2021 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award finalists

Emma is the author of Dreams They Forgot (Wakefield Press 2020) and The Floating Garden (shortlisted Small Press Network Book of Year 2016). Her writing has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Griffith Review, Age, Spineless Wonders, Mardi Gras Anthology, Commonwealth Writers adda. She lives on Bundjalung Country in northern NSW.

From The Missing 

London, 12th May, 1949

The Thames was bristling with every kind of craft as we steamed in. It defies any comparison to any other river, and repels any descriptor flung at it. It is simply the Thames – as this is London. I’m waiting for someone to pull the ropes, snuff the lights, lower the curtains, raise the backdrop, and wheel away these glorious props and sets.

The mail boat met us. I pounced on a letter from Mother. Gig didn’t open hers from Spencer Everett until we were on the train. She’d hoped to see Spencer in his St Johns Wood digs but he’d decamped to Aberdeen ‘for the cooler air’. How could he want to leave London almost as soon as he’d arrived?

As we tottered down the gangplank, my thoughts were of Father. I knelt down and touched the bricks hoping this was where he’d docked en route to Ypres. My gloves are stained, but it’s a comfort to carry my first impression of the Old Country visibly.

We queued for hours at the passport desk then the customs hall. I yawned, smiled sweetly and confessed to being in possession of 300 cigarettes. Gig says my honesty will get us hung. The customs man (handlebar moustache) gave us a curious look from beneath his cap and scrawled green chalk across our suitcases.

With that, we were free.

Jarni is a journalist and writer based in Melbourne. He has worked extensively overseas in Malaysia and Indonesia and has written for publications such as ABC, SBS, Al Jazeera and the Griffith Review. He is the winner of a Young Walkley Award and tweets @jarniblakkarly.

From Talkin’ About A Revolution

All Ikeas look the same. At 6pm on 9 May 2018 faced with the prospect of watching the TV propaganda all night about the re-election of the corrupt government of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, my close family friend Sham had a better idea. Her fourteen-year-old twin daughters were desperate for a new couch, one that folded out for when their friends came over for sleepovers. So Sham loaded us all into the car and off to the Petaling Jaya Ikea we went. The kids lay on the Nyhamn, jumped on the Backefors and debated whether the Lycksele Murbo is long enough or not.

I was bored. To me Ikeas were places of childhood arguments and fights – a constant reminder of what we wanted but what, growing up in Melbourne, our family never had.

I pulled out my phone and went to Malaysiakini, the country’s most trusted online news website which was running live tracking of the election night results. I refreshed the page twice to make sure there was no mistake. Five of the first six seats in the 222 seat Malaysian Lower House of Parliament had been called for the opposition Pakatan Harapan (Coaltion of Hope). The coalition comprised of four opposition parties that had recently joined forces to bring down the government of Najib.

Odette is a Brisbane-based writer. Her work has featured in Womankind Magazine, Jacaranda Journal, In Bloom, Crackle Anthology, The Mirror, and [untitled]. She’s currently working on the second draft of a novel and there's a lot of coffee drinking and staring into space going on.

From A Woman Walks Into a Bar

What Happened to Evie Knight?

The following interviews were conducted by an Underground Melbourne Zine intern for a proposed piece on the disappearance of legendary muso Evie Knight from the Fitzroy music scene in the mid-2010s. 

Jett (manager at the Old Bar, Fitzroy) - Yeah, Evie. God, that feels like another lifetime, when she used to drink in here. I still remember meeting her on my first week at this job, must be ten years ago now. She sauntered in wearing her usual fuck-off steel cap docs and gunmetal grey bomber jacket, threw her jacket on the back of a chair and then leaned on the bar, and said, ‘All right newbie, make me your best whisky sour and don’t hold back on those cherries.’ [Jett laughs] I was bricking myself; I’d heard about her before—she was an icon around Fitzroy. She had this aura, it’s hard to explain, I don’t know, maybe it was confidence, but I think it was something more. You know how they say that some people just have that little extra than everyone else? Well, whatever that is, Evie had it in spades.

Dominique grew up in Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. Hecq writes across genres and sometimes across tongues. Her works include a novel, four collections of stories and eleven books of poetry. Tracks (2020) and Songlines (2021) are her latest offerings. With Eugen Bacon, she co-authored Speculate (2021), a microlit dialogue.

From Smacked

W lay still. She watched the new day seep into her room, drifting, all the way down the wall and across the floor. She was sure she wouldn’t live through it.

The woman who came to be known as W lived in a block of bedsits, a tenement in one of the inner suburbs of Melbourne. W was of a dieable age. She could have been thirty or forty something. She could have been slightly younger. Or older. Her body was wiry. Taut. She looked spartan. Spare. Perhaps this is why people avoided her.

W was from Wales. She had lived most of her life in rented rooms in Llangynidr, then Cardiff, but mainly London, where she earned a living as a nanny from the age of sixteen. She was known as Wallis, then.

D.J. Huppatz is the author of two poetry books, Happy Avatar (Puncher and Wattmann, 2015) and Astroturfing for Spring (Puncher and Wattmann, 2021). He teaches Cultural Marxism at a Job-Ready Training Centre in Melbourne/Naarm.

From The Net

As I got up to make more tea, the net convulsed, enveloping my feet in its folds. Perhaps Mrs Wang next door yanked her final thread for the night through with too much gusto or Old Man Chen who lives by the oyster shed stumbled on his front step and grabbed at something to stop his fall.

“Aiya!” cried Grandfather as I untangled an ankle. “Be careful! Everyone in the village is committed to doing great and glorious work on the net!”

Grandmother, whose brittle frame jolted upright momentarily, frowned at him before she resumed her stitching, carefully attaching a pink silk flower—a little faded and ragged at the edges—onto the rough twine.

“Bitter greens and pork fat,” said Grandfather, “that’s what we used to eat.”

“Pa, let her be,” said Grandmother.

“She needs to know,” he replied. “Young people don’t know what this village was like before the revolution. Eel Face sitting outside Despot Joe’s hut, clicking abacus beads all day, counting Joe’s money that he’d taken from us—his share of the catch, he’d call it.”

Jodie’s stories have appeared in publications, such as Australian Short Stories, Imago, Southern Review, Aurealis, Going Down Swinging and The Big Issue. They have won or received commendations in many short story awards, including the Max Harris, Henry Savery, Stuart-Hadow, Southern Cross, Alan Marshall, KSP, Judah Waten, Albury City Council, R Carsen Gold and Hal Porter.

From Laid Bare

From where she lies on the mattress, Gracie can see a strip of pale sky through the window, the tops of the trees flailing about the way she does whenever she’s nervous or excited.

‘You zoning out, Gracie?’

‘No.’

‘What were you thinking about then?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’

Tyson gives a snort of laughter, props himself up on his elbow so that he’s looking down at her. His fringe hangs over one of his grey eyes. ‘Where’d you pick up that line?’

She’s pleased with herself for having remembered it, for having made him laugh. She can’t remember which of her dad’s girlfriends had said it – Sally or Brenda – so she says, ‘Senda.’

Rashida is a writer living on the lands of Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation in Boorloo/Perth. She is the author of The Historian’s Daughter, published in 2016 by UWA Publishing. Her stories, essays and poems have appeared in the Westerly, Cordite Review, Landscapes and Journal as well as in several anthologies, including Of Indian Origin and Feminine Rising. She is currently working on a new novel.

From The Bonesetter’s Fee and other stories

It is a slippery afternoon. Fingers slip when holding hands, hands slip when pulling at bones – it didn’t feel like fixing what was broken. How can being fixed hurt so much? The Bonesetter is grim with sweat and intent and Mrs Bonesetter keeps wiping my palms so he can get a grip. Such pain. And the bone jutting jagged through skin. My parents have left me here with barbarians. Noisy unpleasant barbarians whose voices are like protruding bones. Uncle Hamid had looked at my poor arm, my sweaty face, my streaked cheeks, and told my parents not to take me to this man. He whispered but I heard. I heard the bonesetter had a reputation. I heard him called the bonebreaker. It would be better to wait till tomorrow morning and see a proper doctor, Uncle Hamid said.

‘A girl’ Hamid’s wife said, loudly and uncaringly, ’must not have visible defects. How can you trust this man to set her bone properly?’

‘Ssh,’ said Mum. ‘What choice do we have? The child is in pain and she’ll scream all night.

Nothing but trouble I tell you. She’ll be alright. Don’t be paranoid. He can fix that arm.

People in the mohalla have been going to him for years.’