The Best Australian Stories 2014 Read Online Free PDF

drunk, that offers no quarter. Everything will be destroyed, so this object, which he wanted so much to serve as his legacy, needed to last for as long as possible. And his wife thought this was noble, because of the family. But for him it was a tapeworm, this instinct towards posterity. This desire to taunt the future with the memory of him.
    â€˜Fucking cunt,’ he would mutter whenever something went astray. ‘Cunt,’ when swearing with brevity. When the bottle of Coke was empty it was a cunt. When the son or daughter mishandled the coffee table, they were cunts. It was a cunt of a life, he would sometimes say to himself, as if it were a bluntly poignant insight. And he hated everyone not exactly situated as he was: the poorer and the richer, because both groups could lay claim to something he couldn’t, because both groups had their own extreme forms of coffee table: the bad and the grandiose. What a cunt, he would think as he stared at the non-events on his monochrome screen, the door firmly shut, untampered with. That brand-new coffee table inside, which he didn’t know how to exploit.
    About a month after the coffee table had been installed, Rowan, his eldest son at fifteen, was home on holiday from boarding school. Rowan had heard a lot about the coffee table from Mum, who sang its praises with a zeal approaching the evangelical. He was ambivalent towards the coffee table but praised it nonetheless to his dad, who was proud of it. ‘It’s definitely a nice coffee table,’ he said to Dad when it was presented to him for the first time, and this unveiling – the dog’s blanket was removed for the occasion – proceeded in a very earnest and eventful fashion. ‘How much was it?’
    Dad buckled. ‘It was expensive!’ What right has the child to question?
    â€˜I bet,’ Rowan said, and turned his attention elsewhere, chiefly to his brother, who was destroying their sister’s dolls in the bedroom.
    Rowan was home for a fortnight, and he spent a lot of time in the lounge room watching pay TV. He was aware of Dad’s policies and so, when Dad was away, would rest his feet on the table’s surface. It was something that he felt obligated to do: seriously, what the hell was the story with this coffee table? Eventually he felt so audacious that he stood on it, and then bounced twice, and then he lifted the coffee table onto its side and spat on the underside, and he would have liked to piss on it, this coffee table, which was so pathetic, this badge of an ageing man with three kids and a sports car and a job that eroded his passion, a man already dead in many ways. Rowan looked at the blanket that lay draped – and probably forever would – on its surface and wondered whether this was waiting for him, and wondered how to cancel it. Because were he to inherit this cheaply made piece of chipboard, he would burn it twice. He would burn this one, buy another the same, and burn it, and the second would feel just as great as the first. And he did indeed take to flicking a cigarette lighter to its underside, very briefly, just the spark, leaving no obvious marks, but the very act of doing so felt important. And he ran the edge of a fifty-cent coin vigorously on the underside of the coffee table’s feet, for minutes at a time, leaving deep marks that no one would ever see. And he swore at the coffee table, he called it a ‘cunt’ while kicking its ridges, with the blanket on. And he spilled whole pint glasses of cola on its surface and then rubbed it meticulously clean. He imagined how the coffee table would splinter at the blow of an axe, and how funny that would be, destroying this stupid cipher right in front of Dad, as he melted like a witch.
    And all the while, as he filed at work, Dad fought the dread.
    Meanjin

The Horse Hospital in Dubai
    Lucy Neave
    Jackie fears she might fall asleep standing up like a horse. She arrived in Dubai from