First They Came...

By Deborah Kalin

FIRST PUBLISHED IN ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS MAGAZINE:

This is not the Melbourne you think you know.

It is a city afraid of silence, one of enforced temperament treatments and rigid disposition management. It is the home of Tacey Micah, reticent in hiding.

And her file's just been flagged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deborah Kalin
• Release date: Aug 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370249176

Deborah Kalin

Deborah Kalin is an award-winning writer of literary speculative fiction, author of the collection Cherry Crow Children and The Binding novels. Her work has won two Aurealis Awards and has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Ditmar Awards and the Australian Shadows Awards. She lives in Melbourne, subject to the whims of a toddler who thinks she's a cat and a cat who thinks she's a person. Both of them whinge, mostly about sleep and food. (The toddler wants less of each, the cat more. Both want more outside time.) Kalin herself hasn't slept uninterrupted through the night since March 2012.

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Copyright © 2012 Deborah Kalin

This edition copyright © 2016 Deborah Kalin

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Design and layout by Deborah Kalin

First published in Australia in 2012 by Andromeday Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue #55

This edition first published 2016 by Deborah Kalin

FIRST THEY CAME…

Deborah Kalin

The trick to passing is the same as any successful lie: stick as close to the truth as possible.

Which is why I don’t cringe under any of the gazes turning on me as I climb up into the tram for my ride to work, but neither do I actively meet any of them. Shyness earns only suspicion, but busy is acceptable and I'm boarding with phone in hand to support just that impression. The noise onboard is dizzying as a slap: a half dozen conversations are competing with the commercial music blaring from the PA. Thankfully, there are still a handful of empty seats — a benefit of the early tram and my mid-way-out stop — and I slip into one beside the aisle and bend my head over the glowing screen of my phone, the last bastion of socially acceptable privacy in a world gone increasingly to babble.

It doesn’t shield me this morning, however.

Terrible fuss, that was, don't you think?

When I look up (with an expression of polite curiosity because anger’s not my default), the gentleman sitting next to me nods at my phone screen, which he’s been reading over my shoulder, and says, The protest.

Another one? I speak quietly, yes, but no more so than can be attributed to consideration of the tram’s other occupants. Like I said, it’s best to stick as close to the truth as possible. I have to fight an urge to turn back to the screen’s silent words, arranged in an orderly fashion complete with narrative flow, and settle instead for my neighbour’s explanation of events, for he’s eager to talk and there’s no shirking from the encounter now.

And a dreadful mess it turned into, too. There were nearly a hundred of them — can you believe there are so many still unidentified? I find it boggling.

"That is a large crowd. I’ve found it best, when my tongue itches with betraying words, to find some facet of a conversation with which I can agree. There’s always something, however trifling. Do you know what they wanted?"

I pray he doesn’t: it will give me an opportunity