Young creatives awards 2022 Writing Winners

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Men don't cry by Victoria Pantelis (12 to 15 years)

Fate is a curious thing. It’s powerful and unpredictable and sometimes callous. It carves its cruel path and makes you walk blindly along it, continually forcing you to circumvent its endless obstacles. Fate is inevitable, incalculable, but most importantly, inescapable.

***

I’m sitting cross-legged at the end of Mum’s bed, watching her being eaten alive. She is being consumed – slowly but surely – by the disease. By the invisible killer, unstoppable and unrelenting. A robber of time. A robber of life.

It makes me mad how unfair this is, but life isn’t fair, and I should have learnt that by now. I carefully slide off the bed and fix the blankets, so Mum’s bony back and slim shoulders are covered. I study the way her chest rises and falls with each laboured inhalation and think about how every breath is for us. Mateo and Gabe, her only two children. Her only two people left to fight for. I say a silent prayer that her fragile heart never stops beating and then my eyes sting with tears and I quietly leave the room, because if I don’t, I will cry and Gabe hates it when I cry.

Gabe is five years older than me, and he says that men don’t cry. He says even if you are sad, you have to pretend to be happy because no one should see you upset. The day Mum was diagnosed, I cried. A lot. Gabe came into my room and sat on the floor with me, handing me tissues until my tears ran dry. He said that crying makes you weak and that I should just ‘man-up’ and deal with it. He said crying wouldn’t help anything and that it was pointless and stupid. Then he stuffed a few tissues into his pocket and left, his eyes glassy and faraway, but not a single tear slipped down his cheek because he is a man, and apparently men don’t cry.

I open the back door and head outside, where it smells like sunshine and fresh honey. I stop by the shed and grab the watering can and weeder, eyeing the packet of seeds on the bench. I leave them where they are though, because they’re for tomorrow. I walk to the back of the yard, to the patch of soil besides the fence, and kneel down. Just above the soil’s surface, three vibrant, green stalks crane their necks to the sky. One of the seedlings is still young, one has grown a few buds and the other has bloomed a single, pink flower. Dianthus caryophyllus. The carnation, with its pink, fringed petals layered delicately like sheets of tissue paper. The first one I planted.

I started the garden to mark the weeks Mum lived beyond what the doctor told her she would. Tomorrow will be the fourth flower I plant. The small garden isn’t visible from the back door and Gabe rarely ventures into the backyard, so no one knows about it except me. And that’s the way I like it. If Gabe saw the garden, he would frown and shake his head and tell me it is stupid. So, I plant my seeds in secret, pray that Mum keeps on fighting and will the flowers to keep on growing.

The day the doctor told Mum she had two weeks to live, she looked Gabe and I in the eyes, held our hands and promised us she wasn’t going to die. I held onto her words and made myself believe them. But I shouldn’t have been so naïve. She may have lived longer than two weeks, but all promises are eventually broken.

When Gabe taps my shoulder early the next morning, the sun is yet to rise and there’s a piercing chill in the air which makes me shiver and pull the covers tighter around my body. Gabe taps me again and I groan, turning over, but there’s something urgent about his touch. Something insistent. Something pleading.

My sight is still fuzzy from sleep, but when I lift my head and look at him, my stomach drops. Something’s wrong. I sit up and study his silhouette – shoulders hunched, hair mattered, head bowed. He steps closer and I try to read his unfamiliar expression. It’s a concoction of sorrow and fear and confusion. It’s pain.

Mum fought for four weeks more than she was meant to. Gabe reminds me of this while he sits next to me in bed, staring down at his lap. His voice is quiet and gentle, and I can tell he’s trying his best to make the news easier to bear, but there is no good way to hear that your mother is dead.

I feel strange. I’m angry and upset but weirdly calm, and it feels like I’m stuck in a hazy dream which is soon to abruptly end. So, I get out of bed, tell Gabe I’m fine, and try to act as if my world is not about to be drowned by a wild tidal wave of woe.

The air outside is sharp and bitter, stinging my cheeks and grasping at me with its icy fingers. I collect the packet of seeds from the shed, walk to the garden and sit on the dewy grass. I hold the seeds in my hands and trace my thumb over the name on the packet: Helianthus Annuus. Sunflower seeds.

“Mum would like them,” Gabe says as he sits on the grass next to me. I didn’t even hear him come out. He doesn’t tell me the garden is stupid and he doesn’t object when I shake a few seeds out of the packet and drop them into his palm.

“Plant them with me,” I say in a small voice.

Gabe puts one arm around my shoulder and helps me plant the seeds with the other. We don’t talk and when we finish, we sit in silence. My cheeks burn, but not from the cold, and before I can stop myself, the tears come hot and fast. They run down my face and onto the soil and I don’t try to supress them. Gabe doesn’t either. He swipes the back of his hand over his eyes and turns his head away from me. But even through my tear-stained vision I see a small drop fall down his cheek, delicately and slowly, running down his face until it drips off his chin. I hug Gabe then, hard and properly, and he hugs me back. We sit together on the grass, crying for Mum but also for each other. Crying like men. Because men do cry.

(Inspired by Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden)

Instant Noodles and Cigarettes by Khanh Ngo (16 to 18 years)

Three thousand words due in three hours and the cursor sat on thirty words.

Vietnamese iced coffee - pungent Robusta, condensed milk, a velvety aftertaste sits on your tongue, lingering with acidity; my “Vietnamese” coffee: sat stale, the coffee too weak, and the milk nauseatingly sweet. The melted ice caused a flux of condensation, dampening the dreaded assessment notification; I pulled out the limp piece of paper in haste, the ink had already smudged, I sighed and tossed it on the never-ending piles of paper, plastic plates and empty instant noodle packages I never managed to clean up. The cursor sat on one hundred and two words.

Glancing at the assemblage of post-it notes swamping my wall, gritty with cigarette ash, the beaming hue of chartreuse tormented me. The stillness of the night, the stench of stale coffee and the surprising comfort of worn-out notebooks lulled me to the sweet oblivion of dreams.

***

It’s been two years since I visited my family. The familiar feeling of our bedroom was soothing. The smell of cedar and the subdued odour of Dad’s cigarette warmed me.

“Làm gì làm hoài…” What’s the hold up? “Ra chơi” Come play!

“No dad, studying. Don’t you want me to become a doctor?”

“Hong, muốn chơi game với tui" Nope! I want you to come play with me, he pouted.

“Fine! One game.”

One game turned into two, then two became three. The stress of the assessment, muted by the calming sounds of the video game and Dad’s occasional swearing.

***
He used to wake me, when I was young, by standing over me and smacking my cheeks lightly.

The blare of the alarm smacked me awake, a trail of dribble on my notebook. Groggy with dream, I took a long, gluttonous drag of my idled cigarette - Dad doesn’t know I smoke, I sighed and threw the flickering cigarette inside the half-empty coffee mug. Mindlessly, I continued to type, the dull thluck thluck of the keys eased the silence of the night.

Looking through the baffling amount of ethnic short stories I’ve opened, my cursor lingered on FaceTime.

“Hellu, làm gì đó?” Dad asked, his voice muffled by a cigarette between his lips, What you up to?

“Làm bài, buồn ngủ quá.” I have to write a story, so sleepy.

“Go sleep, do tomorrow?” he asked in his heavy accent.

“Nope, I have to finish it today”

“Okay, okay” He didn’t urge me any further.

Comfortable silence, I’ve always enjoyed this. I studied his wearied features on the screen as he let out acrid smoke into the brisk summer night… a story about him: “The Oriental Single Father” in italicised bold, Times New Roman, I scoffed - quite poetic.

Dad - he didn’t care much about parenting when Mum was still around, he felt like my older brother more than anything, always been the reckless kind.

***
“Ra chơi, trời mưa nè!” It’s raining, come!

“But I'm helping mum with dinner!" I shouted from the kitchen.

“Who cares, your mum can cook dinner alone” He laughed, waving at me from the street, drenched in murky rainwater.

***

Ripeness is plainly all.

He didn’t shed a single tear at Mum’s funeral as Buddhist monks read out sermons and sutras, his stance brimming with fortitude. Afterwards, he trapped himself in his little dwelling for one whole year, surviving solely on uncooked instant noodles and cigarettes.

The day he crept out of his depressive streak, he told me to go study overseas, his speech backed with painfully profound Buddhist tenets.

“Mày phải học giỏi để kiếm tiền, đừng phải dựa vào mấy thằng hèn như tao” Go, you must study hard to be independent, and not have to rely on assholes like me. He stifled, as pent-up tears of grief finally choked him alive.
I miss the feeling of falling asleep to my mum rubbing my back, when Dad would cover my ears on aeroplanes when it got too loud, or when they both held me tight during thunderstorms. The cursor blinked at three thousand words, a story about the man I love most, Father, my eyes ladened with grief. The coldness of the night pierced my skin, I had long since learned to ignore it.

(Inspired by Nam Le’s The Boat)

I am my own voyeur by Jaya Kortgast (19 to 24 years)

To be feminine is to alter, to edit, to remove hair in some places and add someone else's in others, whether the extensions be on your scalp or your lashes- you can always renovate this house of yours. For your body has never been a home, it’s kept you warm but not safe, others have broken and entered and taken as they pleased. I am my own voyeur. To be feminine is to re-touch, to re-shape in your shape wear, to shrink. I’d go on a diet of apple cores and cigarette butts before I'd ever let my waist take up more space than it's allowed. To be feminine is to be empty, like a vessel, a vessel to carry the child or his desires which masquerade as your own, as your back breaks you’ve learnt to moan. I am my own voyeur.

I stressed that morning, quite a lot. Stressed about money, about making it on time, about if I’d still seem soft and lovely through it all, but mostly about what I wore. The stress of creating who I assumed I should be from heaps of dirty laundry still boasting the stench of last year’s girl. A vision of girlish giggles, cheeks flushed by fertility, cherry picked accessories that scream “pity me” but also “please, please find me beautiful, feel guilty about being distracted from your own sympathy by the glistening streams running from eye, down neck to tender breast.” Dreams of white lace, somehow both virginal and whorish - beautiful in it’s contradiction.
At least that's what I'm mining for from the clothes littering the floor.

Hours later in the doctors office waiting room, I felt foolish in my pornified schoolgirl charade. No longer sexy, just dirty.
Silly to think I could pull it off. Silly to think the right outfit would make it feel ok. Silly now to tug at the hem of my plaid skirt as I fight back tears about the parasite feeding from my youth, silly to cry while my womb prepares a home for a whole other soul when it was no one’s fault but my own, silly girl. And silly to feel bad, for this is what I want. After all, I wasn’t raised on my knees in the pews under watchful eyes of Right and Wrong, so why feel anything at all, silly girl!

I have never at once felt both so mature and childlike. So foolish and alone, so brave and bold. I used to place a great deal of pride in seeming older than my years, a whole chunk of my ego carved from the local boys' praises of how grown up I seemed; which has proven a shaky foundation to build a sense of self. I was always aware of the currency I held, if I could just pull the white lace over their eyes for long enough, it could save me from the long lineage of women before, who spend their nights wide eyed, drowning out their husbands snores with frets of frown lines and children's cries. The future of our mother’s present always seems avoidable, but tomorrow dawns all the same, with the same hereditary nagging tone.
“Do you have a good support network? Do you have female friends, or maybe even your mum?”

In the weeks of carrying this half life, I felt closer to my mother than I had before. Mum had worn a micro mini dress to her wedding and crossed the Nepalese border by yak back, yet I knew her as a gentle country mouse, pickling fennel and ironing my socks. I understand now that why I never met the former woman isn't merely the fact that age smooths out your edges, but that the gilded cage of motherhood doesnt allow for gelled hair spikes and unsensible footwear.
Personhood is a privilege afforded to few. Women fight so hard to derise it and yet it can be stripped away no matter what you do, whether you birth a child or not, your life gets reduced to truck-stop tabloid headings and religious agendas.
Now, sat in front of the doctor, answering questions about family histories of diabetes, I stressed about what I wore. Not at all beautiful in my contradictions, but shameful.
I leave with a medical termination prescription and a vague sense of hope beneath the obvious crushing devastation. I thought that maybe if I could let people in, thought if they heard the news of unwanted life growing inside they’d see how much it was killing my own. Maybe then I could be the girl I created in my outfit-tragic, broken, but lovable, like a shattered lollipop preserved in its cellophane seal.

No one warned me of the 4 am emergency room visit, not an eye blinked at the blood stained hospital gowns and fainting first year nurses.
No one seemed to realise how scared I was. There was no sense of beauty or community within my fear. How could there be, I wouldn’t dare confess to my secret state of mourning when I could barely even whimper the word ‘abortion’. It echoed within me regardless, humming in tune with the ache of my breasts and back, that same pain a reminder of the guilt I felt for just wanting to stop, to stop trying, stop moving, stop worrying about what to wear, stop hoping I could stumble upon the right set of contradictions and just be.

All this time wasted rubbing myself in preservative salt, trying so hard to hold on to something I never owned. Maybe instead it’s time to rot, to become new by ripping the flesh off my frame like a chook on a butcher's hook.
Doctors’ orders: boil the bones down to the marrow, grind them until there’s only dust which the wind will disperse into a million tiny specks. Then, the particles dance themselves into a pattern - that portrait of me. The one burnt into the retina of my mind’s eye. The little girl I loved. And once it’s done, I’ll collect the fallen tender meat and begin to feast, devouring myself the way I deserve to be consumed, absorbing that power I handed over, finally satisfying that hunger of seemingly no known cause. Maybe then I won’t stress about what to wear.

(Inspired by Choice words: a collection of writing about abortion)