Seven diverse short stories that plumb the depths of human experience. I love them all.

‘Why My Hair is Long’

‘If my mother had called me and asked, “What have I done that you can’t forget?” I would have said, “I can forgive anything.” But she never called and that is what I can never forget.’ The opening of ‘Why My Hair is Long’ from Paige Clark’s debut collection She is Haunted introduces us to a mother-daughter estrangement caused by hair. The mother has too little (it is falling out) and the daughter’s too voluminous (which the mother had snipped short and jagged as if she was ‘a doll that a child had given a haircut’). It’s a painful and deceptively simple story that conveys the layered sadness of losing a primary relationship (although it continues to be there ‘like a phantom limb’) with heart, clarity and economy.

‘The Tender Insides of an Orange’

‘The Tender Insides of an Orange’ from Kate Liston-Mills second short story collection Dear Ibis creates a fiction within a fiction, which illuminates a path to hope that can be found even against the backdrop of the 2019-20 bushfires, horrendous storms and the perilous climate emergency banging at our doors. The pivot point of the story is the ‘dead stump’ of an orange tree – that is watered first in penance, then in prayer. The narrator had given up on the ‘root’ but the fictional character Georgia hadn’t – and as it springs to life, having been showered by Georgia with tenderness, the world becomes colourful again, the narrator’s body awakens and her urge to paint, create and connect beckons. A unique and compelling story.

‘A Retreat’

‘There’s something fine about walking a feeling through wet fields in a steady, misting rain when you’re all wrapped up against it. The world is reaching saturation, the air is uniformly cold and wet. … Walking in rain loosens up the bad things inside. You feel good, your heart is big enough for any sorrow.’ Brad Watson’s ‘A Retreat’ from Last Days of the Dog-Men is so beautifully realised I could well have walked those drizzly fields and watched as Mary, the young retriever, rose and sat and rose and sat unable to work out whether to jump at a rabbit skin placed on a high branch or not. The story explores how relationship difficulties can break or make a person. It’s told through the eyes of Jack, who is friends with Ivan – who has just been dumped by his wife for cheating on her. Jack had no clue that the adulterous couple had been using his house for their sexual rendezvous. At Ivan’s family farm on the Louisiana line the men quaff bourbon and walk the fence line to flush out birds and shoot them. Jack is squeamish when he shoots a small rabbit, and when Ivan skins it he thinks it looks human. We’ve been hearing all along that Jack hasn’t been coping too well over the last few years – but the bunny is a clue dropped to indicate that he might have lost something vital.

‘Garland Sunday’

Louise Kennedy’s heartbreaking and exhilarating debut collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac contains a plethora of fine stories – with marriage, children, mortality and memory among her key concerns. I felt the stories grew more powerful as the book went on – and so the final ‘Garland Sunday’ is my favourite. Orla has had a late-age abortion (she was an elderly primigravida when her sons were born and, in the story, they are away at a camp) and her husband has turned stony as they’ve both grieved. The story turns on its head though, and we see how not terminating a pregnancy can utterly ruin a woman’s life and have a ripple effect for decades afterwards. It’s a brave story – full of brilliant detail, including depictions of the tensions of a small town. The cleaning lady who refuses to be anything but perfunctory with Orla’s husband was a really great touch. The risk Orla takes baking a heart-shaped cake to present to her estranged husband is almost too painful to read – but it’s a ‘tradition’. Actually, the story forces us to question the value of ‘tradition’ because it’s a word people can easily hide behind to mask the fact they are doing reprehensible things.

‘Toda Luna, Todo Ano’ and ‘Grief’

A Manual for Cleaning Women contains Lucia Berlin’s best stories and they are superb. A pigeon pair ‘Toda Luna, Todo Ano’ and ‘Grief’ are told decades apart and the same dive school features in both. In ‘Toda Luna, Todo Ano’ the dive school seems to be on the very edge of the world, beautiful and wild. In ‘Grief’, set decades later, it is surrounded by development and getting built out. Cesar, one of the divers is a constant; elemental: ‘Squat, massive, like an Olmec statue. He was a deep brown colour, with heavy-lidded eyes and a sensuous mouth.’ He reveals the underwater world to protagonists of both stories – who are transformed by their experiences. Eloise muses, ‘With no weight you lose your self as a point of reference, lose your place in time.’ What neither woman loses is her sensuality – as Cesar helps to awaken it. In ‘Grief’ we feel the pain of the broken body, lost relationships and the ravages of addiction. ‘How could she talk to Sally about her alcoholism? It was not like talking about a death or losing a husband, losing a breast. People said it was a disease, but nobody made her pick up a drink. I’ve got a fatal disease. I’m terrified, Dolores wanted to say, but she didn’t.’

‘Dado’

What I love about ‘Dado’ from  Sheila Armstrong’s debut collection How to Gut a Fish is the shock of it … but also its shapeliness. It disrupts expectations on many counts – veering off so it’s hard to know where it will end up. Armstrong’s descriptions are also marvellous. For example, in the bathroom in the community centre (which was once part of a school) “the spit-hot rage of teenage girls lingers in the black ink on the cubicle doors”. The woodworking class that meets at the centre, and which is so pivotal to the story, is brought to life with great delicacy and care. I also relished how the main character is introduced to the reader with a slow exposure to his sadness and loneliness – neither condition helped by the fact that his remaining family lives in a different hemisphere. While we can’t excuse the man’s actions they somehow seem entirely in keeping with who he has become in the face of his loss. His grief leaves him ‘untethered and the days carry him along in their surf’. The car he damages ‘is no more than himself, an old dog that has had its day’. But then there is the cabinet he is making so painstakingly in the class. It holds his pain in its grain, but also a tiny shred of hope for the future. Melancholic, unsettling and superb.