SNEAK PEEK: 'Red Sea' by Emma Ashmere

Emma Ashmere's recently released collection of short stories, Dreams They Forgot, is an exploration of illusion, deception, and quiet acts of rebellion.

Undercut with longing and unbelonging, absurdity and tragedy, thwarted plans and fortuitous serendipity, each story offers glimpses into the dreams, limitations, gains and losses of fragmented families, loners and lovers, survivors and misfits, as they piece together a place for themselves in the imperfect mosaic of the natural and unnatural world.
Read on for the short story 'Red Sea', an extract from Dreams They Forgot.

 Red Sea

People say they’ve seen the dead, but do they mean the hair, teeth and bones tucked into the earth? Or do they mean the curl of ash and petals tossed out to the sea?
After the funeral, we walk out along Semaphore pier. Salt and wind whips at our eyes. Waves thunder up through the soles of our shoes. My tartan skirt spirals up. I stop to pat it down but am pulled along by my father, who is telling me not to worry, that he loves the land and won’t be going back out to sea.
At the end of the pier, a man in a woollen hat is trying to lower a sheet of plastic over something, but the plastic keeps flapping and fighting the wind. As we come closer, I see the body of a stingray, rubbery and black. My father shouts to the man over the rattle of plastic and the stillness of death.
We walk back to our house behind the yellow park. There isn’t much garden in our garden, only a few bent-back trees, red gerberas and a spiny grey-green cactus clubbing the fence. One year my mother planted sweet peas each side of the front door but they died, brown and salt-tangled.
We sit in the glassed-in front porch looking out at the sea as clouds poach in fading pinks and reds. Later, when the fishermen come in, my father stands beneath the quavering spires of the Norfolk Island pines or sits in the open door of somebody’s van drinking beer.

—

‘Remember we’re not worthy to gather up the crumbs beneath thy table,’ says my mother, kneeling in her apron on the kitchen floor. She’s been sweeping the same patch for at least an hour, making several piles of sand, crumbs, rubber bands and sticks. I ask her why. Why doesn’t she make one big pile? She coughs and tells me it’s easier to sweep the floor from several different angles. You don’t feel so overwhelmed. I ask her how big our piles would be if we swept up every broken shell and frill of dust from every different country all around the world. Would our piles fill up the kitchen and bury the table? Would they pour out of the windows and spill back down to the sea? Would they stand as high as the white salt mountains I’ve seen glistening and ghostly beside the dry pink lake? My mother keeps kneeling and coughing, dabbing the brush at the mess of our lives.

—

I watch from my bedroom window as my father walks out to drink with the fishermen again. Later I hear him arguing.
At breakfast, he reads the tide times in the newspaper. I can’t see his face so I study the red spots, cuts and sores on his hands. He puts down the paper and looks out the front door past the gate, past the patch of yellow grass and the empty fishermen’s vans. Perhaps he’s dreaming he’s out on a trawler surrounded by the stink of diesel and screaming gulls, remembering how it felt to stay out there for weeks, rolling towards the edge of the world, or waking in the dark pinned to the deck by the pressure of space.

That night, he falls in through the lounge-room window and lies on the floor. A ruddy sunset fills the room. He sits up on one elbow and tells me how to measure the sun from the horizon with the width of a finger.

‘Each finger,’ he says, ‘means half an hour. Or fifteen minutes. Or is it twenty?’ He laughs and lies back down.
We sit on the beach. My sandcastle is being eaten by an edgy little tide. My father is instructing me to watch the horizon for the exact moment the sun goes down. If I’m observant enough, I’ll see the meteorological phenomenon called the Green Flag. I squint in the direction of the setting sun.
‘Watch for a splash, the colour of petrol,’ he says, waving his beer.
We’re lying on the scratch of front lawn. He’s telling me how to draw an imaginary line from the head to the foot of the Southern Cross, using his cigarette as a guide.
‘Times it by four,’ he says. ‘Then you’ll get the south celestial pole.’
It’s my mother’s birthday. I stare at the stars trying to remember the exact colour of her eyes.
All night I hear him roaring and drinking in somebody’s van. It’s still dark when I roll out of bed and lie on the floor, close my eyes and try to remember the exact shape and colour of my mother’s hair. I hear my father lurching down the hall in the milky morning light. The walls move and breathe in time with my heart.

—

‘The wilderness had shut them in,’ says my mother. ‘But the Red Sea parted just in time.’ She stops for a moment to bend and cough. I watch her rounded back, the hand flung across her mouth. When she’s finished coughing, she wipes her hand down her dress.

—

I walk down to the pier. The man in the woollen hat is lining up his fishing rods and setting out his buckets. He fixes his bait to the end of a line, throws it out in one long, fine, silvery, arc. Behind him, one part sea, two parts sky.
I throw three red gerberas into the wash.
Remember, says my mother, the world is only as big as your head.

—

Emma Ashmere was born in Adelaide, South Australia. Her short stories have been widely published including in the Age, Griffith Review, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Sleepers Almanac, Etchings, Spineless Wonders, #8WordStory, NGVmagazine, and the Commonwealth Writers literary magazine, adda. The short stories in her collection Dreams They Forgot have been variously shortlisted for the 2019 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Award, 2019 Newcastle Short Story Award, 2018 Overland NUW Fair Australia Prize, and the 2001 Age Short Story Competition. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Floating Garden, was shortlisted for the Most Underrated Book Award 2016.

Want to find out more about Emma and the way she writes? Check out her guest piece for Theresa Smith Writes here.

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