Bobby left the apartment and went to find the DJ, but the DJ had left the building. At the end of the hall, he pushed through a door and began to climb the stairs, dark drifts of dust at the edges. At the top of the stairs, he pushed hard against another door, stepping over butts and condoms jizzed to the spongy threshold, the smell so sad, and the door opened to the night and there she was, up on the roof, sitting with her back to him high above the silent streets.

‘Listen to me,’ the DJ said.

He wiped his eyes and went toward her until he reached the edge. On the long empty road far beneath her dangling legs some shadows moved and some didn’t.

‘I’ve played in Varanasi. The band set up on a ghat beside the piles of white ash. Ram, my roadie at the time—I picked him up in Cairo—had to kick aside a human femur to hook up the amp. Once I played in the Rio favela, the decks set up on an overturned bathtub on the roof of someone’s kitchen, and twice I blew a marine outside of Fallujah for some scag, but I don’t remember the first time. The second time I met you I wrote you a song, but I lost it, and the remix isn’t as good. Out of one song comes another, each dream a little death. I got the giggles over a mass grave outside of Kladovo, it’s the way it hits you sometimes, but it only hurts when I laugh. I slept in a Malaysian body parts depot or tried to, just to put myself in the mood for our homecoming tour. But you never came. I heard you on a radio interview once. You called in with a question. I was down Sonora Beach at the time. I’d dropped the mic down into a dumpster for some unique samples, the wind blowing across the dunes through the ears of a rodent. But all I got were the sounds of teeth on metal. You wanted to know what song I would play to someone who had just been born.’

Bobby sat down beside the DJ on the ledge, his legs dangling into space next to hers, and the wind gusting all around. He knew she would not let him fall.

J.S. Breukelaar is a Sydney based writer.

It was a zombie day. One of them sat on a branch of the old box gum across the street, eating his own entrails. The sky so grey, the streetlights so sulphurous. Night had not come. It would never come. The zombies on the porch next door were making a meal out of Mrs Baldacci. I remembered Mrs Baldacci’s nettle risotto. I’d never eat that again. So many experiences gone forever. Elaine lay still beside me. One half of her face bitten like a cookie, but that didn’t spoil her beauty. Not to me.

Jay Stern attends the University of Western Sydney.

What if Bigfoot stole my life? I mean, my wife. What if Bigfoot stole my wife? Someone in class came up with that, and they said it wasn’t original, but it ‘resonated’ more for them than the other idea being floated: What if a guy discovers a surprising tattoo behind his knee? That just didn’t do it for them. They’d first heard the Bigfoot idea from a previous writing teacher, and the class decided to go with it. What if Bigfoot stole my wife? Write for fifteen minutes, class, on what if Bigfoot stole my life? What if the earth running between my fingers was not my earth? Or if the night in this place where I stand not knowing how I got here or when, is not the night of dark earth and winter leaves, but in my flared and wary nostrils, the smell of lemon and dry dust? What if Bigfoot stole my night? Did my friends choose me, or did I choose them? Who abducted who? Where are my real friends? People I know. Places I’ve been. Bigfoot came along, honestly, and said, look! Up in the sky! And while I was looking the other way, he stole my child. I told them it was Bigfoot because he was the guy who was with her last. She was my angel. And now she is real. Really gone. I haven’t seen her for years. I follow her life on Facebook. All those pictures. Isn’t she beautiful? She’s the one with Bigfoot. The guy who stole my life, my night, my child.

What if he woke up one day to discover a surprising tattoo behind his knee?

Jay Stern attends the University of Western Sydney.

I remember. I remember the sweets, the pink chocolate pigs and the railway tracks and you. I remember the toy store and you and the packaging you couldn’t open and I couldn’t afford. I remember sitting with a pink pig and you at the park. I pushed you in a swing and was singing to you. I remember trying to push my life away so in that moment I would belong only to you, and failing. I never saw how you’d grow up and inch away. I remember that I forgot to tell you to wait for me.

The phone rings sometime before dawn, the beginning of a hangover licking at my temples from that third glass of cider at book club, and I haven’t finished the marking for my year tens and,  “I forgot to tell you,” you say. “I was dreaming. I dreamed you were asleep. I forgot to wake you. You slept in a white room with the curtains blowing. There was music. I heard shooting. A train in the night. What time is it?”

“It’s alright,” I say. A siren wails somewhere at your end. A continent between us, time zones and malls and drought and cities and jails and airports and sports arenas. “It’s almost day.”

DEEDEE RATNER is a schoolteacher from Taree, NSW. Her first novel is underway.

Living on that Point all our lives, everyone knowing everyone, and cut off from the world and Spike being the way he was, I had to get away by myself sometimes, just go and sit on a rock down on the shore. Spike’d be off somewhere else, bored with my ideas in the end. It was my idea to tie and rope off a pine branch and then swing off it, over the rocks and into the deep water down by the refinery. Or to try and swim all the way across the channel without the sharks or the currents getting you first. Well that was my idea, but I never done it, and Spike did it more times than I lost count, me waiting out in the tinny with a case of beer for when he was done and I’d pull him up and his arms were slippery, his ink glinting in the sun, and the sharks stayed well away, knowing that Spike kept a bowie knife down the leg of his shorts, and a sawn-off in the esky and he’d expect me to go after that shark and its extended family any of them go near him and I would too. Anyway, the sharks are probably just one of those legends they made up to make the place seem more exciting than it is, but the bay does get pretty deep out there in the middle where Spike told me to dump the chains, slick with blood and matter caught in the links. So I did, and then rowed back and then I tied the tinny back up to the old fig tree when I was done. It would have been good to just sit out there a while on the black water in the tinny and I’d done that plenty of times at night, but this time, I rowed back in because the ferries run late, and there’d be fishing boats and that coming back in, and we didn’t need any more witnesses than the possums and bats and that, Spike having taken things way too far, further than what they paid us to do—but that’s just Spike.

After I dumped the chains, I washed the blood off my hands in the water which was like tar because there was no moon, no stars, just a web of greasy cloud over the black sky, and I had to make sure all the blood was gone, so I washed off by the lights reflecting off the water. Then I rowed in and decided to just sit a while on the rock, say good-bye, and watch the night turn to day over the water one last time. The black rock would be haloed in pink on a sunny dawn, I’d watched it plenty of times, but the cloud cover told me there’d be no sun that day and there wasn’t. So I waited for the bay to turn from black to bleached white, the sky hanging low and grey, and I looked down for signs of blood in the water but all I saw was cold steel bay and the boats on their moorings and the gulls on the rigging waiting, just waiting. I listened for Spike, hoping he’d decide to come down and that it could be like it was before, just two wild kids raising hell in a quiet town, but I knew after what we’d done—even though it was what we was born to do—that those days were over. And he didn’t come down because he had more blood on him than me, not just on his hands, because he was always taking things too far, and he had to find a place to ditch his jeans, and they were new, and his leather jacket too, and there was blood and muck all over the tires of his bike, which was gone by the time I caught up with him, because by then he’d dumped both bikes, mine too, and we were hitching north, and I kept the memory of the sheet-metal bay with me, the bay like a steel trap all my life on that faraway tangled piece of shore, and beneath the steel, out where it gets deep enough for the sharks, those chains sinking slowly into the soft black mud.

They took some side trips and passed through Albury at midnight of the following day. Turner kept driving west. He drove until he got to Glen Creek. His mother was up and watching TV and took no more notice of his arrival at dawn than she had of his departure ten years before.

It was an L-shaped house on a quiet street. Out the back was a third bedroom, a bathroom and a fibro verandah with frosted windows. His brother’s EPL stickers still there. Turner set himself and Clint Eastwood up in that part of the house and if his mother ever noticed the dog she didn’t acknowledge him. Turner slept in his old bed, divided from his brother’s by two bed tables, two lamps, a bar heater, and a strip of floor. Clint Eastwood slept in the sunroom on an old towel. Turner kept the dog in during the day but at night they walked along the river and through the twisted stumps and over charred bracken. The river was lined with gum trees that stood bone pale against the dark of the bush beyond and beyond that the darker hills. Muddy watering holes. During the day Turner took his mother to the one shopping centre in Glen Creek or to the doctor. He maintained the garden. The vegetables and fruit trees. Some of the people in the town remembered him. He was pleasant and he made sure to be seen once or twice a month at the pub or at the Video store just so they wouldn’t wonder too much about the creepy guy who lived with his mother and never went out. Some of the old timers remembered Turner’s old man. They remembered his brother who’d stayed on after Turner left.

A few months on he and his mother watched a special report on Today Tonight about the little girl whose hand had been bitten off by a savage and cowardly Pit Bull that was really Clint Eastwood going for the lollipop she’d held out for him. She’d had the surgery and the doctors said she would regain sixty percent of the use of her hand and her mother yanked the little girl’s arm above her head in triumph to show the interviewer the neat bracelet of scar tissue around her wrist. ‘Her badge of honour,’ she said.

Turner’s mother died five years after he and Clint Eastwood came to live with her and Clint Eastwood died five years after that. Turner had been expecting it. The whiskers on the dog’s black mask had turned white and sometimes he’d freeze during his walk and stare into a space just beyond his muzzle as if there was someone or something in front of him that only he could see. Turner sat with him on the lawn from midnight to the smudge of daybreak. He kept watch while Clint Eastwood uncoupled himself from the world and Turner saw it slide off the edge of his dark round eyes. He wept and couldn’t stop. He hadn’t counted on such sorrow. He didn’t know what he should do. If only he could go with him. He sat and thought about that for a long time.

Finally, late that night he picked the dog up, all thirty-eight kilos of him and carried him to the bottom of the long garden near the back fence. He placed him on the grass. He went back to the house for the towel Clint Eastwood slept on. The cold air burned his bare arms. He dug the hole four feet deep and five feet across and laid the towel in the dirt and put Clint Eastwood on the towel. He cut the shovel into the earth and tossed dirt onto the body. It sprayed across the dog’s ribs. A yellow flower from the box gum drifted onto the dirt. He shovelled earth into the hole until the dog was covered in it and the blossoms that blew down in the rising breeze.

Turner didn’t leave the property for most of that winter. He slept late into the morning. He watched the EPL. He listened to ads for stud hogs and the Bowling Club on the local radio. Followed the Golden Spurs contest. He spent the afternoons down by the old box gum in a lawn chair in a patch of sun that hit the fence. He dug the garden, covered the soil in mulch and harvested silverbeet and pears. One day he started to talk to Clint Eastwood down by the fence and at first mistrusted the thin sound of his voice beneath the birdcalls and distant tractor snarl but it got easier. When tiny green shoots began to poke through the dirt Turned said, ‘What the hell.’ His mother was dead. Clint Eastwood was dead. Turner could wait for death too or he could go check with the world one more time just to see if anything had changed to make it worth his while.

‘You should get one,’ the mother’s words floated across the grass. ‘They’ll go on special next month.’

Turner saw that the child was in shock but not yet bleeding to death. Out of one dirty pink jacket sleeve poked a stubby hand with dirt under the nails. Out of the other sleeve there was an ungodly nothing. Blood began to trickle from the edge of the sleeve. The neatly severed hand floated brightly among the scattered leaves and Turner had no idea what to do with it. Hurl it into the bushes. Pick it up and screw it back on. There was a building thwok thwok in his temples like a chopper was landing. He wanted to duck. He heard someone say ‘faaaark’ below the hammering of his heart and recognised the voice as his own.

The mother over by the gondola thumbed her purse higher on her shoulder and hunched against the winter chill. Her fine dark hair wisped around the phone she pressed to her ear. Turner pulled off his belt and wound it tightly around the child’s right arm over her jacket and he lifted the arm up so that the blood would flow back to her heart. Look ma no hand. The child watched him and her face was as pale as paper. He scanned the empty park. Clint Eastwood was not a big talker so when he did you listened. Low in his throat. Time to go. Turner glanced once more at the mother and then back at the child. He raised his own arm in good-bye and then he followed Clint Eastwood out through the avenue of trees past the swimming pool closed for the winter and an hour later they were on the road.

The world was no longer a safe place for them. They put dogs down for mauling kids. Turner sat behind the wheel of the old Astina he picked up from a lot by a LiquorLand. He had had his tragus pierced the day before and the whole right side of his head was throbbing. He hadn’t counted on so much pain. The big dog snored on the back seat. Turner glanced frequently into the rear view mirrors. He’d phoned in his resignation at the plant and felt guilty because it was his birthday tomorrow and he knew Anu on the desk would have ordered a cake.

They left the city and kept going until dawn. They pulled off the freeway for gas and Turner sat in the car drinking a V and reading in the Telegraph about the dog who’d bit the hand off the child in the park back in Sydney. The girl was in a stable condition in the hospital. The bruising and scratches on her back and arms were explained by the savagery of the attack. It was a Pit Bull, the mother said that knocked her daughter to the ground. She said she’d seen the whole thing “‘like in slow motion.’’’

“‘I had to pull it off with my bare hands. You just find the strength when you have to.’”

The dog dropped the hand on the ground and ran off ‘like a thief in the night.’ The mother said she saw an old belt lying by the side of the playground and used it to tie the tourniquet and the experts praised her knowledge of first-aid. ‘You never know when these things’ll come in handy,’ the mother said. She said that it took some doing just to find the hand lying hidden among the winter leaves, which would explain the fact that the blood had begun to clot. How the child was no help but just stood there staring wordlessly past the trees with her arm raised like she was waving at someone.

‘Not waving,’ Turner said to Clint Eastwood with the newspaper spread out between them.

Fortunately no one thought to get a description of the dog from the little girl but according to the mother it was a large white Pit Bull with red eyes and yellow fangs and the authorities rounded up the dogs in the area matching that description but they all had alibis. They described the owner of the dog as a coward. The silenced little girl was a hero. Her mother was a hero too but ‘that’s my job,’ she said. ’That’s what we do.’

Clint Eastwood was not a Pit Bull. He was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, wheaten with a black mask and one white left paw but Turner wasn’t taking any chances. Behind the petrol station, he threw a stick to tire him out but Clint Eastwood just wanted to get back in the car again.

‘What would you do if I they put me down?’ Turner asked Clint Eastwood as night swiftly fell. The road swung ahead of them into a dark bowl peppered faintly with lights.

‘Wrroooogh, wroooogh,’ said Clint Eastwood.

‘Me too,’ said Turner. ‘We’re heading west now. South and west. Is that okay?’