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    Cracklescape
    Cracklescape
    Cracklescape
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    Cracklescape

    By Margo Lanagan

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A presence haunts an old dresser in an inner-city share house. Shining sun-people lure children from their carefree beachside lives. Sheela-na-gigs colonise a middle-aged man’s outer and inner worlds. And a girl with a heavy conscience seeks relief in exile on the Treeless Plain.

    These stories from four-time World Fantasy Award winner Margo Lanagan are all set in Australia, a myth-soaked landscape both stubbornly inscrutable and crisscrossed by interlopers’ dreamings. Explore four littoral and liminal worlds, a-crackle with fears and possibilities.

    Table of Contents
    - Introduction by Jane Yolen
    - The Duchess Dresser
    - Isles of the Sun
    - Bajazzle
    - Significant Dust

    AWARDS
    "Bajazzle" - winner Fantasy Short Story, Aurealis Award
    "Significant Dust" - winner Science Fiction Short Story, Aurealis Award
    "The Isles of the Sun" - shortlisted Fantasy Short Story, Aurealis Award
    "Bajazzle" - reprinted in Award Winning Australian Writing.

    These stories from four-time World Fantasy Award winner Margo Lanagan are all set in Australia, a myth-soaked landscape both stubbornly inscrutable and crisscrossed by interlopers’ dreamings. Explore four littoral and liminal worlds, a-crackle with fears and possibilities.

    ABOUT THE TWELVE PLANETS SERIES
    Twelfth Planet Press is an independent publishing house challenging the status quo with books that interrogate, commentate, inspire.

    The Twelve Planets are twelve boutique collections by some of Australia’s finest short story writers. Varied across genre and style, each collection offers four short stories and a unique glimpse into worlds fashioned by some of our favourite storytellers. Each author has taken the brief of 4 stories and up to 40 000 words in their own direction. Some are quartet suites of linked stories. Others are tasters of the range and style of the writer. Each release is a standalone and brings something unexpected.

    The Twelve Planets
    Book 1: Nightsiders by Sue Isle
    Book 2: Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts
    Book 3: Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex
    Book 4: Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti
    Book 5: Showtime by Narrelle M Harris
    Book 6: Through Splintered Walls by Kaaron Warren
    Book 7: Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan
    Book 8: Asymmetry by Thoraiya Dyer
    Book 9: Caution: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott
    Book 10: Secret Lives of Books by Rosaleen Love
    Book 11: The Female Factory by Angela Slatter and Lisa Hannet
    Book 12: Cherry Crow Children by Deborah Kalin

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTwelfth Planet Press
    Release dateJan 18, 2021
    ISBN9780987216250
    Cracklescape
    Author

    Margo Lanagan

    Margo Lanagan has been publishing stories for children, young adults and adult readers for twenty-five years. She has won numerous awards, including four World Fantasy Awards. Two of her books have been Michael L. Printz Honor books and she has been shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the young adult division. Visit Margo at her blog, AmongAmidWhile.Blogspot.com, or follow her on Twitter at @MargoLanagan.

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    • 4/5
      Creepy creepy short stories. Some very Australian, some 'this could happen anywhere'

    Book preview

    Cracklescape - Margo Lanagan

    Introduction

    I was given a copy of Margo Lanagan’s story collection Black Juice back in 2005. As she wasn’t an author I knew, the book sat around until, by accident, I began the first story. It was as if someone had given me a packet of crisps. I couldn’t stop eating the entire thing.

    And then I began again from the beginning, slowed down, and really read the stories.

    After that, I must have written to or grabbed the hand of any reader I knew demanding they devour the collection, too. We argued over which story was best, but I knew that ‘Singing My Sister Down’ was the winner.

    It seems to me there are three key things in any Lanagan story: the poetry first, then the way—as one reviewer puts it—‘language helped infuse the with a strong sense of place’, and finally the essential oddness or otherness that lies within the heart of the tale.

    Those first two are Lanagan’s own special talent, the third is what any competent fantasy writer strives for. But Lanagan is not just a fantasy writer, she is a fantasist. Her worlds are built head and shoulders, brick, boulder and mountain upon the sturdy armature of poetry, the vatic voice that is as old in her hands, as it is renewed.

    The boy in ‘The Isles of the Sun’ breathily telling his story of escape: ‘Up we ran, jumping over the lumps and hummocks, the grass and dogshit and a drink can—it didn’t matter; it was all golden up there, all ready; we were leaving this behind.’

    The (possible) ghost in ‘Significant Dust’ described: ‘Thanks, comes out of him, as if he coughed it up accidentally.’

    In ‘The Duchess Dresser’, ‘The drawer handle shook enough to blur, hard enough to sing a faint but continuous note.’

    Yes, it’s poetry, but that doesn’t stop the reader from moving forward, doesn’t call attention to itself except on a second or third reading.

    The four stories here are equal to the power and oddness and potency of the Black Juice collection. All of them in some way deal with ghosts—ghost of our better selves, ghost of our worst selves, ghosts of remembering and forgetting. These aren’t common vernacular ghosts, not the hooting, howling sort, accoutred in bedsheets, rattling chains. That’s something Lanagan would never do—write commonly. She is the essential Uncommon writer. These are ghosts of the mind, the heart, the loins. Ghosts made up of poetry, longing, mistaken identities, lost love: a dresser that trembles in the night, a child who flies away from the world, a sooty stranger visiting an out-of-the-way diner, a modern succubus. These ghosts have been formed and formatted by a wide-sky Australian imagination and then loosed on a more constricted reader.

    Do we believe?

    We have to believe.

    Lanagan’s tough poetic prose makes us believe.

    Jane Yolen

    The Duchess Dresser

    ‘See, it’s doing it again,’ said Tanner.

    ‘Picking up earth tremors,’ said his housemate Zack. ‘Or traffic tremors. Trucks going past, down on the highway.’

    The drawer handle shook enough to blur, hard enough to sing a faint but continuous note.

    ‘That’s a nervous sort of noise,’ said Tan.

    ‘Projecting again.’

    ‘Put it in your room, then.’

    ‘Wimp. No way. Horrible old thing.’

    ‘It’s not horrible! It’s beautifully crafted. Not like the tat you have in your room.’

    ‘Snob. Wimp and snob.’

    ‘Fuck you, too. ’S there any coffee left?’

    Tan woke in the night with a face full of hair. It clung across his mouth, a loose gag. It wrapped his head and shoulders, heavy, dark. He tried to grab it away from his face like a cobweb, and pinched his clean face, his stubble. He crawled up out of the dream.

    He’d left the window open for air, and the streetlight shone on next-door’s wall. The way the shadows fell, the dresser’s mirror was a giant pale heart-shape, hovering against the black wall.

    ‘There it goes again!’

    Stella came to the door holding Gus—her daughter Augusta, a hefty name for the most delicate creature Tan had ever seen. Stella idled in the doorway. She always seemed very relaxed to Tan, very reassuring.

    The city went on roaring and banging outside. Down in the street, the bread-truck man shouted to the milk-bar lady as he loaded a trolley. In this room, though, the only noise was the drawer-handle. It went from fitful rattle through whine and up out of their hearing as if it had run out of breath. The shine on the metal handle, which Tan had polished up so nicely when he first fetched the dresser in, was a little dash instead of the dot it ought to be.

    Stella patted Gus’s stretch-suited bottom, slow, automatic. Tan didn’t know why people would choose to have babies. All day and all night you had to attend to that little blob that could do bugger-all more than grin and dribble. It wasn’t always cute; in fact, some nights it seemed more like an instrument of torture for Stella and Fergus than anything else.

    ‘Could you pick that lock?’ said Stella.

    A spider ran up Tan’s spine; he shook it off.

    She saw his shudder and grinned. ‘Let the poor thing out. Want me to have a go, with a bit of wire or something?’

    ‘No, thanks. Wouldn’t want you to scratch it. I mean, no offence, I’m sure you’d be very careful and everything—’

    ‘A locksmith?’ she said. ‘A professional?’ She was deciding whether to put a joke into the words. In the end they came out tentative. She and Tan watched the blurring, listened to the sound-not-sound, the pressure from the drawer.

    The shine-dash eased to a dot, the sung note through rattle to silence. The drawer gave a last twitch and was still.

    ‘Like a little … hiccup,’ said Stella.

    They stared. The mirror looked past them, blandly reflecting everything, not making any kind of point.

    Stella shifted Gus slightly on her shoulder—Gus was sleeping, was a milk-sack, as Stella sometimes laughed. Busy using up the milk in growing. ‘You should time it,’ she said. ‘You know: date, time, duration. Bit of context. See if there’s a pattern.’

    They watched a while longer. Then Tan noticed the tumbled bedsheet, the sliding-off doona the mirror was reflecting, and shifted uncomfortably.

    ‘Weird,’ said Stella non-committally, and walked away with the sleeping baby.

    He woke up knowing he’d put the bed in the wrong place. It ought to be ninety degrees that way, with the head there. Which was ridiculous, his head to the french doors; that didn’t make sense.

    But still he couldn’t shake the feeling of the other body lying across him, the room being out of shape. The dresser stood silent, reflecting, as if while he slept it had thrown out the alternative floor plan in front of itself and considered it, but now that he was awake it had folded it away again. Still at his middle was entanglement, complication, not just a body but a body with … not a gut-ache exactly, but a gut-something, some pressure, a little revolving planet of something. Illness or emotion, he couldn’t tell.

    He moved, to get rid of the feeling, to clear his loins and groin, to claim them back. He climbed out of bed and stood looking down at the stirred sheets, the thrown-back doona. The dresser crouched there. His spare bedsheet swayed, pinned up as a curtain, between the balcony doors.

    That’s a nice-looking duchess dresser, Tan had said. Someone had put it out on Brougham Street, with a pile of other stuff.

    Nice-looking what? Creighton had curled his lip. But curled lip was Creighton’s default setting. Besides, it’s not. It’s horrible.

    I like it with its big mirror. It’s in pretty good nick, too.

    It’s a horrible grandma-y thing.

    Just ’cause you hate

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