Free The Best Australian Stories 2014 by Amanda Lohrey

been trialling a radical kind of neurosurgery on sheep: a tiny part of the animal’s brain that appears active during specific activities – eating and so on – can be isolated and removed. The sheep’s correlating memory sketch, meanwhile, seems to change once the operation is performed. It boils down to this: a particular, problematic memory might be able to be amputated from a person.
    But the research is extremely limited in its application, since they cannot know what the sheep is feeling at the time of the excision, nor make an adequate interpretation of its memory sketch. It won’t go any further, she tells you, without research on humans, which at this stage involves far too many risks.
    You ask for her business card.
    *
    You are forty years old, tied to nothing, and numb. The decision is not hard. You have nothing to lose.
    There is a lot of paperwork to sign, of course. The world is now more litigious than ever. Courts have begun to award monetary compensation for personal hurt, and people have been claiming distress for bruised fruit and bad haircuts.
    Dr Ostrovsky and her team interview you at length about your personal history, and you spend many afternoons having nodes attached to your head while being made to feel a range of emotions, from horror to joy. During this time they map a tiny area of your brain that seems to become overactive when you feel sad. The same memory sketch appears each time this part of your brain activates: it’s a face, but you have no idea who it is.
    *
    You are emerging from an anaesthetic. A team of surgeons stand above you, with Dr Ostrovsky by your side. Her face is not right. They found what they were looking for, she says. Buried deep within the folds of your amygdala, under a dream about a cave bearing ancient pinch pots, in the middle of a garden set at the end of a path where a window looks out onto a sandpit set in rough seas, there is a single memory pressing against your basolateral complex: it’s the little girl bearing the message she divined from your father.
    They excised the memory, but it turns out sheep are altogether different from humans. In humans, Dr Ostrovsky tells you, memories are symbiotic; they depend on one another. They got the memory they were after, but that memory was holding up another one, and so on, and by removing it they have caused your glial cells, the ones that provide structure, to collapse like a stack of dominoes. They have, unwittingly, undone you.
    You are altered, though you can’t say how. The people around you are looking at each other, and you recognise panic in their movements. Dr Ostrovsky is saying something. She is saying ‘sorry’. You can see her lips move but you have forgotten sound. She is saying sorry over and over again, and you know you should feel sad or angry or scared, but you feel like laughing. You try to remember your father’s voice, your mother’s hands. It is like trying to hold water. You feel only pleasure as you let them go.
    Meanjin

Mrs Sunshine
    Edwina Shaw
    The stink of hot dead animal blows up from the creek. The grown-ups all complain, but I don’t mind much because the mud’s great fun to play in, like quicksand from a Tarzan movie. We chuck all sorts of stuff in to see how fast the mud can swallow it. After the flood, when swirling grey water came up to the verandah and a dead cow floated past, we found a whole box of Hawaiian records washed up in the yard. The ones that still played we gave to Gran; the rest we threw into the mud and watched as they sank under. Sometimes we go mud-walking and before you know it, the mud is over your shorts like a giant’s slobbery mouth sucking hard on your legs, making fart noises. You’ve got to be careful and hang on to the mangrove branches or you could get pulled right under and die.
    Paper hats droop and stick to our foreheads with sweat as we sit on the verandah eating Christmas lunch. On the telly some