Murrumbidgee Short Story Competition Winning Entries
OPEN CATEGORY WINNER
ONCE IN A ONE OUT
by Andrew Alchin
I’m not much of a storyteller, find it hard at times to put words together so that it all sounds right. But I’ll do my best to tell this one, if only to get it all out of my head and maybe, by putting it onto paper, I won’t have it lingering there in my memory. What I am about to write all happened. You might think it a good yarn, something to mag about up at the bar with the boys. It happened to me though and, to me, there’s no good in it at all.
I’ve always been a bit of a risk-taker over my life, and at times have found myself on the wrong side of the law, which has led me to have done my share of gaol. They say that gaol can be as scary as hell sometimes but for me one of my laggings was scary for very different reasons.
One year in a hot summer I was the guest of Her Majesty in one of the oldest gaols in Australia – really no need to name the place; let’s just say that most of Australia’s most notorious and hardened criminals at one time or another have been through the place, or rest there eternally in the prison graveyard where I could see their headstones from the barred window of my cell at the time.
Now what I’m about to tell you is no amazing story, no big finale or happy, grand ending. It’s just about some things that happened to me that I don’t often talk about. So bear with me and I will try and tell it how it was.
I suppose it starts with the little things. I was moved into a one-out (that’s a single cell for those not in the know) after being in a two-out for a fair while. At first I enjoyed and welcomed the solitude and privacy that came with it, but after a few weeks I was wishing I had a celly, if only to tell me that no, I wasn’t going crazy and that things were not as they should be. Bread, the bloody bread rations we received each night, it started with my bread.
One night after we were all locked in and the day done, I was lying on my bed reading an old book with sweat running out of me from the heat of the day when my bread ration fell off my shelf and onto the floor. I remember looking at it there on the floor and quickly glancing back up at my shelf half expecting to see one of the monstrous cockroaches that frequented the place that could have knocked it off the shelf, but there wasn’t anything - just my dinner plate, bowl and mug, nothing out of place. I didn’t think anything of it. I got up out of bed, picked my bread off the floor and placed it back on the shelf, but in my bowl this time, went over to the wall opposite my bed, turned my light out at the switch, went back to bed, and was asleep before I knew it.
I awoke early the next morning and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my bread back on the floor. I reckoned the cockroaches must have been in my bowl while I was asleep and somehow managed to knock it back on the floor. I bent over to grab it and as I picked it up I saw that it was mouldy. Bloody screws giving us mouldy bread now, I thought as I threw it in my cell bin. That day I asked others if they got mouldy bread, but of all those I asked, I was the only one. Just my luck!
That night after lock-in the same thing happened all over again. I was in bed as usual reading the same old book when I heard a slap. I looked over and my bread’s lying on the floor again. This time I picked it up and examined it. It felt fresh, smelled fresh; itwas bloody fresh. I put it back on my shelf. The next morning the bread was on my cell floor when I awoke. This time it was so mouldy I could see spoors starting to form, and it really stunk. I couldn’t work out how bread could turn so drastically overnight. I told some of the boys that day; none of them were having mouldy bread problems like me but they all agreed that someone was more than likely playing around with my bread.
That night there were no bread problems and it was still fresh the next morning. The night after that though, things started to get very weird. I was on my bed reading, as I do, when my bread literally flew off my shelf at a hundred miles an hour and missed my head by inches, smashing into the wall, spraying me with mouldy bread - bread that wasn’t mouldy half an hour prior and certainly not bloody flying. It shook the shit out of me and for the rest of the night I lay there not sleeping, thinking of all sorts of supernatural bullshit, ghosts and all that. I told the boys the next morning what had happened and they all thought that I was full of crap and they enjoyed taking the piss out of me all that day. I even swallowed my pride and asked the screws if I could move cells, and even told them why, but they told me to take a teaspoon of cement and harden up, and said they would take a urine sample if I kept it up with spinner stories. So at lock-in that night I went into my cell all jumpy and anxious and went to sleep with my bread under my pillow.
The next week or two passed by uneventfully with nothing out of the ordinary taking place. I let my guard back down and just went with the everyday motions of gaol life.
It was a forty degree night. Sweat was pouring out of me as I lay in my bed trying to sleep. I still remember how soaked my sheets were from my perspiration. At some stage I must have finally drifted off into a deep sleep. Around two o’clock in the morning I awoke, freezing cold. My teeth were actually chattering and my sheet like ice from being wet with my sweat. Crazy, I thought as I grabbed my two blankets from under the bed. How can the weather go from one extreme to another? I could see my breath in the cold frigid air as I pulled the blankets over me.
I was awoken as the screws rattled the key in my cell door lock for let-go that morning. It was boiling hot, probably already forty degrees, and here I was under two blankets absolutely drenched with my own sweat. Even my foam mattress was soaked right through. I remembered how cold it had got through the night and I asked the boys how they went. After long discussion they all put across the idea that maybe I’d had a fever, maybe even a bout of food poisoning. It had been a stinking hot night and we were in for another. I convinced myself that I had eaten something dodgy, probably the ham I had for lunch the previous day. I was feeling alright though and glad that if it was food poisoning, it seemed to have run its course. I watched what I ate all of that day and at lock-in that night it was still forty-plus degrees. My mattress had dried out from the heat of the day, and although it was a bit more on the nose than usual, was alright to sleep on.
I tossed and turned in the heat as I tried in vain to fall asleep. You get to know your cell like the back of your hand. Everything has its own place. Spend enough time in the one cell and you get to know every mark on the walls, every smudge, every stain and, when the lights are out, every shadow. It was in the dark lying in the unbearable heat with my eyes open staring at nothing in particular that I noticed something. A shadow in the shadows where there shouldn’t have been a shadow would be the best way to describe it. In the furtherest corner of my cell, roughly three metres from my bed, a solid black mass where there should have been a trickle of light and the hint of the corner of the cell. There was a definite shape there. I stared at it in the darkness. I didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t even blink. Then I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, so I had to blink. The black not-supposed-to-be-there shape moved. I nearly yelled, then I tried to yell, but I couldn’t make a sound. My throat had seized up. I was terrified. I watched unbelieving as this shadow grew taller, grew wider, like it was coming at me. Finally I found my courage and threw my pillow at the shape. “Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran for the light switch, found it and flicked the switch. Glorious light instantly filled my cell. My pillow was lying on the floor in the corner where the supposedly-whatever had been lurking. I was swearing at myself and my heart was thumping in my chest. Had my eyes been tricking me? Was I still sick from the so-called food poisoning? I went to sleep that hot night with the light on.
No-one took me seriously as I talked it over in the yard the next day and by lock-in that night I had accepted that with the heat of the night I may have been dehydrated and my brain was having little meltdowns. The night to come though left no doubt that what was happening was real and had nothing to do with my mental state.
Another scorcher of a night, and it would have been after midnight before I succumbed to sleep. I awoke around three in the morning freezing my balls off and my body shaking with cold, and there it was, right in front of me sitting at my feet in the darkness; the silhouette of a man, a big man. At first I thought, and only for a brief second, that it was another inmate, that somehow another inmate had been let into my cell. My brain was searching for possibilities, anything! I can’t describe how terrifiedI actually was. No words on paper would do justice to how I felt at that moment. Thething on my bed seemed to stand up in the darkness making the dark darker, then it merged into the shadows in the corner of my cell, the same corner where I had spied this menacing shadow previously.
I can’t tell you how long I sat there in the dark hugging my pillow to my chest, freezing cold. I can’t tell you how long that thing and I sized each other up in the dense darkness. I must have slept because I was awoken by the usual key rattling in my cell door.
All that day I tried and tried to change cells. The screws didn’t want to know about it and they seemed to take pleasure in watching me plead with them.
Every day must come to an end. Kids go home from school, workers make their way home at knock off, and prisoners get locked back in their cells at night. I don’t pray to God that often; I’m not what you call a good Christian man. But that night at lock-in I prayed and prayed. Prayed to a God that I didn’t know, a God I didn’t understand. I fell asleep praying and with the light burning bright.
Someone holding me down, by my shoulders, someone strong. I awoke; pitch black darkness, thick darkness and someone holding me down. An unbelievable force, strength, pushing me into the mattress. Fingers; freezing cold fingers trying to gouge my eyes. There’s nobody there, all I see is black. Something not human all around me, all over me. “Get the fuck off me!! I scream. It’s gone. In an instant it’s gone, a split second, gone. Looking into the darkness of the cell all the shadows are as they should be. I manage to turn the light on and negate the darkness. Heart thumping, sobbing like a child. There are scratches around my eyes and mouth.
And that’s it. No more to tell. I was moved from that cell the next day. The screws saw my face and thought I was self harming. They put me back into a two-out. They moved a young bloke into that cell the same day. He was found in the cell the next morning with scratches around his mouth and eyes. His hair had turned white. He was as dead as a doornail. I said nothing, what was the point?
So that’s my story, that’s the whack. I couldn’t give a stuff if you believe it or not. I’ve done a lot more gaol since that happened. I hear stories now and then about haunted cells and strange stuff. Touch wood that nothing has happened to me since, but there’s no way I could spend any time in that particular cell again.
UNDER 18 WINNER
Inching Apart
by DANIEL BRIDGE
The musty, earthy reek of mould lingered in the air, growing off a crumpled white box of Chinese food discarded in the corner. It stuck lazily on the yellowed carpet, amongst the empty, unlabelled, brown bottles that reeked like the pungent, septic smell of fermented ingredients. A path of old fast food boxes and stains followed the meshed front door to a tattered, cream couch, where a bloated, shirtless man sagged into the cushions, with half of his body melting like wax onto the filthy floor.
My eyes continued scouting the room. The same strips of peeling wallpaper stretched from bedroom to living room to kitchen, as if you couldn’t tell when one room began and the other ended. I sniffed again at the air, the dusty staleness, mixed with soot and other little mites. But the most overwhelming odour came from the sleeping, half-bald man, a malodorous stench that reeked of an amalgam of sweat and beer. A guttural snarl growled from his buried face, his swollen hand climbing the foot of the coffee table to a glass ashtray. His fingers scrounged near the shrivelled butts until they plucked a half-finished brown stick, plunging the other hand under his greasy chest to grasp a lighter.
“Mornin’” I mumbled under my breath. With a puff of blue-white smoke, he grunted back, his eyes staring listlessly out the mesh door, at the unkept, browning grasses. I followed his gaze, barred by the metal wiring and plastics separating the stench and disgust we both stood in from outside. Dragging my feet over the cream linoleum tiles, I opened the hinging mini fridge door. Instinctively, I held my hand to my nose, a smell of sulfur that had lingered in the backs of the cold shelves for several months barraged my nostrils. I had attempted to clean it before, clearing out the fridge and scrubbing each shelf in vain, just for it to come back once the door opened again. Something that had fallen into the filter, maybe?
I plucked out a half-eaten McMuffin, biting down on the cold egg and rubbery bacon, and let it sit on my tongue. The taste of nothing. I could see the top of the old man’s, my ... old man’s head, peeking over the ledge of the couch, with a cloud of smog billowing above him, catching at the ceiling. The slow, rhythmic bounce of his head peeking over the back of the couch, each rasping breath a struggle through the dense, unmoving air. As it grew hazier and the smoke began to tickle my tonsils, I pulled my shirt up to cover my nose.
“Open a window, dammit” I spat at that figure, as I clutched my breakfast and marched out towards the front ‘door’. Without an answer from him, I slammed it back in its frame as much as it’d let me and sat out on the porch. Sitting down tugged at something far back beyond me. A memory? Indigestion from the bacon, maybe? Looking up at the clouds, I tried to make pictures in the sky: a blob that kinda looked like Korea, another like the Honda logo, that one maybe ... a frog? I felt 10 again, except 10 year old me would have done a much better job. He would’ve seen a wizard fighting a dragon or a pirate setting sail on the ocean. Closing my eyes, I could hear muffled, enthusiastic shouts of a woman’s voice echoing behind me. Music played out the window, Fleetwood I presumed. The warm drums and bass of ‘Dreams’ slowly faded away, and morphed into the low, monotonous drone of a news anchor. I guess he’d found the remote for the box somewhere in that mess. Looking back at the clouds, they’d returned to smudges. They were the same clouds, so why couldn’t I see wizards and pirates anymore?
I felt sick from the mushy muffins and wet bacon and eggs, and chucked the last mouthful or two past the fence on my left, and into the neighbour’s chrysanthemums. My gaze shifted from the orange and lavender buds to their tidy, recently-mowed lawn to the open doors of their Suzuki car. It was a deep burgundy colour, with dead bugs splattered on the car window, and five of those family car stickers on the back: a mum, a dad, two daughters, and a son. Inside the vehicle, a plump woman, the ‘mother’ I presumed, was yelling for a man who was making his way out their front door, briefcase in hand. The two of them, with three young kids in the back, quickly reversed out and sped past me, turning a corner out of view.
I sat up with a sigh and stood still on the wooden planks below my feet. Turning back around, I softly pushed the door back open and stood in the doorway, looking him head to toe. He sat with this intense hunch, the hair from his head had migrated to his back, and he’d picked up a second, old cigarette as the first lay half-lit on the couch beside him. But he noticed and made eye contact with me, his eyes reflecting a sombre, warm gaze I hadn’t seen. Seeing something in my own as well, he straightened his back and smushed the cigarette onto the ashtray. With an awkward sweep of his hands, he wiped off the debris from the couch and made a faint gesture for me to take a seat. I took a deep breath and followed his command.
UNDER 12 WINNER
The Kangaroo Friends
by Odette McGuinness
Izzy is a 12 year old. She lives on a farm in Australia with her mum and dad. They live with a cat that is spotty and named Poppy. They also live with a dog named Hoppy and it is white and brown.
When Izzy goes to school everyday on the bus she sees lots of kangaroos.
Poppy and Hoppy go with Izzy to the bus stop every day and when Izzy is at school they play with the kangaroos. The kangaroos are really friendly and smart. The kangaroos are that smart that one of them can throw the ball for the dog and the other one can use the toy fishing rod to play with the cat.
One day, Izzy’s dad went out to get Poppy and Hoppy for lunch. “Come on Hoppy and Poppy! Time for lunch!” called out Izzy’s dad. Poppy and Hoppy were being very naughty and did not come when he called them so he had to go out and get them.
When he got there one of the kangaroos kicked him in the leg because they were having too much fun and the kangaroos and did not want Poppy and Hoppy to go for lunch.
The dad was lying on the ground and Izzy’s mum came outside. “Are you okay?” asked Izzy’s mum.“No!” screamed Izzy’s dad. “Let’s take you to the hospital now” said Izzy’s mum. “How do I get in the car?” asked Izzy’s dad. “I will lift you up in to the car” answered Izzy’s mum.
When they got to the hospital they had to wait for the doctor in the waiting room.
When the doctor came out they were called in to go and see the doctor and the doctor told Izzy’s dad to get on the examination bed so he could have a look at his leg. “You have a very bad break in your leg. You have to stay the night in the hospital” said the doctor.
When Izzy got home she could not find her mum or her dad. “Mum! … Dad!” Izzy screamed. The whole town could hear her screaming. Izzy called her mum on her watch to see where she was.
“Why is Poppy and Hoppy at home?” said Izzy. “Because one of the kangaroos kicked your dad in the leg and it broke it and I am at the hospital with him” said Izzy’s mum.
“Mum, can I come to the hospital so I can see dad?” asked Izzy. “Sure” said Izzy’s mum.
“How do I get there?” asked Izzy. “Could you please call your best friend’s mum to bring you here?” said Izzy’s mum. “OK” said Izzy.
When Izzy got to the hospital her dad was in a wheel chair and he had a plaster cast on his leg. They all stayed at the hospital for the night and the next day Izzy, her dad and her mum went home.
Then 4 weeks later he had to go and see the doctor for a check up. His leg was healed and Poppy and Hoppy never went with Izzy to the bus stop ever again.
OPEN CATEGORY Runner-UP
The Crushing Inevitability of 4.00
by CAI HOLROYD
Vincent had deep-cleaned his house twice by now, and had attempted to listen to an audiobook recording of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ about a dozen times. He had selected the book from a range of options he got for free when he signed up toanother meditation app that hadn’t helped.Turns out the audiobooks didn’t help much either.
He was about to see whether plucking out the 32nd of his arm hairs would make him relax when he decided to light a candle - hoping that the soothing smell of lavender and turquoise would make him feel better. He reread the label on the candle again, thinking he must have misread it, but no. This candle was supposed to smell of ‘lavender and turquoise.’ He wasn’t sure precisely what ‘turqoise’ would smell like, but part of him was curious to find out. Vincent shrugged and lit it anyway, revealing that it was a misprint. In fact, the candle smelt of cheap soy wax.
It was 1.32, the clock on his microwave told him. That made it two minutes since the last time he had checked it, and sixteen minutes since he had attempted to have a quick sleep on the couch before starting up in a panic that he had missed something vitally important but could not remember what.
“They’ll be here in 2 and a half hours,” he mumbled to himself. “That’s plenty of time to go out, get some lunch and some sunlight, and come back.” It was a good thought, immediately undercut by a far less helpful one that theorised that they might arrive early. Leaving them waiting at the door for more than a few seconds would not go far in changing their mind. Although, might it put off a kind of casual, devil-may-care attitude that could work in his favour? No, he correctly concluded. It would not.
It was 1.33 now, and Vincent threw his hands up in the air. “This is BULLSHIT,” he said, once again. It was his fifth time today. “I cannot wait around here stressing about what may or may not even happen. I have a life, I’ve got shit to do,” he said, before throwing himself into a recliner - ready to accomplish exactly none of his shit.
1.45 now.
Vincent paced around the room, like an under-stimulated tiger at a bad zoo... but with none of the grace and predatory menace that that implies. He had promised himself not to look at the clock for five whole minutes, but realised quickly that he didn’t have any way to tell whether it had been five minutes or not without looking at the clock. He estimated that it had been about 3 or 4 minutes now. It was, in truth, exactly 26 seconds.
Giving up and looking at the clock, Vincent was filled with a sense of rage mixed with melancholic impotence. Part of this, he realised, was disappointment at his own incompetence regarding how much time had passed, but a much deeper part was directed at the concept of time itself.
It struck Vincent as unfair that it continued, no matter what else while his favourite events were frequently cancelled on account of unforeseen circumstances.“Hubris,” he said. “It’s hubris, is what it is... and inconsiderate.”
The clock ticked, spitefully. Staring at it ever deeper, Vincent watched the second-hand judder along. For a moment, he could have sworn it went backwards - mocking him by adding another second to his torturous wait.
“Hahaha,” said the clock. “Hahaha Vincent, you stupid son of a bitch.” “That’s enough from you,” Vincent said, hauling himself up from his recliner and angrily stomping over to it. The clock seemed indifferent to his attempt at intimidation.
Removing the battery from the back of the clock, Vincent looked contentedly at the hands as they slowed to a stop. He stared at the stationary hands for a moment; for while the gears of the clock had stopped, the gears in his mind had begun to turn. The clock read 1:47, and it would continue to read 1:47 for as long as it continued in this state which had given Vincent his epiphany.
“Time is an illusion,” said Vincent, correctly.
“If daylight savings can take and distribute hours as it wants, why shouldn’t I?”
It should be noted that Vincent was not alone in his fear of 4 o’clock, but he was alone in his mad race around his apartment - searching and collecting anything with a clock attached. He grinned manically as a radio, his microwave and his phone were added to a pile in his living room.
While some were easy enough to halt, requiring simply to be unplugged or have their batteries removed, some proved difficult. Checking his phone battery’s settings, he learnt that it would last another 6 hours - far too long to be useful, and he could not access the battery himself.
Vincent thought long and hard about this, before calmly drowning his expensive phone in the kitchen sink.
“Noooo...” said the phone.
“Hahaha,” said Vincent.
The phone had no response to Vincent’s devastating comeback, and simply blubbed pathetically as it died.
It was...
It was...
Vincent did not know what time it was, and concluded that as nobody was around to correct him, it must have been 11 in the morning. After all, the blinds were drawn so that no sunlight would come in and give him a hint regarding what time it could be. He was not concerned with what time it might be outside his apartment - this was his realm, and if he said it was 11am, then it simply was.
Vincent lay back on the lounge and relaxed. He had hours left until 4 o’clock, and he fully intended to simply decide that it was 11 again once more when the hour approached. And yet, something ached at him. It nagged at the back of his brain, a hint that his solution was not as infallible as it seemed.
“I know,” said Vincent. “It can be 11 o’clock in the morning forever, but 4 o’clock in the afternoon will still be approaching and I shall never be free.” With that, Vincent had his final epiphany and decided that rather than it be 11 o’clock, or even 2 o’clock - it should be exactly a quarter past four.
“That way, 4 o’clock will have come and gone already and I shall have nothing to fear.” With his mind triumphant and settled, Vincent stood tall and declared to his empty apartment that it was indeed 4.15 and that he would not hear anything to the contrary. After a quick coffee, he lay down to have a nap.
It was some unknown amount of hours later when he was awoken by a beeping. Blearily, he looked around for the source of the infernal noise and identified the pile of devices that still sat motionless in his loungeroom.
Pawing through the pile, he was still unable to find the source - until his stomach dropped with a grim realisation. “No.”
His watch was beeping with a shrill note reserved for alarms, and looking at the digital face, his face settled with grim finality. In his haste to eliminate 4 o’clock from existence, he had overlooked what he had trusted most and indeed, the digital face read “4:01” - smugly pretending that it didn’t know precisely what chaos it was heralding in.
As he fumbled with the strap, there came a loud and rather obtrusive knock at the door. 4 o’clock had arrived all the same.
UNDER 18 CATEGORY Runner-UP
Where the light falls
by madDison WEIR
The morning was quiet, except for the faint whistle of the kettle beginning to hiss. Steam curled in the cool kitchen air like a slow exhale, vanishing just as softly. Ellie stood at the sink, her palms resting on the edge, dusted with flour from the half-rolled dough behind her. Her back was slightly bowed—not from age, but from the weight of the morning, from memory, from a stillness that had settled deep into her bones. Her eyes, though, were fixed beyond the window.
Outside, the world shimmered. Rain had passed through in the night, leaving behind a thin glaze over the garden. The whole space looked like it had been dipped in glass, and leaves trembled with droplets that slid down and clung stubbornly to their edges. The lavender bushes, heavy with bloom, leaned in slow arcs over the path, spilling fragrance into the damp air. A lorikeet darted past, a blur of green and vibrant red, landing messily on the lemon tree whose branches sagged under the weight of yellow fruit. Beneath it, the grass was dappled in shadow and light, blades glittering like tiny mirrors where the sun touched them.
The sun was just high enough now to paint the world gold. It slanted through the paned window above the
sink, catching on the curves of the cupboards and striking the lip of a single mug left on the bench. Blue and white porcelain, with a fine crack tracing its side—delicate in a way that felt almost out of place in her modern kitchen. It hadn’t matched the rest of the set for years, but Ellie kept it anyway. The handle had been glued once, long ago, by hands steadier than hers. She reached for it without thinking.
She remembered this light.
Not today’s exactly, but something just like it—years ago, pouring in through a different window, touching her mother’s face as she sat at the table with the same mug, steam rising from it in soft spirals. Those mornings had felt endless in their simplicity. She remembered cereal boxes on their sides, the sound of spoons clinking against ceramic, the scuffle of socks across wooden floors. She remembered the garden from that house, wilder than this one—roses tangling themselves into the fence line, a rusted wheelbarrow sinking into the grass beneath the jasmine, bees buzzing drunk on sun.
They had been days lit from within, filled with small, perfect sounds: porcelain against wood, a page turning, the soft whirr of the fridge cycling on. They carried the lightness of routine, the kind of magic that slips by unnoticed until it becomes memory. She could hear her mother’s voice again: "Up early, love?" Spoken like a gentle secret. No rush, no demand. Just the acknowledgment of presence, of being together before the day woke fully. Now, the house was quiet in a different way. No clatter of footsteps across the floorboards. No second cup being poured. No gentle humming drifting from another room. The walls felt wider somehow, their silence stretched too thin.
Ellie wrapped her hands around the mug, feeling the faint hairline crack beneath her thumb, smooth from years of use. The kettle’s whistle lingered a moment longer before softening into silence, leaving the kitchen hushed except for the gentle rustle of the curtains shifting in the breeze. She tipped the water slowly, steady as a ritual, and watched as the tea leaves unfurled and drifted like dark petals in the pale water. They bloomed in slow spirals, staining the liquid with a warmth that spread outward, richer with each breath of steam that rose to meet her.
Outside, the world carried on as it always had. A bee hovered near the rosemary bush, fat and purposeful. The breeze stirred the curtains just slightly, making them ripple like a tide. The light shifted across the tiles, slow and honeyed, catching in the ridges of the flour still scattered on the bench. Her tea spread warmth through her chest, anchoring her. She thought of her mother’s kitchen again, of mornings that tasted like marmalade on toast and sounded like the low murmur of a radio playing news that never seemed urgent. The old wooden table had been scarred with knife marks and ringed with stains, yet it was there that life had unfolded most steadily. School forms signed, birthday candles blown out, letters opened with care. She remembered how her mother always kept fresh flowers in a chipped vase, no matter the season—daisies plucked from the roadside, or camellias shaken free of rain.
Ellie glanced at the dough waiting on the counter. Bread had been her mother’s ritual, too. The smell of it rising, the crackle of the crust in the oven. The way it drew people together, even in silence. She had taken it up again not out of necessity, but out of longing—out of some hope that the act itself might summon what she missed most. She sipped again, slower this time, and let her gaze drift to the lemon tree. She would harvest the fruit later, maybe make curd or a tart. Her mother would have insisted on lemonade, tangy and sweet, served in mismatched glasses to anyone who came by. Ellie smiled faintly at the thought, though it tugged at something deep in her chest.
The lorikeet squawked, wings beating in a blur before it leapt into the sky again. She watched it vanish into the distance until even the sound was gone. The quiet returned, but it no longer felt hollow. Instead, it was layered—with memory, with presence, with the steady hum of a world both gone and still here.
She reached for the rolling pin, her hands steadying against the wooden handle. The dough yielded easily under pressure, soft and pliant. Flour rose in a pale cloud, catching in the same sunlight that had touched her mother’s face years ago. In that moment, Ellie felt a thread between past and present, woven through the most ordinary of mornings. Outside, the light shifted once more. The bees moved on. The garden shimmered and settled into itself. And in the quiet kitchen, with warm tea and rising bread, Ellie carried it all forward—the memory, the weight, the comfort—into another day.
OPEN CATEGORY Highly commended
HOUSEKEEPING
by CAI HOLROYD
This story contains references to suicide and drug use.
It’s been three weeks since you started living on this couch. Every week, you pay your oldest friend $100 for the privilege and every night, you scroll sharehouses and send messages to potential flatmates. Your friend occasionally asks you how it’s going - if it was going well, you assure her, she’d be the first to know.
“Aren’t you leaving today? Remember, I asked you the other day to go,” she says.
“Yeah, you said next Friday.”
“No, I said Friday.”
You resist the urge to bring up the text that clearly states next Friday, and you simply nod. You don’t really have the energy to fight with her. You pack up your bag, grab your yellowed, ratty pillow and step out the door.
Some manipulative part of you hopes she’ll ask where you’ll go so you can tell her that you don’t have anywhere else and maybe she’d let you stay for another week. She doesn’t say a word.
That was the last time the two of you spoke, with the single exception of one message eight months later asking if you’d be at her birthday. You didn’t go. In truth, you understood why she kicked you out - but the silence that followed was too much to look past.
The thought of talking to or seeing her again fills your mouth with cold acid. You are confident that you used to be good friends, but whenever you try to think of that time, you can only conjure up the charred remains of what that might have looked like.
You didn’t stay with any other friends after that, for fear of the same destruction.
~
It’s been one hour and sixteen minutes that you’ve been on the phone with your mother.
“Honey, why don’t you just move back home?”
“I just want to see how this one pans out, I have a good feeling about it but yeah, maybe if this place doesn’t take me in, I’ll move back.”
You’ve thought about going back home with your tail between your legs every night for the last three weeks, but stubborn pride is all you have left now. You don’t have it in you to tell your mum that the people you ‘have a good feeling about’ messaged you four hours ago to tell you they found someone else.
When she sends you some money for a night in a motel, the guilt makes you vomit. You pretend not to notice the blood in it, that is a problem for another day.
When people ask why you didn’t move back home, you laugh it off. “Too stubborn, I guess,” but the truth you keep to yourself is that it would have killed you. Deep down, you already know how the story would have ended. You move back home, you go back to work at the chicken shop and three months later, the newspaper prints that a young man was found with his wrists slit in a bathtub.
You couldn’t go back. There would be too many reminders of your failures. At least if you die out here
on the street, at least you went out fighting, right?
~
It has been one week since you moved into what could politely be called a crack den. You don’t think your housemate has slept in that entire week, judging by the fact that he’s always been awake when you’ve seen him and the fact that his eyes seem to be painfully close to falling out of his head.
His friends are over most nights. You spend your mornings sweeping up broken glass from the kitchen floor before heading to classes. Every surface is covered in scorch marks and every shelf is littered with bongs made out of gatorade bottles. You have, so far, resisted the impulse to partake.
When you come home from uni each day, the first thing you do is check that your stuff is still where you left it. One day, it isn’t. It’s fine, you tell yourself, nothing you had was worth much anyway.
Every time you leave the house, you check that it’s locked at least twice. Usually three times. You can no longer sleep during bad thunderstorms, as you can’t truly be sure whether the noises are just the roof tiles creaking or someone checking the doors for weaknesses.
When you come home after work, you can’t help but hold your breath as you unlock the door. You are expecting the cupboards to be open and your stuff to be gone.
You don’t like leaving for longer than a weekend. When you do, you pay your friends to check in on the place. ‘Just in case you need a quiet space, you can use it while I’m gone,’ you lie.
~
It has been seven years since you moved into your own flat. It costs you $400 a week, but you don’t have to share it with anyone else and you can decorate it how you like as long as nothing marks the walls.
It makes you happy to have a place of your own. You occasionally show it off to people, proud. “It’s nice,” they say. “Minimalist.”
You don’t think they really appreciate the enormity of what you are showing them. You could fit your life into three duffel bags - but that’s too many to carry by yourself so you know that it’s actually far too much. You wonder whether you’re a hoarder.
You cry when letters arrive from your property manager, just in case they tell you the words you’re dreading. At least once every six months, you start budgeting in case you need to offer more in order to keep the place. Your therapist tells you that it’s okay to feel panicky. Therapy will be the first thing to go if you are asked to leave.
Someone will sit down to write about your experiences, but it won’t be you. It will be a stranger - someone bitter and cold trying to chronicle memories that tighten in their chest as they write. You are still living on the street, bouncing back and forth between old couches and new disasters. You will die there as this other person pretends that they have moved on.
Seven years later, the stranger will still wake up in a cold sweat wondering where they’re going to sleep tomorrow night.
under 18 Highly commended
Bubble popping
by daniel bridge
Innocence is superficial, a fragile facade gifted to us at birth. When we near the edge of a cliff, it becomes the blindfold we tie over our eyes, shielding us from what lies ahead. It’s like trying to walk before your legs can hold you. Everyone begins life innocent, but somewhere along the road, change becomes inevitable. Growth demands it. Ironically, innocence longs to be seen as mature, even as it contradicts what maturity truly is. And yet, as we grow older within our communities, the desire to preserve that fleeting purity resurfaces. Remain young. Remain pure. Remain unchanged.
As children, we’re often told to “grow up” or “act our age.” But these expectations are shaped less by nature and more by convenience, fabricated to suit the comfort of adults, of teachers, of what society deems a ‘sensible’ child. Why should we act our age when it’s within our nature to remain curious, naive, and unguarded? Studies suggest that nearly 40% of high school students are disengaged from school, perhaps not because they’ve failed the system, but because the system fails to nurture the very innocence it claims to protect. I remember being reprimanded in Year 5 for asking too many questions, told to sit still and “just listen” as if curiosity were a crime. That institutional authority stuck with me, transforming me from a quiet child to an anxious teenager to what is likely a despondent adult. As we grow older, we find ourselves caught in an impossible choice: desperately cling to a childlike view of the world, or surrender to the greyness of the ‘real’ one.
This raises a confronting question: is innocence truly something we should hold in such high regard? Often, it’s romanticised in hindsight, tangled with regret as we mourn the youth we’ve lost. Public discourse echoes with the idea that we’ve been robbed of our childhoods, that the world, in all its quiet cruelties, has pushed us too quickly into the deep end. Former American footballer Ray Rice once reflected, “I was forced to become a young man at a young age.” His words speak to a broader truth: when innocence is lost, we aren’t comforted, we’re celebrated. When children rebel, we call it a phase. When adults do, we call it a crisis. Either way, we treat disobedience as pathology, as if curiosity were contagious. We’re told we’re ‘mature for our age,’ and applauded for growing up fast. Somewhere along the way, society began placing us on a pedestal not for what we’ve preserved, but for what we’ve had to leave behind.
Innocence is not a virtue, nor is it something to wear with pride, it is merely the absence of knowledge, the absence of wrongdoing. To be innocent is to live inside a bubble of silence. Our first bubble is home: our sanctuary, our safe haven. But curiosity is relentless, and eventually, we pop that bubble, believing, naively, that it can somehow be ‘unpopped.’ Studies show that most parents believe childhood ends before adolescence. Children themselves say it ends around age ten, sometimes even earlier. At my age now, I often wonder: if I’d known what came after the pop, would I still have dared to press against the bubble?
If I had been aware of the outcome of any major decision in my life would I still have wanted to do it?
Thomas Hobbes once claimed that “all humans are naturally selfish and wicked, driven by a perpetual and restless desire for power that ceases only in death”, thus believing humanity’s core to be rooted in self-interest and moral corruption. If innocence implies ignorance, then why do we cling to it like a ‘virtue badge’? Perhaps it’s less about what we know and more about who we’re allowed to become.
In contrast, innocence acts as our earliest shield, protecting us from the bitterness and resignation that adulthood often demands. As children, we look toward the ‘adult world’ with wide- eyed reverence: dreaming of meaningful jobs, loving relationships, and dying fulfilled. But somewhere along the way, we are fundamentally changed, transformed from naive dreamers into ‘selfish and wicked’ beings, absorbed into the quiet machinery of life.
Yet, why are we so shocked? All of this didn’t happen overnight.
When I was young, my parents gave me a tablet, the first piece of handheld technology I had ever used. I often think of that moment as the beginning of the end. The bright, flashing colours, the absence of boundaries, the creeping isolation it brought. This strange, sprawling world they handed me, just a small taste of the adulthood I once longed for, was also what quietly severed me from my childhood. In hindsight, the nostalgia I feel for those early days only proves how fragile innocence really is. It is fluid, yet brittle. I wonder if writing about innocence now is itself a kind of mourning. Maybe this is what adults do, recycle the pain of loss into palatable reflections, as if that makes it worth something. A gift, a mask, a promise already breaking the moment it's made.
under18 Highly commended
Sydney New Year’s Eve
by MACKENZIE LEE
6:30 p.m
Sydney. December 31. Western side of the harbour. Grass warm, still holding the day’s heat. A red and white checkered rug is spread beneath him, crumbs caught in the weave from earlier dinner, torn bread, dips scraped clean, watermelon slices sticky on his fingers. The faint scent of sunscreen lingers in the air, mixed with the earthy sweetness of crushed grass and the distant salt tang of the harbour.
7:45 p.m
The heat still rises off the concrete paths, shimmering faintly as the sun sinks lower. Children chase a football too close to the water, their laughter bright and careless, echoing off the stone seawall. Nearby, a sharp pop breaks the evening calm, a twist-top bottle opening, followed by the low spill of liquid into plastic cups. A murmur of voices threads through the air, overlapping with the steady slap of gentle waves against the harbour edge.
The man watches a couple nearby pass a bottle back and forth, their smiles lazy, worn from a day spent outdoors. The smell of grilled meat drifts up from a barbecue further down the hill, spicy and smoky, mingling with the faint whiff of burning charcoal and onions caramelising.
Slowly, the sky begins to drain its light. The blue washes out, folding into soft violet that deepens with every minute. Lamps flicker on boats anchored across the harbour, their reflections wavering on the rippling water. A breeze rises, cool and salty, carrying with it the faintest trace of smoke, as if the world is quietly preparing for what is to come. Music drifts in thin threads from a nearby speaker, a guitar riff, voices singing softly out of tune and bursts of laughter ripple from a group Daniel cannot see.
He feels the weight of years pressing on this night, as though all previous Decembers have funnelled into this one moment. He thinks of childhood New Year’s Eves, sitting on his father’s shoulders, feeling the world open beneath him like a glowing bowl. The fireworks bursting like flowers overhead, gold blossoms spilling light onto the faces around him. The smell of spent powder settling thick in the warm night air, the sticky residue clinging to his shirt and hair.
9:15 p.m
A lone firework arcs into the sky a splash of red blooming then fading quickly to black. The crowd applauds softly, not for the display but for the promise it carries. The year is moving closer to its end.
Time stretches now, slow and heavy. Drinks grow warm in half empty cups. Conversations soften, drifting into murmurs or silence. The water laps lazily at the seawall, as if waiting too. He leans back, his head resting on the rug, eyes tracing the deepening sky. Stars start to pierce the violet, scattered like distant sparks that echo the city’s own lights.
A helicopter passes overhead, its steady buzz low and distant. Its shadow slides across the harbour like a ghostly hand brushing the water’s surface, reflecting the glow of the bridge’s lights which hold steady.
He feels the city itself holding its breath now. A collective pause, a stillness before the flood. Plastic cups are stacked in haphazard towers; children wrapped in towels yawn and rub sleep from their eyes, fighting to stay awake for what is coming.
11:58 p.m
Voices drop. The crowd shifts closer together, shoulders lean forward as if to catch a secret. The air thickens with anticipation. Seconds seem to weigh more heavily now heavier than the hours that preceded them. He feels the taste of salt on his lips, the faint chill of night creeping into his skin as the warm day finally gives way.
The countdown begins, rising like a wave, sweeping through the gathered crowd in a cascade of voices, all reaching for the same moment:
Ten... Nine... Eight... The air crackles with electricity.
Seven... Six... Time pulls taut, stretching every heartbeat.
Five... Four... Three... The world narrows to the sound of breath and the feel of waiting.
Two...
One.
The sky splits open. Reds spill into gold like molten metal poured across the dark. Blues crack into green shards. Smoke unfurls, softening the sharp edges of the city’s skyline as bursts multiply and cascade faster, louder, an unrelenting cascade of light and sound that seems to stretch and swallow time itself.
For a moment, the world is nothing but fire and noise, a furious pulse of celebration and release. Then, slowly, the last sparks fade. The harbour dims, the bridge’s steady white lights reclaim their quiet hold. Smoke curls like ghosts across the water, weaving into the night.
12:03 a.m
The crowd exhales. The cheers ripple and fade. He presses his palms into the grass, and watching the city reclaim its shape. Around him, people embrace, laugh, promise changes and dreams for the year ahead. But time slips quietly onward, a river that cannot be held. Midnight has passed. Another year has begun, both distant and immediate, already drifting away in the quiet moments after the noise. He feels the weight and release of it all, a breath held and then let go, the second before midnight swallowed into the endless seconds to come.
