2023 School Magazine

‘TO TARNISH’ Senior prize - Charlotte d’joncourt Folklore Competition Lauren Zillman (12H)

Meredith sips from a crystalline cup of just water, wishing dearly for the liquid to be replaced by gin despite the life she knows is swelling in her womb. It is early now, instead of late , she thinks, as the slim second hand of the giant, eye-like clock on the wall in their living room swings to twelve alongside the other hands. Sometimes she wishes for an earthquake, just so that the mocking clock would fall and shatter into pieces. Then she could sweep it, and the time it so likes to remind, into the trash. Her husband is yet to return. Meredith has already managed to quell the rage of their toddlers into a calm, undulating sleep, as she has done every night since she followed him to his country. She longs to hear her mother’s trilling her voice, hold her brother in a hug, see her father smile again. Instead, she hears the abhorrent ticking of the clock, feels the weight of the parasite in her stomach, sees the filth in this house; the dust, the muck of the children, the children, the children he wanted. Meredith bore the loss of her family’s love for this rotting house. The lock of the front door clicks. The sound tends to ring throughout the house, like an alarm. He has returned. A mop of dark hair over two beady eyes with blemishes down his button-up shirt. That is how Meredith describes her husband and that is how he stumbles into the living room. He sees her but continues trudging forwards. She sips her not-gin. The ache for her love to be returned has faded with time, tempered, dulled like crayons, like carpet stains. Now, she is resolved with the discovery she has made over months. It is a discovery that warms her chests, rises in her throats, brims to be spoken. Meredith has spent her waking hours mulling it over, wondering why it was not considered before. She likes to put it down to age, growth. Not growths but her own blooming. Her husband topples back into the living room, clutching a bottle of Grant Burge, red. He is clearly drunk, Meredith knows this but, the one thing she has learnt about her husband since journeying across the sea for him is that he can hold his liquor. He will not forget and she will not wait. “You,” Meredith says softly. She has not used his name in years, not since she realised the creature she had married was not the one she had loved. Her husband halts, with a foot stamping to the ground all tantrum-like. The clock staring behind him teeters on its hook. It feels the shift. “What?” He rolls his eyes. “I’m leaving you with the kids,” Meredith grins. She feels intoxicated too. “If you’re going on a trip somewhere just hire-” “Permanently.”

Inspired by the Greek myth of Jason and Medea

BRISBANE GIRLS GRAMMAR SCHOOL 2023 | 131