Authentic Voices: Stories That Speak Beyond the Page
This term, Year 10 English students explored a suite of poems offering diverse voices and perspectives on themes such as race, identity, wealth, socio-economic status, age, illness, and complex family relationships. They were then challenged to use one of these poems as inspiration for a short story featuring a strong narrative voice.
Some truly imaginative pieces emerged, with many students experimenting with narrative structure, dual narration, motif, and tonal shifts to convey layered experiences and emotions.
The following piece, written by Year 10 student Molly Edwards, was inspired by Douglas Stewart’s poem Lady Feeding the Cats, which critiques society’s assumptions about the poor and elderly. Molly’s story captures a strikingly authentic voice, inviting readers to reconsider their own judgments about appearances and attitudes.
“
LEMON SHORTBREAD
by Molly Edwards
I observed him the way astronomers observe comets; from a safe distance, through veils of lace and caution, half expecting destruction followed by impending doom, but also half-drawn by awe.
He appeared every Saturday without fail, like the faint tolling of a haunted church bell that no one dared admit to hearing. Same bench, same pose as though he had been drawn from the last night before the stars went out, a haunting outline of everyone’s last breaths before being swallowed by his shadow. His motorcycle, solid and chrome-skinned, stood as a proud sentry beside him, exhaling heat and menace in slow, deliberate staggered clicks. It was not merely a machine, but quite frankly, a creature, coiled, chromed, muscled, predatory. The air around him was filled with strong traces of cold metal and stale cigarette smoke, the sharp acrid smell clinging and lingering in the back of your nostrils, making its way down to your throat.
His mohawk, an eyesore, was a jagged, sharp-edged ridge of bristled and defiant rebellious hair, each spike lacquered and gleaming like wet obsidian, with blood-red tips flaming upward as though he were on fire. Tattoos crawled up his arms, legs and neck like curses etched in coal, not the delicate swirls of youth or vanity, but brutal, sharp, declarative marks. They reminded me of ancient script carved into a cliff face, the script that foretold and prophesied that something terrible was to happen. They looked like records of violence: events captured in ink the way fossils capture bones and preserve them. I used to imagine that each ink trace was a confession, or a tally mark for every crime he had committed, not of dread or sorrow, but of pure violence, like a sick and twisted prayer offered in reverse. The bench groaned and creaked under his weight, the wood straining and paint chipping away. The faint sound: tap… tap… tap… of his metal spiked boot on concrete sounded like a countdown that no one wanted to reach zero. He lingered like a heavy rain cloud above. He moved over Myrtle Street like a sharp, staggered, freshly sharpened blade across silk.
He once spat on the pavement, a sharp, wet and foolish punctuation and looked at me. He didn’t look at me for long. But he looked just long enough to make my spine remember its fragility. He didn’t smile, didn’t sneer, and yet I felt it all. I felt the vibration in my bones, a shudder, a shiver as though I were prey being spied on through tall uncut grass. It was not cruelty I sensed, it was indifference, and somehow in every way, that was worse. Others felt it too; mothers clutched their children with white-knuckled urgency when in his presence. Members at my senior citizens club gossiped about it as if exchanging war stories. We’d huddle over exotic herbal tea mixes – paired with my famous lemon shortbread squares – as if we were young children huddling around the campfire exchanging ghost stories. Eileen swore he kept a knife tucked in his boot, George, our token gentleman, claimed he’d escaped from prison, then leaned back with the smugness of someone sure you would beg them for the details. Dorothy claimed he could vanish between blinks. Even little Agnes with dementia chimed in, cheeks pink, with how she swore his shadow was warped and fell the wrong way. We passed each story like a sweet treat, pretending not to savour it.
With him around, I had to walk twice as much just to avoid that bench. My journey was weighted by arthritis, limited mobility and resentment. My back ached. My hips ached. My pride ached more. I told myself I was being too prudent, I told myself I was too old to take foolish risks. I told myself I was being silly.
But one morning, although dodging it for long enough, misfortune found me. The stiffness in my knuckles led to my plastic grocery bags’ handles snapping, like water slipping through my fingers, taking me with them like water trickling down a waterfall. Lying on my hip, around me, eggs spilled like broken moons. Flour spilled, leaving a cloudy trace on the pavement. A jam jar rolled in a slow, unsteady, wobbling motion before shattering into a million fragments. The smell of powdery citrus and egg yolks burst into the air, sticky and sweet.
No one moved.
Except him.
He rose, not quickly, but with the gravity of something that’s been long at rest, like a bear leaving its cave from hibernation. He crossed the space between us in slow strides. Each step carried the faint hiss and tap of his metal-spiked boots. He knelt beside me, steadying my trembling frame, with calloused and motor-greased palms. I braced for menace. Instead, I found grace. Scooping his hands beneath my hip and lifting me from the ground, he cradled me as if I were a light feather or as if I was a butterfly and he was the cocoon protecting me. I was no longer lying on my hip. I found myself upright on my feet. He gathered the fragmented glass and cupped broken eggshells in his hands as if they were hatchlings. Without a word, he returned to his bench, his chrome-skinned motorcycle glistening in the light. I didn’t thank him; my mouth refused the words. Gratitude, I thought absurdly, may break something deep inside for both of us.
That afternoon, with a sore right hip, I baked. My famous lemon shortbread squares. Buttery, bright, homely, zingy, stitched with love and zest. I pressed the dough just like my mother had taught me, the aroma smelling like old childhood memories and laughter, just the way I liked it. Nostalgia.
When the shortbread had cooled, I wrapped it in parchment, placed it in a tin and tied it with a violet ribbon. I walked to the bench, and I placed the tin down, the metal faintly clinking against the wood. He wasn’t in sight, only his motorcycle. No note, no name, only love, citrus and flour, hoping maybe he’d understand the language of offerings. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, the tin was gone.
The next Saturday, I returned to the bench, and he was already there. I sat beside him.
