Free Gotham by Nick Earls Page B

fired every fraction of a second. We track them from top to bottom, one picture at a time. The hood blows back, the tube appears and my first thought is it won’t be hard to photoshop it out. Smokey clicks to the next image, and the next, and then pauses on one.
    The sunlight is falling across Ariel’s pale outstretched arms, lighting up her wispy hair. She is upright and fearless, and I hadn’t seen that. Her hands are bunched into small pale fists. She is flying for a moment. It is, after all, a city of superheroes, of caped crusaders and heroic deeds.
    â€˜Look at your beautiful girl,’ Smokey says.
    She is staring straight at the camera. She is, I think, willing it to take this picture, record this instant and all its glee and defiance. She wants us to have a good photo, her mother and me. She wants to give us a picture of a good time. Not every minute of our present is to be recorded as diabolical and hard, and something to be endured in the hope of better. She is in the present—this present, between the tube feed and today’s treatment—and she has made room for joy in it.
    The tube will stay in the photo.
    â€˜LyDell’s granddaddy,’ Smokey says, ‘he worked at Bloomingdale’s. He was an elevator guy. Had a uniform with a cap.’ He pauses. ‘This is just us talking, right? Just so you know. He died on the job one day. Heart attack. Just closed his eyes on his stool and he was gone. Bloomingdale’s looked after the family real good. LyDell’s momma ran wild even so. She wasfourteen, or somethin’.’ He glances over to our kids, who are close to the top of the steps again. ‘LyDell’s sleepin’ somewhere with a smile on his face. I checked in with him around five and he was still talking ’bout those pants he didn’t buy. Those Alexander Wangs. That boy…He’s just a boy, and it’s so dangerous sometimes. I want to help him be a man, you know. We all do whatever to bring our kids up, yeah? Give them whatever. Whatever it takes.’
    At the top of the slide, Eugene Junior sets the cardboard in place. Ariel takes her seat, flips her hood back and shakes her hair out. She braces herself to push.

1
    GOTHAM
    2
    VENICE

    3
    VANCOUVER
    4
    JUNEAU
    5
    NOHO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In late 2013, I worked out that my five best and most compelling story ideas would need padding or some other kind of fakery to become novels and would lose something if I tried to trim them to short-story size. I had to write them and they had to be novellas.
    Any author can do with a team of like-minded people on their side, and the author of a novella series needs them more than most. I needed people whose response was ‘Yes! Novellas!’ with the exclamation mark audible after each word—people who saw 20,000 words as a great size for the timesand had great ideas about what to do with it. So, a big thank you to:
    â€“ Meredith Curnow and Chris Flynn for backing me from the start
    â€“ Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown for talking me into the idea rather than out, and making the idea even more ambitious
    â€“ Kim Wilkins and Bronwyn Lea, in their UQ roles, for their regular wise navigational advice for a new world
    â€“ Jane Stadler for the crash course in how to survive there upon landing and Isobelle Carmody for being the ideal fellow traveller
    â€“ the Griffith Review Novella Project III judges and editorial team for backing novellas in general and mine in particular
    â€“ Donna Ward and her team at Inkerman & Blunt for embracing a new approach to novellas with passion, imagination and editorial vigour
    â€“Georgia Knox and the team at Audible for adding new dimensions to the project from their first email
    â€“ Will Entrekin at Exciting Press for being the ideal partner in the ebook world
    And a particularly big thank you to Sarah and Patrick for tolerating me all those times when my brain stayed in the story rather than in