L-R: Andrew R. Cameron, Nellie Crawford & Alison Davis outside the Raine Square Short Story Station, where you can find their stories and many others. Picture: Jess Checkland
First Prize: An Ode to My 2002 VX Commodore by Andrew R. Cameron
We barrel across the Narrows in the stagnant heat of a summer’s midnight, low and intimate with the bitumen. Windows down, radio blaring. Tepid streetlights strobe in the spaceship curves of your bonnet. The freeway is ours, you promise, and the tiny city with its sprawling suburbia stretches vast and beckoning through your windscreen.
And now, old warhorse, with your wheezing, stuttering engine, time has rusted you, rendered you impotent and slow. Trapped us together in morning gridlock, where we crawl and rattle towards mundane pastures. But I don’t mind, because you kept your promise when we were young.
Second Prize: A Rope Swing in the Forest by Nellie Crawford
I wish you could feel it, know it. The feeling of swinging weightless over the river on a rope tied to a branch, and the terrifying freedom of letting go.
Of plunging through watery shafts of light to the murky bottom. Of kicking blindly to the surface to gasp the cool swamp air. And of floating, face to the treetops and the sky, while dragonflies hover with fragile rainbow wings.
But there’s nothing to show you. Just a weeping ulcer of a pool, a bruised sky, a dying forest, and this remnant of rope, still hanging from its branch.
Third Prize: Shattered by Alison Davis
I slam the front door behind me so hard the windows tremble.
Before that, I hurled the glass vase across the kitchen. The one your mother gave us, hand-painted with cerulean flowers. It shattered on impact with the fridge and tiny shards of glass pooled around your bare feet.
Before that, you yelled with your mouth so wide-open I imagined I would disappear inside it.
Before that, we tossed words carelessly at each other. They fell lightly around us like summer rain.
‘It’s your fault,’ we both said.
Before that, we were breathless with the brilliance of our love.
Wendy Arthur. Picture: Wendy Arthur
People’s Choice Prize: Spin Cycle by Wendy Arthur
I left your ID card in my breast pocket and the washing machine buckled your photo into a misshapen parody. The colours are right, but it isn’t you anymore.
Hold still, let me remember. Your face shimmies loose in my mind. It is a dust moth, skittering and sliding. Fleeting. Elusive.Alchemise into an apparition. Visit me as I sleep. Come, stand before me. Peer down, so I can paint your eyes, your nose, your mouth, deep into the twisted crevices. I want more than an echo, a mnemonic, a fragment. Live and breathe, laugh and smile, if only there.
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