Short story: Annie, My Anne, by Barbara Else

By READINGROOM - Barbara Else | Posted: Monday Dec 09, 2024

One of the best and most beautiful short stories of the year by a master of the form

Short story: Annie, My Anne, by Barbara Else - Newsroom

It’s the summer evening she remembers, not the overloaded wharf and rushed goodbye, her aching throat. No – it’s months before the troop ship left, the dunes, the tiny island far beyond each wave, the sandy startled child who toppled over them, the way they laughed, Jack saying Annie, my Anne, hand on her hair, upon her collar.

Work goes on, year upon year, her basket, tram, and rain, tobacco fumes from pipes. At her desk the students bow and ask for the Professor. Dressed like men, each still a child, timid, bluff or even smug, some ask if she will go to tea, maybe a dance. One even asks straight out, “Your hand in marriage.” How can she help but smile.

She lives with an unwed brother and ageing mother who’s growing child-sized, rounder, bundled in black shawls beside the hearth. “At least your sister married,” the old woman mutters.

“Is a bad choice better than none?” Anne mutters back, though even as she’s ageing too the compliments come.

One bitter day her sister begs, “Come walking, please, I can’t let Mother hear.”

Down at St Clair the icy wave creeps up to meet the snow. The sister’s husband, petulant, well dressed, heroic in amateur dramatics, had funded their son to train as a minister but refuses now to pay their bright young daughter’s fees for university.

“I’ll pay,” Anne says. “I’ll take a cheque to Registry myself. We can tell him later.”

Her sister’s face, astonished, blooms as lovely as she’d been before her wedding day. Anne is happy she can offer such a gift, but tastes sadness too. The children of strangers tease the waves and hurl their bonnets and caps into the wind.

Her brother-in-law ends up in court for theft as a servant. Anne’s not surprised. But the shame flattens their old mother, transforms her sister into a living shadow, blanches the now-adult children. Gambling? Dandying? Scarlet women and song? He will not say. At any rate, it’s proof of a wasted marriage.

Brother Will beats on the door at midnight. Lost his key. Again? Again. He’d earned a Silver Fern for rugby, sailed off with pride across the Tasman Sea, then home again in disgrace for drinking and swearing. Anne speaks through the crack in the door, “For God’s sake, you ageing child, don’t dare wake Mother. Sleep it off in the shed.”

Chain-smoker till she stinks of it, the years make Anne’s voice rust. No visiting child dares go near Will’s dog, masterless now, chained by the barn. The creature’s silent only when Anne gives fresh meat and water, then howls again its endless grief. She has retired. Her old mother dies. And what is left?

The unchangeable summer evening, Annie, my Anne, Jack’s hand at her collar, the regular hush of a wave, her long curls loose, the way he looks at her and she looks back, so close they’re tiny people in each other’s eyes. There’d be laughter, a loving home, a child’s breath soft against her throat.

Taken with kind permission from the excellent new short story collection The Pets We Have Killed by Barbara Else (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $35), available as an ideal Xmas gift in bookstores nationwide.

Barbara Else is a best-selling writer in many genres. She was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in 2005 and holds the Margaret Mahy Medal for services to children’s literature. She is co-partner in TFS Literary Services with her husband Chris Else, and works as an editor, mentor and manuscript assessor.