Free Steeplechase by Krissy Kneen

fingers out of my mother’s hand and rub at it. Mother keeps her hand curled over as if my fingers were still in her grasp. I watch as my sister picks one foot up, delicately as a foal, and stretches it through the fencing wire. She points her toe and touches the ground outside our property, turns to look back at the house. She isn’t to know that our grandmother is not watching, that the only ones watching are me and our mother, and our mother doesn’t notice her at all.
    And she picks up the phone again and listens and I know that it is just a part of this madness that is taking her away from me, but I watch her nodding into the handset and I wonder what would happen if I could hear it too. Whoever is on the other end of the phone is there with her now and I am here alone. If only I could see whatever it is that she sees. If only she would let me hear the voice on the other end of the phone. I am frightened but more lonely, perhaps, than scared. I follow her through a world of invisible hurdles, cantering just a little way behind.

Waking Up with Him
    He has curled himself into a little ball, pushing his bottom into the curve of my hip. I can feel the heat come off him. He feels too hot, fevered, but this is how he is different from me I suppose. All my limbs are cold, the tips of my breasts are cold. I touch them and they are chilled, the little hard nipples like fingers of ice. He has shuffled so far over to my side of the bed that I can feel the hard edge of the mattress under my back. I suppose he has followed me as I shifted further and further away. I am unused to sleeping with company.
    He is like a wombat. This is what strikes me first, how large and round and soft and warm he is, his arms curled up into his chest, his knees butting into his elbows, his nose in his fists. I raise myself gently up onto my elbow to watch him, the beautiful soft expanse of his skin. His back is lightly furred. I remember when Emily and I were lying in the backyard, a conversation about boys. We were teenagers then, a brief interlude where we caught up with each other for a moment. Before this there were years of her racing towards puberty, me lagging, struggling to keep pace.
    But on this day we were almost even and she rolled over in the grass. She had taken her top off and laid it on top of her bra, a band of white cotton for modesty, her skin on either side reddened from the sun. I remember watching her pick an ant off her flat stomach and wishing my own stomach were flat like hers. I even wanted her skin, strawberries and cream. My skin was olive and whenever I picked up a drinking glass I smeared oily fingerprints all over it. I kept my shirt on while sunbaking, rested a hat over my face, any scrap of skin exposed to the sun would cook to a deep charcoal colour and Emily would point and tell me I looked like an immigrant, even though I knew Germans are supposed to be pale and not dark at all. I am the colour of my father. This was never mentioned but it was often in the air. I am of my father and therefore lessened.
    â€˜When I meet the love of my life he will be smooth. No hair at all on his arms or his chest but messy longish hair on his head. Sandy hair, with white bits like he’s been in the ocean. I want him to smell like the sea, and when I put my ear to his chest there will be the sound of the waves.’
    This was a good time, before Emily began to leave me. I locked the image of the love of her life into my consciousness, wanting only what she wanted. Slim, hairless, oceanic.
    John shifts back towards me a little more, nestling. I lie back on my pillow and put my arms around the hot engine of his body. I rest my cheek on his hairy back and listen. Not the sound of the sea, but the regular thudding of his heart. A live human being, this human being asleep in my bed. I should never have let him stay over. I know this even as I hug him closer, relaxing into the pleasure of this warm body pressed up against