for the latest monthly faculty morning tea.
‘Look – please take one,’ she said to Olivia. ‘ I’m a good cook, you know.’ Once again to Olivia.
Olivia blushingly,’ of course, I’ll have one. What had Jasmine been sensing?
Not even having to taste the cannolis- to know they were ill conceived, too thick and doughy, white instead of brown, not fried enough. Filling with chocolate not ricotta cheese. A travesty.
The cannoli. Any tooth aching sweetness she could get past by drinking her coffee, biting a mouthful like diving into a pool of cold water on a winter’s day. It’s sticky, tacky, soft, gooey, doughy shell more sickening than expected but she was saying unbelievably. ‘I’ll have another.’ She gave Jasmine a thumbs up. Jasmine hugged her around her waist. She could finish the cannoli under the tree outside.
On another morning, the head of Department Linda carried a large cheesecake she had baked. Everyone was saying and laughing. ‘It’s a welcome for Olivia,’
But cheesecake is tricky, and the base was soggy and the creamcheese drippy and cloyingly sweet.
The cake was a gun to her head. She couldn’t swallow more after the first bite but did. Everyone ate their slice and they all said,’ delicious.’
‘How wonderful a head who cooks for their staff.’
‘Give the four pieces left over to Olivia, our newbie. ‘
The four pieces were wrapped in cling wrap and then put in a brown paper bag and presented to her, –
She would drop three slices into the neighbour’s compost and one slice to their dog. Certainly.
A long hold up on the Hume highway homeward bound making it later even, again. The brown paper bag was on the front passenger seat, almost a companion, slightly cosy. Their hospitable gesture. She yawned and sighed and that slight hunger gnawing stomach, usually dismissible -nutrients in her blood like glucose, amino acids and fatty acids possibly, at a low concentration.
She shoved the three pieces of the cheesecake, one after another, into her mouth, swallowing a double-edged sword of the collegial affinity she was so wanting and the disfavor at the means of its execution.
Each swallow the cakes’ vileness was less and less irksome. It went on like that. More poorly made cakes at morning tea, more swallowing but less and less disgust every time. Enjoyment even. Pleasure in the desensitization; denaturing, cheapening, debasing and corrupting and she was talking to everyone then, Pete, Suzy, Maria, Janey, Gracie, Andy, Rog, Jazzie, even Linda.
May 9, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
S.V. Plitt is a queer author living and working in Naarm, Melbourne. Son’s writing has been published in Archer magazine, Darebin n-SCRIBE, and won second place in the Odyssey House Short Story Prize 2022. Their manuscript ‘Strange Intersections’ was Highly Commended in the VPLAs Unpublished Manuscript Competition 2022. They also appear on the (Un) Marginalised Season Two Podcast, discussing themes included in their writing, such as gender identity, mental health, religious oppression, and intergenerational trauma. Son draws inspiration from volunteering as a carer and their work in customer service.
A Fairy God Princess
A subversive tale of feminist woes
There once was a Fairy God Princess.
She kissed a lot of toads looking for her prince.
Not only toads, in fact.
She pranced through the forest kissing lizards and lions and amorous amphibians.
With each slippery kiss, her disappointment grew.
The disappointment grew and grew inside her belly like a bag of snakes in a battle for sovereignty.
Battling for the prize of turning the princess into a lizard, or a lion or an amorous amphibian.
They fought fiercely, keeping the princess up at night.
Whenever she drifted into an exhausted slumber, the lizards or goannas, the toads or the lions would pull the tendon by her tailbone.
Like a puppet, her legs wriggled and squirmed out of bed and tried to run away with her.
To turn the princess into a toad or lion or amorous amphibian.
To make her a bride.
But the princess was also a warrior and worried that if her legs ran away with her,
the battle in her belly would boil and boil, filling her up with a storm for scales and fur.
She begged the moon and the stars and the emptiness in between,
that the lizard prince whose eyes gleamed like black jewels,
the prince that had so chivalrously waited in the forest for a decade,
that he might be the victor, in this battle of bravado that boiled in her belly.
But like all the contestants, his price for saving her from the lions and the toads and the amorous amphibians, was sovereignty. To possess the flesh in which she resided. To grow a lizard in her belly. To grow a king.
The Fairy God Princess, the warrior that worried, knew deep down that the flesh in which she resided, could not be divided. It was hers and hers alone.
No heir, no king, no lizard, no amorous amphibian, no lion, and no toad would chain her to the future. She prayed to the moon and the stars and the emptiness in between.
An answer came. It was a vast and empty silence that spread through her heart, her belly and her mind. She relinquished her title. No more a Fairy God Princess.
She remembered her true identity and became they. They knew the I in them. Their I was in all of the fairies, gods and princesses, in all of the princes, lizards and toads, all of the goannas, the lions and the amorous amphibians. They were all of it and nothing. And belonged to themselves and no one.
And they all lived ever after in a confusing land of grammatically problematic pronouns.
March 13, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maja Rose has returned to her hometown of lutruwita (Tasmania) having lived in London, Brighton, Melbourne, and Sydney. She completed a BA in English Lit/Media (Hons) at La Trobe University, and a Creative Writing residential summer at Oxford University. She has a background in screen production and currently works in the library at Risdon Prison.
Movement
My father, Otto, is gutting fish on a makeshift table in the backyard, a thick piece of wood with a surface of dusty splinters laid out on some iron contraption that in hindsight, maybe he keeps just for this.
Skrrth, skrrth.
The edge of his knife flicks scales off the plump bodies in easy, smooth movements of his nut-brown, knobbled wrist. Silver flecks winnow up into the air, caught for a moment by the wind before they fall into the grass. Tiny mirrors, reflecting nothing.
“Have you ever seen a squid beak?” he asks me.
He caught all yellowfin mullet, one calamari squid. I took a photo of the bucket, a mass of shining light in blue plastic before he turned the hose on them and the blood I hadn’t been able to see rose up from the bottom and turned them all muddy.
“I don’t think so,” I say, and come to stand beside him.
He rummages through the squid’s face. An eyeball pops out, and I have to look away before I gag.
Then he pulls out the beak, a little knot of black.
“See?” he says, making it open and close. “Just like a parrot.”
*
My other father, biodad, sends me a message on Whatsapp.
I’m about to board the plane now, darling. I’ll call you when I land in Paris, if you’re still awake.
Sometimes I wonder how we came to this gentle, easy way of talking. There’s a part of me that thinks it’s because I stopped caring. I no longer have expectations, so he can no longer let me down.
The day I saw him in Bangkok and realised that, in 25 years, I had never spent a night alone with him, I came to an understanding.
This is just a man. A man who you are only connected to through blood and semen. What a strange thing. What a pointless reason to be in this airbnb together.
But I don’t feel anger anymore. I don’t think.
Is it worse to feel nothing?
When I see that he’s landed, I don’t open the message. I’ll wait until later. It’s too early to call.
*
When I was very young, a year into Otto’s arrival into my life, we made up a game together. A friend had made a chaircover out of knitted soft toys, little clowns and dolls and bears that held you up as you curled tight and read a book (I had just learned how to read).
On the left arm, there was a tiny little postman, with a hat that you could remove, and a red satchel with a bone button that you could flick open with one finger. The satchel was very small, but big enough to hold a note, if you folded it up very tight.
The postman would carry notes between Otto and I, and I think I believed that the postman was also, perhaps, a fairy. Overcomplicating things for the sake of magic was a common pastime of mine.
Would you like a cup of tea? Otto’s note might say.
Can I call you dad? said mine.
*
I had an argument with dad after I first flew home from living overseas. My grandmother—biodad’s mum—had just died, and I’d scattered her ashes with my cousins on the river. Mum was in a new relationship for the first time in years, and it made me feel uneasy, unsure for the first time where I stood in my relationship to her. I felt like a kid, even though I was 29.
My grandmother dying was a reminder that I was on the outside of that side of the family, both because of my dad’s actions and my own. I had put up boundaries in my teenage years to stop myself from hurting, but it had kept me from connecting with the rest of the family, too. I felt guilty about having been away while she was dying, and guilty about having been away from everyone for longer than the three years in Thailand would account for.
*
Dad has had another daughter. I think she’s so beautiful, the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. I was on the beach on Koh Kradan when he called to tell me.
On the other side of the world, the sky was orange and pink with sunset, and I had taken a photo a few minutes before he called. I’d like to think it was taken as she emerged into the world, and I had felt it and knew I should document it.
When I come back home, dad has too many glasses of red wine and tells me I don’t love him, or any of my family, because otherwise I never would have left.
“Say goodnight,” dad says to my sister, waving her chubby little hand at me. “Say goodnight to your big sister; she’s going to leave you again. And this time she isn’t coming back.”
*
Biodad told me that he’d wanted to marry my mum when he found out she was pregnant with me. He spun a fantasy that I desperately wanted to believe.
When I told mum, stars in my eyes, eighteen and stupid, she laughed so hard she fell to her knees.
“Oh really?” she said, still wheezing on the floor. “And when was he going to propose? Before or after he recorded our phone conversations to give to his lawyer?”
*
Dad holds the squid beak in his hand, clicks and clacks it shut as if it’s speaking. My sister runs up on steady legs, demands to see. Dad smiles at me, sunshine in his leathery face.
“Can you pick her up?” he asks me. “My hands are dirty.”
We stand together, all three of us, the fruit trees’ heavy perfume mixing with the tinny stink of fish guts. Dad nudges me, winks as he makes the squid beak clack in my sister’s face.
I wonder what he would say if I told him I was thinking of moving away again.
January 23, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born and raised in China, Jing Cramb came to Australia for postgraduate study and is a teacher in Brisbane. Her short stories have received a Highly Commended Award in Peter Cowan competition and have been shortlisted for Deborah Cass Prize.
Lisa looked like a Laughing Buddha when she was talking about her son Oliver. It was quite remarkable because Lisa was not Asian, but an Australian redhead. Her eyes squinted into a slit almost disappearing from her face, only leaving her nose, permanently shining with sweat from the heat in the café kitchen. Her face looked happy and content. My grandpa would say with a face like that she ought to have good luck.
“Oliver got into this prestigious local school”. Her voice was infused with sweet excitement sounding like a chirping bird. I had already heard the news. I was not sure if the word “prestigious” should be used for a public school, even in a good suburb, perhaps I was wrong. English is a difficult language.
“The kids from the school look…”, she paused searching for the right word and then said “clean”. As if I didn’t understand she stared at me, drew closer, whispered it slowly in her low husky voice “C-leeaann”.
The word echoed around me.
So, Oliver will become as clean as the other students, who wear freshly laundered and ironed clothes, shiny polished shoes, shower twice a day, rarely have acne on their faces and are all fit because of the healthy food they eat. As opposed to someone who looks “dirty”.
I looked clean I suppose. Last week, a grey-haired, stern-faced lady told me “You don’t look like a waitress, you are…too clean”, as she examined me making her coffee. Her silver- rimmed glasses seemed to emanate cold air and sent a chill down my spine. I didn’t know what to say. I was embarrassed, trying to work out the meaning behind her comment and being the centre of attention. I looked at her and smiled. She did not smile back.
The coffee I made her was burnt.
I might have accidentally fallen into the “clean girl” category, as proven by my pale-yellow skin and the lady with the authoritative look. It should be an honour for a girl like me. I grew up in a heavily polluted industrial city in the north of China. The sky was permanently grey. A big open rubbish dump was a few hundred metres away from the little one-bedroom flat where my grandparents and I lived. Sometimes stray dogs roamed around with unknown items dangling from their mouths, followed by a swarm of flies. The public squat toilet, with window frames but no glass, was always freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. There were no divisions in the toilet, everyone was on display, everyone was equal. Giant white maggots moved slowly over the cubicle floors.
My thin, brown, wrinkly no Laughing Buddha-faced grandpa always sat cross-legged on the couch next to the little dining table. At lunch time, he would fling his head back, scull a shot of warm rice wine and smile at me. His teeth were stained with excess alcohol, black tea and low-quality tobacco, a couple of teeth missing. He wished that one day I could go to a university in the capital city, unlike him. He had never been away from his hometown. He and I did not know that a decade later, I would come to this clean country, live in the clean city, breathe in its clean air and become a clean person. Unlike my grandpa, who never had a chance to become, clean.
August 12, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rayan Chakrabarti is a writer from Kolkata, India. His poems have been published in Mulberry Literary, Monograph Magazine and Indian Ruminations. He likes to travel to the hills and play the piano.
Becoming Cyborg
Now I become Shadow,
Accept me, Mother
now I shed teeth and penis,
accept this haunting.
There is that time, vast oceans of heave, that exists before the discovery. And though the house in the nerves has shifted, and corrugated tin has started to take measure of the tea, the lack of the discovery means that everything is yet equilibrium. In fact, the ants are bubbling away in the sauna of rice, and deep sparrows have risen from the colouring book. A long family of the day will be upon the silverware, polishing off the sun in reflection.
I have left my body to become a spectator to its contours. Just around my hip, I’ve discovered a new mole to gnaw into, bread it into knead, make it palatable. I’ve locked the door to immerse myself in its expanse. Still, a night has to travel before the morning breaks it open. A half-brewed tearcan melts from ice-cool on the bedpost.
Midnight has brought with them a new audience. Grains of metal, flying in from a faraway galaxy latch onto my armpit. Some of the blood has found a station there. In the moonlight, when their arrival announces a river, you can only hear the softness of the steel bed.
But who are they, hunting for new territory at this part of the night? Known customers trudge along the margins of my vision, travellers to a fasting star.
The Almirah, bank of dreams, kneels around my childhood. Monsoon wells in the hippocampus, stinging of death. Mother burned at the stake, for whose sake do we go on living? Perhaps, a summer of longing, last summer with toffee and younging.
The Crow, measurer of blight, gossips around my neck, pecking veins, counting on the quick shine and gloss. For him, it is a step out of routine, but he’s been out for vengeance since I stopped feeding their offspring last year. Feeding them goat’s brain and koyel tails, so they can prey and wring. I too shall become nest and birthing.
Tree of sorrow, Tree of light, become creeper around me, take my fingers as yours, make me disappear before they break the door down, before the final shock of parenthood, let me become leafvein and telephone pole charging electric through the city.
In some stills, the morning is.
Fear not, trees of sheath surround you,
bark of wire and calm.
July 28, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Chelsea Harding is a young writer who lives on King Island.
Silence
You open your tired eyes, the harsh morning sun glaring back at you with an unknown source of rage. You respond to this mysterious anger by closing your sensitive eyes once more.
The sun burns your face, frigid air nips at your exposed skin and goosebumps run up your body, as if competing in some sort of race. Flowers and shrubbery tickle the sides of your face and arms, dancing with the wind, as you focus on the sounds surrounding the place you now lay.
The sound of water immediately fills your ears, splashing and sploshing and swirling in circles, sending a satisfied smile to your face. It bubbles up, then falls down, stuck in a never-ending pattern. Searching for another sound, your focus switches to the rustling leaves, brushing against one-another. You find these sounds oddly calming, like a cool shower on a hot summer’s day, or the smell of fresh parchment in a new book.
You lay still, listening intently to the flow of the water and soft movements of the trees, their leaves and their branches swaying with the rhythm of the breeze, feeling yourself relax at the noise, until it stopped.
Everything stopped.
You force your sore eyes open, despite the pain your eyes endure in the scorching sun, sitting up in your spot. Everything is moving, you think, so why can’t I hear it?. The longer you think, the more confused you grow, like something was digging deeper and deeper into your brain every time you try to focus.
Silence never seems like it’s such a dreadful thing, like it’s something you could easily ignore, but it’s not. Silence is so undeniably loud, so insanely loud it’s irritating. You can hear your heart hammering in your chest. You can hear your breathing increasing by the second. You just can’t figure out why everything has gone so abruptly quiet.
Confused.
Scared.
Alone.
Tired.
The words seem to ring in your ears, engraving themselves in your brain. You feel your eyes closing, pulling themselves shut with unignorable force. You close your eyes, letting yourself click back into a sleeping state, blacking out and forgetting this ever happened.
Everything stopped.
Machines
As the cogs began to turn once again, a flicker of light sparked from within. Watching, waiting, anticipating its the first move, the rise of the machine was imminent.
The light shone brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding. The cogs spun and churned, emitting a swirling rainbow circle of light resembling an eye.
It twitched. Once, twice. With each subtle movement the machine’s confidence grew, blooming like a ruby rose in a field.
It stepped forward.
December 3, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
T.L writes fiction, short fiction, poetry, and reviews. Her work has been published in Mascara, Cordite, Southerly, Best Australian Poems 2014, and Griffith Review, among others. In 2016 she won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature. Her second novel, Autumn Leaves, 1922, was released in August 2021 by Pegasus Books USA. She has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University. She lives on Bidjigal land in Sydney.
Butterfly
A butterfly battles across Parramatta Road. It’s big and black, with white eyes on its wingtips. Even so, the wind in this storm-season is strong and each car and truck that rumbles beneath it sends fresh blasts to blow it off course. It tries to reach the other side of the highway, but it keeps falling, struggling up and then falling on to the road and almost smashed. Then it rises again, against the wind, against the traffic’s displaced air. I wait in my car and the radio blasts, a doctor from the children’s hospital in Kyiv, the broadcaster prompts him, the boy was six, he had bullet wounds, yes, in his chest, his abdomen, his head. The trucks are constant, the cars, the noise incessant. It’s not gridlock and the heavy vehicles, dirty after all the rain, barrel down the hill. The radio continues, the doctor’s words are scattergun, the baby had wounds. Yes. Shot wounds. Yes, the baby was shot in the head. They shot the ambulance. The Russian soldiers, yes. The ambulance called me. On the way to the hospital. The baby died. The butterfly crosses at the lights, where I wait, trying to get home before the next onslaught of flooding storm. The butterfly pushes itself up and up, black wings in a grey sky, up and up. The radio drones on, another city, another basement, I’m in Mariupol, still, I can’t get out. I saw them, my neighbours. They are on the road now, a mother and her boy and her girl. Before they were on the road, they went up, higher than the roof of the church, it seemed impossible, they went up and up, they were flying. Up and up, black wings in a grey sky, up and over the truck, over the next truck, it dips and is almost smashed, then it rises, it reaches the other side of the highway and the trees that stand staunch against the heavy, threatening sky.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Belle is a non-binary writer from regional NSW, most of their work is based around LGBTQ+ topics and working towards a greener future. They also love a good oat milk iced latte.
The Last Choir
There will be little nothings that follow. Moments found between parchment and stone. A leaf, floating in the wind will be a great moment of joy for the world.
Momentous, even.
Because there will be no songs after the last bittersweet verses of a choir. The whales in the deep seas have melted. The moonlight has become lonely without them. There are no strangers to gaze up at the sky and wonder if a better life awaits them over the next hill.
The last of the symphonies played out long ago where only sand remains now. The bones are bleached, a poppy has sprouted through an eye socket. Congratulations to the skull of the loan shark, who managed to bring some beauty into the world. One hundred years after his death.
There is no music in the world, for now. But there are germs and seeds still. Enough that one day, there will be birdsong. Crickets in the evening. Cicadas during the summer.
But no more choirs to mimic them.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zoë Meager is from Aotearoa New Zealand and has a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. Her work has been published abroad in Granta, Lost Balloon, and Overland, and at home in Hue and Cry, Landfall, Mayhem, North & South, Turbine | Kapohau, and anthologised in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and two volumes of Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy.
Come a gutsa
The crazy lady has climbed into the orange rafters of the rollercoaster. She clings not to the tracks, with their promise of tick-tick-tick teeter-tease then dive whoosh swoop zoom whee! but just beneath, where deep iron shadows criss-cross her body.
Down on the ground, slight park attendants with brightly-coloured t-shirts and pale voices address the waiting crowd. The crowd has already purchased its tickets, already queued in compliance with the park’s stated queuing code, already eaten the fairy-floss-hotdog-chips, and now it wants the simulated near-death experience it was promised.
The mother koala and the baby koala are curled into a ball and pressed like grey chewing gum into the junction of two orange beams. They are so close—the crazy lady could almost reach out and touch them. The mother koala listens to the crowd below with eyes half closed. She rearranges the baby koala against her, squeezes, rearranges, squeezes. She does not attend to all the railings to bounce off on the way down. She is thinking about the khaki-coloured leaf that is good to eat. She is thinking about drinking, the liquid taste of earth that is chattering cool.
The crowd below stares up with stones for eyes. Pie holes drawl open, half-chewed words spill out: We’ve been in line for bloody ages, we want a go on the ride! Those koalas jumped the queue, they shouldn’t get to zoom! Those bloody koalas should go back to where they came from.
All this quick year, the crazy lady has heard the country fires drawing closer. She has wandered through old banks of trees, heard the fruity thud of desiccated bats as they hit the ground, she has picked them up, said goodbye to their closing eyes. On dusty streets with shouts and sticks she has broken up squabbles between dingoes and domestic dogs. Seen a grassy parakeet snatch an icy pole from a baby’s sausage fingers. Koalas coming in, perching in the public gardens and starving in suburban backyards. Housewives towing their kids to garden centres and pet stores, asking for eucalypt leaves when they have only just put to bed the annual swan plant shortage.
In the orange rafters of the rollercoaster, the mother koala and the baby koala are a fuzzy football, tailless and divine. The crazy lady is trembling as she inches forward beneath them, a jute-strong bag wedged under her reusable shoulder. She is hoping that when the koalas come unstuck, she can catch them.
The crowd below is baking restless, letting off swearwords into the summer-blue sky. All its white faces boiling red, blonde hair in a halo of putrid smoke. The crowd points its arms all up, up, a hundred skewers, It’s her, she’s stopping us riding the coaster! She’s taking away our human rights!
The baby koala really wants to cling to its mother’s back. It’s at that age. Okay then, says the mother koala, drowsily, letting the baby koala tunnel under her arm and up and onto her back. The baby koala arrives safely on its mother’s back, scrunches its perfect black claws into her rabbity fur and gives out a small dry sigh, and it’s safe there clinging to the hill of her back. Except it doesn’t and it isn’t and it never could, except thirst has left it weak and plummeting, a teddy bear dropped from a pram, headfirst and gone. The crazy lady moves to catch it, the bag snags on the stud of her jeans and she struggles to work it free. The mother koala feels the baby koala’s weight drop away from her and opens her eyes, only to see the shadows of the rollercoaster rafters crossing, double-crossing, double, double. Her nose, a spoon of molasses, she buries into her own soft body. The crazy lady knows it is too late then, and she knows that there is still time.
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
