Heroines: An anthology of short fiction and poetry. Volume 2

By Sarah Nicholson

Heroines is a wide-ranging and deeply moving anthology which combines the ancient and the modern, and travels alongside some of the forgotten women of history, both real and imagined. With a focus on rewriting the heroines of legend, fairytale, and mythology in ways that are both resonant and startlingly new, The Heroines Anthology presents a ch

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Neo Perennial Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648607908

Book preview

How My Mother Made Porridge

Julie Watts

While we slept on

in the cold winter mist of our bedrooms

she lit the old wood stove

set a small sun glowing

in the centred room of our childhood

clanged the iron lids in place

while we drifted in our sleep

she ironed pleats

filled saucepan with oats and water

polished the tan shoes

and while the kettle whistled

woke us

softly prising us from dream

returned to the oats and the stir

of spoon, breathed heavy

into the gathering steam

watched the gruel thicken

in the warming room

the table filling one by one

with the shivering

the moats of milk, the dollop

of honey in the middle

like last night's moon

called us for plaiting

and a brushing down

voices rising like the heat

young limbs scampering

and knocking against each other –

in the lounge room, our father

weeping to Puccini

Mimi dying every morning

tragic and beautiful, the walls

thumping, the room off limits

while mother stirred

and brushed and held the sink

to breathe

until our father clapped his hands –

the rushed goodbyes, car door thuds

and she alone heaving

in that asthmatic kitchen

left to spills and smears of breakfast

and her books waiting

to flush her out.

Of Matriarchs, Work, and Wishes

Anna Jacobson

In sewing boxes: buttons in medicine bottles,

thimbles, bra hooks and old suspender straps.

Nana's initials from before she married: A.B.

Her mother found work as a machinist

during the Depression. Pregnant with her second

girl, she created a disguise—padded herself

with pillows like a Passover matzah ball.

Seven months on she fainted

at the machine, lost

her job.

Nana remembers the frilly dresses her mother made

from nighties. Her mother worked from home, trying

to please difficult women—afterwards refused

to teach her girls to sew. Now I stitch

buttons onto cardigans, patch tears

in clothes with findings from my great

grandmother's wooden sewing boxes.

Buried under antique lace—

a silver wishbone wrapped in thread.

A New Land

Therese Doherty

‘Oak, broom and meadowsweet.’

‘What, Agnieszka?’ my husband asked.

I was sitting in the armchair by the window, sun pouring over me. The book I was reading lay open on my lap. It told the story of two magicians who magicked a woman from the blossoms of oak, broom and meadowsweet.

‘No oak or meadowsweet here,’ Gregor said wistfully. ‘And broom is a weed. How do you say? Noxious.’

Perhaps we are like the weeds, I thought. Introduced. Noxious. Do we really belong?

‘She was a woman not born of woman,’ I told him, ‘but created by men. Made to be the bride of a man cursed never to have a human wife.’ I sighed. ‘She had no say in her life.’

‘Poor girl. And made from flowers. It is unnatural.’

Yes, poor girl, I agreed. But what could be more natural than flowers?

It seemed an age since I had been in the garden, or worked on a painting. I'd been laid up in bed with a bad case of early spring flu. Gregor had been tending to me, and to the vegetable patch too, which was springing into new life. Though something, or someone, had been eating things during the night.

‘A possum,’ I said.

‘What damn possum pulls up beets and radishes by the roots?’

Gregor led me out to see the damage. Some nibbled kale, a small round beet with a bite out of it so that it looked like a waning moon. It did not seem so bad.

‘It's good-for-nothing kids, I tell you.’

But I knew it could not have been. Some bored children might vandalise a garden, but what children would then eat what they had found? Raw beetroot and radishes, Russian kale and spinach. No, it could not have been children.

That night I woke, my mouth dry, and I carefully descended the stairs in the dark. In the kitchen I poured water into a glass and drank. How lucky we are to have water come straight out of the tap like that. It was not that way in the old country. But, I wondered, will our luck one day run out, like the water?

I looked through the kitchen window over the dark garden and then put down the glass in surprise. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadow begin to move towards the veggie patch. Slight, oddly-shaped. I stared. She stooped and seemed to take something before moving off into the darkness.

Why did I say she? Something about her size, her quick, graceful movements. I knew she was a girl. And something moved in my belly, a fleeting recollection of sad tenderness.

If Gregor and I had had children, perhaps we would have felt more like we belonged here, their births and lives rooting us with this soil, this land. But little Jezebella did not live even a week, and there were no others after her. It is so hard to be a mother without a child, never called mama, never to be called babcia, grandmother. Yet we made a life here, Gregor with his piano, his teaching. Me with my painting. Both long-since retired, mostly we pottered about the garden, tended the vegetables and roses, ate kasha and schnitzel and cabbage rolls.

Our house is the very last one on this street, quiet (as we had wanted), but surrounded by the bush. So, we grew a European garden around it, and our beloved vegetables, sealing ourselves in to our own little domesticated place of old memories. Despite many decades living in this land, we still did not understand the wild landscape here, the strange spikiness of the plants, the grey-green drabness of the eucalyptus forest. We shut it out, thinking only of Europe, what we had had to leave behind—the green countryside, the great cities, the culture—ignoring the way the sealed road ended abruptly just beyond our driveway, degenerating into dirt and continuing on into the bush, nothing more than a fire trail. Sometimes it felt like we had emigrated to a place at the very end of the earth. What was there beyond us but emptiness?

I didn't tell Gregor about what I had seen. I don't know why. She seemed like my secret, come to me out of the empty, unknown place beyond the garden. And the next night, when Gregor's slow, deep breathing told me that he was sleeping soundly, I crept down to the kitchen again, for I knew I would see her. Yet, I must have stood in the dark for hours, in a daze, for just when I thought I had glimpsed a movement in the moonlit garden, Gregor found me, switching on the light.

‘Agnieszka, what are you doing standing in the cold? You mustn't get ill again.’

Startled, I stood gaping at my sleep-bedraggled reflection in the blackness of the window.

---

I woke to the sound of kookaburras laughing loudly, yodelling magpies, and the sweet song of a blackbird—yet another creature who did not belong. Like the weeds. Like rats, rabbits and foxes. All emigrants, like Gregor and I. Though had any of us had a choice? We had all been subject to human intervention—species introduced unwisely, wars waged. We were all here now, and we had to go on living.

I was still regaining my strength, and walked unsteadily along the driveway to the letterbox. I knew the postman had been. You could always hear the squeaking brakes of his motorcycle from a mile off. Though as I reached in to get the mail the neighbour's German shepherd appeared from nowhere, barking madly. I froze, remembering all of the vicious dogs I had seen during the war, and their even more vicious handlers.

‘Fred, no!’ a young man shouted, running out and grabbing the dog.

Fred? More like Killer, or Fang.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, as he roughly dragged the dog by the collar back through the gate. ‘Bad dog!’

I shook with anger and fear. Why did I dislike the dog? If anything, it was the humans