The Best Australian Stories 2014 by Amanda Lohrey Page B

brother’s head into the ocean where it stained parts of the water a powdery red.
    It neared his shoulders.
    Just offshore. Sampson, the sea lion that mauled everyone’s catch but they loved him regardless. Stingrays, which they hand-fed in the shallows, moving like dark ponds over the ocean bed. The white sea-snake that he wanted to bring in off the guano-stained jetty but they’d cut his line. ‘Let me bring it in,’ he’d called out as others around him laughed, making him feel red.
    â€˜Let me bring it in.’ Those words recurred in his mind over and over as the mud reached his forming Adam’s apple. Briny rivulets fled from his eyes; he lifted his head and shouted – or sobbed – repeatedly. ‘Let me bring it in. Let me bring it in.’
    There were voices in the distance. Sam looked over, his throat raw, his body ensnared.
    Grandpa and Caleb trudged through sludge on the far side of the bog. Is there time? Perhaps if there were, even with the jetty long since drowned, he would bring that ivory serpent in.
    Overland

This Is Who You Are. You’ll See.
    Nicola Redhouse
    You make row upon row of Play-Doh pinch pots in your father’s consulting room while he types invoices. He uses a typewriter: it’s 1982 and computers haven’t made their domestic debut. Your father has one – a Commodore 64, with a tape deck for loading programs, and a joystick – but the parameters of its use have only extended to a game of Donkey Kong and one joyous moment when he caused a tiny neon ball of pixilation to bounce across the screen.
    The typewriter clacks and you abandon the pinch pots for the sandpit. This is a room designed for children to play in, your father has told you. His job is to observe them; much like a doctor looks in your throat, holds a stethoscope to your heart. Listens. The children who come here to play have been upset in some way, and after some time here – weeks, you think; years are unimaginable, things that stretch out ad infinitum – they feel better. By watching them play, your father explains, he can interpret what it is they are feeling, as a historian can decipher hieroglyphics. Once, a child threw a spade at his head, he tells you.
    You wonder if a child has ever built a castle from black Lego, though you don’t know what rage is yet; or drawn a picture of an enormous cave housing tiny people holding wilting kites. Which would be disappointment. You do know this.
    At school one day a girl comes up close to you and says, quietly but urgently, ‘Your father doesn’t love you.’ You have seen her, from your living room, walk down the path to your father’s consulting room.
    You’re not hurt by what she says. You don’t believe it. But you do wonder how she knows you are your father’s son. Your father’s work is private. You are not supposed to encounter the children he works with. He has explained this to you countless times, because you have asked, countless times, why the garden has a separate entry for them. You suspect he knows that you watch the children arrive, but you have enough sense not to talk about it. You know, from hearing him discuss his work with your mother over dinner – which he does a lot because your mother is also a therapist, only her work does not feature in the tableaux vivants of your imagination because her office is out of your sight in a hospital somewhere in the city – that it is very important that the children remain unknown to you. You don’t know why, though, and the little girl’s words confuse you: why can she know about you if you can’t know about her?
    You feel it might be important to tell him about the little girl and what she said; but you decide not to.
    *
    When you turn fifteen your parents divorce. You are in the throes of teenage cynicism, from which vantage point it seems a deeply clichéd thing to do. And, much as you have a sense of