Won Highly Commended (Category C)

Monash Short Story Writing Competition (2022)

She wonders why he killed himself. A rich kid like that, he probably didn’t even do his own taxes.

His face haunts her as she drives to the school. It dogs her steps as she shakes hands with the PA president. His eyes stare back from the faces of bored parents; as sky-blue as they’d been on her morning news feed.

In the centre of the table, her Tupperware container lies open. Rows of chocolate cupcakes glare at her. She can still see the pop star’s face, drifting like a grinning balloon.

One of the parents is talking, their voice shrill enough to rupture the floating face. The heater pants into the back of her neck. The other parents squirm in the over-warm room, like worms scuttling through the earth.

The icing begins to melt. It oozes down the chocolate sides like slime.

The dead boy’s face remains. His bleached teeth click together in a wide smile.

You only ever see the happy photos in the news, don’t you? They never show you what you really wanted to see – the dead body; limp and pale and grotesque, an empty needle protruding from a translucent vein. It’s always the happy ones, and people think – why would someone so happy kill themselves?

The meeting ends and the PA president ushers them to the back of the room to take a picture for the school newsletter.

She smiles for the camera. It flashes.

…

She’s working in her home office when Tarini walks in.

Tarini clears her throat. ‘I want to take violin lessons at school.’

She pulls back her headphones, one eye on her screen. The shareholder meeting is dull, but at least she’s stopped thinking about the dead pop star. ‘Aren’t you learning the piano?’

‘I don’t like the piano.’

Right, just like Tarini no longer liked her new electric keyboard. She’d argued with Matt for hours over that particular birthday present.

‘How much?’

Tarini gives her the enrolment form and flounces away. She picks up the form and looks down at Tristan, lying belly-flat on the floor. He’s seven, and he’s drawing a red Toyota Corolla with a broken crayon. He likes cars.

He doesn’t look up at her. He hasn’t met her eyes or said a word to her in over five years.

She clicks off Zoom and Googles violin price cheap. Her lips thin.

…

It’d felt like a death sentence, the diagnosis.

He’d always been like that. Walking around oblivious, like he and his cars were all that existed in the world. Sometimes, all she wanted was for him to look at her.

She remembers the paediatrician; the poised half-smile on his face. The news had been delivered in a neutral tone. Mild-to-moderate – he’d said. Like all her boy had was the common cold.

‘Would you like to hear your options?’ asked the doctor.

…

She’s curled on the sofa, phone pressed to her ear. Matt shouts.

‘Of course we don’t need a new psychologist! What’re you talking about? You said you like her!’

She glances at a painting on the wall; red, blue, yellow smeared across a white canvas. Tristan’s kindergarten project. She’d joked with Matt that maybe this was Tristan’s calling. Maybe Tristan could be the next Van Gogh. Van Gogh had issues too, hadn’t he?

‘I don’t want to argue with you about what I did or didn’t say. I’m telling you now that all she cares about is Tristan’s NDIS fund.’

‘I don’t understand what you want. The world can’t bend over itself to suit you. Your son’s psychologist can’t only tell you nice things.’

She rolls over and shoves her face into the back of the sofa. ‘Tarini wants to learn the violin.’

‘She what?’

‘You should talk to her,’ she says. She hangs up and tosses her phone. It skitters across the carpet and thuds against the far wall, spinning like a silver disc.

The living room feels too quiet without Matt’s cutting words. The silence pins her to the sofa.

Any more, and she might be crushed.

…

The pharmacist recognises her. He smiles.

‘Mrs Wong, the usual?’

She’s recognised nowhere else. Not at her favourite café in the CBD, which serves the fluffiest eggs benedict she’s ever had; not at her regular coffee spot, where she picks up a flat white nearly every morning; not at her favourite restaurant, where she only does takeaway because she doesn’t have anyone to eat with, not anymore.

She unfolds a prescription from her purse. The pharmacist disappears into the back of the store.

She scrolls through her phone, looking for that dead pop star, when the pharmacist reemerges with a bottle labelled Vyvanse. It helps Tristan with one of his conditions, she’s told.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to purchase?’ asks the pharmacist.

She glances at the counter. The topmost shelf is stacked with boxes of Panadol. They glitter like cardboard emeralds.

She takes four and lays them out on the counter, one after the other.

…

There was a British television series she’d loved once, about a private detective who solved interesting crimes.

She remembers the detective picking up a dead woman’s hand and squinting at her wedding ring. He then declared that the victim had an unhappy marriage and was a serial cheater. Why? Because the ring was tarnished on the outside but clean on the inside. That meant she never polished it (ergo the unhappy marriage), but took it off often (ergo the serial cheating).

She’d always found the idea absurd. Polishing rings seemed like a pointless and expensive exercise. Maybe it was a British thing.

Then again, she hadn’t had a happy marriage.

Was life like that too? Did it begin to look tarnished when you began to stop living it?

If only she could take it off sometimes.        

She thinks the detective kills himself in the end. Maybe. She doesn’t remember.

…

She snaps out the pills from their aluminium trays. Pill by pill by pill. The pile at her elbow grows like a molehill.

She gathers them up in her cupped hands and lets them fall through her fingers into a glass jar. She used to keep seashells in jars like this, white and ghastly and beautiful.

She thinks about logistics. She thinks about how she’d swallow them all.

The idea is uncomfortable. She’s never liked medicine or the feeling of things sliding down her throat.

…

She brings Tristan to Woolies after his therapy session.

They stand in the yoghurt aisle and stare at the refrigerator. There’s a gap in the row of cheerful plastic packets.

Dread pools in her stomach. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s out of stock today.’

Tristan frowns. Every Sunday, he goes to his speech therapist, then he comes to Woolies for blueberry yoghurt. He struggles with the altered fact of its nonexistence.

His face scrunches up. His mouth drops open and he shrieks; the sound shakes something loose inside her.

She hugs him to her chest but he jerks away. He doesn’t stop screaming.

She claws through the shelves. A packet smacks into the floor at her feet and splits open; mango, not blueberry.

She wraps her arms around him, dragging him to the ground. Gazes slide over their backs and stick, acidic.

Eyes, eyes, eyes.

She wants to curl up into a ball and die.

…

Matt calls. They argue about the psychologist.

He asks if she can take the kids for the week. She snaps at him about not being his personal assistant anymore. He calls her a controlling madwoman. She calls him a cheap asshole who never bought the toilet paper.

They argue about his mother and her grandmother. They argue about Tarini’s new violin.     

When she hangs up, she goes to her dressing table and digs out her wedding ring.

She pulls up a WikiHow article about jewellery polishing. She scrubs out the ring with warm water and soap.

It’s gleaming by the time she slides it on.

She drops by TerryWhite after work and buys two boxes of Panadol.

…

Tarini gets into the passenger seat, cramming her violin case in between her thighs.

‘How was school?’ she asks, turning out of the parking lot. Tristan is strapped into his car seat, spinning the wheels on his toy Mustang.

‘Alright.’ Tarini slides out her phone, thumbing down its screen. ‘I learnt the G major scale.’

The phone pings. The car is silent. Tarini’s thumbs tap out a steady three-four rhythm.

‘Maria’s having her birthday party next Saturday. Can you drop me off?’

‘Of course, sweetie.’

…

That morning, she makes herself an instant coffee and drops her children off at school. She drives to her favourite café. She orders an eggs benedict.

She picks up a flat white on her way home. She leaves the takeaway cup on the dining table and takes out the jar. The pills clatter inside like loose bones. 

A limp breeze drifts through the open sliding door. At her elbow, her flat white cools to lukewarm.

Her fingers skitter across the glass lid, as gentle as a mother’s touch.

A wall clock ticks. Her laptop pings in the next room. There’s a clinking of keys at the door.

‘Mum! We’re home!’

She jolts upright. Her first instinct is to check her phone – it’s nearly four o’clock God she’s an awful mother–

Tarini strides into the kitchen, grabbing a soda from the fridge. She either doesn’t notice the jar, or thinks nothing of it.

‘Shit. I’m so sorry–’

‘It’s fine, Mum. I know you’re busy. We walked home with Maria.’ Tarini sticks a straw into the can. ‘Oh, you should see what Tristan drew today. Tris!’

Tristan is lying on his stomach in the living room, drawing. He doesn’t lift his head.

‘Tri– Ugh.’ Tarini stomps over to their discarded school bags and tugs out a wadded ball of paper.

‘See? It’s kinda good, right?’

She takes the paper and smooths out the creases. Four figures with misshapen heads and spaghetti arms stand side-by-side. A stick figure with a ponytail that looks like hers is holding hands with a shorter stick figure. A sketch of her car sits in the background.

The white spaces between the lines gleam. Pristine.

Tears sting the back of her eyes. She squeezes them shut.

Tarini looks at her, brow furrowed. ‘Mum?’

She thinks about the dead pop star. Her fingers curl, crushing the drawing.

She puts her head down and cries.