WINNER: FIRST PRIZE - ALBURYCITY SHORT STORY AWARD 2023, WRITE AROUND THE MURRAY FESTIVAL
HIGHLY COMMENDED: AAWP/UWRF EMERGING WRITERS’ PRIZE 2023
Published in ACE Anthology IV, edited by Julia Prendergast, Eileen Herbert-Goodall and Deb Wain (2023: Recent Work Press).
I
Kerania Diakara looks out over the blustering sea and thinks about the fish.
Her son stands like a stocky-Odysseus on the bow of his ship The Penelope, gazing out over the Eloundian bay. He’s yelling out orders the way he yells for food – too loudly and with no tact. He’s overseeing preparations for the Eloundian boats to join the fight against the Ottomans, to push the invader out.
It’s not him she’s focused on, however, as he stands there with his hands on his hips. Kerania thinks instead about the red mullet, swimming unspoiled beneath the hulls of the moored Cretan boats. It could be swimming in olive oil instead, with a bit of garlic and lemon, to be fried up for dinner, if only Apostolos had thought to take care of this one thing before he left. If only he had thought of his mother at all.
It’s Captain Apostolos now though, she supposes, and she can’t help the stab of pride despite her fury about the mullet. Her spine straightens so she looks taller than her 5-foot 2-inch frame. Mothers and wives and daughters stand alongside her on the shore in a line of feminine obedience. Despite her height, she is the tallest of them, she thinks. She feels something else there too, darker, and wilder. Something lower in her groin and hidden under her skirts, something she thought long ago destroyed…