Creative Writing - Sample Stories

Finding my Mother's Magic

    Cups of tea blew steam into the air and Aunty Flo scratched her chin. She looked at mum across the kitchen table. Mum sat with her elbows resting on the table and her hands covering her nose and mouth. Because she didn’t sit like that very often, I remember it more than shivering in the dark and cold when we started to walk home.
    Mum was usually too busy around the farm for any sitting down at all, let alone resting in what I think of now as her ‘had enough’ pose. I caught her at it other times when she didn’t know anyone was watching. She’d sit there for a few minutes, moving her hands up and down her nose and sighing into her fingers. But that night was the first time I’d seen her doing it with anyone else around.
    I scuffed my shoes on the dirt floor and looked at them both. Mum didn’t seem to notice that the rain was getting heavier. She didn’t call my brothers in from the porch. She’d said they could play out there, just for a few minutes, if they put their jackets and hats on. I don’t think she wanted them inside. She never let them play outside, ever, on nights that cold.
    My eldest brother, Peter, had disappeared into the barn. I wondered whether he might go and comfort Fella, my horse. He was really Peter’s, but when I was four and a half, I liked to think Fella was mine. I knew he’d be scared with the wind starting to pick up. The paddocks were all thick up with cloud and dark and Fella was probably running away from the wind hooting at him out of wire fences. That was if the sound of gum trees wrestling with each other wasn’t enough to scare him.
    ‘So Harry’s out there in the car on Grampians Road and he just let you lot walk home?’
    Aunty Flo stared across the table. She already knew the answer because mum had told her. But mum looked at her and then told her again.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, stretching the word out and rubbing her head. ‘When we broke down he said he was stopping there for the night. And he just lay back and before I knew it he was snoring. I couldn’t get out and try and get the car going myself. And I wasn’t going to stay out there all night with the kids. They’d have bloody froze.’
    My mother looked at me. She didn’t swear much. Not in front of me. She didn’t want me turning out like one of those loose-mouthed larrikins that hung around Brian Woodford’s shop. Whenever she swore in front of me she said sorry love, don’t listen to that. Tonight she just looked at me and gave me the smallest smile I’d ever seen and said go and play in your room will you please.
    ‘That’s a good lad,’ said Aunty Flo, taking a big slurp out of her cup and putting it down.
    I liked Aunty Flo. She was big with flabby arms and when she gave you a hug you felt like you were snuggled up in clouds. She looked after us sometimes when mum had to help our father in the paddocks. Aunty Flo wore a straw hat, always, with flowers strapped into it. Her dresses, too, were always covered in flowers, mainly red ones. That night she was driving home when she saw us all walking in the dark. She picked us up and brought us back to the farm.
    ‘Go on Neville, get going.’ Mum’s voice was louder.
    I ran off into the lounge but didn’t go straight to the bedroom I shared with two of my elder brothers. There was something about the way mum and Aunty Flo were talking that made me want to be around them.
    The kitchen was quieter. Normally the two of them would let knives and spoons clatter in the sink and they’d talk to each other like they were sitting at opposite ends of the town hall. That night they were quiet with their cups. They landed them like sparrows on the saucer after every sip.
    I looked through the kitchen door at them from where they couldn’t see me. Aunty Flo was looking at mum and mum was looking down at her tea. I wondered what was in her cup that was worrying her so much.
    ‘Nancy . . .'
    Mum didn’t look up.
    Aunty Flo had a look on her face as if she was carrying something really heavy and couldn’t find anywhere to put it down.
    ‘You know you should think about leaving him.’
    That made mum look up. She moved her head forward as if she might answer straight away and then she was quiet for a long time. Finally she said something.
    ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid Flo. What would I do?’ She stopped then and rubbed her finger into her eye. ‘And where would I go? I haven’t got tuppence to rub together.’

* This is an excerpt from 'Finding my Mother's Magic', to be published soon in Quadrant. It will also appear in my short fiction collection next year via Wakefield Press.