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- Herausgeber: The Emma Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: The Emma Press Prose Pamphlets
- Sprache: Englisch
The stories in First fox offer an everyday world tinged with the dreamlike qualities of fairy tales. Radojkovich explores the complex dynamics of families with a blend of dry wit and startling imagery. Disappointments and consolations meet with fantastical moments, winding their way into the realm of possibility.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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First fox
OTHERTITLESFROMTHEEMMAPRESS
PROSEPAMPHLETS
Postcard Stories, by Jan Carson
Me and My Camera, by Malachi O’Doherty (Nov ’17)
The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna (Nov ’17)
POETRYPAMPHLETS
Dragonish, by Emma Simon
Pisanki, by Zosia Kuczyńska
Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real, by Padraig Regan
Paisley, by Rakhshan Rizwan
POETRYANTHOLOGIES
Urban Myths and Legends: Poems about Transformations
The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea
This Is Not Your Final Form: Poems about Birmingham
The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts
POETRYBOOKSFORCHILDREN
Falling Out of the Sky: Poems about Myths and Monsters
Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens
Moon Juice, by Kate Wakeling
The Noisy Classroom, by Ieva Flamingo
THEEMMAPRESSPICKS
Malkin, by Camille Ralphs
DISSOLVE to: L.A., by James Trevelyan
The Dragon and The Bomb, by Andrew Wynn Owen
Meat Songs, by Jack Nicholls
Bezdelki, by Carol Rumens
THEEMMAPRESS
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by the Emma Press Ltd
Text copyright © Leanne Radojkovich 2017
Illustrations copyright © Rachel J Fenton 2017
All rights reserved.
The right of Leanne Radojkovich to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 978-1-910139-70-7
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow.
The Emma Press
theemmapress.com
Birmingham, UK
Contents
The back of beyond
First fox
Mila and the cat
The unexpected likeness of beings
Once upon a time in suburbia
The bookkeeper’s tale
The travelator
Wisdom tooth
The very old mother
New light
The onion
Acknowledgements
About the author
About the illustrator
About the Emma Press
Other Emma Press pamphlets
First fox
The back of beyond
Gran was a tough little cockatiel. She lived in a two-storey, paint-peeling cottage overlooking a beach. There were no other houses around, just vast limestone outcrops in the paddocks out back and free-range sheep who kept the grass down. Sometimes she rode a rickety lady’s bicycle to the shop in the nearest township.
At first, the girl and Gran got along well enough. The girl liked climbing down the cliff to the beach, a rocky strip where stones rattled about as the tide moved in or out. She also liked pottering in the garden: weeding, staking, and talking to the plants, since there was only Gran to talk to otherwise. Sometimes Aunty Deb rang from Brisbane to see how they were. Sometimes her father rang to see if he could visit; she’d hang up. He’d remarried a month after her mum died. The girl had just turned seventeen. She’d quit school and moved to Gran’s.
The girl lost all sense of time – partly she was adjusting to being uprooted, and partly it was the strangeness of living in the back of beyond. It seemed only yesterday that she’d started kindy in a purple fairy dress, and a lifetime since she began tending Gran’s garden.
One day, Gran was upstairs perched in her comfy chair, smoking, when she had a stroke. After a stay in hospital she came home and spent more time upstairs, with the best view of the sea. She smoked more, drank more sherry, and at some point never went down the stairs again. ‘My legs are filled with sand,’ she’d say to the girl. ‘If you chucked me in the water, I’d drown.’ When Aunty Deb rang, Gran laughed her hard smoker’s laugh and told her, ‘I’ve been out dancing.’
‘Are you there?’ she’d call for the girl, day and night. ‘Are you there?’
‘Coming, Gran.’
The girl brought her cups of tea and eggs on toast, and emptied the chamber pot. She had to bike to the store in-between taking orders. The garden went to seed. The girl began talking to the kettle.
This went on for a long time, or a short time; the girl couldn’t tell.
‘Are you there?’
‘Coming, Gran.’
‘Are you there?’
The girl went up the stairs. Gran was in her comfy chair wrapped in a cloud of smoke, stacks of Sudoku books on the table and her pink hibiscus ashtray filled with stubs.
