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Key

October 6, 2011 in K

By Amber Francis

 

My grandmother had a box that could only be opened with a key.

Honestly, that’s the only way to do it. Now that she’s dead my whole family’s been trying to open it, but it resists everything. Every key they can find has been tested for it, but none fit. They’ve tried to break it open, but it’s too tough even for axes and chainsaws. My family just tries even harder. They’re like that – determined.

I’m not. I’m the timid one, who never auditions for a role in the school play, who never tries to score goals in any kind of sport, who is quite happy to put something aside and move on if I don’t think it will work. I know my brothers are half ashamed of me, but they and my parents still try to coax me out of my square. Because, you know, they hate giving up on anything.

What they don’t know is that I could open the box, if I wanted.

Because before she died, Grandma gave me the key. She gave it to me, she said, because what’s in that box should never ever be let out. She didn’t tell me what it was, just that she trusted me with the key because I wasn’t stupid enough to try to open the box.

Not like the rest of my family.

I’m tempted, of course – it’s difficult not to be. Pandora had her work cut out for her, I know. The world shouldn’t be so hard on her. But it turns out I can be just as determined as the rest of my family. I’ve hidden the key somewhere only I can find it. When I have kids, I’ll choose the wisest of them to pass it on to, and hopefully they’ll do the same, and so on. I know eventually somebody will open the box – that’s just the nature of these things.

But not while I can help it. The key to determination is finding something that’s worth the effort.

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Bump

October 3, 2011 in B

By Linette Voller

 

My baby has a strong heartbeat, according to the sonographer sweeping her device across the smooth cold expanse of my stomach.

Huh, I said it: ‘my baby’.  My shrink will be pleased, but I feel that something essential of me is slipping away.  They say that it’s normal in pregnancy to feel a little disassociated, or resistant to the changes that sweep over your body.

Turns out they don’t react too well when you tell them it isn’t your baby.  Each time I’ve told someone that, they look at my belly and back to me as if somehow I haven’t worked out what my massive bump is all about.  It’s easier for them to think I’m mad than to acknowledge the truth of my situation.

No, I haven’t slept with anyone in the last year, and no I’ve not drunk or taken drugs in that time.  I explain this in great detail each time, but they all think I got impregnated when I wasn’t looking, or am a pathological liar.

The lady in the light blue scrubs is trying to hide it but I know from her faltering overly cheerful voice and the way the colour drained from her face when she looked at the screen that something has deeply worried her.

I wonder if they’ll take me seriously now?

 

 

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Train

October 3, 2011 in T

By Christopher Thomas 

 

The tremor transmitted up from the ground through the sturdy wooden chair to Casey’s warm thighs and buttocks roused him from the dead-end contemplation of a conversation with Winona that will never happen. A graceless stab of his hand silenced the drone and extinguished the phosphor light of the late news update discussion panel show thing he had been looking at without really watching and certainly without listening. He had moved too quickly and failed to divine what they had been talking about so he could pretend to himself he had been paying attention instead of dwelling on some unrealised opportunity and thus avoid the self-recrimination of what was a sensible bedtime on a week night for an adult with a nine-to-five desk job.

As the rhythm of railway bogies rattling across expansion joints started its crescendo Casey lifted his great frame upright and steered it down the hallway toward an ironic bedroom scene where nothing more climactic than a change of clothes would or had ever happened. His gaze passed over the sideboard: his wallet, house keys, car keys, portable media player which was now five years old and unable to support the latest audio file formats. It didn’t matter because he could listen to music sufficiently well in the old formats and surely the determining factor was the speaker in the equally outmoded earphones plugged into the superseded electronic gadget. It wasn’t even an issue because he didn’t love the music rather than the memories of better days it evoked and he didn’t need high fidelity equipment to achieve that when he could still be halted on his track by a tinny dress shop monophonic speaker leaking ‘Give Me a Reason to Love You’ by Portishead into an echoey mall arcade.

“I just want to be a woman” ran through his head as the hem of his nightshirt dropped to his ankles and he smiled briefly at the pyjama gender dichotomy of nightdresses cut to essentially the same pattern before his mind wandered onto the track of how he came to be on the verge of negotiating his way into the bed linen when he couldn’t recall ducking through the doorway or the freight train passing out of earshot.

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