Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Depicted: family separation
Unidentified Phenomena
Sam really didn’t know why she had been rostered on for Father’s Day. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever thought she had creative talent. Even her kindergarten teacher, Mrs Phobos, had seemed unenthusiastic as she stamped the corner of her stick figure drawings with a perfunctory ‘good work’. The plastic tables were covered in glitter and pots of glue. Kids, dragged along by their mothers, adopted a look of forbearance as they filled in the outlines of the free printables. There was a brontosaurus with a goofy smile (‘Dad, you are roarsome!’); a shiny ute (‘You are loads of fun, Dad!) and, her personal favourite, a rocket crowned by a semicircle of stars (‘Hope today is a blast’). There was also a pile of blank cards for those whose sentiments exceeded the available templates. Some of their creations had the far-flung exuberance of a scaled-down Jackson Pollock. One freckled boy with a lopsided grin glued three sheets together, creating a life-size rendition of a foaming stubby. When Sam offered her tepid smile as praise, a look she had been perfecting for years at Hardware Emporium, the budding artist proudly explained ‘Craft beer – get it?’. Sometimes she just wanted to get inside one of the portable garden sheds and slam the door shut.
After vacuuming the activity corner, then wiping down and stacking the tables in the storeroom, Sam took her allotted 30-minute unpaid meal break. The rain was hammering down so the indoor café was her only option. Some of the kids she had been supervising were now sipping babyccinos with practiced sophistication. Their younger siblings were corralled inside a miniature white picket fence. For entertainment, there was a slide as well as a cubby house with a pirate flag, a periscope and a large red steering wheel. It was confusing. As she bit into a cheese toastie, she watched a petite girl in a neon-yellow tutu push her younger brother over with a well-aimed shove. He whimpered on the astroturf. Sam wondered what it would be like to have a brother or a sister. Maybe she’d have someone to call when emptiness threatened to overwhelm, like a flat desert stretching languidly towards an ever-receding horizon. Her musings were interrupted by the strains of ‘Happy birthday’, the café staff proudly carrying a layered sponge cake to a beaming family, the tutu-clad girl now contentedly cocooned in her father’s lap.
* * *
The day after her 7th birthday, all pink balloons and pins clattering on the waxed bowling alley floor, her own family clambered into the Land Cruiser, ready for an epic road trip along the Stuart Highway. Sam could still picture her mother’s air of expectancy as she picked at the stubborn Blu-Tack marks on the bedroom wall where Delta Goodrem, Princess of Pop, had reigned supreme. Once the mauve walls were spotless, she skimmed the pebble-crete pool, swept the timber-look vinyl flooring, switched off the air-con, and stepped out into the blistering heat. Sam sat in the backseat while her father impatiently idled the engine. This had always been the exit plan. Soon another family would occupy the double-brick home they had lived in for three years, waiting for their own end-of-contract bonus.
As they turned out of the driveway, he yelled out ‘See ya Alice – only 1,500 kilometres to Darwin!’ Half an hour later, they pulled over at the Tropic of Capricorn Marker, her mother extending the selfie stick as she arranged them in front of a metal globe corseted by circular bands. Say ‘Please!’ she instructed, pushing Sam’s damp hair from her face. A plaque marked their latitude. When Sam asked her father what it meant, he replied: ‘It’s when we let you have hot chips for dinner’. Her mother elbowed him, bending down to explain: ‘It’s an imaginary circle that goes right around the planet’. Her breath was all pepperminty. Sam pictured someone drawing a gigantic texta line right around the earth and then, shrugging, returned to the car.
If she closed her eyes, even now she could hear the monotonous humming, the wind whistling through the side windows. The road seemed endless; sometimes she slept, waking momentarily to find the view exactly the same, a heat shimmer bending sky to sand. Her parents talked softly, careful not to wake her. ‘It’ll all be fine, Helen’, her father reassured, one hand on the steering wheel as he offered a consoling pat with the other. Her mother briefly tilted her head towards him, then returned her gaze to the desert, occasional clumps of spinifex interrupting the vastness. A goshawk swooped to pick up roadkill, a sticky red mass of grey fur all that remained of a roo.
And then they arrived at Wycliffe Well. As they approached the tiny township, her father told her to watch out for aliens; her mother reprimanded, ‘Don’t scare her Frank; you know how sensitive she is.’ They drove past a hand-painted welcome sign. Hovering above ‘U.F.O. Capital of Australia’, there was a spearmint green alien, with a large brain and a downcast expression. Galaxies swirled around him, a gleaming white spaceship shooting into the stars. They pulled into a parking spot just past the statue of Elvis. Her parents broke into song, crooning True Love Travels on a Gravel Road. Sam hid her embarrassment by burying her face in a cushion, a memento plucked from their camelback sofa to pad the backseat.
The holiday park was a motley collection of camping sites and self-contained cabins. There was an artificial lake for recreational fishing and a roadhouse wallpapered with newspaper articles about alien sightings. The beer garden was brimming with cashed-up pension day patrons. Frank settled straight in. When he stumbled back to their cabin a few hours later, he was mumbling incoherently about hovering lights. He asked Sam if she’d ever heard about the guy who was sucked through his kitchen window. Sam shook her head. ‘It’s all true’, he declaimed, the red veins in his eyes like cackle glaze. ‘A bloke told me they come for the water’, he added hoarsely, as though that settled it. Helen held her finger to her lips, steering him towards the lower bunk, leaving a glass of water and two aspirin on the bedside table as she firmly shut the door. Sam turned up the tele–she didn’t want to miss any of the action in the re-run of the X-Files.
The next morning her father was uncharacteristically quiet, his usual confident bonhomie replaced by an unfamiliar hesitancy. Sam wondered why he was so unlike himself. She might have said something but the look on her mother’s face warned her off. As they drove past the lake, she tried to take her father’s side by commenting that the water level really did seem a lot lower. Her mother clenched her hand into a fist, sighing ‘Jesus, we really are in the Never-Never.’
That was the last precise memory Sam had of her father. It was almost fifteen years since she’d arrived home, tense from a day spent trying to fall under the radar, thrown her school bag down and then heard a kind of strangulated whimpering coming from the direction of the kitchen. She followed the sound to find her mother hunched at the counter, head in hands, shoulders heaving. It was her father’s rostered day off. They had planned to finish putting together a worm farm when she got home. She hoped he could fix this.
Sam checked the living area, some scattered white bread crumbs on the carpet the only sign of recent activity. Then she opened the screen-door to the backyard. A rotating sprinkler was purring on the lawn. The Land Cruiser was still hunkered down in the garage along with piles of shredded newspaper and upcycled polystyrene boxes. Sam hesitated at the kitchen entrance, then followed the corridor down to her bedroom. At 6.30, her mother called. There was a single plate of chicken nuggets and meagre salad on the dining table. Sam toyed with the shredded lettuce. Her mother stood at the far end of the room, looking through the slats of the venetian blinds. Then she turned and said, ‘He’s gone’.
Idly leafing through a family album a few months later, Sam found that all the images of her father had been erased. In some, his figure had been carefully cut out. More often, he had been drowned in a thick wash of white-out. The selfie in front of the Tropic of Capricorn remained but now it was just herself and her mother with their fixed smiles. She held the page open, pointing to the photograph. ‘The topic is closed,’ her mother replied. Over time, Sam came to understand that the subject could not be broached. Whenever she tried, she was met with firmly pursed lips and a sense of disappointment so deep she thought she would never be able to fathom it. Her Mum got a second job at Woolies on the weekends. Other people’s mothers drove her to netball practice.
* * *
Over the intercom, Sam was called to customer service. She flicked the last sliver of congealed cheese into her mouth. She would rather be scanning the aisles, counting nuts and bolts for the Friday stocktake. One of the new recruits was probably being threatened with a trowel. It was amazing how aggro people got in Hardware Emporium. She’d been trained in de-escalation techniques. But sometimes it was hard not to punch back.
After work, she headed for the harbour, shrugging off the cordless garden blowers, the knee-length gumboots and the croc-wrangling garden gnomes awaiting adoption. By the sea, the humidity seemed less oppressive, a light breeze whipping the dark waters into frothy peaks. Passing a trio of young men fishing, buckets thrashing with Flathead, Sam took off her work boots and dangled her feet over the weathered planks of Nightcliff Jetty. It was her favourite place to be when the sun set, watching wading shorebirds as a slow bruise of crimson and ochre stained the sky. She stayed until it was dark, Saturn slowly rising, the four bright stars of the Southern Cross almost close enough to touch.
She rubbed her eyes; it had been a long day. And then she glimpsed something moving at the periphery of her vision. A row of luminous blue orbs hovered, heading rapidly towards her in a V-formation. Sam blinked, but they were still there. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being looked at, part of some sprawling inventory. She turned to face the trio of fishermen, packing up their lines and nets. They were joking around, waving their buckets in a triumphant arc, oblivious. Sam looked back, scanning the sky. The blue orbs were moving rapidly away, pinpricks of light. Soon they would be gone. She stretched out her hand, her finger tracing their glittering pathway through the inky blackness.
Rozanna Lilley is a widely published researcher and author writing across multiple forms. Her work is included in Best Australian Essays (2013 and 2014) and Best (of) Australian Poems (2015 and 2023). Her hybrid prose-poetry memoir Do Oysters Get Bored? (UWA Publishing, 2018) was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. A poetry chapbook, The Lady in the Bottle (London: Black Spring Press), was released in 2023. A docufiction verse novel, Beechworth, 1879, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann. Her short story, ‘Prayer bones’, appeared in Verge 2025 Blue (Monash University Press). ‘Unidentified phenomena’, in this issue of Locative, is her second published short story. For more details see: https://rozannalilley.com.au
Locative Magazine 