Short Stories

How many times will I have to exhume you?

You rise again, a winter bulb. White corm of your face blanched as a knuckle, the quivering mycelium of your hair, stirring.

1. When you fall, one speaker goes with you. They’ve been daisy-chained around the house, so those on the deck get the same din that’s piped out to the stairwell, a playlist to pound your Docs to. You’re dancing with a vengeance by now, erotic stomps with industrial tread, your hips a counterweight where gravity meets velvet, fingernails raking the air. Someone has spliced in ultra-long cable, so the speaker follows you, to the bottom. But if it’s still singing when it hits, your brain has switched station.

Phantom flutes ring in your ears, well past the finish of the music. The kind you get from a migraine or the neurotic howl of cicadas in the summer. The kind that hangs eerily at the back of your neck, a reminder of the thin veil separating real from imagined. The kind that makes your mind chase its own tail. It can’t be (but it is) but it can’t be and so on, into the silence that is not silence. Your father slides around in the back of the car. What slides around in the boot is not really your father but rather a shadow, or an echo or a remembering. Reminds you of shelling peas as a child. Pull out the orbs from between the fleshy green lips, eat the innards until the skin sinks in on itself into a hollowed husk. The body in the boot is just such a vessel, empty now that he has left, just epidermis and bones and irises that will break down into smaller compounds. Organic matter reduced to biology. And in the absence of soul, a peculiar cold sort of smell if a smell can be described like that. Metallic almost, like when you press your head to the concrete as a child and feel the vastness of the earth creep into you.

This week on The ABR Podcast we feature a short story from the ABR archive. The story, ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ by S.J. Finn, was commended in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. (The 2025 ABR Jolley Short Story Prize is now open!) S.J. Finn is an Australian writer based in Melbourne. Listen to ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’, first published in ABR in 2018 and now part of ABR’s extensive digital archive going back to 1978.

In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast we revisit Cate Kennedy’s short story ‘Sleepers’, which won second prize in the 2010 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Sleepers’ was also included in Kennedy’s 2012 short-story collection Like a House on Fire. Cate Kennedy is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Listen to Cate Kennedy’s ‘Sleepers’.

This week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on August 17. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode Three features ‘Our Own Fantastic’ by Uzma Aslam Khan, published in the August issue of ABR.

This week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on August 17. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode Two features ‘The Mannequin’ by Rowan Heath, published in the August issue of ABR.

This week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on August 17. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode One features Winter Bel’s ‘Black Wax’, published in the August issue of ABR.

My father died twenty-eight years ago this December. Each anniversary, I watch a movie that we enjoyed together, or would have. This year, a week before the day, I learn that the hotel his company owned has permanently closed. I’m given this news through an article titled ‘New York City’s historic hotels are owned – and destroyed – by Asians.’

They met by the smashed call box at the intersection of Homan and 16th, as proposed in her perfectly spelt text message earlier that night.