Creative Writing - Sample Stories

Nesting

She is wandering back and forward in the open space between the biggest of the gum trees. He can see her from his window, high above the park. It’s raining, but she’s not seeking shelter. Surely someone will come.

    Standing in y-fronts and a singlet, Patrick puts his grey suit on a coat hanger. As well as the hint of mothballs, he can still smell dust on the suit, despite all the times he’s tried to air it out by hanging it in front of the open window of his fifteenth-floor housing commission flat.
    He slides open the door of a small built-in robe and places the suit on the rack, amongst pale blue jeans and a thin, bone-coloured jacket. In the robe mirror he sees a tousle of greying hair, lines on a forehead. This morning, wearing the suit, he looked in the length of that mirror and saw a man who was getting old, but who didn’t look too bad for his age. This afternoon he doesn’t want to look long enough in the mirror to see, even for a second, what the assessors saw, what they must have seen every time he sat in front of them.
    Patrick takes a pale orange shirt from off its hanger. He’s about to shut the door when he decides it’s probably stupid to hang the suit unprotected in the robe. It was dusty and smelly when he first started using it again after the years it had been hanging there. What if he wants to use it again?
    He puts his shirt on and looks at the suit, hanging side-on in the robe. He lets out a sound that’s halfway between a sniff and a grunt. There’s really no point hanging the suit up at all. He’s not going to use it again.

*this is an excerpt from 'Nesting', forthcoming Antipodes, June 2006