SOMEONE FOR EVERYONE: FourW Thirty-One New Writing 2020 Prose Short List for Booranga Fiction Prize
From Tug Dumbly: On a darker note is ‘Someone for Everyone’, by Kristin Hannaford. It’s a dystopic story about dealing with an ageing population, and is maybe closer to the bone than we’d care to believe. For me it has shades of Peter Carey’s early short fiction, and I think it’s some of the strongest writing here:
‘In the first wave, people could select Guests according to their gender, religion, and cultural backgrounds. It became a kind of status symbol to have a middle-class, educated Guest. People began to trade, to do deals. Ugliness began to characterise the ‘selections’; it became difficult. An organisation known as Culturally Sensitive Placements (CUSP) gained ground, and it was widely accepted that they were a front for the ‘Whites with Whites’ movement. CUSP’s involvement was popular for a period, particularly in the wealthier suburbs, but in the end, there were simply not enough ‘whites’ to go around’
‘After the first redistribution, Australia recorded a significant number of Ninth Generation deaths. A spike in break-ins to veterinary practices, doctor’s surgeries and chemist shops suggested a kind of desperation. People didn’t know how to deal with the elderly. They’d all been shut away for so long. Now they were in our houses. In our bedrooms. In our lives. An undercurrent of death permeated the national outlook. People experimented with homemade recipes and humane methods to euthanize. Others simply took their guests out to a clifftop and pushed. In most cases, the authorities turned a blind eye or ruled ‘Death by Natural Causes’.
QUIQUIRIQUI : Placed third in the Rachel Funari prize for Fiction (2018)
An excerpt : “The nail artist first examined my foot on her knee, before submerging it into a vat of warm, soapy water. She then scrubbed at my heel with an orange towel. Streaks of spilt varnish had hardened the fabric. You have dirty feet, hey? She shook her head and proceeded to scrape out the red crescent-moons of dirt under my toenails. At the end of the street, the arched grandeur of the Casa de Cultura and a plinth supporting a bust of Cuba’s national hero, José Martí, stood silent.
The red dirt of Viñales had seeped into my toes. A day earlier, we had bicycled through the hills and picnicked at the base of a mountain. Above us on the escarpment walls, were paintings of vivid, imposing dinosaurs posed with Neolithic humans. The route had taken us past pineapple and sugar cane crops. The warmth of the day and the mogotes, mountains rising like rounded haystacks, reminded us of the trachyte-plug geography of home, in Central Queensland. Despite scrubbing, I could not rid myself of the stain” Read the full story here
THE DIRECTION OF SUNLIGHT Overland 211:5 Winter Fiction – an excerpt.
Martha swung the metal disc to the side and put her eye up to the glass. It took a moment to adjust her gaze to the smallness of the lens. In the hallway stood the health inspector. He had returned.
She recognised the shape of his cranium and its familiar sheen. He wore his silver name badge far too high, just underneath his left collar. Michael Isthmus.
At her Urban Beekeeper’s Group, Michael Isthmus had quite a reputation as a ‘botherer’. Swimming against a tide of popular support for the bees, he’d been diligently policing the New York City Council’s ban on city beekeeping for the past five years. He was charged with the job of monitoring hundreds of covert beekeepers who were establishing hives all over the city.
Martha smiled to herself as she remembered the difficulty he had pronouncing his own name, a tongue tripping over a peninsula of sharp and slippery consonants.
Last week he’d served her a notification insisting on the removal of her bees.