A Short Story
This is a short story I wrote for the Australian Writers' Centre's monthly Furious Fiction contest. Since my story was not selected as a winner, it will live here instead.
Enjoy!
David hated the holidays and the constant, suffocating pressure that the Christmas season brought. There are too many presents to buy, parties to attend, and family to be irritated by. Every year, he longed to escape, and for once, he succeeded. Running away to a beach in Thailand was the perfect way to avoid the unpleasantness of the bleak, cold, and festive December.
His family hated that he avoided the parade of functions, parties, and togetherness to lay alone on a beach. They also knew as well as he did that his bank account couldn’t support a month in the Far East. Unemployed and broke, booking a plane ticket and carrying a wallet full of brand-new credit cards was par for a lifetime of bad decisions.
The truth was far worse than they knew.
He still didn’t know what force drove him to walk away from everything. As the brown, murky water receded, so did the forty years that defined the version of David still chasing him.
The ambivalence of that Boxing Day haunted him. On one hand, his lie undoubtedly caused pain, but on the other, he was free from…
