Originally, I wrote this short story for a uni assignment. I ended up submitting it to the Tasmanian Writer’s Prize and it got shortlisted and published in Forty South’s Annual Short Story Anthology. Something Blue tells the simple story of a child and her island home…

I found a marble and a dead kingfisher that day. I gave the dead kingfisher to Mum, and she buried it in the backyard. He wasn’t going anywhere. The marble did though – it went right into my marble collection. Marbles fascinated me; they did things to my insides, they made me hungry for forbidden things, they reminded me of a home-place. I didn’t even know how to play marbles, but I pretended I did. That’s what the whole earth did – pretended for the sake of being known. Even in my tiny world I knew that. I lived on an island where the afternoons were smoke-and-cut-lawn smell, the nights were sleep and thunder and bats, midday was green ants and thrumming crickets and sweat and barking dogs. When it rained, the clouds gave up their dead and water pelted down so hard the top of my head got a massage. The ocean was a special blue – the blue of ocean-colour in the tropics. The sunsets burnt the inside of my eyes. The island was home. A tiny home with one shop, a clinic, and an airport. Planes flew in and out daily, whining like lawnmowers. Dad flew them. He flew them to places on the mainland. I lived in a tiny world, in a giant sea. A barge bought our groceries in from Darwin every fortnight and we drove to meet it. It came in alongside the barge landing and I ran down that landing watching the water; a jealous lapping edge reaching towards me from who knows where and making me thirsty. The mangroves ticked with washed-out warnings and hints about what could be out in the sea. Giant stingrays, Dad said. As big as his plane, he said. And hammerhead sharks and crocodiles and glitter that fell from the sun. This was my world, and I knew no other.

I’d watched Mum bury the kingfisher that morning before school. Mum was crying – she loved kingfishers. But I was too nervous to cry because I was late for school, and I hated being late for school. Everyone turned and looked at you and chuckled when you came in late. I was running up the road and sweating and looking down at the ground. My sandal slipped past my vision and then… a piece of blue glass. A perfectly round glass ball half-buried in the rubbishy dirt. I stopped. I dug in and picked it up. It had a yellow fleck on it. I couldn’t believe my luck. I felt naughty and triumphant, and then my six-year-old pride rose up and I couldn’t stop grinning. The grin lasted all the way to school. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Marbles were a rarity and school was too funny a place to be flaunting blue marbles about. I liked school – school was where the world lived. Everything else, all the ‘out there’ lived at school, and I got to be a part of it. But it wasn’t a friendly place. So I kept the blue marble to myself, like I kept most things to myself. I kept it in my pocket all day and felt its smoothness like I felt comfort and rest and tears. I was late for school, but it didn’t matter. On the island it was good enough if you got to school. Never mind you were late. Or if you got there at lunchtime. Or if you skipped a day here and there. Or if you didn’t show up for half the week. We were free kids on the island, and the island held us together, and the sea held the island together, and I was in awe of it.

‘Come in Luce,’ the teacher said. I sat on the edge of the carpet with my backpack still around my shoulders. Someone moved behind me. The kids were chuckling behind me. The kids were hard to figure out. I was forever looking into their faces and wondering. It was the same with the ocean. Something tugged my braid and my head jerked, and then a burst of shuffling. I didn’t look around.

‘Luce has found a marble!’

It was rolling along the floor and Jack snatched it up. I snatched it back. He grinned and his eyes went all slitty. Em whispered something in his ear, and Jack stared at me and then Em stared at me, and I felt lost. I didn’t know what to do – I was only Luce – I couldn’t be anyone else. So I told them the marble would never be theirs, and I saw the plotting lines in their faces, and I waited for what was coming. It came at lunchtime when I was walking back to the classroom. I looked up and Em was marching towards me. I saw the malice on her. It was dripping from her dress.  

‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you…’ she said, hitting me hard on the crown of my head. She hit me so hard I felt shorter. But I laughed because that’s what the ocean did when it was hurt. Four girls sat laughing at the bottom of the steps and I laughed with them. We all laughed, and I thought, ‘We’ll be friends now.’ But Em was crying, and I wondered why. School was like that, but I went home that day a winner because the blue marble with the yellow fleck still belonged to me.   

‘We’re having dinner on the beach tonight,’ Mum told my sister and I that afternoon. We dumped our backpacks on the floorboards and lay down with the fans overhead and wet flannels on our faces. The window louvers split the sky. We could hear a band practising down the road – their tinny drumbeats skipped across the humidity and into our lounge where they melted down to nothing. We both pretended the tinny sound was rain on the roof. The sun dipped and fell in-between the louvres and soon it was too hot to lie there anymore.             

‘Come on, girls,’ Dad said.  

It was a long drive through the bush with dinner knocking around in the back. I caught sight of the open shore and the beach seemed a giant sandbar – reaching right into my dreams. The sea had printed leftover patterns in the sand on its way out, before becoming a silver line in the distance. We ran along those patterns. Something blue caught my eye – a bottle washed up. Dad said it must’ve come from Indonesia. I looked at the writing on it; the beautiful, stroked-over words a people across the sea could read. I wondered about the hands that had touched it last. I thought about a smoky grey city stacked high with people and I wondered how big the world was. I thought about my island, my country. This bottle had its own country and I wondered upon it. We left the bottle there. We sat in the sand and listened to the pandanus rustling to each other. I walked over the sand dunes to the billabong and looked down at its dark navy and saw the lily pads on it and I felt mighty with the breeze in my hair. Then I thought about lurking crocs, and I ran back to the beach and ate gritty sausages for dinner, cordial for dessert, the sunset the wind the air for the soul, and the sinking-fast light for the mind. Then it was time to go. Dad chucked sand on the fire, and it hissed and writhed and smoked. I watched it die. That night, I held the blue marble and it sent me rolling to sleep. I knew tomorrow would be easy. 

‘Luce – want to play marbles?’

I said I did. It was lunchtime and the afternoon was coming in all hot-heavy and sweaty. We set up a game under the stairs where the concrete was scattered with cigarette butts and wrappers and old lollipop sticks. Shadows flashed when kids ran thumping up the stairs. The marbles winked at us. The aim was to win the big marbles. Jack always won the big ones. I only had one big marble in my collection, so I played to win. Jack didn’t like it. He played to win as well. He watched me line up a shot for the big glassy marble right in front of him, right in front of Jack who had so many big marbles in his pockets they weighed down his pants; Jack who hated to lose, who lived to win, who seemed vast as the sea. I flicked my little grey shooting marble right into that big one and grabbed it and yelled out and laughed. Jack didn’t like that much. He pushed his hand into my face. I watched him sneer at me in between his fingers. I got out from under him and stood up. My nose felt bigger than my face, and the tears came, mushy-soft, and I ran. I ran off so the world couldn’t find me or know where I’d gone. Neither would Em or Jack. I ran down the red dust-stained road, running under the powerlines and feeling them above me – they were buzzing a warning. I walked past my street. I walked along the grassy track where the sun tumbled halfway down the trees. I went to the sea. I sat on its shore and cried and cried and cried. My tears fell and the tiny shells in the sand caught them and soaked them up. I was still holding the big marble I’d won. I put it on the sand and watched the ocean through it. The ocean curled up, warped into a million different waves, bending like glass, pulsing, throbbing with its current. I glanced up at the flat blue and saw something gliding, gliding just under the water. A trail of movement. It glinted and threw the sun back at itself. I watched it and sensed the heavy reptile strength. Just under the water, just out to sea. I started running home – looking sideways, running, looking behind me, running, looking everywhere, running, and then a flash of gold-touched speed, a streak of blue. A kingfisher was racing me home.