​Legacy

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When it came, at last, it was one hard push in the centre of his back. For an instant, he doubled over in a deep, elaborate bow. Fittingly Oriental. There was no sound, save a single, thin exhalation, which may have belonged to one of us. His long navy trench coat swaddled him as he drove down, pearl diver tight. A long pennant of dark red scarf, flying like the banner of a minor royal, waved in the air behind him. No arm flailed. Nothing unseemly.
    The water received him with a muted splash, pulled him down and away with the sea’s sure hand. There was a moment, only one, when we told ourselves it would be like a burial.  ....
                                                                                                                                                  
© Amanda O'Callaghan 2013
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Excerpt from a short story published in Review of Australian Fiction. This story features in my debut collection, This Taste for Silence (UQP, 2019).  

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The Memory Bones

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 We never swam there again.  By the next school holidays, she was a widow.  On a bright morning in a snap-cold winter, men in dust coats carried furniture and farm equipment into the yard.  The sideboard teetered down the stairs, its mysterious drawers emptied and removed, its gap-toothed, brown face looking huge and defeated.  An auctioneer in a greasy hat hammered his way through forty years until only the dry land, with its rough fences and its thirsty trees, remained.  By the next day, two men in clean boots patted each other’s suede shoulders and levelled a proprietorial eye along the distant line of gums. ....

​© Amanda O'Callaghan 2013
Excerpt from my short story published by Spineless Wonders and Review of Australian Fiction. This story appears in my debut collection, This Taste for Silence (UQP, 2019).  
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The Painting

This short story, "The Painting", won the prestigious Aeon Award for speculative fiction. It was published in 2016. It features in my debut collection, This Taste for Silence (UQP, 2019). 

“It’s worth a pile,” she said, her breaths coming harder now, “or so your father reckoned.” In the silence that settled between them, he watched her insect fingers curl and uncurl around one corner of the frame.
     "You don’t deserve it, Eddie,” she said, “but there’s no one else to give it to.”
     She pushed the painting across the counterpane that had been on her bed since before his father left. Watching the picture scrape across the cloth, Eddie saw how filthy the bedlinen was: the unwashed colours still uncannily bright, each nodding daisy mired in a field of grime.
     Beneath the cover lay her rasping form, her hair fanned out, her eyes filtering the last of the light through aqua-tinted lids as fragile as ancient lace. As night came in, she stirred a little. Deep within the frail bones, something was rattling to the surface. She stared hard at the ceiling, seeing beyond the swags of web, the tongues of paint arching down.
     “Rory deserved it,” she said.
     There were no more words, just sounds. Weak and girlish in the end. A breeze rose and pushed through the drapes like a visitation. Soon after that, he had no mother. He had an oil painting framed in heavy black, the wood as thick as a child’s arm.
     As he watched the still form, the night cooling around his shoulders, it didn’t seem like a bad exchange. ....

© Amanda O'Callaghan 2016
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This short story, "The Turn", won the Carmel Bird Award  in Australia in 2015. This story appears in my debut collection, This Taste for Silence (UQP, 2019). 

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The Turn

A crowd is a terrible thing. I know it’s foolish to say so because mostly a crowd has a purpose: commuters, shoppers, hospital visitors. The posse of media in my front yard. In a crowd, pretty well everyone has a place to be. But for me, even after all this time, it’s different, unnerving. I look at every face, assess every shape and size. I get entangled in the impossible knot of all those lives: the way they walk, hold their head, their voices as they pass. Once, near the old bus station, I could hear a frantic call, “Robbie, Robbie” and the accent was English and I said to myself, Don’t turn around. She always said your full name. It’s not her. It can’t be her. But at the last minute, I did turn, and I saw a woman with her arms outstretched, and a black dog racing away trailing a glittery red lead. And when someone caught the leash as the dog shot past, bringing him up tight like a cartoon character, front paws pedalling the air, I burst into a crazy cackle. Too loud, too high. And everyone turned—some with frozen smiles from watching the dog—and they all stared because I was a man laughing alone in a crowd. A man who didn’t have a place to go. ....

© ​Amanda O'Callaghan 2015

Excerpt from my award-winning short story "The Turn" published in the short story collection Crime Scenes, edited by Zane Lovitt (Spineless Wonders)

The Mohair Coat

This piece of flash fiction won first prize in the Flash500 contest in the UK (2016). My debut collection, This Taste for Silence (UQP, 2019) features this and other award-winning flash fiction. 

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​It could not go to strangers, this leaving coat. How could they know about the terrible newness of things? The way her parents had gripped the sleeves, a great rush of parting shaking them all. How they’d turned from her then, without another word, bowing into the wind and the slick, grey road. And when the ship pulled away at last, streamers cross-hatching the dock, how she’d watched them mount the old wharf steps, knowing by the set of their shoulders that they would not look back. As the ship rose beneath her feet, how she’d turned up her collar and watched the ocean unfold like a plan.

​It could not be left for strangers, this returning coat. My mother’s winter uniform for journeys back to her homeland. The way she pressed her hip against the ship’s rail, the sun burning her head, the coat looped over her arm like success. The seas waited, and later, the skies. Above the clouds, she tucked in her sleeves, made a pillow, watched the horizon for unforgotten places. She brought stories in her pockets.

It could not be left for strangers, this quarantined coat, hovering like a ghost in a reek of naphthalene. Once, before the end, my mother took it out, laid it down on the bed like sorrow. The heat prickled the wool. I tried to imagine a place where the weight of this would feel right.

“Do you remember your mohair coat, Mum?” I said, and she ran her fingers across the lapel. I watched her shoulders rise and fall. She did not answer.

It could not stay with me, this haunting coat. I travel back to her country; carry it in my arms. Better in a place where hard winds undo the mystery of double cuffs. In the old village, her ancient sister waits. I look forward to meeting you, she wrote in crafted loops. I will give her the coat. It has been worn four times in sixty years. We will not dare to speak of the unbearable brightness of its wool.

But in a post office two hours south, I can no longer bear the weight of empty clothes. I take the coat, cross the arms, lay it out in heavy card. In the over-heated room, I watch the clock. Soon, a van cortege will come and bear it home along the roads of her youth. 

As I seal the box, an impish scent of her—a stowaway in the hand-sewn lining—threads past me and is gone.

In that grey room, wary eyes watch a stranger clasping a heavy coat, sobbing into its depths like an abandoned child.


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© Amanda O'Callaghan 2016

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