Rebecca Lupton
Bio
Stories (19/0)
The forest whispers
I always thought whispering forests were a metaphor. I was wrong. Now I am terrified all the time, I can’t block out the sounds. They whisper to me, they scream. The grass doesn’t rustle, it murmurs. It murmurs my name. It recites my wrongs, the evil things I have done. The flowers shriek my transgressions and I cannot get away. If I run, I am pursued. I cannot eat, the vegetables condemn me. I cannot live here. I cannot live. It wasn’t my fault, not really, but the trees don’t know listen. They are judge and jury.
By Rebecca Lupton12 months ago in Fiction
I did mean to make you cry
Today, I am making a video. Tomorrow, I will make people cry. Tomorrow I will be at my day job, teaching high school. These are not the people who will be crying, hopefully. Tomorrow there will be a funeral. The video I am making today will be played at that funeral, and people will cry.
By Rebecca Lupton2 years ago in Humans
The corridors of power
Parliament House was in complete disarray. Wombats were running hither and yon, all rational thought completely out the window. The chamber bells were ringing frantically, the green lights of the House and red lights of the Senate on the clocks flashing non-stop, calling absent members of Parliament to their seats. Of course they were absent - humans had vacated Canberra decades ago. The only occupants were wombats, hundreds of them. Wombats who were just now losing their minds.
By Rebecca Lupton3 years ago in Fiction
The rain stopped
Jake imagined he was staring down the wombat, but he couldn’t be sure. It was actually possible the wombat was asleep. Jake was never good at dealing with other creatures. He had heard the stories of the Canberra wombats, their reputation of mindless violence and barbaric small talk was known from the coast to the Snowy Mountains and beyond. That reputation also ensured that they were given a wide berth, usually. Unusually, a wombat had appeared in Jake’s territory, and Jake wasn’t entirely comfortable about that. Being approximately forty times heavier than the wombat, Jake was OK with giving it a prod with his hoof, which he did. With surprising speed, the wombat leapt to its feet and looked around in astonishment. So it had been asleep. Jake was even more surprised. What’s going on here? He needed to find Steve.
By Rebecca Lupton3 years ago in Fiction
A box of gold
Pearl removed the brown wrapping paper with care. Paper was precious and she was astonished that this had survived in such pristine condition. It spoke of care and determination. She was deeply impressed; Pearl couldn’t abide waste and sloppiness. Under the paper was a brown cardboard box, clearly used (James Bennett was printed in blue ink on the sides), yet still sturdy and intact. At some point someone had written “kitchen” on the top in Texta. It wasn’t sealed.
By Rebecca Lupton3 years ago in Fiction
Against the ruin of the world
It wasn’t there yesterday. It wasn’t even there this morning. It had appeared sometime between lunch and sunset and, judging by the lack of sogginess, Pearl was thinking it had arrived later rather than sooner. She looked at it long and hard, gave it a nudge (it was heavy), and looked at it some more. She sniffed it, but no particular aroma stood out.
By Rebecca Lupton3 years ago in Fiction
If the question is chocolate, what is the answer?
It wasn’t that the recipe was difficult, per se. It was that sourcing the ingredients was looking like it would be bloody impossible. It had been a very long time since conventional supplies had been available at conventional shops - people mostly made do with what they could grow or swap or steal from others. Flour was going to hard, let alone chocolate. Esther was still not convinced that it was vitally important to have a chocolate cake for Margot’s eighth birthday, however Margot herself was becoming obsessed with the idea. Something she’d read in a book. Something called “birthday cake”, and it had to be chocolate.
By Rebecca Lupton3 years ago in Fiction
Eucalyptus in the rain
Unexpectedly, the rain seemed to have stopped. For reals, stopped. Louie couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t raining. For the entirety of his admittedly short life, some form of precipitation had fallen from the sky. Once upon a time it had snowed here, but that was before the nuclearish war had changed the world and the creatures upon it. Now it rained, but not now, exactly. Not this minute. The High Country, they called it, because it was a bit higher than everything else around it. As far as mountain ranges go, the Australian one was never going to break any world records, but it still counted as “high”. Not as high as it used used to be: rising sea levels paradoxically lower elevations, so technically even Mount Everest isn’t as big as it once was, but, you know, high.
By Rebecca Lupton3 years ago in Fiction