Breaching the Drought
Category C: Highly Commended (2026) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Penni Giuliani
His eyes are shiny and wild, and they pin me down like rusty stakes jammed into the earth. I can go nowhere now, except where he chooses to put me. Or maybe this time he’ll only hiss and spit venom at me, watching, smiling, his prey cornered. Maybe that will be enough for him.
A lawn mower starts up next door, only a few meters from us. Petrol fumes drift through our open window and on another day I might smile, imagining the bright green piles that will dot the neighbour’s yard afterwards, fresh and fertile.
But not today.
His thick fingers begin to twitch and my body responds, bracing for the impact. When it comes, the force knocks the wind out of me. I gasp and my limbs flail wildly to steady myself, like a freshly caught fish on the floor of a boat before it gives up hope or is smashed over the head. I stumble backwards into the kitchen bench, my hip cracking against its edge, hands searching for grip, knocking the fruit bowl. In that instant – in the gap between knowing it will smash at my feet, and the sound of the glass shattering - I am back there.
***
My mother is standing in our family’s kitchen, a tea towel in one hand, dinner plate in the other, her pupils big and black like the deepest wells. Fear has seized her, tethering her in a moment that stretches infinitely, waiting for the sparking molecules to ignite. I am there too, my young body trembling, breath suspended as hers is. I want to call through time to her, my young self, to let her know that I’m here, with her.
Mum’s eyes dart across the room to meet mine, their whites like the brightest full moon. Her lips part in readiness for speech and for a fleeting moment it seems that she will tell me what to do or offer some reassurance. But she doesn’t and despite knowing how this plays out, I urge her to run, just run.
With a click, the latch on my father’s office door releases. I am fixed to the spot on wobbly legs, can hear my mind turning somersaults, desperately searching through my catalogue of recent memories for the trigger I’d missed, the thing me or my mother did wrong. But even then, I understood that knowing wouldn’t help. The damage, whatever its cause, had been done.
His shoe appears around the door, frayed laces pulled tight, a layer of polish not able to mask the worn brown leather beneath it. My mother sucks in a wheezy breath, the sound amplified by the silence. She hears it and catches herself, trapping the sound, as the rest of my father’s body emerges from the doorway. He smiles broadly, so that the dimples either side of his dry lips deepen and his ears lift. My Pa had big ears too, and dimples. But when he smiled, the smile reached all the way to his eyes and they shone like polished marbles.
‘Playing musical statues, are we?’ my father asks, pinning my mother with dark eyes. It’s not a question. She’s not supposed to answer him and neither am I. But the air hisses viciously in my ears and through my head and I want it to stop.
‘Well?’
Mum won’t say anything. It’s like she’s turned to stone.
I try to swallow, but my throat is so dry that the structures don’t move. I try again – nothing. I have to say something, anything to dampen the fizz of colliding atoms and so in desperation I say, ‘No.’ No, we’re not playing musical statues, Dad. But you know that. It comes out louder than I’d intended and I shrink.
My father turns to me, thrusts his hands into his pant pockets and begins to rock on the heels of his shoes, their rhythmic click on the boards like a ticking bomb. ‘No?’ he asks. ‘No, what?’
My armpits grow hot and damp, panicked thoughts dart around like pinballs in my head. ‘No… we’re not playing that game.’ I urge myself to move, to get to my mother and grab her wrist and fly out the door and down the drive and far away from here, but I can’t. I won’t.
He nods and walks with deliberate steps to where my mother remains immobile behind the kitchen bench, suspended mid-task.
‘Is that right, Neve?’ He plants both hands flat on the bench in front of her, leaning in close to her face. ‘No game?’
She cannot respond, the words trapped in her mind, not daring to venture from her mouth. Words stuck, like my feet, keeping us here.
‘Answer me!’ His fists slam into the bench. Glassware rattles.
I scratch at my jeans, clear my throat, hoping to distract, divert, desperate to tame the energy that swirls around us now, gusts and gusts of it.
‘I won the poetry competition at school, Dad,’ I blurt, my voice shrill, out of place, like it’s just been thrown into the wrong scene. But it won’t be enough to distract him. It doesn’t work like that and I chastise myself, wish I could suck the stupid words back in. Wish I could rewind far enough so that I am riding on my dad’s back, my legs swinging, fingers twisted into the collar of his shirt as he crawls on all fours around our garden, my horsey, stopping to nibble on the plants. Back far enough so that the fury isn’t there, isn’t here. So I can just be a little girl, being looked after by her Mum and Dad.
He doesn’t move. ‘That true, Nevey?’ He darts a hand up to my mother’s face and I stifle a shriek. She flinches, but he simply tucks a stray hair behind her ear with care, traces a finger down her neck and slips it beneath her collar where it lingers. He grins. But I’ve seen the dish begin to slip from my mother’s hand and I know the smile will vanish.
The plate smashes onto the tiles at her feet, pieces bouncing, skidding, then settling into the pounding silence.
When he speaks, his voice is smooth, calm, not a ripple on the surface. ‘You going to clean that up, Neve?’
My mother quivers – her face, her arms, all of her, like the last of the autumn leaves when the winter wind squalls.
He reaches for the fruit bowl, grips it in both hands. Please don’t. Don’t do it, I beg. But he will. And he raises it above his head and hurls it down onto the tiles narrowly missing my mother’s bare feet.
‘No!’ I scream. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’
When my father is back in his office and my legs begin to move again, I take my mother’s elbow and help her navigate around the glass and china and out of the kitchen. Her body is stiff, feet shuffling, her face a mask. A single drop of bright red blood on the side of her foot catches my eye, stark against her pale skin. It’s minor – a cut in the flesh that will heal itself with time, leaving no trace.
‘You’ll be alright in here for a while, Mum,’ I say as I slide the laundry door open. ‘Just stay here, okay? I’ll clean up.’ I pull the hand towel off its hook and pass it to her, gesturing to her foot.
My mother crawls in beside the washing machine and draws her knees up to her chest, hands locked together around skinny legs. She doesn’t blink or make a sound. She looks so small.
But I look smaller.
I was smaller. And it was so big, all of it, all the time. But I shouldered it for her, for us, because she couldn’t and because I didn’t know what else to do. No one told me or showed me. No one came.
No one knew.
***
Glass shatters at my feet, the sound cracking through my conscience like a shock of lightening overhead. I am here, looking down at my adult feet; at a gash across my small toe. Thick, glossy blood surfaces then slips down the side of my foot, like the first, precious trickle that breaches a long drought.
I see my mother cowering, hiding; hidden and helpless.
I see my own hand reaching down for a large, jagged piece of the fruit bowl. It’s the bit with a lemon on it, two small leaves either side of a neat stem. He can’t stand lemons. Won’t have them in the house.
I grip it and lunge.