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.