The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) by Jennifer Mills

same.
    The radio kicks in again at Port Augusta, as I drive past the suburbs full of government housing. I try to find a station playing something other than carols as I navigate the area, but end up with some 1950s crooner, dreaming of a white Christmas.
    Weatherboard buildings, identically mistreated, leer like beaten faces from these streets. It’s a wonder they don’t hide them better. I pass a dusty park, a broken swing set. A single unsupervised child spins round and round on a roundabout, her eyes huge and hollow. Then the stink of cheap sausages on somebody’s barbecue. I roll up my window.
    A drunk old woman stumbles across the street with a Santa hat on. I brake in time but she still gives me a fright. I try not to stare at her. She ignores me, not even flinching. It’s as if I don’t exist.
    I cross the sickly water. The bad smell wasn’t just meat. I want to turn around and drive straight back to Perth, but there’s nowhere to pull off the road, and the presence of other cars travelling at speed makes me sit forward in the seat and hold the steering wheel hard. I should take a break but I keep going. Before it disappears again, the radio news says they have closed the road behind me. I’m stuck on this side, maybe for days.
    It’s four more hours before I get to Adelaide, but the last stretch of highway goes quickly. It’s built up, there are mountains and ruined farmhouses to look at, and before I know it I’m travelling through the dismal small towns which are backed up against the north end of the city like traffic.
    It goes too quickly. I arrive in Helen’s neighbourhood at two in the afternoon, weary and nervous, just as unprepared for this as I was when I left Perth.
    I pull up in the street opposite her house and sit in the car, like a bad actor on stake-out in a television cop show. It’s a nice neighbourhood – I realise guiltily that I was expecting weatherboard housing, broken swing sets, drunk grandmothers and the stink of cheap meat. I was hoping for no children, but I can hear them from here. They are either screaming or laughing, it’s hard to tell. My eyes hurt from the drive. I wait for my head to settle.
    Family is a kind of fog that won’t clear, a blind place in the mind. You navigate through it because you must, without knowing where you’re going. There’s no rule that requires us to stick together, and the advantages of doing so are not always clear. I suppose that goes for the species as a whole.
    I could waste all day sitting in the car and thinking abstractedly about the idea of my sister. I could attempt to compose the right words to say what I have to say, but every phrase seems to rise lifelessly and fall again from my thoughts like ashes.
    I get out of the car and walk up the neat steps. The potted plants and toy-strewn porch, the miniature gumboots beside the door, describe a family at once structured and playful, and I feel a pang of something like envy. I find myself hoping that for some reason I have come to the wrong house. I knock twice heavily on the door with my bare knuckles before I notice there is a doorbell. I wait a moment before I press it.
    My sister answers the door while calling out to someone behind her, so when she looks at me for the first time in fifteen years she’s still wearing a natural, intimate smile. It collapses pretty quickly. I watch her try to rebuild it.
    ‘Helen,’ I say. I shouldn’t have come here.
    She pulls me inside by the shoulder, but we don’t embrace. There’s no happy family reunion. She closes the door behind me as though she’s worried the neighbours will see me.
    Inside, the house is cool and a little dark. I face my sister in the hallway. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks. I have no words for this and my body appears to have come untied. I am loosened from the earth like some kind of vapour. The children have gone quiet; my suspension in their house, my particulate strangeness, has spread through the