Young Creatives Awards 2024 - Young Writers
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Ages 12 to 15
Winner: Evgenia Damjanovski
Kvachka
He was an elderly man who sat alone on the rooftop. His skin sagged and stretched and bunched together. Though he was a fixture there, people saw very little of him. He smiled infrequently, but when he did, his eyes would beam from the creases that surrounded them, radiating a youthful glow upon his weathered face.
Occasionally he would bring his telescope up and gaze through the lens. Though he saw nothing, he never left; but he was content in the abyss that stared back at him. Every Saturday the old man would return to the same spot and conduct the very same ritual, despite the frigid July wind. On one of his ritualistic evenings, a young boy sauntered towards him. They both sat, gazing at the stars. Not a word was spoken, and the old man parted an hour later.
The following Saturday, he ambled his way onto the rooftop as he had done for 5 years now, only to find the boy had beaten him to it. He staggered over and sat down next to him. The old man habitually looked up at the freckled sky but promptly broke his gaze to peer over at the boy. His hair was tousled and tattered, his face marked with dirt, yet there was an honesty in his expression that surpassed his dishevelled condition.
“The name’s Manolo.” the boy introduced himself, reaching his hand out towards the old man.
“Bojan.” He reciprocated, taking Manolo’s hand and giving it a firm shake. They sat silent after the exchange.
“Why do you come here?”
The man made no reply.
“I see you from my window before I go to sleep. I always try to look out for you.”
“That is nice of you.”
“Yes, I suppose”
“Why do you look out for me?”
The boy made no reply.
“My mum told me not to come up here. She says you sound funny—and look a little funny. I don’t think you sound funny.”
“You can tell your mother I think she sounds equally as funny to me.”
The sun began to tuck away into the fine horizon line, leaving nothing but a shimmering golden edge over Sydney’s skyline. And still, the silence between Bojan and Manolo remained unbroken The boy swung his legs back and forth, and soon his gaze shifted from the inky canvas above to the old man. He studied each fine line etched into Bojan’s face and gave up when he lost count of the crevasses. He has as many wrinkles as stars in the sky, Manolo thought. To him, the old man looked like a painting. Certainly not one from the Rococo period, but he thought he would make a fascinating portrait nonetheless.
“You can see that constellation from home.” Bojan gently elevated his finger and made a pointing motion towards an assemblage of stars. “Kvachka is her name. She is the mother hen. My Baba would always tell me ‘When Mother Hen rises in the east, it is around two o’clock after midnight. You better not be awake long enough to see her, or you get the metla’.” The old man chuckled to himself briefly, releasing a string of coughs and dazing back off into the sky. Manolos' eyes widened. He opened his mouth as if to speak, before opting for silence and shifting his gaze elsewhere. Bojan observed him keenly, stealing glances from the periphery of his vision. Though his vision was a murky haze, he discerned the boy watching him, coaxing a soft grin to crease the corners of his weathered face.
“Is this not your home?” Manolo inquired, his fingers idly twirling as he peered up at the man.
“This is where I live.”
“So it is your home then?”
“Those are not quite synonymous.”
Manolo lapsed into silence, lost in his thoughts as his eyes darted up and down in contemplation, one fist propping up his chin. The void above appeared to draw nearer. It was a strange feeling to see the skyline from this view. Manolo had never stayed up this late. He had always made a habit of going to sleep as soon as he saw the old man; That is how he knew it was bedtime. The red and white flickering lights of cars zipping down highways came in and out of his view. The windows and stars blurred together, almost indistinguishable from one another. As the night deepened, they merged into a single entity, until he found himself staring at one vast cluster of flickering, dancing lights.
Twenty minutes elapsed and Manolo got up to shake the old man’s hand, still absent and astray in thought. With a small nod, Bojan bid the boy farewell.
From his bedroom window, the old man remained within sight.
Manolo and Bojan continued their meetings, with Manolo making it his aim to visit fortnightly and engage in conversation with Bojan. During their encounters, The old man often spoke of Home.
“Manolo. Man, they say, is a creature that can grow accustomed to anything.” Bojan would remark, punctuating his observation with a chuckle. “Though, I am hardly a paragon for such a statement. Ah, It is a pity Macedonia is not very well known. Sometimes I feel as though our culture is dying. I have not been asked about it in 30 years. People lack the childlike wonder you possess, Manolo. They end up losing it."
Though Manolo found it puzzling to decipher most of his commentary, he would sit for hours and absorb his descriptions like a sponge. When nightfall came, Manolos' mind would illustrate wondrous pictures of the Macedonian countryside, filled with the melodic chatter of sparrows and sun-kissed children dancing carelessly in his mind.
Bojan would speak of the seasons waltzing and whisking away like clockwork, accompanying the lingering scent of shrivelled tobacco leaves that emerged during the scorching summertime.
By September, Manolo would eagerly greet the man with a “Kako si?” and before long, they would exchange sentences in Macedonian.
Bojan no longer sat alone on the rooftops; Manolo sat beside him, once again tracing the familiar creases around Bojan's eyes before turning his gaze upward to the blinking lights scattered across the vast black expanse. The intricacies and formations of the night sky became second nature to them both.
“What do you see, Manolo?”
Manolo pointed towards one of the clusters splattered across the sky's canvas.
“Ah yes, that one” Bojan parted his lips to continue speaking, but was cut short by an interjection from the boy.
“Yes, I know, That one is Kvachka.”
The old man beamed with pride.
Runner up: Chris Pantelis
Hot Off the Press
First day, new environment, fresh air, long way to go. It’s like the beginning of one of those novels, the almost ancient novels that you find jammed in the back of a dusty, abandoned shelf in a library, a misfit from the popular books. Always a pain and an absolute bore to attempt to understand, but slowly improving and gaining strength. Blossoming in its final flourish of pages to a crescendo – a Queen Of Andes plant, building up a stalk of thousands of flowers over one hundred years to create a spectacle of natural wonder – rewarding, precious, beautiful.
A new chapter is started, the sequence repeated: sediment, layers forming, moulded by nature into a precious Australian land formation, its beauty untouched.
But the pages of this story are being creased. Mould is invading the corners of the yellowing paper. Mining companies, industries and politicians are invading the land, growing, grouping, overpopulating like a cockroach-infested basement. Destructive, hungry insects which consume the land. Unravelling the stitches of the book’s spine, unravelling nature’s work. All for the sake of what they think matters.
***
“Three, two, one…and we’re live!” The morning news has started.
Announcing the latest headlines, the news reporter isn't letting his real thoughts through. Only the “we’re on live T.V.” thoughts are said out loud, his brain like a flour sifter, featuring a mesh screen that removes the clumps of his real thoughts and slowly releases his carefully constructed script to the audience.
“Today’s headline: More than one hundred Aboriginal sacred sites – some dating more than 50,000 years ago – could be overtaken by mining companies.” The reporter reads off the teleprompter with a sour face. He clicks his pristine and glistening pen set on the glass table, unsatisfied. This isn’t fair to his ancestors, to his history, to his people. He isn’t the only one mad about it. He really isn’t.
The program switches to mindless and materialistic advertisements on the latest trends, and the producers announce that it’s the end of the reporter’s morning shift. He blends in with the few people that walk down the small sidewalk of the tranquil street. The town is washed in a blue tint, the almost glacial morning air being washed over by a layer of acrid, black smoke disgorging from the large buses and taxis taking the miserable adults to work.
The small, weathered corner store is where the ant trail of people are heading, hobbling in their coats and woollen scarves, to the only store in the neighbourhood open early, for their daily, magnetising cup of coffee. The store’s rusty newspaper stand holding stacks of crisp, newly printed newspaper copies with bold headlines, remains unnoticed. Everyone continues to go about their ordinary lives, infatuated with their phones. Evidently, likes, comments and brain-rotting short videos seem to be more important than printed, cold, hard facts:
“A sacred rock shelter in the Pilbara region, WA was legally destroyed by Rio Tinto mining company…” The reporter leaves the shop with his steaming coffee, trying to ignore the headlines, not to be aggravated once again.
Don’t think about it; don’t let it flood your head. He made his way down the cold, cracked pavement. The rhythm of the clicks of his polished, back work shoes, echoed through his empty and stressed mind. His ears began to ring as he heard the large and industrial bus pull in, the thick, black fumes tightly choking his lungs. Slowly, the large, glass doors of the vehicle opened and out stepped a young child with his mother. The news reporter boarded the bus, collapsing into one of the blue, battered seats. As he leaned his head against the window and the bus slowly rumbled forward, his eyes followed the mother and child who passed the city walls plastered with posters and graffiti.
The glimmering, cerulean eyes of the overstimulated child wander to one of the withered and dismembered posters, torn at the sides and edges. He inspects the smudged, stocky, black ink, dents, rips and colours, his eyes darting to every detail, like flechettes being hurled at high speeds across the wall. The poster hangs its head low, unobtrusive and unnoticed from the rest of society as if it doesn't deserve anyone’s attention. The child slows down to a halt, burning with curiosity on what the poster said. The mangled flaps of torn paper waver in the wind, making it almost strenuous to read.
“Help…
Australia’s crumbling history…
What are you going to do…
To help?”
His mother tugged at his hand, a gesture to keep walking. They quickened their pace and lowered their heads, as if they were feeling the poster was glaring back at them longingly, forlorn. Their faces reflected great shame as they issued the ‘beggar treatment’ – the ignorant and embarrassed way people walk by when disregarding the less fortunate people of society; as long as they weren’t in that situation, it couldn't perturb them less. Tik Tok is more vital to their withered, clustered and diluted brains. No words were spoken. No thoughts were discussed. Only visible proof of modern society not having enough courage to address the requisite issue, yet just enough courage to think to themselves that ‘Superman’ will make his entrance to their local area and wondrously solve the issue for them.
***
At the end of the day, a novel doesn’t make sense when most of its pages have been destroyed. No-one wants to read an incomplete story, so it remains in the back of the bookshelf, collecting dust, forgotten, destroyed, not mattering enough to be read. Australia’s natural stories are fading away. People are ruining and changing centuries of monumental effort, flushing it down a lifeless sewer where the souls of critical Australian history and past are being cleared away because of the belief that “it doesn’t matter.” Yet, it truly, undoubtedly does.
Ages 16 to 18
Winner: Ruby Norman
Memory of a Headless Snake
My brother and I stand idly under the shade of the Wasanger Footy Club’s tin veranda. This is Kangaroo Island, a bottle-shaped mass of farming land two hours off the coast of South Australia by ferry. The beaches are hemmed in rocky cliffs, the powdery dirt roads blinded by scrub. Men are sitting out with cold beers, sheep farmers in blue checked shirts. Kids I don't know dressed in black, crouched down by unleashed panting sheepdogs, oblong puddles of black and white on the cool cement. My uncle and Mum emerge from inside with a couple of old women in stiff sleeveless dresses trailing behind them with icings of sweat across their upper lips. “We’re taking Shane’s car,” my mum says. One of the women, about my height, opens her arms wide and wraps me in a doughy embrace to say goodbye, although I’m not sure I said hello to her in the first place.
“Mum, what's in the bag?” my brother asks in the car park. She carries a shiny pink paper gift bag splashed with yellow stars, “It’s Grandpa Richard”.
“What?!” Hamish ran up beside her,
“Yeah, remember? We’re sprinkling him down at Smiths Bay.”
Then we’re in my uncle’s car, Mum sitting between Hamish and I rather than in the front seat. She rests the shiny pink bag between her feet, loosely grasping the string handles like it's an expensive champagne she’s bringing to a dinner party.
“Well,” says my uncle, shutting the door and turning the key into ignition, “I’d say that went well.”
“And if Mum was here she’d just turn it into The Shirley Show”
A rumour had been circulating that Grandma Shirley wasn’t going to attend her ex-husband’s funeral.
“Apparently Vanita’s not talking to her either.”
“Well,” he huffed, “made my day a lot easier.”
My grandma was the runner up for South Australia’s ‘One in a Million’ beauty pageant in the early 60s, and used to ice cakes for the Islanders’ weddings. Mum has a picture of her in a photo album — squarely bent over a needle and thread in her sewing room, small bird-like eyes squinted in concentration. Her jumper is the stark red of an unripe cherry, the fine knit stretched flat over a rotund torso. Her legs, crossed at the ankles, are thin like a child, and hair so white it’s almost blue, laying in straight clumps flat on her scalp.
I remember the last time we visited the island was a couple years ago, when I was seven, it was Christmas and we stayed at her house. She lives in Kingscote in a flat orange brick house overlooking the ocean. In the back room my brother and I would sit on the carpet striped with afternoon sun, watching the pelicans fly in. One morning, when it was just her and I, she leant over the kitchen bench and told me in a hushed voice; “You know, Geoff is really good to me—” (Her second husband, the grocery man she had an affair with) “—Richard treated me very poorly. Your Mum doesn’t know this because she’d left home, but he once tried to run me over in his ute,” she shook her head and played with her gold bracelets, “I was running through the paddocks, I had to climb up a tree so I wouldn’t be killed. Eventually he left to go to bowls, but that was the moment… I knew…” She got up, turned towards the sink, “Geoff has always been really good to me”.
Even then I realised that I was too young to know these sorts of things, and when I told Mum she just said: “Mum’s losing it”.
A long stretch of dirt road, then, the sheep huddled in the shade, the blond hillsides and
blackened tree trunks. “Dead snake,” my uncle points out. I turn around so I’m looking out the back window and just catch the long black snake lying belly-up in the sandy gutter, white stomach bloated and spilling over with a jammy red. Headless snakes don’t stop moving until dark, Mum used to tell me, “I’d chop off their head with a spade and skin them (I was younger than you are now), you could come back in an hour’s time and they’d still be wriggling around in the dirt like a big pink worm.”
Gross! Were they still alive?
“No, definitely dead, they wouldn’t be able to think or feel anything. Grandpa just throws them in the dam, it’s always freaked him out.”
She still speaks of Grandpa like he’s alive.
She points out my window, “Look over there Ru. Can you see the old farmhouse?”.
To my left sits a squat building nestled into the treeline behind lines of paddock fences. The green weatherboards of which the house was built looked cool, and pond-like under the shade of the deep veranda. The red tile roof — a heavy brow on the facade — squashed its features into a somewhat grimacing face.
“Remember going out to catch calamari here — when you were little? You and Dad went out in that little dingy with the blue dolphins painted on the side.”
“Um, maybe.”
But Grandpa Richard didn't stay on the island during his last years, he cared for an old estate on the mainland.
“Gosh I’m glad I didn't get to see him then, apparently he was in really bad shape,” Mum would say afterwards, a small consolation she often called upon to smother the guilt of not visiting him.
“Can I see in the bag?” asks Hamish.
“Hey don’t spill my dad all through the car!” Uncle Shane says in a fake gruff voice. The urn is sleek brushed silver similar to a bullet, ‘Richard Turner’ engraved in cursive. The name seems more foreign to me than ever before. No resemblance to the man whose hair sprouted white from his ears and nostrils, whose laugh made whole rooms shudder, whose chilly blue eyes seemed almost supernatural against a landscape of brown fibrous skin.
She screws open the lid to show Hamish, inside is a plastic bag of white powder. I imagine the ashes flying down the beach and landing on the water, a fine pooling of chalk, little fish caught in the mass.
Although my mum has seen this urn before, I recognise in her face a sudden disappointment. For her, the sun is setting on his memory.
The car goes quiet and from it, a ghostly echo renders the land unfamiliar. I’m not sure I ever truly knew this place, or the time my grandpa spent here, but right now all I can think of is that photo of my grandma — and I — in our matching cherry jumpers that one morning in her sewing room.
The car turns right and the water is suddenly visible. A small fingernail of white sand, a clearing of sky. No wooden boat painted with blue dolphins.
Runner up: Jade Huang
This Android Doesn't Want to Dream of Electric Sheep Anymore
Mathieus’ fingers clicked against the old wood table. Click, click, click.
The table was a relic of the past Earth, just like the “abandoned” warehouse he was sitting in—really a secret military base for android repair.
Audible, irritated taps on the screen of the machine giving Mathieus a full-body scan accompanied his clicking. They stopped when the tapper gave Mathieus a glare.
“Mathieus! Stop that,” Leo snapped, slapping Mathieus’ soft, eerily twitching “skin” stretched out on the table. “You seem really invested in ignoring your engineer today even though you gave your state-of-the-art regenerative skin an unhealing paper cut on your finger!”
Today Leo’s patience sure is stretched thin—like the skin on the table, Mathieus thought. He laughed flatly. Was that funny? Mathieus briefly wondered if his humour file in his “brain” was corrupted. But it was just his new nervous laughter mechanism.
Leo shook his head. “I don’t know why the higher-ups decided to give you a “humanising” update when you wouldn’t benefit from all the useless actions, like tapping on a table when you’re “anxious”. Just because PROTON X is no longer on the field, doesn’t mean they have to go along with all this activist crap about “androids who served in the war deserve to live normal human lives. You were fine without it.”
Mathieus stilled. PROTON X. For years, it was the name that appeared on people’s portable displays when they opened the news to see how many were saved in the latest military operation. The name that used to pass the researchers’ mouths in hushed whispers, since he was their new “secret project.” “Mathieus” was just a temporary name they let him choose during his early stages when they were deliberating on his official name. Leo still indulged him, but now it felt more like strange pity—on one hand, Leo thought he was better off as a android with numbed emotions, but on the other, he called him a human name.
The scanning machine emitted a loud beep. Leo gave its screen a glance.
“Okay…I see. Your clorium levels are too low, so your liquid abloxide started acting out since it isn’t being balanced by clorium, which makes your skin more fragile. Have you been drinking the clorium bottles we send you every week, Mathieus?”
“Yeah, I’ve been drinking them. Thanks. Bye.”
“Uh, no. Your skin, Mathieus. Put it on. And just a reminder—as your clorium levels decrease, your corrosive abloxide will try harder to escape and redden as the vessels that hold it weaken. I don’t want synthetic-skin-corrosive chemicals shooting out of all your orifices now, alright?
Mathieus nodded and grabbed the material, struggling to hide his reluctance as he pulled the stuff on. The flesh stretched and fit perfectly along his body, and he knew he should feel grateful that it did, as his predecessors were exposed during their spy missions because of the gaps in their skin which enabled it to be taken off. Instead, he was envious. He couldn’t take his skin off unless an engineer was there with specialised equipment.
The skin fused together. Mathieus grimaced at the strange sound it made, then pushed the warehouse’s door open, leaving the sound of Leo’s typing behind.
*
As soon as his house’s door shut automatically behind him, he slumped down and gripped his head. It hurt to think about everything that these new updates had seemed to unleash for the past few months. Ideas! Emotions! And contradictions. They engulfed him to the point where he stopped drinking those clorium bottles which had started to pile up in the living room. Mathieus couldn’t bring himself to do what felt so natural to do before, even as the pain in his stomach clawed at its walls. He didn’t want to.
He had served his purpose as a medic, a technician, a spy, a killer. Now they had so many newer, upgraded androids that Leo had to decrease Mathieus’ checkups to once a year to work on them and send clorium in bottles rather than install a new supply. Why not dispose of him instead? But the government would not, since the public was concerned about the ethics. They knew Mathieus as the hero the government had painted him to be so it could capitalise on his fame and encourage more to enlist. So, the government decided PROTON X couldn’t just disappear, he had to carry on the will of the public, which was now to live a human life. But you built me, program me to carry out your wishes, then try to make me human?
He looked into himself. There wasn’t a beating heart, to love. There wasn’t skin attached to flesh, to feel. There wasn’t a pink brain, to think in the spirals people do. There were only dangerous yet essential synthetic chemicals, more synthetic materials that kept them inside,and code. It’s not real. I’m not a real human. It was a curse to program me to act human, because I can’t be.
And then the veins in his eyes started hurting. Tears were building in his eyes, tinting his vision in…pink.
When the pinkish tears spilled over, he felt a burning on the surface of his cheeks and felt around his face. The tears had left thin “scratches” under both eyes, like the one Leo had treated. Only, they were longer, wider, and on his face because Mathieus didn’t need to come up with an excuse as to how he scratched his face since he would not be attending the next checkup.
An inner programmed alert sounded in his brain, repeating the words “SYNTHSKIN DAMAGED. URGENT REPAIR REQUIRED.” Mathieus waited a few seconds, and as he expected, it didn’t lower in severity. I couldn’t tell because abloxide darkens slowly, but it looks like it became more corrosive. Before, the scratch healed slightly around the edges, so the alert only said “SYNTHSKIN DAMAGED.”
Underneath his skin, the abloxide vessels throbbed, but nothing came out of the wounds.
The damaged vessels were still able to close up—they were state-of-the-art, after all. But the abloxide was also a state-of-the-art chemical. Mathieus did some calculations.
In six months and three days, the abloxide will be blood red, the vessels will break, and all of it will rush out. Then my fake skin and fake chemicals would all be destroyed. The abloxide would burn a hole in the ground, and what was left of me would fall inside. In that moment, would I be something human?
Ages 19 to 24
Winner: Jaden White
For My Grandmothers
Her eye, which by now knows well the ceilings of this house, will suddenly sparkle and she will turn to us with delight and begin “and there is another terrible story…”.
–Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje
I Want You to Haunt Me
i want you to haunt me
beginning with my skin
and eyes that used to be yours
then
to haunt my memories of you
after they got you started on morphine too early
you said you remember at your son’s birthday
one of his friend’s whisked you up from your seat to dance
though dad smiles and tells us later that you never danced
i want you to haunt me
to swell my kidneys
like your own
like golden vadais expanding in oil
like your chicken pan rolls
sitting in our freezer that i bought for you
at ram’s in homebush west
but that dad keeps forgetting to fry and bring to you
i want you to haunt me
beginning with the scars on my body that won’t heal
like the rings you can’t take off
then to the card games i keep winning
unlike you i sometimes cheat
unlike you with your three fucking jacks in the first hand
i know there are three jacks between those fingers
by how much your bottom lip is sticking out
so i open with a nine and you rock your head at the risky move
“tche darling…” only to save me with one of your jacks
i want you to haunt me
so i can show you the beauty i’ve seen in the last year
thư’s face after she wins at cards
that one time i saw dad laugh the hardest daniel and i have ever seen him laugh
the forest behind bác vá and lotta’s family home in älmhult
to show you clearing storms over garie beach as enya and thưthư joked in the sand
long sunsets
colonial ruins
confessions of love amongst friends
one-eyed foxes
dogs and their immigrant fathers
sitting around a table talking about the beauty of still life paintings
and massage chairs
i want you to haunt me
to show me everything
every single celestial moment
that fits into ninety years
the simple bliss of crimson red on your nails
the first years of my father’s life
baths in cold buckets in leeds
papa
dancing in your morphine dreams
after you are dead
and we are inside the memory of each other
can we dance
can we chase each other
through a hand of rummy
or swedish forests
at one of louie’s house parties
where he and all his seventy-year-old friends
share curries and complain about new ailments or recent travels
diane explained to me the impact of richard de zoysa’s death on the colombo bubble
during the sri lankan civil war
later i read his poems
and how after he died
his body washed up on a beach
and his mother was quoted saying
“I was lucky that my son was
brought back to me by the sea.”
i wonder what will bring you back to me
maybe three jacks in the first hand of three hundred and four
maybe dancing
We Never Spoke about Those Kinds of Things
you with your raindrop voice
in your pink overalls
picking at the fingers that will later
massage the surgery scars down my back
you who refuses to tell me stories
more than once
i want to know all your ghosts
i'm thinking about what ersilia said
about beppi and ghosts
nana do you believe in i fantasmi?
or did nonno?
confused she shook her head replying
“my grandmother did but beppi… non lo so…
we never spoke about those kinds of things”
i want to know all your ghosts
ersilia, nana, with her liquid tears
that begin when we arrive
with kisses and mum’s lasagne
atrophied varicose hands clinging to her tissues
mum has already washed her
she is gentling combing nana’s dyed brown hair
and i’m reminded of that lyric by adrianne
come. help me die. my daughter
nana has said she wants to see beppi again
but her body refuses to let her die
i want to know all your ghosts
only recently
while watching my parent’s camcorder home
videos of me refusing to wish nana
a happy birthday in italian
and nana was asking mum
about the complexities of my impressionist
crayon artwork that mum zoomed in on
only then did i realise
how much the stroke changed her voice
and then
audrey showed us the amorphous vases
she made for her grandfather’s memories
who died not long ago
she told me that in trying to piece together
a history of him she instead found videos of her
grandmother, lovingly playing with her and her brother
i want to know all your ghosts
and how our ghosts come to know us
like a palm buried in the grass for so long
like a spiderweb catching the light in the breeze
like the dead lorikeet
i saw lying asleep
in the shadow of the morning sun
on the library balcony
like two old eucalypts whose branches have fused
like holding your grandma’s soft hands
kneading the folds in her skin
pulling tension away from her knuckles
and clasping them for warmth
like the palimpsest stretch marks on your thighs
like watching ants carry petals to your toes
like how we rhyme moments together
like when your grandma bites your arm or slaps my ass
like secretly planting flowers in other people’s gardens
like the dusty windows we look at the past through
like the blanket sky crashing onto our roof at dusk
like watching ông đức hold his dog tẹt like a child
looking up to his face
saying, you are an old man
you are an old man
like from now
until all the heavens that lie in the past
have left us
or are never spoken about
i want to know all of your ghosts
and i just want them to stay
Runner up: Ira Freidberg
Half Empty, Half Full
He peered through the three bars and lay his eyes on a favourite toy, one of many strewn on the floor. A ping pong racket; red-on-one-side, yellow-on-the-other, with an umbilical milkwhite ball. He imagined the ball bobbing on the surface of just-calmed water, carried from his room. The racket is heavy. It might sink, float down and past the submerged, flooded apartments. Or maybe the wet and wooden thing will be carried by a wave and settle on the apartment’s rooftop, where the sea level will have reached its peak. The string will get tangled in the spinning clothesline.
So far, the worst had come at age seven, when the kitchen flooded past his ankles. Standing by the oven and lightly kicking his mama’s dish pan, watching it float beside an uprooted pot plant. He shields his nose with an elbow. Fish, but not the fried kind, the kind served stomach side up, scales intact. He knows that every year he grows older, he will grow closer to an event worse than this. He resolves to never celebrate his birthday.
On the morning of his eighteenth, Stefano was still snoring in the bottom bunk. He had made no such moral sacrifices. The ten-year old was still playacting the king, admiring usurped land and the arsenal used for the taking. Model airplanes with stripes down their spines, tow trucks with vicious claw-arms, a reserve of plastic bricks and plastic men.
A decade later, some hours into writing his doctorate, he’ll look out his dormitory window at the criss-crossing highways, the empty sea beyond, and recall how the playthings of his youth were made of the materials which sank his home. Not only, they were models of bigger machines which hurried the process along.
But now, they are refuge. He can place one big toe after the other on the cool aluminium rungs, terrified to incite his brother’s underslept rage. He can levitate above the light pastel carpet and drop softly, a few inches from the shag. He can pick up a battleship and hold it above his head, let it sail in mid-air, back and forth until the room becomes a series of thin, rushing parallel lines, then curling waves, the stage of a great battle between twenty-first century firepower and the cannons of a galleon ship. In play, he can sink his enemies, emerge victorious, against an enemy of the seventeenth century, the likes his tutors have taught him about. Diagrammable, cartographic, comprehensible, defeatable. Stefano groans and turns slightly, hugs his pillow tighter to his ear.
It is still seven years until the boy will meet Theo, not far from Vespuccio’s bar. And there is still this party to get through.
His grandfather was next to wake. His loud stretching woke his wife, the boy’s grandmother. Her son, the boy’s papa, returned from work a couple of hours after sunrise. His wife, the boy’s mother, had been up the longest, making calls and putting out fires. She presented her husband with a sliver of cheese on an open-faced roll. ‘Keep yourself occupied with that,’ she said, covering herself in mink. ‘I’ll be back in five, Patrizia can’t get her gift down the stairs.’ The door slammed shut a little too loud, she yelled an apology even louder, and with that, their son, his brother, woke up.
Little brother loomed over big brother, interrupting a yawn with a party horn. Stefano pushed little brother out of the way, staggering to the bathroom, resisting a grin. Piss, wash your hands, scrub your face, shave for the fourth time ever. Brush your teeth. Make sure there’s no gristle, no crumb, and don’t dare eat before the photo is taken, not an orzo, not a grain. You will never have this day again. Pluck your filthy monobrow, and do your hair, but please, not with the gel. You’ll look like a mafioso, or worse, a stockbroker.
Stefano ran at the smell of coffee on the stove. He left the tap running a touch. The sink was peppered with black hairs. The plug was still wedged in, water and shaving cream and soap swirling, reluctant to drain.
By the time their unit had mobilised and walked to Vespuccio’s, it was packed with relatives. The little boy was grateful that Stefano would be doing all the talking and kissing and hugging. For once, the weight was lifted off his own grabbable shoulders and pinchable cheeks. He sat in a booth and slid his boat along the table.
Vespuccio stood behind the bar, brandishing his ceramic teeth and overpouring red wine by the inch. Whether it was by generosity or hyperopia, who cared.
The old sat on the deck, on splinters folded out in the shape of chairs. They got woozy from the late sun and the Amarone.
The young men leaned against the walls and parapets, making whooping calls at distant cousins and their plus-ones. When Stefano escaped the embraces at last, he hung with them, let himself be prodded and cajoled into making a move on Lena, his object of affection since primary school.
It is a scene not dissimilar, perhaps with the light more faded and the paint more frayed, from when the boy will meet Theo, at Aunt Patrizia’s final wedding. Theo will offer a cigarette to the boy—now a man—and propose a stroll by the canal. The grown boy will oblige, walk with him through twilight and into dusk. Their feet will plop in the blue and bird-shit water, and they’ll pretend that the soft grazing of their toes is the doing of a floating plastic wrapper. Dull yellow streetlight will keep such activities ambiguous.
The water wraps around his legs, two inches above the ankle, the same point it reached when he was a boy. His legs are longer, but the sea level has raised to meet them. He will leave this place before the water can reach his knees.
Librarian's choices
Jonathan Smyth (12–15)
It
Sam stumbled through a dark cave of trees, the shadows creeping in behind him. From somewhere in the murky woods a low, guttural growl sent shivers down his spine. He felt his heart rising in his chest, every beat deafening like the boom of a drum. The creature’s raspy breath was rapidly closing in, its ghostly body making no visible sign of its movement. Sam risked a glimpse behind him as a pale patch of moonlight shone through a gap in the roof of trees, illuminating its face.
Hollow eye sockets stared blankly at him, petrifying him, while dark grey lips curled back to reveal sharp teeth, perfectly white. In place of a nose were two gaping holes and its pale, translucent skin seemed to absorb Sam’s essence, leaving him strangely fatigued. He had seen that face two nights earlier, staring at the cloaked figure in the darkness outside his family’s tent. He’d been jolted from his sleep by the terrifying sound of his mother screaming, his father struggling to free himself from confines of the monster’s grasp.
Around him, the wind began howling like an evil laugh, drawing his focus back to reality. The tangle of trees surrounding him had given way to a large clearing, bordered by a cold, pitiless cliff. There was no way out but the track he’d just run. Now he knew his end had come …
Sam turned and watched as the distance between them closed rapidly like a darting python. Inching slowly backwards, he felt his left foot hover dangerously on the edge. He had nowhere to go. In the shadows of the clearing, it stopped, waiting with a hungry fire in its eyes. It slowly advanced into the moonlight giving Sam his first full view of the creature.
Ripped grey cloth hung from its body like cobwebs, swirling in the wind. Two gnarled skeletal hands poked out like tree roots, though claws sat on the end of them, gleaming in the dull moonlight. Slowly it drew closer, its hollow eyes searing through him, preventing him from turning away from the ghastly apparition. A black aura began to swirl around it, enveloping the surrounding landscape and blotting out Sam’s vision. Out of the murky gloom materialised a table of polished, white bone, the broken figure of his father restrained upon it. Sam’s anguished heart sank as he observed his father’s slumped, unconscious form, eyes puffy from tears and wrists red from the tightly bound ropes. Worse still, Sam dared not think about his mother’s fate.
Now as it floated towards him, he looked around desperately for something to fight back with.
There was nothing. However, in the gloomy light reflecting off the rocky ground, he saw a comforting and familiar sight. Two bright lights moving rapidly up the track towards them.
Headlights. Sam glanced at the beast and caught it quietly fuming at the oncoming car, it’s cunning eyes burning with hate. It stood there momentarily as the lights approached, before fading into the bush.
The car pulled up in the clearing, tires screeching on the rocky ground, and the door opened with a shuddering creak, revealing an officer. Smiling reassuringly, he stepped out of the car to greet Sam.
“Hello, I’m Sergeant Johnson. A few days ago we had reports of an otherworldly creature moving through the forest at night. What are you doing out here on your own, son?”
The sergeant saw the table with Sam’s father tied savagely onto it. Stepping back, he drew his gun and looked suspiciously at Sam, challenging him. “What is going on here?”
“Sir, that’s my dad,” Sam stuttered. “He was captured by the monster two nights ago and I think it got my mum too. Ever since, I’ve been hiding, trying to find help. It was just here, and it disappeared when you arrived.”
As the officer considered this, his suspicious expression softened. “What’s your name?”
“Sam Harrison.”
“Alright let’s get you two out of here.” Running quickly to the table, he pulled out a knife to start cutting the ropes, before passing another one to Sam. The progress was painfully slow and Sam’s hand began shaking from the effort. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, Sam cleared the final rope and sighed with relief.
“Thanks,” he commented, turning around to look at the officer behind him. But to his surprise, there was no sign of Sergeant Johnson.
Every sound around him seemed to cease and his stomach jittered in fear. Looking across at the car window, he was relieved to see the sergeant finishing a conversation on his radio before returning to the table.
“We’ll carry your dad to the back seat where he can be comfortable,” the officer explained. Sam nodded and together they lifted his father from the table and made their way towards the car. Sam struggled under the weight, his young body exhausted from days without sleep. However, he resisted the urge to call for a break; the faster they were out of these cursed woods, the better. Reaching the vehicle, he slumped, exhausted, into the protection of the back seat as the sergeant laid his father beside him.
“I’ll get you a blanket,” Sergeant Johnson called, walking to the boot. Cradling his father’s head in his lap, Sam looked outside, remembering the horror of the previous days. He couldn’t imagine his mother’s fate. The forest seemed as menacing as ever, but he would have raced outside in a heartbeat if he could have saved her.
Sam heard the boot close and watched the sergeant step into the driver’s seat. As the engine roared to life, a flood of relief washed over him now that he was finally leaving this nightmare. Vaguely he wondered what had happened to the blanket, but he was too weary to ask. As the car rolled forward, Sergeant Johnson flicked the headlights on and Sam caught sight of someone standing at the edge of the darkness.
“Sir,” he shouted, pointing to the figure, “there’s someone out there!"
Without answering, the sergeant turned the car until the figure was centred in the headlights. Sam started in surprise as the automatic door locks engaged, trapping him as the vehicle suddenly accelerated.
“Stop! Stop!” he exclaimed, as confusion gave way to panic. Looking in the rear-view mirror, a pair of hollow eyes burned back at him, and two skeletal hands clutched the wheel.
In a moment of horror, a nightmare worse than he could ever imagine came to life before him as he recognised the figure in the headlights.
“Mum!!!”
Kane Arriagada (16–18)
Of a Thousand Faces
You are searching for a new book, a book you do not yet know the name of. You scan the shelves, where the names on the sleeves seem to indicate nothing of their contents. Perhaps it is just part of the allure of mystery.
You remove a book, to peruse its secrets. It’s titled In the Twisting Shadows, and that doesn’t reveal much of the story, though it suggests lies and deceit. You turn to a page, somewhere near the start to gauge its contents, and are greeted by unfamiliar things that you feel you should know…
When I arrive, the street is dark. Cloudy pools of light simmer in the surrounding darkness. The vague consistency of shadow gives it the effect of movement, and I cannot help but look over my shoulder.
There is no one there. Not the person I’m to meet either.
I wait by a lamp-post, where the cool metal kisses the light perspiration gathering on the back of my neck despite the cold. My foot taps involuntarily, some skewed and syncopated rhythm that hops and lurches violently like the shadows around.
There is a short period of silence, and then a voice comes from the shadows behind me. I turn, and I cannot make out their features; determine if they are the person I’m here to meet. I don’t know if I want them to be.
When they speak, their voice is nondescript, but it is them.
“Are you the one I am to meet?”
Ah, a thriller. You seem to like the style, though you admit you are lost. You think, perhaps, that you should have turned to the beginning, and things would have made sense. But it is too late now: the story has lost some of its interest to you. So you remove a different book, titled We Meet Again, and this time you turn to the start, where you meet with an epistolary voice -- unexpected, though not entirely unfamiliar…
Dear Brutus
I was not expecting to see you, in the window of that shop. If it were someplace else, removed from this dreary town, perhaps I would have believed it was you - at first - with a little greater ease.
I had not realised you would be in town for the week. I trust your “business” holiday was lovely, and that you haven’t forgotten me in the meantime, for it feels an age since I have seen you.
I would like to see you. I can meet you, on the main street by the park. Come late at night, under the cloak of darkness. Remain in the hazy penumbra of the streetlights, where the glow doesn’t quite caress your figure, and I will find you.
But we must be careful. I cannot let them find out that I am coming to see you. Dress inconspicuously; do not fear yourself blurring into those that surround you, as happens with so many. I wish to feel that you are different.
Love,
Your Moonshine
A romance. You don’t mind a romantic piece, though perhaps it isn’t what you would turn to first. But there is a taste, in the style, that you can appreciate.
Perhaps it is simply that the author has introduced the story well, but you seem to know everything that has happened to lead to this moment and even the moments that will lead from it. The intangible familiarity is unbearable. It is likely just the vague portrait it paints of the characters, but you don’t know that you want to continue with it.
You put the book back in its spot and pick up the one next to it, and when you open it find, not paragraphs, but stanzas that seem to peek at some tangent of a separate but not entirely disconnected story…
Beneath the moon's guise
The moon is not the only light
That casts its doubt on night’s dark cry
You sit in pools of hazy light
And I’m left here to sit and cry
You wove a maze, to hide your-
self in ashen stumps of toppled pasts
Bathed in moonlight and vague cloaks of lies, that
flitter
flitter
flitter
Were you there? In the street?
In the dark… why in the dark?
You shake the light of your vague cloak of lies
And kiss twisting shadows, my Moonshine
Again you have the same problem. This seems so different, and yet it seems to align with something - some story - that you’ve read, or experienced. You are on the edge of something you cannot quite put your finger on. You must pick up another book. Perhaps then you can understand.
But wait…
No. You understand now, don’t you? The faint thread pulling itself through your head has become unstuck. The stories seem to fit together. Arguably they are the same. You are amazed you could not see it.
You scramble to pull the books back down from their shelves. Surely they must be a part of some collection. You didn’t think to check the author’s names.
No. They are different. Different authors, different genres, different styles in a sense.
But ultimately they seem to align.
And you realise, now, that you have seen this story before, or at least in some familiar or similar capacity. You are bound to have. Perhaps our experiences are endlessly unique, but to some degree, they morph into one another, twisting beneath the guise of an individual sleeve and title, though, even many of those seem to mirror their neighbours.
You remove another book. You want a conclusion, of some sort, something to substantiate this narrative you have stumbled upon…
Dear Reader,
In the twisting shadows, we meet again, beneath the moon’s guise. You may not recognise me, but I have appeared before you, an apparition of your identity and consciousness sprouting and branching from the empty words on the page and moulding me from blobs of clay that - in every way that matters - are identical…
Joseph Hathaway Wilson (19–24)
After School
Thom was skinnier than I remembered. The first thing I noticed was his Adam’s apple, and the sharpness of his face in the yellow porch light. His chin was freckled with hair, the type of straight, blunt stubble he could never grow in high school. The party and those around us faded as I studied the Thom before me – the adult who looked at once both weathered and gentle. Thom was good-looking.
‘Outside bathroom?’ he said.
‘I think it’s on the other side.’
We looked out at the oval. Silhouettes were gathering on the grass, staggering, sharing cigarettes, sitting with their heads on each other’s shoulders. On the far side, a brick toilet building stood alone in darkness. I followed Thom as he stepped off the porch towards the toilet, the scent of wet grass rising around us.
After school, we split a family pack and sit on the hill overlooking the oval. We talk and share songs through tinny iPhone speakers. We watch the AFL juniors training, silently observing how the sun gleams on the skin of their arms. The grass grows dewy as the sky darkens, but Thom doesn’t want to go home. We sit beneath the broken floodlight, the one spot where we are enveloped in night.
Gingerly, without looking me in the eye, he tells me a secret.
I didn’t ask Thom how his girlfriend was. He didn’t ask if I had one. The buzz of voices softened into a hum as the thumping music slowly muted. The floodlights were switched off as they loomed over us, sneering. I imagined the broken floodlight like the black sheep of the family, holding its breath, praying.
‘Enjoying the party?’ I said.
‘Yep,’ he said.
‘Righto.’
‘Righto what?’
‘Nothing, just righto.’
We walked the rest of the way in silence, save for the broken floodlight weeping.
We step onto the sand, shaking the ocean from our ears. I feel I am glowing: my odd body, half naked and acne-infested, in the comfort of friends on a Friday afternoon. Thom is there, making people laugh. Someone brought a speaker and picnic blankets and I am lying down, talking to a girl. We talk for hours. Our friends return to the water while our bodies grow hot in the sun. As the day fades and the group splits, Thom’s expression is ambiguous. I want to believe he is tired; that saltwater is stinging his eyes.
I once heard someone describe memory as being like a film reel. For every memorable shot, there are hundreds of thousands of seemingly insignificant frames: tangible fractions of time you failed to realise were passing. No one understands how much time has passed until they unroll the film reel and look at all the frames they forgot existed. Walking with Thom felt like the reel was stuck. Frames from years ago were jammed in the projector.
‘You’ve got to be taking the piss,’ Thom said.
The toilet building was locked.
‘You can try going through the window,’ I suggested.
Thom looked up at the window in question, saying nothing.
‘I’ll give you a foot-up,’ I said.
‘How are you going to get in?’
‘It’s fine, I don’t need to go.’
Thom looked at me briefly with a face like a question mark.
‘Alright,’ he said, ‘what’re we going to do if I can’t get out?’
‘I dunno, I’ll tell everyone you had an emergency.’
‘An emergency on the shitter?’
‘Yeah, like Elvis. It’s rock n roll.’
He grinned for half of a second.
Thom is crying. It is the first and last time I witness him cry. The sound occupies space in the darkness of my room. It’s a school night. The moon casts a line of silver through my window, across the floor and up the wall. I have my arm around Thom’s shoulder as his head rests on mine. His hair smells like straw. I try talking. I ask if he wants to help me pull out the mattress from under my bed. He says he’ll sleep on the couch downstairs.
The grass squelched underfoot as we walked back towards the house. From halfway across the oval, the party looked like an animation. People crawled across the screen like characters who will cease to exist once they exit the frame. Thom slowed before he stopped walking.
‘Do you think about it often?’ he said.
‘All the time,’ I said.
The night was still. The skin on my face was prickling.
‘Would you change anything?’ I ask.
Thom looked at me like I had just asked something stupid. I laughed, relieved, and we turned back to the party, watching the silhouettes weave in and out of each others’ lives.
Jaya Kortegast (19–24)
Father: A Love Ode, a War Song
My grandfather’s glass cabinet taught me perseverance is the kid brother of success; on the other side of suffering lies an onslaught of medallions that grow to new heights under the light of ‘family heirloom’.
There was always the bottle. It watched us like a hawk, perched above the spice rack, nestled next to those kitsch containers for coee, tea, and our, in that sweet spot your eye line sought asylum in during dinner time, eeing the cacophony of cutlery, forks marrying peas to mashed potato and accusations to eat more broccoli. The bottle that raised an empire just to watch its beloved city crumble, to return to its cobbled alleys and looted mausoleums with a strained single tear and hymn of squandered chances.
Some stories write themselves. Or rather, some stories are too obvious to be worth the listen - the irony too palpable, the metaphors too apparent. Here’s one to prove it - a beer-brewing family with a hereditary habit. A classic tale of hubris. Too obvious to ever be clever.
Outside of genetic predisposition, our sole heirloom from my Father’s side was a bottle eternalising the prime of the Kortegast Brewing Bros reign; an embossed glass carafe, fogged from the decades of lonesome-lipped admissions.
I have never known my family without the breath of the bottle. A whi of sawdust and Melbourne Bitters and I shiver with my father's arrival; lying in my mum’s lap I’d get hints of the top notes of her Pinto Gris and be lullabied to sleep by the lingering vinegar bite. I was raised by an army of bottle-blonde aunties, whose wisdom was singed by the falling embers of their cigarettes and whose laughs outlived them. I deciphered sacred truths through wrinkled coral lips, nose inches from their spit, savouring every breath no matter my hatred for the wafting tang of cheap Riesling, no matter the way my constricting chest pleaded for me to ee as I stayed staring, catatonic and uncaring, taken hostage by their peepholes of pleasure.
I would learn, from my family and their spirited breath, that a woman drinking is a rebellion; a man drinking is a warning.
If the bottle was the breath, regret was the pulse of my family home, shaking loose the dust bunnies and mice bones with each throbbing blow. It was my father’s favourite mistress and his muse for future mistreatment. It’s call dragged him through the daily raga as a master with a leash, from pillow to work to the foot of my stairs.
Years ago, he was exiled to the moors of blundered chances, or so the story goes, where they hung him up to dry like a carcass quartered, the once prized sow at the county fair, nally fallen.
His posture still shows where the hook caught - at the nape of his neck to the bone of his collar - where the butcher’s crescent scythe tethered him, tauntingly, halfway to heaven.
At night my father would wrestle the feeling, confront it head-on with the horns of a Taureen in a storm of whispered confessions, words hissing, slick with ethanol and swallowed ambitions, he’d ght with shadows from a past unspoken. The murmured threats and curses seeped through my memory foam pillow and burrowed there until the morning reprieve, where we would all rise and stretch and smear vegemite to bread and pretend those hushed words were never spoken. Denial pairs lovely with Farmer’s Gold and Twinnings.
Dad often thought we were nothing alike. I know this cause he would say it. Often and enraged.
Interestingly, I’ve come to know that the same shadows cross our souls. As a child, I was him in my physicality. I wanted to run and jump and leap. Like him, I was good with long distance: a penchant for perseverance. As a teen, I was his anger, bottled and contained, but quick to rise, eager to escape. In my early 20s, his appetite for drinking. I am the puddle pleading with the gutter “Just one last drink, go on, spill me over”.
There are lives I’ve never lived without the dampening of drink. Songs sung solely in its pretense, places visited but untold.
Whenever I get asked if my Dad and I are close, I respond ‘Well I don't really know him’. So he wasn’t around, is the obvious conclusion. An absent father. Well, yes and no. He was absent and he was there.
There. Breathing in the walls. Coming home, heading home, down at the bottelo.
Soon, soon, always soon.
Waist deep in the sawdust and semi-dried cement.
If he was absent, how was he there? Well, what is presence outside of proximity?
What is presence outside of a shifting weight at the head of the table, a resting elbow scorned?
Is presence nothing more than the knowledge of their feet, the cadence of their boots making sense of the eve?
Didn’t you know, that absence has a loud presence; she’s an impolite wedding guest dressed in white, he’s a foreign hand making friends with your lover? Absence seldom reads a room but grows to the size of the elephant in its corner, requesting roast pork on Good Friday and dancing sodden gumboots on fresh shag carpet.
So, Dad was absent, but he was also proximity apparent. He was the knowledge of the distance between two forces, the awareness of arrival, and the ght it takes to stop this.
I have never known my Dad without the taste of drink. A buer of beer as armour, the bludgeoned brain of a morning after.
Dad, where do you go when you slip under its control? When you’re all alone, and the shadows you whisper to raise their weapons, do you become someone else, or do you regress? Back to before you could no longer avoid letting in the noise.
Is your father present, or do you two merge? Your dad, a man I’m thankful death stole the chance of meeting. Who, from stories I have gathered, was both the dictator of your worst nights, and a small washed-up thing you, after years of estrangement, had to stoop to shake the hand of, his blank face provoking you to state your name and relation like you were standing before a presiding magistrate.
I would like to meet you someday Dad. I like to think I would allow myself to listen.
Let’s start small: take the Bottle down from the top shelf, dust o the family crest, and we’ll light a tapered candle and slot it in, so as we talk we won’t be tempted to put our lips to it. Let’s talk about what brings us joy, what makes us tick - but breathe from the diaphragm, shoulders back - there’s no seat at the table for whispered threats.
People's choice
Matilda Thomson (19-24)
It's Called Messy Love
The Midnight Butterfly
Feel the breeze in my wings
I land on a stone by myself without anyone to bug me.
Stay calm during the night and I fly to the city opera house,
to see a famous singer and I
transform into a pretty and kind and famous queen.
I have lots of bodyguards around me and when I am going back to my hotel my bedroom
is called the queen’s bedroom.
My bodyguards do everything for me,
they fold my PJS and put my clothes away and clean
my shoes and take me to the shower and let me know if I have a meeting.
They make my bed and clean the shower and take my clothes out for the next day and help me
to get into my bed and then
at the end of the day I transform into a cheerleader.
Butterfly
Fly away
Be free in the air
It’s a Story about a butterfly
I like it when I feel it on my skin.
It makes me happy just like seeing my friends at Studio ARTES.
I am doing this for my dreams, to make them come true and
Have my own job.
I am going to hide my body as a butterfly,
I don't have feet and I don't wear socks,
My hair is different as a butterfly and I change my name to butterfly
My friends are butterflies, they can be any type of butterfly or any type of bird or moth.
Heart
Feeling love is important to me
When I miss him I just keep dancing
Sing it out like oops I did it again
Feeling love is like burgers
It's called messy love
I see a little drip down from his face and I help him
That’s why I’m his girlfriend
I am overprotective,
Swimming of course is my favourite thing to do with Krishaan
painting, sharing chips, kissing, going to the movies, blushing
My tummy feels glad when I think of my boyfriend
The best thing about him is He is laughing and he is burping
Tips About Friendship
- Don’t scam about your friends
- Don’t be negative about your friends
- Don’t hurt your friends’ feelings
- Don’t paint your friends’ clothes
- Help your friends always
- Stay away from negative strangers
- Don’t say anything negative about your friends’ art
Matilda’s Hair is Shiny Like a Diamond
Dancing is like the best thing ever;
Pop Stars are famous, have lots of money;
Solos are my fav. I like it, I’m happy, I’m in love!
Three Weird Ways Dancings Feels
- Sadness, Love, Friendship
- Crazy, wild when I’m having my coffee and sugar drinks
- Always with my friends: Lily, Jim, Char, Jill, Tyler
Matilda’s Dance Solo at Studio ARTES
Dance is my Everything
I don’t want to miss my solo
It’s why I have been dancing every Thursday and Friday morning
I want to do my solo at Studio ARTES and in my bedroom and in the
Kitchen at home
And I have been doing the same
Dancing at my work.
I do tell the staff when I’m feeling tired
When I’m doing my own thing I’m on the floor
I get up and keep on rocking out
In my separate group on Friday morning.
My Best Day Ever
I want to see Bridget and Char
Because I miss them a lot
Bridget loves me way too much
Like a massive heart emoji
Char always makes me happy
He is my Best Friend
I love being at home with Bridget at home
All the time.
We do dancing and singing and she tickles me under my armpits
Missing someone feels like crying down on the floor
Friendship is always important
There are no friends in my house
Talking about fashion and dates is making me feel sad
Like I’m hearing sad songs
Feels Like
Exploding bubbles
Steaming water
Crushing cans
Thunder storms
Exploding head
Steam from my ears
Stinky armpits
Throwing pebbles
Kicking sticks
Dirt bombs
Fart bombs
Ripping paper
Throwing pies
With Love
Always
When you are away in India
From your girlfriend
You are my first love when I’m sleeping
And when I’m awake every morning.
Wicked Magic
Watch Out!
I’m going
to turn
you into
a donkey
using
my
magic
thumb
I am
the most
Powerful
Person
I could
turn
myself
into the most
Powerful
Wicked
Queen
If I was a Mermaid
I would swim under the water and sing
With the dolphins away from the couple
And no one tells me what to do.
When I am a mermaid I don’t wear shoes
I dance at the party at the beach and
Everyone wants to take photos of me.
If I was a mermaid
I would have magic powers and
Bring my dog alive again.
What Does Love Mean To You?
Love is everything!
I love my dog Milo
I love music
I love boys
I love girls
Love is in the air,
Love is everything!
Love is a pain
Love is a rollercoaster
Love is a pineapple
Spikey and sweet
Love is peace and forgiveness
Love is everything!
I love my friends
I love my butt
I love my mum
I love chicken
Love is a work of Art,
Love is everything!
Love is comfortable,
Love is respecting yourself
Love is caring about others
Love is laughing
I share it with my friends
Love is everything