Overland short story prize 2014

Last year, Jennifer Down won the 2013 Overland short story prize with her work, Turncoat.

Entries are open again for this year.

Time to get writing, or redrafting and crafting. There's only about a month left until entries close on 31st August. (Mine is hidden behind the blog walls, for now.)

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Coming of Age

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked, my brother and I and the neighbourhood boys. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the train station platform across the road, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation. The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. One day, my mum greeted me at...

Shadow of the Oaks

As soon as I saw it, I wished I hadn't. There was something deadly ominous about the darkened room. Bare wood floors, panelled wood walls, slices of weak light coming in through the long, autumnal windows. Funereal. I could hardly process it. A sign. The room was empty, the service cancelled, the food and drink all dried up. Finished. It was our last day in New York, and we had returned to the Oak Room at The Plaza to toast Dad with a negroni. At this stage, when we knew he was fading, e ach negroni seemed like a communion . The Plaza was one of the places him and mum had honeymooned. The last time we'd been in NYC, with kids in tow, we had blown a couple of hundred dollars on fancy burgers and lemonades for the kids, and champagne and wine with dinner for us. Spending mum and dad's trip gift money. That was nearly 5 years earlier. We had taken our girl to look for Eloise , the little literary inhabitant of the Plaza...

Personal Real Estate

People say newborns and sleep are mutually exclusive, but I can say that the horror of house hunting with babies on board is a close contender for doing your head in. In the back of an old notebook, I recently found notes which recorded the time and duration of each breastfeed for my newborn baby. Which side I fed from, and for how long: 10.31am L 15 R17 12.45am L22 R15 And inevitably 1.33am, 5.04am etc. At the front of the notebook, I had recorded the upcoming inspection and auction times for houses for sale: Thornbury, 15 Wales St 12.30-1 Northcote, 23 Derby St 1-1.30 Fairfield, 9 Gillies St 1.45-2.15 North Fitzroy, 35 Miller St etc etc repeat for 18 months of Saturdays. Weekend after weekend, we drove tired, hungry, poopy-pants babies in concentric rings around our northern suburbs, in search of a home with more than a lean-to for a kitchen, and a curtain for a bathroom door. In those days, the budget was sitting around $600-$750,000, and those prices were realistic. Although the No...

Notes of Substance

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