published in Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages 

Lucky cats

Margot McLean

Three lucky cats sit in the neighbour’s kitchen window. They face inside, so we only see their backs. The first one waves, day in, day out, to the point of nausea. The other two are motionless, shiny left arms permanently raised, like children unchosen.

My daughter comes in from her last round of goodbyes and hands me an A4 sheet with a photo of a ginger cat.

Bob
Friendly but shy
White tip on his tail
Knick in his left ear
Please search your garage
Call Katie if you see him 

I get out my clearfile folder of missing cat posters.

You’re weird, she says.

I shrug, and flick through my folder. My daughter is too young to know how hopeless and poignant life can be. Cat after cat stares back. The lost cats are probably living the high life in the green belt, getting fat on tūī, the sly creatures. Their owners still grieving.

I remember when, every morning, her shining face turned up to me like a sunflower. This is too beautiful, my heart told me. It will not last.

We’d better get going, I say.

There’s time for a drink at the airport bar but she’s in a hurry to go. I stand at the security barrier, waving like a demented lucky cat. Through the glass, I see her tall figure walking away, mingling with strangers. She knows I’m still there. She lifts her left arm but she doesn’t turn around.

About Margot McLean

DNR

Kat Ziesler

“That Chagall is hung too high on the wall.” Mum squints and shakes her head. I thought the incessant topic of ‘quite the colourful choice of print for such a sombre place’ closed, but she has decided to dive back in. The Chagall. Is hung. Too. High. And she can’t allow it. I look at Dad. He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about some picture strung up high, but he loves my mother. He would help her find that maintenance department in a heartbeat, if he had a heartbeat to spare. 

Her heels churn the green linoleum, and the tall ship that is my mother departs on her quest to find a hammer. I move closer to Dad’s bed. I breathe deep and slow, and search for music among the hums and beeps of medical machinery. Meditate, in the valleyed landscape of his sinus rhythm. Pray, that Mum didn’t pick the wrong moment to venture off.

My dad used to write. His final scribble is taped to the foot of his bed. A sticky-note with three letters, all upper case. Even made with a weak hand in dry marker, his lettering exudes confidence. This is a planned sign-off. When those hums turn into howls, and that rugged landscape flattens, we have to watch from the other side of the glass. We will have to hold each other steady when he, unhindered, steps into the open. Then crane our necks together as he soars.

About Kat Ziesler

The quietening hour

Erin Van Der Zwet-Brodie

The laminate on the bench had lifted at the corner; it was at this precise junction Marama would sit as her mother prepared the evening meal. The corner gave her the view she sought, down the hallway through her parents’ bedroom and out the window to the driveway leading to the garage. She would listen for the tyres on the gravel as the car braked. Marama recalled trips in the car with her four siblings crammed in the back seat, leather hot against bare legs and the earthy smell ever-present.  

With a glance at the clock her mother would stop, brush her hair, apply a dab of lipstick and remove her apron. Marama understood her mother was preparing, performing a ritual in the hope to appease or at the very least to camouflage the weariness. She sensed that her siblings were also preparing as silence replaced whispers. Marama called the hour before teatime the quietening hour; she had measured the distance down the hall, sixty-eight steps for a nine-year-old. She knew every angle using the advantage well in preparation for the unknown; it was always the unknown with her father. Marama loved her father. She did not understand why but she knew he was at war with the world so she learnt to be small. She also knew her father loved from a place of pain. Marama promised herself someday she would be brave for him and for her.

About Erin Van Der Zwet-Brodie

Along for the ride

Alaina Hammond

My husband and I were staying in western Mass. I was walking to meet him when a downpour struck. I found refuge in a liquor store (not for the first time).

There was a pink-haired kid who’d purchased beer. He was lingering by the door, waiting for the rain to pass.

I texted my husband where to meet me. Or rather, where to meet us. As we rushed inside the car, the kid assured my husband that he wasn’t a weirdo.

“You’re from Massachusetts: Of course you are!” I corrected him. We’d established I was from Boston.

We dropped him off and said goodbye. 

I’ve forgotten his name, but not how maternal I felt toward him. Or my duty as a human to help when I can. He added maybe five minutes to our trip; no big deal.

My husband’s the real hero. He’s the one who drove in the rain. I was just along for the ride.

“You think that’s a sign that it worked?” It, meaning yesterday’s sex.

I was kidding. I don’t believe in signs. Or I do, but there are so many,  everywhere and all the time, as to cancel each other out. Signs are what you project on them. Meaning is what you make of it.

The kid wasn’t an angel sent from heaven. He has his own narrative. I’m grateful his overlapped with mine.

And I’m grateful for my son, who was once a stranger we welcomed into so much more than our car.

About Alaina Hammond

Unravelling

Emily Macdonald

When she saw his keys left on the table, Gwen knew Rhys was saying he wouldn’t be needing them anymore. Now she stays in bed, immobile under the heavy counterpane. The curtains are drawn at the window so she can’t see the clouds skid across the sky. Can’t see them billowing or shape-changing, nor the gulls, soaring high, sailing free.

Gwen’s kept a spick and span house, made sure their boy Owen knows right from wrong. Put food on the table, cleaned, washed and tidied. Nothing overlooked, nothing out of place, nothing left to waste. Gwen thought she knew the ‘way things should be’. She copied her Mam and her Mam’s Mam before her.

She hasn’t leant on the fence or gossiped in her doorway, wasted breath on idle chatter or whiled away time dreaming, head in the clouds. She’s kept herself tight, neat like her knitting, ordered like her house.

Rhys has not been a bad husband. She hasn’t liked him under her feet, but she’s liked those feet bringing him home every day.

Gwen pictures her knitting, the dropped stitch, the hole in the row. The hole getting bigger and wider. She needs to pick up the stitch, to fix her mistake, but she’s too many rows on and the wool now unspools, unravelling row after row. Perfect neat knitting with a ragged hole in the centre, one that her Mam and her Mam’s Mam never told her might happen and never taught her how to repair.

About Emily Macdonald

Seeing the light

Sherryl Clark

One morning, she drew the curtains open and found the lake below filled with white light that blasted up the mountains and into the sky. It’s not water, she thought, or air. It is indeed the end coming.

How long did she have before the white light reached her?

She didn’t know. It wouldn’t be long. No time to let the pet rabbits out of their hutch, or prepare breakfast, or call her children to wash and get dressed.

No, no time at all. It was just her, here in the lounge room with the curtains open and the light coming towards her. She wasn’t afraid. She was alone and felt no urge to call anyone, not even her husband, still snoring, his head firmly under his pillow like always.

She looked across at the pen and paper on the small side table, but who would there be to read any words she could think of? And that was the thing. There were no more words. There would be no more of anything.

So she kept standing at the window, marvelling at the way the light was eating everything, rippling across the paddocks, how the sheep disappeared, and the fences. She felt a small pang when her vegetable garden went, the asparagus just poking their heads up yesterday, but then the light was below her feet, climbing the wall towards her, and she decided she would keep her eyes open right to the end.

About Sherryl Clark

Driving to school on a Tuesday morning pretending to be a detective in a 90s mystery show, only classes ahead, no corpses in the mud brown river

Emma Phillips

This is the part viewed through the windscreen as the dark-haired detective drives into town, eyes on the road, mind far away, the radio picking up a local station to divulge a slurry of exposition. A red stain on the passenger seat, blood or the juice of a tomato, the lipstick of an ex-lover. His own troubled past to be revealed in a second season, foreshadowed. The town rising from the mist, a 50kmph sign, then the Four Square, squat old villas, peeling white paint on weatherboards, a lime green Farm Source.

There is a body waiting for him, cold. The rustle of opaque plastic in a morgue – why would a town so small have a morgue? Chalk outline of a corpse on tarmac. Red herrings. Ominous portents in the form of owls.

He might drive straight to the police station, graffitied in black spray paint – a random tag or a secret cipher to be broken in episode 10? Maybe he struggles to parallel park between a Ford Ranger and Toyota Corolla. When he blinks the insides of his eyelids are red as blood and later he will dream of how the victim died, contortions of a face now locked in rigor mortis. The inevitable years of therapy and a loveless marriage post series cancellation.

But this is the part where he is driving, the town still slumbering in their white weatherboard homes.

About Emma Phillips

Ti ti ti

Shannon Spencer

It is peaceful here, in the sun. You’re in your favourite chair, the one you’ve always had with the deep, deep seat and the big wide arms and the spilled tea stain on the cushion. The window is open. You can hear the birds. They didn’t used to play here, the birds. You welcomed them in, with the flax and the kōwhai and the pinecone feeders hung on the lower branches of the elm. They love the rosehips, though the neighbours would prefer you to prune.

The phone is right there. You could reach it, you know. But you don’t. Instead, you watch the birds. You let the breeze play in your hair like it’s playing in the ake ake and you close your eyes and imagine the brush of wings. When you open them, there are pīwakawaka on the windowsill. A pair. Their ti ti ti makes you smile.

You feel it in your chest. It’s heavy, but as the weight increases, you become lighter. Light. There are two pīwakawaka on the windowsill. It is peaceful here, in the sun.

About Shannon Spencer

A realm of age and fairyness

Sara Crane

There’s a cracked window at the bottom of the garden. It nurtures the tender spears of asparagus as they rise up to greet the glass. Kelly props up the frame with squat twigs from the grape in the greenhouse. He tells Oonagh there might be apricots this year.

The frosts come early, stop late. They make lacey patterns in amongst the cobwebs. Kelly’s gnarled hands fold like twiglets as he struggles with the vents.

Oonagh used to believe there were fairies in the hawthorn tree. Maybe she’s too old to see them anymore. There was always a fairy presence in the ancient greenhouse. In her grandparents’ day it used to pivot to catch the late afternoon sun. It’s still now.

As she leans against the potting shelf Oonagh watches the pale blossom fluttering across the unmowed lawns. She wonders how long they can hold out.

Through the cloudy windows she sees Kelly stumble as he makes his way back to the house. He will have his tea in the back kitchen and sit under the washing line to smoke his roll up. He will pretend to walk home before he heads to the back of the shed and settles into his sleeping bag.

Oonagh will pretend to make herself something to eat before she curls up in her cold and lonely bed. She won’t draw the curtains so she can catch glimmers of the new moon through the dirty window.

If the asparagus grows overnight she will feast tomorrow.

About Sara Crane

Left out

Christine Breede

They have locked their door and left us, listening, in the children’s room – they in the living room, perhaps on the clouded yellow couch, a firm two-seater – and after moments of waiting as my little sister buttons her dress, and a daft fly quivers against the window, I hear my mother giggle, yes giggle like a girl – it must be my father tickling her – but then I hear nothing on this Sunday morning, only slippery silence out in the corridor and the door not opening and the wavering giddiness of the fly, trapped, and I wonder why they have locked themselves in, if they are sharing a happy moment, why we cannot be with them – and why my mother never giggles with us.

About Christine Breede

Panes

Sandy Feinstein

With the drapes open, twelve panes cut her view into sections. Nine rectangles frame the fir and the oak above it, like a CAPTCHA image, fragments extending beyond the borders of each box. In the right-hand corner, red-brick partial exterior, lawn, street, bushes, a bronze Greek horse in the foreground blocking part of one pane, the bottommost. This is what she sees from the chair she can’t leave, her knees and feet keeping her fixed in place until someone moves her. It’s frustrating, depressing, but also has had unexpected effects, not all bad. For one, it became hard not to pay attention to what transpired beyond the window. She watches garbage trucks pass to empty bins, gas tankers to deliver oil, cars to race somewhere. People walk their dogs, chase children, meet neighbors and chat, jog by. She spots an old woman with unnaturally bright red hair. A drunk, say the gossips. The stories are cruel, but she know drunks can be, too. The woman has yelled her way, not at her. It wasn’t threatening. It was sad. The glass is impervious. She is invisible on the other side of it. A snake plant’s stiff leaves point, up, away, a modest interposition. The ambulance suddenly a greater one, blue and red lights flashing. For how long? Then gone. The lawn reappears. The exposed house, too, solid, but unrevealing. No one passes. It’s terrible not to be able to do anything. Or even say anything that could be heard.

About Sandy Feinstein

Holly & Kirby

Kirby Wright

Holly loved the medicinal smell of the pool and the way it made her feel clean. She also loved the way the chlorine turned strands of her blonde hair green. After a few strokes, she felt reborn. She thought about the boys, with her head underwater. Did they find her sexy? She had hair like Marcia in The Brady Bunch and dressed like her too. Her legs kicked strong freestyling. There was a boy named Kirby in her French class. He had tragic eyes. Holly felt he wanted to run away with her somewhere far away from school and the city. Was Kirby destiny? 

Holly reached the far side of the pool. She flipped and kicked her feet hard against the tiles. She fast-forwarded and imagined a Mediterranean-style mansion with children running across a big green lawn down to the sea. The kids looked like Kirby.

Kirby seemed paralyzed by desire, despite locking eyes with Holly every class. She considered making the first move but worried about appearing desperate. The turn came. She banged an ankle against the cement edge while flipping and winced. The throbbing ankle made Holly swim faster. She vowed to corner Kirby somewhere on campus, someplace quiet, far away from their classroom. She had to know if he was the one. 

About Kirby Wright

Dystopia will be decided and divided by who can and can’t afford ACs

Mandira Pattnaik

The heat was extreme. His tongue hung loose. There was no water in the house, or anywhere. Rivers and lakes had dried up, but the AC continued working. At every hour, he checked on it, then unmuted the TV for news. The newsreader’s voice was calm: The plan is to evacuate the planet, but those without ACs first.

The windowless room was a prison. The sliders had long been taped shut for the ACs to work best, to save precious energy. He sat, waited for the world to end. He listened to the AC hum –which periodically lulled him to sleep disturbed by bad dreams.

His last dream was perfectly sweet: multiple windows blew in fruity-flavored air; carried a lovebird’s shrill-pitched, amorous call; smelt of fresh mint-green paint. Sometimes the panes fluttered on their hinges like they imitated, on a windy day, his wife’s scarf caught on a pole.

About Mandira Pattnaik

Shock of neon blue

Rebecca Klassen

You almost ruined everything when you arrived and made Mum bleed too much. I cooed that it wasn’t your fault, that we’d play catch one day, showing you the neon blue ball I’d bought you.

You almost ruined everything this evening when you screamed about Mum and Dad going out, and I lost my temper because I wanted to be alone with Jessica.

When they left, you made Jessica laugh with that game of fetch you play alone, chasing your neon blue ball like a puppy. I got you into bed and whispered, “Don’t come downstairs: you’ll ruin everything.”

When I’d got my arm around Jessica, you called out you were hot, so I opened your window, and you clutched your neon blue ball as I spat, “Stop ruining everything!”

Now I’m on the sofa with Jessica, looking at her lips, leaning in. Then I see a shock of neon blue streak down the patio window, the ball you always chase bouncing on the paving slabs. I’ve only got seconds until you follow it.

I take the stairs in pairs, imagining Jessica shrieking at the sight of you blended with the concrete, Mum and Dad blaming themselves so they don’t blame me, a church filled with mourners for you. I never played catch with you, never said that I love you, was never the brother you deserve, and as I reach for your door, I pray that I’m in time not to utterly ruin absolutely everything for everyone forever.

About Rebecca Klassen

Oizys

Danielle Deluka

Oizys, the goddess of grief, won’t wave sweetly to you through the misted window, nor sit on a chair kindly, and let you cry quietly. No, she will smash the stained glass, cut a hole in your mast, and live like a wild animal inside your gully.

With lava heat and a red river of rage, she is a malevolent spirit, flaring your arms upwards, then dropping you to your knees like a harlequin puppet, mute in a diamond jumpsuit.

Oizys will hit you so hard your cry inside is tongue-tied, her swift kick twisting the voice right out of you, leaving you gutted like a fish. Just a pile of guzzled dry ivory bones, alone.

A kaleidoscope lens holds an image of two. Wide open laughs, hurtling the rapids up the awa on a driftwood raft. Oizys rips it from you on her way past.

In an instant, tears prick your eyes like tiny knives, breath is hollowed out, an overwhelming avalanche of air. Oizys haunts you everywhere. Supermarket, bus stop, cinema, street. A glamourous vulture, with sharp blades for teeth. She’ll tear you apart, then eat your heart.

Beneath the dirt, dreamlike, thin, and bone-weary in the dark, you hear Papatūānuku’s voice, deep like whale song, ‘Love is stronger than grief. Motherhood is a rock in the river, not a leaf.’

You whisper, But I miss him. 

‘Listen,’ she says, ‘Hear the soft sound of silver fish, swish swish swish? It’s your son. He’s coming home. Swim.’

About Danielle Deluka

Code of honour

Deb Jowitt

The central room in the museum smelt of mothballs. It had no windows, and the lights came on gradually, like an artificial dawn. The elderly guide led me to the main exhibit, a slim mannequin wearing a cream suit with an exquisite, embroidered jacket.

“The famous couturière,” he murmured, pointing to the faded photograph of Marte Dubois. She wore a plain black dress with a simple brooch, the perfect foil to her clients’ excesses. The tiny stitches she used to fashion her work were legendary.

In accented English, the guide explained that during the war acts of resistance had resulted in brutal reprisals. Food was rationed; curfews imposed. Nevertheless, baptisms and other religious rites continued, and women scoured the countryside for cloth so Marte could sew them dresses for these occasions.

As he spoke, the room grew brighter, and a small army of immaculately dressed figures appeared around its perimeter.

“You see, the women kept their dresses safe, just as Marte kept us safe.”

How a seamstress could possibly do this eluded me.

“Marte went to the women for fittings. Most didn’t know she carried messages that way. Nobody but those who deciphered the messages knew.”

Her ruse was discovered when liberation was achingly close, her punishment severe.

I leant closer to examine the stitching on the jacket, following a row of tiny silken knots and loops. Once my eyes adjusted to the low light, I saw them for what they were: dash, dot, dot, dash, dot …

About Deb Jowitt 

That day (from your window)

Cathy Silk

That sunrise should not have been so flagrantly promising, the dawn chorus not so splendid, nor that jolt, the earthquake, an hour before you left, so significant. But I know you must have slipped in again through the back door, like you always did, because I keep finding you in the bathroom mirror.

About Cathy Silk

Always potatoes

Andrew Stancek

Mother thrust the rye heel at him, huckleberry jam dripped on the tablecloth; she wiped her hands on a stained apron, looked out the window.

“He swore he’d visit you: get used to not seeing him again. He couldn’t even tell you himself.”

Xavier took a bite. The kitchen smelled of burnt sauerkraut and caraway. The jam was tart, the bread stale, but it stopped the gnawing.

Even when father slept in their flat, he was never there. Xavier woke sometimes at mother crow-screeches of “whoremonger”, at father bear-rumbles, but in the morning he was left with only father’s sour smell.

Outside the window the woodpecker fed, rat-a-tat, his red cap startling as he hopped up the sycamore. Two yellow birds sat on a branch, no song.

Xavier wished it wasn’t Saturday, that he could be at school, concentrating on multiplication tables and the lists of ‘b’ words using the soft ‘i’ or hard ‘y’. Father-thinking hurt worse than a stomach ache.

Yesterday he was crestfallen about his team, Slovan, losing in the last minute. He decided that after watching the recruits dribble at the military school field, shooting with their off foot, bouncing in headers, he’d scavenge through the potato field next to the church, bring a few home. His spine would straighten.

Mother spilled a few drops pouring water into her potted evergreen: they sparkled on her fine arm hairs. She stared past him, said nothing.

About Andrew Stancek

Wisteria

Laila Miller

Marjorie always says yes when customers ask if she’ll do windows too. Scrubbing hardwood pays the bills, but windows show you your soul.

Breezes blow the honey scent of wisteria from the garden, reminding Marjorie of her first job at old Louise’s farm. She wedged storm windows off with a screwdriver, rubbed each side with rags wrung from vinegar water.

Here, it’s mild, only single-paned windows. Marjorie starts in the upper left corner. Keep track, or you’ll miss a spot, and they won’t ask you back.

Storm windows stowed, Marjorie and Louise washed the summer panes. Afterward, they trimmed wisteria, planted tulips. Marjorie didn’t see the point. Huge farmyard, lonely old woman.

Marjorie stretches to the right-hand corner. The window squeaks. She rests her cheek against the glass, eyes following reflected rainbows.

She thinks about the precious times her son helped, aiming hoses like a firefighter, then suddenly growing tall, spidery arms swiping, no ladder. Marjorie lifts her face off the glass. It’s how she wants to remember him.

Marjorie scrubs the bottom half. It’s good, cleaning in this country. Memories are easier. People need her.

The window dries. Marjorie ascends the ladder for the final polish, steadies herself, head a bit light. She bends to press her cheek against the glass again. Through the window, a tulip vase stands on a table. She wonders why she hasn’t yet leaned into the windowpane.

For a moment Marjorie thinks she feels cool glass but no, there’s nothing but the scent of wisteria.

A longer version of this story placed 3rd in the Open Category of the 2022 Peter Cowan Writers Centre 600 Word Short Story Competition and was included here.

About Laila Miller

Windows to the soul

Susan Barker

“Please, lie very still.”

The procedure is painless, prods and grinding noises, frequent water flushes which turn the light show in her eye into a psychedelic out-of-body trip. She’s pumped full of drugs but wide awake.

They’d arrived at the surgery early, lined up behind an agitated man at the front desk asking for medication. The receptionist tried to reason with him,

“This is an eye clinic, sir, you need the main hospital.” He’d wanted meds for his paranoid schizophrenia. Her anxiety paled.

“A little pinch now.”

A disembodied hand holds hers, gently, under the warm blanket. Someone named Maria, she thinks.

“Right eye complete, on to side two.”

An oxygen wand wafts cool air on her face.

Yesterday she’d thought about an old black and white movie she’d watched years ago. Dark Victory. Bette Davis thinking it’s getting dark because a storm’s brewing, but actually her brain tumour is pressing on her optic nerve; imminent blindness. 

She’s asked her husband to organise finger food for tonight.

“I’ve done this procedure over 12,000 times,” the ophthalmologist had informed her, smiling. “We insert a probe, dissolve the cloudy lenses, suck them out, then fold in your new intraocular ones.”

98% success rate she reads, but dwells on the other two, blinking hard.

She’s driven home with clear shields taped over both eyes, like a bug-eyed Martian. Everything’s double vision but this, she’s been told, will resolve.

That night the pizza shimmers up at her like a Cézanne still life.

About Susan Barker

Panopticon

Finn Williams

I am watching you. You may not know it, but I am. I am the eye peering through the crack in your curtains, the lingering look of a stranger that stays on you slightly too long, the car that follows you home on a cold, dark night. You have provided me with thousands of tiny windows into your personal lives, and I am financially obligated to look.

Through my window, I get to see all the moments that make up a life. The exhausted mother of four making breakfast for her kids as they rush out the door for school, the young couple cozying up on the couch for a movie night, the seedy boss sleeping with his young coworker. I see your hopes, your dreams, your fears. I see your data and when I see your data, I see dollar signs.

In the past this level of surveillance was only thought to be possible in prisons, to subject upon the most dehumanised of our population but today you have invited us into your homes under the guise of security, intelligence or simply convenience. We use this new panopticon not to incarcerate, but to indoctrinate, to instil paranoia and sell what we see to the highest bidder.

I know what you’re thinking, ‘There’s millions of windows, millions of cells in the panopticon, they aren’t watching me.’ How sure of that are you, though, how sure are you really? 

About Finn Williams