Free Pants on Fire by Maggie Alderson

my heartbreak as a story idea—and I now realised she’d bought me lunch on my first day in the office expressly to get all the grisly details—but I was in such a good mood that morning, I was prepared to forgive anything. Plus, I quietly gloated, it was me who had come up with the final editor-pleasing line. That’ll learn here, I thought. Ms. Vidovic may have had the smartest mouth on Glow magazine for the past seven years, but now she had a little competition.
    I was in a particularly good mood because of the fabulous long weekend I’d just had, but I was also still generally high on the newness of living in Australia. Just walking along a street was thrilling. Going to the supermarket was an anthropological expedition. Everything had different brand names—I tried three brands of loo paper before I discovered that the Australian equivalent of Andrex was called Sorbent. I spent quite some time watching water going down the plughole to see if it really did go the other way. (It does—and I’d made a special point of watching it in England just before I left, so I would know the difference.)
    The birds were different. The sirens were different. The radio announced “golden oldies” I had never heard before. The news-readers were strangers. You went north towards the sun. A southerly wind was a really cold one. I bought a postcard that showed Australia was the same size as the whole of Europe, and another that showed the world with Australia at the top. “No longer down under” it said. Too right, mate, I thought.
    Sometimes I would be strolling along and the thought would literally stop me in my tracks. I’m in Australia. Australia. It thrilled me to the core. There I was on the other side of the world, as far away as I could be from Rick the Prick Robinson and his surgically enhanced sperm receptacles. From him and all the other weak-willied goons my homeland could come up with, under the heading of Men.
    I was yonks away from all the superannuated public-school boys who were terrified of a woman with a job and a libido. Miles from the working-class blokes who thought I was a snooty bitch the minute I opened my mouth. Twenty-four hours from the idiots who said, “Oh, you’re one of those feminists, are you?” because I ticked the “Ms.” box on forms.
    If Glow had a Mars edition, I might have taken a job on that, but for the time being Sydney was as far as I could go. And judging by the ones I’d met at Danny Green’s hat party, the men here seemed to be a whole lot more attractive than Martians.
    When we came out of the meeting I told Liinda I wanted a word with her in my office.
    â€œYou are appalling,” I told her, shaking my head, but smiling. “You’re shameless. You just lifted a great segment of my life to make a coverline. Unbelievable. Do you do this to all your friends?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDon’t they get mad at you?”
    The bird’s nest teetered dangerously as she nodded. “Yes, but they carry on telling me all about their love lives anyway, so I carry on using them for inspiration. They know the deal. I always change their names.”
    I couldn’t help laughing and she smiled back at me like a naughty child who knows they’ve got away with it.
    â€œOh, that’s a relief. And who’s writing this story about leaving a country to leave a man, anyway?” I asked.
    â€œI’ve already written it.”
    â€œBut you’ve never been out of Australia, have you?”
    She shrugged. “No, but I have a good imagination.”
    â€œDid you actually speak to anyone about what it’s like to change country?”
    â€œYes. Three psychologists. And you. And my mother. She moved here from Croatia in the 1950s, so she knows what it’s like to move country.”
    â€œYou are a piece of work,” I told her, but I couldn’t help liking Liinda. She was so